ROBERT SHECKLEY – The Status Civilization. Dell 8249; paperback; 1st printing thus, October 1968; cover art by Podwil. Published earlier as a two-part serial in Amazing SF. Aug-Sept 1960 as “Omega!.” First book publication: Signet S1840, paperback, September 1960.
A standard plot: The static society of Earth is redeemed by the fresh enthusiasm of criminals escaping from the prison planet Omega. Will Barrent is a convicted murderer, sentenced to Omega, who survives the rigors of life there to be contacted by an inner group dedicated to return to Earth. But before the welcome return can take place, the subconscious hypnotic teaching of Earth’s classic school must be overcome.
By itself, society on Omega is self-destructive: laws are designed to keep population down, with murder the most prevalent method; the ideal citizen is the one who breaks laws successfully. This is what Earth, stifled by conformity, needs to continue man’s expansion to the stars.
Memory is removed before sending a criminal to Omega, but evil still seems inherent in the criminal class as previously mentioned. It would seem that the question of evil by heredity or by environment could be investigated under such conditions, but Sheckley’s emphasis is on the law as it exists, independent of those who administer it or live under it, Yet laws of man would have to be less important than the basic laws of nature.
The writing is mediocre, again especially in comparison to an author such as [John D.] MacDonald. The dialogue is occasionally stiff and old-fashioned, while the action is rapid, taking place in flashing scenes, without really pausing to reflect on its consequences.
Thus in many ways, Sheckley’s writing here is like that of an author from the thirties trying to pass for modern. The theme is up-to-date, however, which probably explains why this story hes been resurrected from oblivion.
MAN FROM GOD’S COUNTRY. Allied Artists, 1958. George Montgomery, Randy Stuart, Gregg Barton, Kim Charney, Susan Cummings, James Griffith, House Peters Jr., Frank Wilcox. Director: Paul Landres.
George Montgomery takes the helm in Man From God’s Country, a 1950s western that doesn’t break any new ground, but is enjoyable enough for a casual watch. Montgomery portrays lawman-turned-cowboy Dan Beattie who, after being exonerated for a crime he didn’t commit, heads out for the town of Sundown. There, he hopes to have his own spread with former Civil War buddy Curt Warren (House Peters Jr.)
Alas, things don’t turn out exactly as he had planned. Turns out his buddy Curt is knee deep into a criminal enterprise run by local boss Beau Santee (Frank Wilcox) and his henchman, Mark Faber (veteran character actor James Griffith).
More than anything else, Santee wants to make sure that the railroad doesn’t come to Sundown, lest it destroy his own business interests. When a rumor spreads that Beattie (Montgomery) is a railroad agent, Santee shows he is more than willing to kill to stop the railroad industry’s plans for the west. Rounding out the cast is Randy Stewart who portrays a showgirl caught between Santee’s affections and power and Beattie’s rugged nobility.
Filmed in Cinemascope with a script by The Wolf Man (1941) director, george waGGNER (that’s how he spelled it folks!), Man From God’s Country has all the elements needed to make a solid western. Gunfights, fistfights, cattle drives, and a morality play. What stood out to me the most, though, was the color design and the lighting scheme. Seems like a lot of effort was made into making the interiors in this B-western look exceptional.
Overall assessment, thoroughly enjoyable with a solid coterie of actors including the aforementioned James Griffith who you probably have seen many times before, but nothing you absolutely must rush to see. Final note: for a movie nominally about railroads, there were no trains. Now that was disappointing.
ANTONIA FRASER – Quiet As a Nun. Jemima Shore #1. Weidenfeld ^ Nicolson, UK, hardcover, 1977. Viking, US, hardcover, 1977. Ace, paperback, 1978. Bantam, paperback, 1991. Norton, paperback, 1986. TV : A six-part version of the book appeared on ITV’s anthology series Armchair Thriller in the UK, 1978. Maria Aitken played Jemima Shore.
The heroine of this first novel by noted historian Antonia Fraser is Jemima Shore, Investigator — not a detective in the proper sense, but an investigative television reporter in London. Her show carries great influence, and it is on the strength of this that Jemima is summoned back to Blessed Eleanor’s Convent in Sussex, where she attended school.
Jemima was a Protestant, thrust into the convent world because of the “vagaries of her father’s career,” but her best friend, Rosabelle Powerstock, was a Catholic and later became a nun at the same convent.
Now Sister Miriam, as Rosabelle was called, is dead under strange circumstances, having starved to death in the black tower built by the founder of the order-a structure commonly referred to by the schoolgirls as “Nelly’s Nest.” People give the nuns strange looks on the streets of town; a cloud hangs over the convent; the air is full of suspicion and distrust; and the Reverend Mother Ancilla turns to Jemima to find out what is amiss.
Jemima is loath to revisit the scene of her childhood, but an aborted trip to Yugoslavia with her member of Parliament — and very married — lover makes her welcome a change of scene. She settles in at Blessed Eleanor’s in considerably more comfort than she enjoyed as a schoolgirl, but its charms fade when she hears strange footsteps at night, has a terrifying midnight encounter in the chapel, and discovers that politics, while very worldly, are not alien to these hallowed walls.
Jemima is an interesting character — a complex combination of a hard-driving career woman and a person who repeatedly binds herself into no-win situations with married men; she also has more than her fair share of skepticism about nuns and Catholicism.
The nuns, in their diversity, are also absorbing, and it is upon their hidden motives, passions, and beliefs that the plot turns. The unusual combination of the trendy contemporary world and the Gothic old convent gives a nice look at how such a place functions in the modern world.
Subsequent Jemima Shore novels are The Wild Island (1978), A Splash of Red(1981), and Cool Repentance (1982).
1. Quiet As a Nun (1977)
2. The Wild Island (1978)
3. A Splash of Red (1981)
4. Cool Repentance (1982)
5. Oxford Blood (1985)
Jemima Shore’s First Case (1986)
6. Your Royal Hostage (1987)
7. The Cavalier Case (1990)
Jemima Shore At the Sunny Grave (1991)
8. Political Death (1994)
A MESSAGE TO GARCIA. 20th Century Fix, 1936. Wallace Beery, Barbara Stanwyck, John Boles, Alan Hale. Director: George Marshall.
During the Spanish-American War, an American courier is sent with a vital message to the leader of the Cuban rebels, aided by an ex-American soldier, now a small-time thief and adventurer, and an aristocratic Cuban woman.
As the courier, John Boles makes very little impression, and while Barbara Stanwyck is immaculately beautiful, the show is really all Wallace Beery’s, as a loutish but devoted oaf, and like the movie itself, twice as large as life itself.
BANACEK. “Let’s Hear It for a Living Legend.” NBC, September 13, 1972 (Season 1, Episode 1.) George Peppard, Stefanie Powers, Madlyn Rhue, Robert Webber, John Brodie. Director: Jack Smight. Currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
This was not the first time that Banacek, the well known Boston-based insurance investigator, appeared on the country’s TV screens. There was a pilot made-for-TV movie entitled “Banacek: Detour to Nowhere” that was shown on March 20, 1972. It did well enough for NBC to pick the show up as part of their rotating Wednesday Mystery Movie series, sharing the time slot with other shows.
If anyone of a certain age remembers the show, it is almost guaranteed they will remember the gimmick in this one. At one point during a televised football game, a runner for one team is stopped and buried in a pile of players for the other team. As those players peel off the pile, the audience both at the stadium and viewing at home is stunned to discover that the runner at the bottom of the pile has … disappeared. Vanished into thin air.
Impossible crimes such as this one were Banacek’s forte, and as a result, the series was on for sixteen episodes over two seasons. Banacek himself appears to be modestly well-to-do, but that may be due to his continued success in his crime solving abilities.
The premise in this one is fascinating, but the show is at least partially let down by the writers trying to fill a 90 minute time slot with lots and lots of not especially interesting questioning. And even though the pace is slow, I don’t think that anyone watching could very easily take what they see going on and put a solution together.
Which is both clever and, alas, not very likely to have come off as perfectly as it does here. George Peppard does his best to make his brashly bold but not quite arrogant character interesting, but the allure here is the “impossible crime,” and unfortunately it takes only five minutes to explain.
The show seems to have done well, though. so you might want to take my comments with a grain of salt. It’s fine. It really is. I liked this one.
THE CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF. Hammer Films, UK, 1961. Universal Pictures, US, 1961. Clifford Evans, Oliver Reed, Yvonne Romain, Catherine Feller, Anthony Dawson. Based on the novel The Werewolf of Paris, by Guy Endore. Director: Terence Fisher.
The Curse of the Werewolf was apparently the first werewolf movie filmed in color. Good thing, then, it was a Hammer production, given the studios use of lush color schemes in its set and costume design. The bright colors, along with the overarching Gothic atmosphere, work well in telling the story of Leon Corledo (Oliver Reed), an eighteenth-century Spaniard tragically born as the product of a violent rape. Both the circumstances of his conception and his birth have not worked in his favor. Far from it. He’s been cursed with lycanthropy. In other words, the poor bastard’s a werewolf.
Although it takes a while for the story to get going, The Curse of the Werewolf eventually delivers the goods any good horror connoisseur looks for in a film, including a great special effects man-to-beast transformation. There’s some genuine pathos here too. Reed’s character desperately doesn’t want to be a monster, although he realizes that there is a scant chance in reversing his cursed fate. It’s up to Corledo’s adopted father to eventually put the werewolf down once and for all.
The cast benefits from a solid group of talented actors, some of whom you’ve probably seen in other Hammer films. This includes Clifford Evans (Kiss of the Vampire) and Yvonne Romain (Night Creatures). As far as the score, it’s an unusually captivating one by British composer Benjamin Frankel. Listen here:
Overall, a solidly constructed, very British werewolf film. I give it a hairy thumbs up.
JOHN D. MacDONALD – A Flash of Green. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1962. Crest, paperback, date? Reprinted many times. Film: International Spectrafilm, 1984, with Ed Harris, Blair Brown, Richard Jordan.
What might easily only be a story about the expanding universe of Elmo Bliss very quickly becomes a study of reporter Jimmy Wing, who is offered an inside position in Elmo’s organization, geared to eventually be put him in the governor’s chair. Jimmy accepts, with his usual rationalized reservations. His job, to uncover the facts necessary for blackmail; the rationalizations being someone else would do it, somebody not quite so kind. And being on the inside has its own attractions. But once he rationalizes, the decision has been made.
Blackmail is considered necessary to defeat the birdwatchers opposed to filling in Grassy Bay for commercial purposes. The beginning grabs, the warnings are there, you know it’s going to be a nasty fight. Elmo has his own simplified views of man’s place in nature, of the abstraction of art and beauty, of man-devised tourist attractions as opposed to nature’s own. But in today’s pragmatic world, his views are those which are applied to the Florida of the green dollar. Which is not to pick on Florida, of course.
And the bay is filled in, with the aid of the pure in heart: the businessman with an eye to the community good, the anti-Communists who pave the way for the efficient action of free enterprise, and the zealous religionists who tie and beat those who do not confirm.
It is nasty, but not until the beating of Jackie Halliday will Jimmy have enough. His exposure of Elmo’s plans stop future ambitions for the governorship, but this does not seem enough to pay for only the physical damage done, and it is difficult to believe that life in Palm City can go on as before. But on the surface it seems to …
Lots of characters, fully realized, in depth, but almost too many to keep track of. Wives of businessmen tend to blur into identical sameness, as do the less important of their husbands. But MacDonald manages well, brings life to minor characters as few authors can, and has a point will worth making. Down with ugliness!
Nero Wolfe on Page and (Small U.S.) Screen: Death of a Doxy
by Matthew R. Bradley
In the last of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe novels adapted for U.S. television, Death of a Doxy (1966), Archie finds a rude surprise on a personal errand: ex-showgirl Isabel Kerr with a marble ashtray that presumably dented her skull. Orrie, returning from a tail job for Del Bascom’s agency—last mentioned in, I believe, Might as Well Be Dead (1956)—says he didn’t do it, so Archie agrees to keep silent; the body is found by her sister, Stella, whose husband, Barry Fleming, teaches math at Henry Hudson High School. Held as a material witness, Orrie calls attorney Nathaniel Parker, letting Archie decide how to handle it, and a summons from Wolfe extricates him from a poetry reading at Lily Rowan’s penthouse.
Per Archie’s report, Isabel was “rescued” from showbiz by Avery Ballou, president of the Federal Holding Corporation, now paying her rent, but has set her sights on Orrie, whose baby she claims to be carrying. To derail his engagement to airline stewardess Jill Hardy, she threatens to reveal pictures, letters…and his license, lifted from his pocket, hence said errand. Wolfe says that if he did it, he’s Parker’s problem; other ’teers Saul and Fred are uncertain, but the four vote that he didn’t, and Wolfe is “constrained not only by his long association with me but also by my self-esteem. You must know that I have no affection for him; he has frequently vexed me…But if he didn’t kill [her], I intend to deliver him.”
Archie invites a disbelieving Jill to the brownstone, putting her in the front room, whence she exits, when Cramer comes to get Wolfe’s stance and hint darkly about Isabel’s diary; Jill denied knowing of her, so Archie visits and jars Stella with the titular term for Isabel, hotly disavowed, learning only that she lived another life with her “circle.” Archie visits Orrie, not yet charged, at the City Prison, and learns of her best friend, Julie Jaquette (née Amy Jackson), a singer at the Ten Little Indians club. A business card inscribed, “There was a diary in the pink bedroom and the police have it” brings Ballou to the brownstone, where Wolfe points out that helping identify the killer might obviate divulging his name.
He seems to have nothing to offer, except money declined by Wolfe. Julie agrees to tell all about Isabel if shown the orchids, claiming she neither knows the identity of the man paying the rent nor has met Orrie, but told the police he killed her, although she believes Stella “thought Isabel would be better off dead” and says the family physician, Theodore Gamm, was fixated on her. “I wish you well. I have the impression that your opinion of our fellow beings and their qualities is somewhat similar to mine,” Wolfe says, actually standing as she leaves, yet a list of mutual “friends” Julie supplies is hopeless, so Archie contrives to see Minna Ballou (née Minerva Chadwick), who has the only known motive.
With a pretext of getting advice for Lily on acquiring an Irish wolfhound, on which she is an expert, he writes off the languid, forgetful Minna. They are visited by Gamm, to state that the strain endangers Stella’s life, and Ballou, to admit being blackmailed by “Milton Thales,” i.e., Greek mathematician Thales of Miletus, pointing to Barry, who presumably learned of Ballou from Stella, and killed Isabel for threatening to tell her sister what he’d done. Withholding Ballou’s name, Archie has Julie write to Barry, revealing knowledge of “Thales” and the blackmail, and guarantees full-time protection; with Archie present at the meeting, Barry agrees to return the money in two days, begging Julie not to tell Stella.
Shots are fired, one hitting Fred’s leg, as they transport her to her hotel from the club, so Archie puts her in the South Room, above Wolfe’s, where she spins a tale in response to Cramer’s questions. Ballou had offered $50,000 to keep him out of it and—hidden from Julie—stops by, agreeing to pay her the same if she can help them do so. They summon Stella, who wants to protect Isabel’s name even more than he does his own, so on arrival, Archie takes a gun from her handbag and, as Wolfe listens in, shows her a copy of Julie’s letter; then it’s Julie’s turn in the alcove as Cramer reports that Barry has shot himself and left a note confessing to Isabel’s murder, with a falsified motive that totally omits Ballou.
One of three episodes of NBC’s Nero Wolfe series directed by Edward Abroms, “What Happened to April” (3/20/81) was scripted by Stephen Downing, as was “Death on the Doorstep” (1/23/81). He replaces Orrie with Saul (George Wyner), nabbed seeking his effects in the titular “floater’s” apartment after Cramer (Allan Miller) calls in midtown Det. Barney Cross (Gavin Mooney); he doesn’t recognize her, but Saul—riding along on a job—does, telling Wolfe (William Conrad) she was just a friend with whom he stayed occasionally. Downing renames Ballou (as Chester Winslow; Richard Anderson), Julie (now Keen; Deborah Fallender), and Stella (as Donna MacKenzie; Laurie Heineman).
Math professor Donna is happy to accept drowning as the tentative cause of death and close the case, but M.E. Andy Davis (Mario Roccuzzo) wants tests to explain the pupil dilation. Julie tells Archie (Lee Horsley) that Donna was ashamed of her lack of success as a singer, despite efforts by Julie’s manager, Paul Cummings (Thaao Penghlis), to find her a gig; engaged to department head John Stewart (Bob Carraway), Donna says April’s lifestyle killed their father. Next into the river is Andy, his sample missing, but colleague Dr. Lydia Proctor (Julie Carmen) took it to continue his work, and after Winslow makes his offer, revealing the blackmail, she proves that April had died from insulin poisoning.
After making Cramer wait while he and Fritz (George Voskovec) prepare a 200-year-old recipe for yak veal—complete with yak milk flown in from the Himalayas—to be served in a week for the first time in North America, Wolfe asks him to identify the man tailing Archie and fingers Donna as “Thales.” Archie enlists Julie, who survives being injected by a masked man at the stage door before going on at Chez Petite, yet Cramer’s men not only were watching Donna, but also saw her inject herself as a ruse. Archie’s tail (Mark Russell) confirms that Paul, his employer, blackmailed Winslow to pay gambling debts, and out of love for Paul, Julie helped with the scheme to deflect suspicion toward Donna.
Directed by co-executive producer/star Timothy Hutton, “Death of a Doxy” (4/14/02) was the two-part second-season premiere of A&E’s A Nero Wolfe Mystery, adapted by consulting producer Sharon Elizabeth Doyle. Hutton, playing Archie, sets the effective initial confrontation in Orrie’s (Trent McMullen) apartment in almost total darkness, an apt visual metaphor for his inevitable suspicion. First seen in her recurring role of Lily, as she hosts the dreaded Poet (Julian Richings)—several passages of whose hours-long “epithon” Doyle gamely supplies—Kari Matchett then assumes the part of Julie; fellow frequent repertory player George Plimpton makes his first of two appearances as Parker.
Well and faithfully staged, the confab that Wolfe (Maury Chaykin) convenes with Saul (Conrad Dunn) and Fred (Fulvio Cecere) is an interesting character study, with none of them leaping unhesitatingly to Orrie’s defense, yet voting to help. After the visits by Jill (Janine Theriault) and Cramer (Bill Smitrovich), Archie sits outside the Flemings’ door, suspiciously asked, “Are you waiting for someone?” by a hefty, broad-shouldered woman (Araxi Arslanian), then admitted by the arriving Barry (Carlo Rota), to Stella’s (Christine Brubaker) dismay. Ballou (James Tolkan) says that non-physical contact with Isabel was restricted to reading her the poems of Rudyard Kipling, Robert Service, and Jack London.
One of the most interesting women in the canon, Julie serenades the unimpressed Wolfe with her flamboyant rendition of “Big Man Go-go” (lyrics presumably original to Stout), and we are treated to her number with the Little Indians. Doyle eliminates a superfluous Gamm, while Mrs. Ballou (Nicky Guadagni) is portrayed with maximum eccentricity, as she strokes one of the huge wolfhounds only alluded to on the page. We briefly glimpse Isabel (Hayley Verlyn) in a flashback as Wolfe reads Barry’s confession; as in the novel, after Cramer leaves, Archie flips a coin, telling Julie, “I am deciding something that can’t be decided any other way. Tails. Stella killed her husband herself,” and Orrie weds Jill.
After 1967, the first year since Stout’s wartime hiatus in 1945 during which no new Nero Wolfe book was published, he produced four more novels, starting with The Father Hunt(1968), a natural bookend to The Mother Hunt (1963). Hired to help Lily research a book on the father who’d “made a pile building sewers and other items and had left her enough boodle to keep a dozen penthouses,” Amy Denovo now hires Wolfe to find her own—but discreetly, aided by the grateful Ballou. As cover, he claims to be investigating the death of her mother, Elinor (a presumed alias), a three-month-old hit-and-run in which Cramer seems to have an unusual interest…especially when he learns that Wolfe has one as well.
Echoing Death of a Doxy and “Death of a Demon” (1961), Death of a Dude (1969) is set in and around Lame Horse, Montana; back from “The Rodeo Murder” (1960) are Harvey Greve, now the boss of Lily’s Bar JR Ranch, and Mel Fox, filling in when he is jailed for shooting daughter Alma’s impregnator, St. Louis newspaper scion Philip Brodell. Wade Worthy is outlining A Stripe of the Tiger: the Life and Work of James Gilmore Rowan, and fellow guest Archie is certain but unable to prove Harvey is innocent. So, per Lily, “The mountain comes to Mohammed,” with Wolfe pulling some strings to get himself and Archie credentialed as special investigators by county attorney Thomas R. Jessup.
Following a record four-year gap, in Please Pass the Guilt(1973), Wolfe does Vollmer a favor for his friend, crisis-intervention psychiatrist Irwin Ostrow, seeking to learn if there is any basis to a pseudonymous patient’s Lady Macbeth syndrome. Quickly identified as Kenneth Meer, he is chief assistant to Amory Browning of the Continental Air Network; fellow VP Peter J. Odell, Browning’s rival to succeed retiring president Cass R. Abbott, was blown to bits while opening a drawer in Browning’s office. The obvious question is whether Meer really does have metaphoric blood on his hands…but was the bomb meant for Browning, reputedly dallying with secretary Helen Lugos, or truly targeted at Ordell?
Guilt and A Family Affair (1975) feature both developments with recurring characters and Stout’s customary carelessness about names; the former’s climax reveals that a suspect’s sister is married to Wolfe’s bête noire, Lt. J.M. (hitherto George) Rowcliff. In the latter, Rusterman’s waiter Pierre Ducos arrives, afraid for his life and insisting on seeing Wolfe, so Archie stashes him for the night in the South Room, where he is killed by a bomb in an aluminum cigar tube he’d presumably discovered in his coat pocket. The last name of the maítre d’hôtel who ran Rusterman’s under Wolfe’s trusteeship, Felix, is variously Martin in The Black Mountain (1954), Courbet in “Poison à la Carte” (1960), and finally Mauer.
Pierre served at the dinner hosted by Harvey H. Bassett, president of National Electronics Industries—shot shortly afterward—to address how Watergate “debased…the equipment for electronic recording.” We learn that Wolfe has “hankered…to have an effective hand in the disclosure of the malfeasance of Richard Nixon,” yet per the title (“since there was no client and no prospect of a fee, this was all in the family”), the truth is closer to home. This time, Orrie is guilty of killing Pierre and his daughter, who attempted blackmail, and Bassett, whom he cuckolded; the jig up, he uses a bomb on himself on Wolfe’s doorstep.
A month after that was published, Rex Stout passed away at the age of 88 on October 27, 1975, in Danbury, Connecticut, where my lovely bride and I first set up housekeeping in 1988. That brings us to the end of the long road down which I’d started some two years ago with my post (2/13/23)—the first of 24, by my count—on Fer-de-Lance (1934) and its screen incarnation, Meet Nero Wolfe (1936). I’ve hugely enjoyed revisiting the series, my memories of first devouring the books in 1981 back in high school (where I also met said lovely bride) totally undiminished, and hope you’ve enjoyed getting (re)acquainted with what rank among the greatest characters and partnerships in all of detective fiction.
Editions cited:
Death of a Doxy: Bantam (1967) The Father Hunt: Bantam (1969) Death of a Dude: Bantam (1970) Please Pass the Guilt, A Family Affair, in Seven Complete Nero Wolfe Novels: Avenel (1983)
RUSSELL HOBAN – Turtle Diary. Jonathan Cape. UK,hardcover, 1975. Random House, US, hardcover, 1976. Reprinted many times. Film: Rank, UK, 1985, with Glenda Jackson & Ben Kingsley.
So it’s a sweet and sad little caper novel.
William’s in his mid-forties. He’s a bookstore clerk. Used to be an ad man. Used to have a wife and kids. But that’s all gone now. He lives alone in a London rooming house. He’s aimless and alone.
Naera’s also in her forties. She’s written a series of popular children’s books about personified small animals, living in a hovel, drinking tea, daintily and quaint. She also is alone, and suffering writer’s block.
During their solitary wanderings, they visit the zoo. In the reptile building three full grown sea turtles share a small tank.
There’s some genetic homing device within the soul of a sea turtle, beckoning them to breed on some faraway island to which they’ve never been. But somehow, they know the way. And will go there, danger and distance be damned.
To Naera and William it suddenly seems of the utmost importance that these sea turtles be released to the sea to achieve their predestined teleology.
Naera and WIlliam finally meet when Naera seeks an obscure sea turtle book at William’s bookstore. And they covertly hatch a plan to kidnap the sea turtles and release them to the sea.
Which they do. Releasing the sea turtles at the simulated Cornish fishing village of Polperro, formerly a real fishing village, now surviving on tourism and verisimilitude.
And then they part, William and Naera, released back into the world. With no preprogrammed teleology. To map their way on their own. Without a compass.
WYOMING OUTLAW. Republic Pictures, 1939. John Wayne, Ray Corrigan, Raymond Hatton, Donald Barry, Pamela Blake. Directed by George Sherman.
The Three Mesquiteers ride again in George Sherman’s Wyoming Outlaw, a surprisingly effective entry in the Republic Pictures series about the three Old West adventurers. John Wayne, just on the cusp of stardom, portrays Stony Brook, the titular leader of the outfit. Ray Corrigan reprises the role of Tucson Smith, while Raymond Hatton plays the third Mesquiteer, Rusty Joslin.
When the three adventure heroes drive their cattle through dustbowl country, they stumble upon a small town where Joe Balsinger (LeRoy Mason), the local corrupt government boss, is doling out jobs for campaign contributions. Worse still, he’s extremely vindictive and has driven the Parker family into poverty.
This explains why tempestuous, politically radical Will Parker (Don Barry) has been illegally poaching animals on government land and even went so far as to steal one of the Mesquiteers’s cattle! Circumstances get even rougher and Parker eventually goes on the lam, hiding out from the sheriff and the Cavalry alike. He becomes the titular Wyoming outlaw with a rifle and a willingness to kill.
Now, I know what you’re probably thinking. An comparatively early John Wayne movie from Republic? Must be clunky and dated. Let me assure you: it isn’t. Although the story is simple, it’s delivered in a sophisticated manner that isn’t dumbed down for mass consumption or a young audience. There are no silly songs or goofy humor here. With fistfights aplenty and Wayne’s rugged charm, this somewhat downbeat programmer is hard not to like.
