APOLOGY FOR MURDER. PRC, 1945. Hugh Beaumont, Ann Savage, Russell Hicks, Charles D. Brown. Director: Sam Newfield.

   Not so very long ago, as you may recall, David Vineyard reviewed a film entitled The Walls Came Tumbling Down, which he called a probably intentional homage to another film entitled The Maltese Falcon. As coincidences sometimes do, coming in pairs, here’s another film, this time from low budget PRC (which does *not* stand for Poverty Row Corporation, although it easily could do so) which is another homage, this time in honor of another well known film noir, this one entitled Double Indemnity.

   As legend or even truth may have it, the working title of Apology for Murder was Single Indemnity, or it was until the people at Paramount got wind of it, and that was the end of that.

   Playing Fred MacMurray’s role was Hugh Beaumont as a brash young reporter who gets involved with the wife (Ann Savage, shortly before she became a short-lived star in a movie titled Detour) of a much older businessman who is becoming more and more tired of her extravagant ways. And she more and more tired of him. What she needs is a way out.

   Her solution to this well-traveled dilemma comes along, most fortuitously for her, in person of Hugh Beaumont’s character, who, as brash as he is, is no match to the charms of the unhappy wife. Their mutual solution (but mostly her idea, when it comes down to it) is the obvious one. After which point things most naturally so sour. When Miss Savage takes up with a lawyer to help break her late husband’s will, it leaves Mr. Beaumont with, well, nothing, and when his editor gets this crazy idea that the accidental death was not really an accident, the walls really start closing in.

   It’s not really a bad picture, but even the dimmest member of the audience will know exactly what will happen next, each step of the way.
         ___

    Arthur Lyons, in his book Death on the Cheap somewhat challenges the generally accepted idea that the film was a direct ripoff of that other film. His suggestion is that it may have instead been based on the same true story on which James Cain based his book of the same title. He goes on to say: “… either way, this is no Double Indemnity, although Ann Savage paints as powerful a picture of sinister femininity as she did of a nasty virago in the noir cult classic Detour.”

   The greatest baseball player of all time makes the greatest catch of all time:

THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN. Columbia Pictures, 1946. Lee Bowman, Marguerite Chapman, Edgar Buchanan, George Macready, Lee Patrick, Jonathan Hale, J. Edward Bromberg, Miles Mander, Elizabeth Risdon. Screenplay by Wilfred H. Pettitt, based on the novel by Jo Eisinger. Directed by Lothar Mendes.

   The title of the film, and the McGuffin (Leonardo’s The Fall of Jericho), are the only original touches in this out and out rip off of The Maltese Falcon, right down to Lee Patrick as the hero Gilbert “Archer’s” (Lee Bowman) secretary.

   A priest has been murdered to make it look like suicide and gossip columnist Gilbert Archer is out to find his killer which seems to have something to do with a lost Leonardo masterpiece, the priest was hiding to protect it.

   Patricia Foster aka Laura Browning (Marguerite Chapman) is the mystery woman in the case supposedly seeking the painting with her excitable father Ernst Helms (J. Edward Bromberg, think Joel Cairo), while the Reverend Matthew Stoker (Macready) is none too subtle about what he would do to find it with his patroness Catherine Walsh (Elizabeth Risdon) and their lawyer George Bradford (Edgar Buchanan). There’s even a hood name Rausch (Noel Cravat) in the role of an over aged Wilbur.

   Most of the subtlety is gone, as well as any erotic tension between Bowman and Chapman (or the Gutman, Cairo, and Wilbur stand-ins who are all straight), but it is virtually a scene for scene steal from Falcon beyond that down to the bit where Archer (Spade) tips a hotel detective off about Rausch (Wilbur).

   It does vary a bit at the end, the McGuffin isn’t a lead bird, and Chapman and Bowman end in a clinch, but it so blatantly rips off Falcon it’s shocking Hammett or Huston didn’t sue for plagiarism.

   I assume the Eisinger novel was very little like the film, or action surely would have been taken. It feels as if the book might have been rather more pious than this, and too dull to film if you go by the preamble before the Falcon plot kicks in, so it was dressed up with the plot of the Hammett film and novel.

   Macready is sufficiently evil and threatening as a crooked evangelistic type, and Buchanan oily as a crooked lawyer, while Bromberg is about as subtle as a train wreck, but thankfully the plot is changed up enough he makes an early departure as the bodies stack up.

   As far as production values go it looks good, none of the actors are bad, but none of them overly good either. Bowman fared better in a few comedies as a lead or second lead when he had good material. He isn’t awful, he just has nothing to work with other than look like a poor substitute for Bogart (honestly, in this he’s a poor substitute for Ricardo Cortez; the attempts to change his character from solemn avenger of his priest friend to bright fast talking Spade substitute are jarring enough to loosen fillings). His hero has all the charisma of his television Ellery Queen, which is none.

   The whole business about his being out to avenge his friend the priest just doesn’t work with the Falcon plot that requires a fast talking Spade who may or may not be quite honest and didn’t even like his partner, and this being 1946 they don’t dare suggest anything untoward about the dead priest to enliven the plot a little. Hammett’s plot can’t bear any saintly characters other than Effie.

   I suppose if you had never seen The Maltese Falcon and stumbled on this one late one night you might enjoy it. It’s not incompetent, badly acted, cheaply made, or poorly directed. In fact if they had just honestly remade Hammett I might have given it a C for effort, it’s not as bad as the Warren William film by any means.

   But it is a jarring film, lurching from fairly solemn to wise cracking and back again as if Sam Spade had been rewritten as Father Brown, and the result is a film that doesn’t know what it is and as a result isn’t very good as anything.

DENNIS LEHANE – Gone Baby Gone. Patrick Kenzie & Angie Gennaro #4. William Morrow, hardcover, 1998; paperback, 1999. Reprinted several times since. Film: 2007, with Casey Affleck and Michelle Monaghan.

   Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro are Boston PI’s.

   They get hired to try to find a missing child. The child’s mother is a wastrel, a waste, heavy drug using, sexed up, alcoholic piece of used jet trash. And neglectful to boot, constantly leaving her young child untended, sunburned at the beach, or left to rot in front of the television. Yet she wants the child back.

   Turns out the kidnapping is part of a much deeper conspiracy, and the mother was a drug mule who absconded with a couple hundred thousand dollars from some guys you better not mess with.

   And the deeper Kenzie and Gennaro dive into things, the deeper the conspiracy goes.

   The book is much longer than is my wont, clocking in at over 400 pages. But it came in #9 on the Thrilling Detective poll of the top 14 PI novels of all time — so that put it in my TBR.

   It was alright. Compelling enough to keep me flipping the pages. But it doesn’t, to my mind, rank that high as a PI novel. It’s fine for a marginally disturbing beach read. But that’s about it.

   Then again, I’m quite biased in favor of mid-century PI novels. I feel like something of the immediacy of the language, terseness, to the point-ness, joltiness, briskness, tightness, has been lost somewhere between the mid-century and now.

   I can’t quite put my finger on it. But our language has become flaccid. It’s certainly not a problem unique to Lehane — he’s better than most. I feel like it infects/inflects most of our contemporary use of language.

   And I’m no exception.

LUCAS WEBB – Eli’s Road. Doubleday, hardcover, 1971. Popular Library, paperback, no date stated.

   I recently went back to a used book store to buy the copy of Green Ice they’ve had there for years, and got distracted once again. This time by a novel called Eli’s Road,  by Lucas Webb.

   Considering the quality of this thing, I’m surprised Webb and his novel aren’t better-known. It starts off a bit awkward, but soon gets the reader involved in a first person narrative spanning ante-bellum Kansas to 1880s Wyoming.

   Webb does a remarkable job of keeping his narrator believable from the time he writes as a callow teen-ager till he ends up in stoic middle-age, quite a feat of style, and the story: Bloody Kansas, rogue mountain men, orphan girls, pro-slavers, store-keepers, abolitionists, border ruffians, emigrants, freed slaves… and the mysterious Brother Frank.

   Seek it out.

JACK WILLIAMSON – Bright New Universe. Ace G-641, paperback original, 1967. Cover art by John Schoenherr. Collected in Seventy-Five: The Diamond Anniversary of a Science Fiction Pioneer (Hafner Press, hardcover, 2004).

   Idealism is confronted with reality, as Adam Cave meets opposition, then disappointment, as he rejects the material comfort which could be his on Earth. The Moon is the site of Project Lifeline, aimed at sending signals to space, seeking other life in the universe. He does not know contact has been made, with his own father, believed dead, and organized opposition has already been created,

   His conflict is with those who feel change is always destructive, and indeed with white racists who know their values cannot withstand the shock if the alien culture as it overwhelms Earth’s. The symbol of his triumph is a small Negro boy who now has the power of a transgalactic civilization at his fingertips.

   There is a message here, and it is obvious. […] The characters are symbols and little more. It comes as a shock to realize how crude the writing style is, as compared to a craftsman such as [for example] mystery writer Ross Macdonald. There are the ideas, though. Williamson meant for better things, but [this time around], he doesn’t succeed.

   It’s just not been my year. Thankfully this latest thing doesn’t affect the blog, at least not directly. It seems as though Cox, my Internet provider, has decided to go out of the email business and has shut down all of their customers’ email accounts. The good news is that they have made arrangements with Yahoo (you’ve heard of them) to take over all of their previous email business. They promise a smooth transition.

   Me, I’ve heard people tell me that before. Combine this with back-to-back afternoons of previously scheduled medical appointments, and you’ll have to excuse me for closing down the blog again for a few days while I tackle all this. It shouldn’t be longer than that, but as past experience tells me, who knows.

B. TRAVEN – The Bridge in the Jungle. Serialized in Vorwärts in 1927 (in German) and published in an extended book form in 1929. Knopf, 1st US edition, hardcover, 1938. Reprinted several times. Originally written as a short story and intended to be the title piece of Traven’s short story collection The Collected Works of B. Traven: The Bridge in the Jungle.  Available online at the Internet Archive website. Film: United Artists, 1971.

   Told in the first person, our American narrator is hunting alligators in the Mexican jungles. Makeshift native settlements dot the river banks. In one such settlement, our narrator runs into an acquaintance of his, another gringo named ‘Sleigh’ who has married into the community. He decides to stay for a couple of nights.

   There is a pump station there that runs water to the railroads. The pump station attendant has the status of local royalty as he has the finest of huts, an actual mattress to sleep on, and pots and pans to cook with. Once in a while the pump station attendant brings in beer and soda and some musicians for a party and sells the beer and soda for a little profit. Such a party is scheduled for tonight.

   For the party, a young man returns for the weekend from the Texas oil fields to flaunt his riches, sow his oats, and play with his little brother Carlosito who worships him. He comes bearing gifts: a beautiful shining black pair of shoes for Carlosito. The first shoes the child has ever had. He is tremendously excited to put them on and show them off — yet for a boy who has never worn shoes before, the shoes prove to be a bit of an encumbrance to the boy’s exuberant comings and goings and jumping around.

   Between the pump station and the settlement is a rickety old bridge without any railings, the 12 foot deep river running beneath.

   The party begins, and villagers from all around descend upon the pump station, hazarding the bridge in the pitch jungle darkness. The mood is festive, there’s laughter, giggling girls, coy boys, dancing and gossip.

   And then Carlosito disappears.

   At first the disappearance and the mother’s fears are dismissed: it’s only been half an hour; boys will hide and run away — but they always come back. But as the hours pass and the boy fails to return, the mother’s fears turn more and more hysterical, while the grounds for her hysteria become harder and harder to dismiss.

   It’s a powerful story of the depths of maternal love and grief and the interpersonal scope of tribal motherhood where every mother in the village shares trepidation and grief, joining the aggrieved ​in union, in unison, giving everything they have despite their squalor, for no other reason than love.

   I liked it. Maybe not as much as I loved Death Ship (which to me is one of the best books ever). Nor was there the breadth of adventure and psychopathology of Treasure of the Sierra Madre, nor the Death Ship-lite sarcastic voice of The Cotton Pickers. But there is a purity here presenting the native maternal heritage where one rightly wonders whether civilization has wrought a more or less civilized humanity as we struggle through love and loss, together and alone.

ON THE WATERFRONT. Columbia, 1954. With Marlon Brando, Eva Marie Saint, Karl Malden. Lee J. Cobb and Rod Steiger. Written by Budd Schulberg. Directed by Elia Kazan.

THE HARDER THEY FALL. Columbia, 1956. With Humphrey Bogart, Rod Steiger, and Jan Sterling. Written by Budd Schulberg. Directed by Mark Robson.

   I should not be surprised that two movies from the same studio, with the same writer, should feel so similar, but I watched these back-to-back, and it was like having the same dream twice.

   Both films involve corrupt bosses enriching themselves by exploiting simple (and simple-minded) men who make a living by brute strength. In Waterfront it’s longshoremen jumping to the tune of Lee J. Cobb as Union Boss Johnny Friendly; Fall offers Rod Steiger as Nick Benko, Fight Promoter, but they’re both basically the same character: venal, ruthless, and possessed of a sublime indifference to the pain of others.

   But the similarities don’t end there — they’re just beginning. Early on in both films, someone who crosses the bosses meets an untimely and violent end. More to the point of the narrative, both feature a protagonist who works for the Boss, uneasy about things he sees going on, but compromised by his position in the organization:

   Waterfront’s Terry Malloy (Brando) has a brother (Rod Steiger) in Cobbs’s inner circle; in Fall, Bogart is a well-respected (but out-of-work) sportswriter, helping Steiger (again) build up odds on an oversized Bum, but both men are essentially hiring themselves out as tools to enable the exploitation of others. And in both movies, the drama builds as our heroes begin to ask themselves “What kind of tool am I?”

   Sorry about that. But the question never is satisfactorily answered in either film. In both cases, they manufacture dramatic crises to provide a “Movie-Ending” that rings palpably false — in my ears, anyway. Schulberg and Kazan don’t explain how Terry Molloy, shunned for squealing and avoided for safety’s sake one minute, becomes the rallying point for the dock workers after he gets his ass whupped by Cobb’s goons. But the ending of Fall is even worse than that, with Bogart sitting down at his typewriter to do an exposé of “The Boxing Racket.”

   I hasten to add that these unsatisfactory (to me) finales come late in the films, too late to spoil a couple of very watchable movies. On the Waterfront is an acknowledged classic, and The Harder They Fall is an underrated gem. Maybe not a spectacular coda to a career like Bogart’s but not bad at all.

   I want to say something about the acting. Waterfront was Brando’s sixth film, and by now he was comfortable on the screen, but still visibly hard-working. He’s also surrounded by actors from the same school where he learned his craft, and the interplay between them is like watching a well-oiled machine operating perfectly.

   But I find the thesping in Harder more fun to watch. Rod Steiger attacks his part with real method-madness: animated, powerful, and vigorously phony; his performance is fascinating to watch, but obviously a performance.

   Bogart, in his seventy-fifth and final film, simply walks across the screen and dominates it effortlessly with the assurance of an established Star. Acting never enters into it; he simply is Bogart. And the clash of the two actors and the two styles brings a riveting intensity to their roles that is no less impressive for having probably been inadvertent.

A TRAGEDY AT MIDNIGHT. Republic Pictures, 1942) John Howard, Margaret Lindsey, Keye Luke, Mona Barrie, Roscoe Karns, Miles Mande.r Screenplay by Isabel Dawn, based on a story by Hal Hudson and Sam Duncan. Directed by Joseph Santley. Currently streaming on YouTube (added below, but see Comment #1).

   Radio detective Greg Sherman (John Howard) is roundly disliked by the police who he harasses with his weekly program solving crimes while they twiddle their thumbs, so when he wakes up to find a murdered woman in the twin bed in the borrowed apartment of Dr. and Mrs. Wilton (Miles Mander and Mona Barrie) where his new wife Beth (Margaret Lindsey) should be, while their apartment across the hall is being painted, it looks bad, and when Lt. Cassidy (Roscoe Karns) shows up and arrests him, it looks even worse.

   Luckily for Sherman, with a little help from his wife and houseboy Ah Foo (Keye Luke), he quickly escapes, but now he is on the run not even knowing the name of the murder victim.

   Obviously modeled on The Thin Man, and despite the stereotyped Chinese houseboy who speaks in pidgin English (but luckily has brains and knows judo) this film from Republic Pictures moves fast and has a decent mystery at its heart, as Sherman and his attractive wife discover the dead woman had two names, two apartments, and two lovers, one a club owning gangster.

   As murder and circumstance eliminates their best suspects Sherman races to find the solution and manage to make the deadline for his next broadcast where he has to produce the killer.

   Howard and Lindsey make for an attractive minor substitute for William Powell and Myrna Loy and have some natural presence playing off of each other. The suspects are the usual lot. and there are a number of decent red herrings along the way before Howard closes in on the real killer on the air.

   Of course there are holes in the plot. and you probably don’t want to think too much about it, but the solution is satisfying and one of those “that was obvious” endings that aren’t really obvious until you actually hear them explained.

   The whole stereotyped Chinese houseboy business is. as you might suspect, offensive, but frankly Luke seems to be playing it tongue ’n cheek and brings such energy to the part, it’s hard to dwell on the injustice. He was an actor who was invariably better than the material he was given. It’s hard to imagine why the pidgin English though, considering his years as the thoroughly American Jimmie Chan. He’s at least integral to the plot and not just comedy relief.

   There’s nothing new here, but it is done with energy and at least some thought to the mystery and not merely the comedy and quick patter. As a B, it does exactly what it aims to, which is worth commending in any film.