ELLERY QUEEN “The Adventure of the Seven Black Cats.” Ellery Queen. First published in The Adventures of Ellery Queen (Stokes, hardcover, 1934). Reprinted in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, January 2016, the opening story in the first month of the magazine’s year-long 75th anniversary celebration.
Ellery stops at a pet store thinking perhaps to buy a dog and ends up solving a very strange case involving cats, seven of them, all black, all purchased from the store at a rate of one a week by a bedridden older lady named Euphemia Tarkle, who is known to hate cats. Ellery’s curiosity is aroused. What is going on?
The owner of the story is one Marie Curleigh, young and very pretty. Realizing he needs assistance in any sort of investigation to follow, Ellery asks: “Miss Curleigh, I’m an incurable meddler in the affairs of others. How would you like to help me meddle in the affairs of the mysterious Tarkle sisters?”
And of course she does. The story that follows is meticulously planned out, and will be a lot of fun to read by any mystery fan who likes, no loves, following along with the clues. One negative note should be mentioned, however. The culprit at the end can easily be discerned by the judicious process of elimination. Too few suspects there are, that is. (Not that I did, but I could have, and should have.)
And if asked, I could come up with a couple of other notes. The superintendent of the building where Miss Tarkle lives is named Harry Potter. And Miss Curleigh is such an agreeable assistant in this case that one wishes she might have appeared as well in other tales in Queen canon. I don’t believe she did. She should have.
THE RIVER’S EDGE. 20th Century Fox, 1957. Ray Milland, Anthony Quinn, Debra Paget, Harry Carey Jr., Chubby Johnson. Director: Allan Dwan.
Ray Milland and Anthony Quinn face off in The River’s Edge, a contemporary western/thriller directed by Allan Dwan. Filmed in Cinemascope with some terrific on location shooting in Mexico, the movie tells the story of Nardo Denning (Milland), a scoundrel and criminal who shows up out of the clear blue sky at Ben Cameron’s (Quinn) small, modest farm.
His plan? To win back the affections of Cameron’s wife, Meg (Debra Paget) and to abscond across the border to Mexico with stolen loot. It doesn’t take long for Meg to agree to her proposal, bored as she is by the quiet, but challenging, life on her husband’s farm.
What Meg doesn’t quite realize is how her affections for Nardo are misplaced and that the guy is a cold blooded, heartless killer. After Nardo kills a state policeman, he convinces Cameron at gunpoint to take both him and Meg across the border, first by truck and then by foot. This gets to the heart of the movie, a story about a woman torn between two men, one of whom is very dangerous.
Overall, I somewhat enjoyed watching this one, even though I don’t think there was enough material in it to sustain some ninety minutes or so of screen time. It’s also not quite clear what genre the movie fits into. In many ways, it’s both a contemporary western and a thriller. But it’s also a drama and a romance. One wonders who the exactly intended audience was.
Final assessment: a relatively minor film in the scheme of things, but with Milland and Quinn as the leads, you can do far worse.
JACQUES FUTRELLE – Best “Thinking Machine” Stories. Dover, softcover, 1973.
The career of Jacques Futrelle was heroically cut short by his choice of holiday transportation — he sailed aboard the Titanic. Before that, however, he created one of the most notable eccentric detectives in crime history, Professor Augustus S. F. X. Van Dusen (with plenty of degrees after his name), “the Thinking Machine.”
The professor is a famous scientist with an enormous, domelike head (he wears a hat size 8); a wilderness of straw-yellow hair; and squinty, watery blue eyes. He has thick spectacles, long white hands, and a small body. His henchman and gofer is Hutchison Hatch. a newspaper reporter. Most of the Thinking Machine’s cases arc brought to him by Hatch, who knows that to get a good story, one brings it to the man who can get to the bottom of an “impossible crime.”
The professor, in the fine tradition of armchair detectives, knows that any puzzle has a logical explanation. His sententious principle is “two and two always make four — not sometime but all the time.” Much of the legwork is done by Hatch off stage; the professor himself is a phone fanatic — he often goes into his little phone room and returns with the complete solution.
The Best “Thinking Machine” Detective Stories are a dozen collected from The Thinking Machine (1906), which contains seven stories, and The Thinking Machine on the Case ( 1907). Two of Futrelle’s tales were shown on public television in The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes.
The Thinking Machine was introduced in a story, much anthologized, called “The Problem of Cell 13.” From a simple arguing point, a challenge is proposed. The professor undertakes, on purely scientific grounds, to escape from a death cell in the penitentiary in one week. And does so.
Other stories contain puzzles about dying messages, perfect alibis, buried treasure, and an occult legacy. Excellent “locked-room” variations are presented in “The Stolen Rubens,” “The Phantom Motor,” and “The Lost Radium.” Another, “Kidnapped Baby Blake, Millionaire,” where a person vanishes from footprints in a snow-filled yard, is not quite up to snuff.
In “The Missing Necklace,” the crook is about to give Scotland Yard the bird except for the intervention of the Thinking Machine. He is able to sum up one case thus: “The subtler murders — that is, the ones which are most attractive as problems — are nearly always the work of a cunning woman. I know nothing about women myself.” Shades of Sherlock Holmes.
PIN-UP GIRL. 20th Century Fox, 1944. Betty Grable, John Harvey, Martha Raye, Joe E. Brown, Eugene Pallette, Dave Willock. Director: Bruce Humberstone.
A secretary poses as Broadway star during wartime to win the love of a sailor. Dave Willock plays the sailor’s buddy, and as a team Martha Raye and Joe E. Brown display a bit of denture work.
Lots of large-scale production numbers add to the proceedings, but not much to the story, which is low-scale. Just in passing, I wonder if Betty Grable would be a glamour girl today. I’m not trying to be awkward. I just think standards have changed.
LEN DEIGHTON – XPD. Alfred Knopf, hardcover, 1981. Ballantine, paperback, 1982. First published in the UK by Hutchinson, hardcover, 1981.
Speaking of movies, this is going to be a good one. Stories about World War II, and about the Nazis, and with lots of killing and loads of intrigue — sure fire box-office. And nothing less than Winston Chirchill’s reputation is at stake in this one.
Here it is, four decades later. Len Deighton’s somber recitation of events may lack a little something in the way of providing the sheer joy of reading that good writing is capable of, but in solid-documentary-like fashion, his main thesis is nothing but convincing.
At least, it could have happened. In 1941, Churchill could have gone to Germany, hat in hand. He could have offered Hitler concessions in Africa and around the world. To end the war, he could have offered the Nazis joint control of Ireland. Is it fact, or fiction?
If it were true, emphasis on the if, it would certainly be embarrassing if it were to be found out today. It’s no wonder the secret organizations of at least three countries — no, make it four — desperately want to locate the evidence.
In the wrong hands, it would shake the world.
The movie that will be made from the book will probably be mostly flash, with little substance. Deighton’s dry, almost academic style, complete with occasional footnotes, has always seemed just the reverse to me. The action comes in spurts, nor, strangely enough, does it really seem to provide the main thrust of the story.
You can easily end up reading this almost solely for the characters involved: the British agent whose divorced wife is the daughter of the director general of MI6 and his immediate superior; the Jewish ex-soldier who accidentally stole the documents in question from Hitler’s secret cave, today a successful California businessman whose son is falling for the daughter of an ex-Nazi guard now in the movie business; and that ex-Nazi’s superior, the spy who plays it three ways against the middle.
The relationships are all a tangle, as you can plainly see. Everyone who enters this world of shadows and sudden violence falls at once into a boggy quagmire of manipulation.
But, then, that’s what you expect from a Len Deighton spy thriller, and that’s what you get.
What else can I say, other than he’s done it again?
Rating: B minus.
— Reprinted from The MYSTERY FANcier, July-August 1981.
NOTE. From Wikipedia: “The title is the code used by the Secret Intelligence Service in the novel to refer to assassinations it carries out, short for ‘expedient demise’.”
GERALD KERSH “The Ambiguities of Lo Yeing Pai.” Vara the Tailor #4. First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, July 1968, Not known to have been reprinted,
I have not read much of the novels and other short fiction of Gerald Kersh, but based on what I have read, including this one, he was a magnificent writer – a man born to write. His Wikipedia page is here:
Even better, here’s the first page of another summary of his life and career, as posted by SF writer Harlan Ellison, champion of his writing like none other:
Assuming you have now gone and come back, I will now be content to talk only about this one short tale. It’s a minor piece in many ways, and yet a completely fascinating one. Vara is a tailor, plying his trade somewhere in Manhattan, and as the tale begins, he is busy declining the advances of a salesman offering a fantastic deal on a neon sign for his shop.
To further his explanation of why he is not interested in the offer, Vara tells the salesman and another man (who may be Kersh himself) a story of a murder, that of one of two Chinese partners in the ownership of their own shop, also somewhere in Manhattan – but one that was close by.
As I say, it’s any ordinary tale, a mystery, one with a happy ending, more or less, a puzzle of words, you might say. The magic is in the telling, though, a magical way of talking about events that had already happened. What it was that made me smile every so often were the diversions that Vara takes his listeners along upon.
I shan’t say more. If you ever happen to pick up this particular issue of EQQM, make sure you read this one. Don’t pass it by. It’s the last story in the issue; make sure you read it before setting the magazine down for good.
The Vara the Tailor series —
The Incorruptible Tailor (The Ugly Face of Love and Other Stories, 1958)
The Geometry of the Skirt (EQMM, 1965)
Old Betsey (The Hospitality of Miss Tolliver and Other Stories, 1965)
The Ambiguities of Lo Yeing Pai (EQMM, 1968)
BOTANY BAY. Paramount Pictures, 1952. Alan Ladd, James Mason, Patricia Medina. Cedric Hardwicke. Screenplau by Jonathan Latimer, based on the novel by Charles Nordhoff & James Norman Hall. Director: John Farrow.
Alan Ladd and James Mason face off in this 1950s swashbuckler/adventure film about the founding of Australia as a penal colony for English convicts. Ladd portrays American medical student Hugh Tallant, who has been unjustly imprisoned in Newgate Jail for theft.
He, along with others, soon learns that he will be shipped to a penal colony in New South Wales. Mason, for his part, takes the role of Paul Gilbert, the sadistic captain of the Charlotte, the boat that is to take Tallant and others to their final destination in backwater Australia. Patricia Medina rounds out the cast as a female prisoner caught between her affection for Tallant and the predations of Captain Gilbert.
Both Ladd and Mason do their best with the source material, even when it runs a little dry. Botany Baymay not be the most exciting feature film of its kind, but it has a lot going for it. The set design and costume design, along with the bright color scheme are all very impressive. In many ways, this John Farrow-directed feature reminded me of a Hammer Production. That’s high praise coming from me. Plus, there are even koalas and a kangaroo at the end!
MILES BURTON – Death at Ash House. Inspector Arnold #26. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1942. Published earlier in the UK as This Undesirable Residence (Collins, hardcover, 1942).
Inspector Arnold of Scotland Yard is called in when a man’s secretary is murdered, done in by a large piece of iron – dropped from an upper floor of an unoccupied[ed house. When a missing stamp collection is found, the only motive seen for the crime has disappeared.
It is hard to imagine how two detectives sitting around for pages theorizing about the crime could be entertaining, but it is. I love it. And the, with two chapters to go, a revelation is made which in one stroke, illuminates everything. Absolutely terrific.
Back to the Wells, Part 2: The Island of Dr. Moreau
by Matthew R. Bradley
I can perhaps be forgiven if I replaced my beloved boyhood Berkley Highland edition of H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau(1896) with the 1996 Signet tie-in to that year’s screen version starring Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer. That was out of loyalty to one of my idols, John Frankenheimer, who had been hired—not for the first time—to replace the original director of the film, sadly considered a train-wreck both on- and off-camera. But like several of his others, Paul Lehr’s Berkley cover remains etched in my brain, with its virtually all-red palette; desolate, mountain-backed landscape; burning sun above a nearly naked, bearded man in the foreground; and figures, some with tails, glimpsed behind him.
An introduction presents the novel as a narrative by private gentleman Edward Prendick, found among his papers and published, unsubstantiated, by his nephew and heir, Charles Edward Prendick. Presumed drowned after “the Lady Vain was lost by collision with a derelict when about the latitude 1º s. and longitude 107º e. [on February 1, 1887, he] was picked up [11 months later] in latitude 5º3′ s. and longitude 101º e in a small open boat… [supposedly from] the missing schooner Ipecacuanha,” captained by drunken John Davis. In the dinghy for eight days, he had been alone since a struggle during which an unnamed seaman and fellow passenger Helmar, having drawn lots for cannibalism, fell overboard.
Picked up by Davis, en route to Hawaii, Edward tells Montgomery—to be landed on the nameless island where he lives—that he “had taken to natural history as a relief from the dullness of my comfortable independence.” An “outcast from civilization [who] lost my head for ten minutes” 11 years ago, the medico is returning from Africa with a menagerie (dogs, llama, puma, rabbits) and misshapen attendant M’ling, hazed by captain and crew. Having run afoul of Davis, Edward is dumped with Montgomery and a white-haired man who meets him with a trio of “strange, brutish-looking fellows”; on their arrival, some of the rabbits are released to “Increase and multiply,” replenishing the island’s meat supply.
Told that his uninvited guest “had spent some years at the Royal College of Science and had done some research in biology under Huxley,” the white-haired man says, “We are biologists here. This is a biological station—of a sort,” where they see a ship about once a year. Overhearing his secretive host’s name, Edward recalls the “Moreau Horrors” of a decade past, as the “prominent and masterful physiologist…was simply howled out of the country [for] wantonly cruel” experiments in vivisection. While Montgomery evades his questions about M’ling’s furry, pointed ears and other odd attributes, Edward hears cries of pain from the puma, emanating from the locked enclosure nearby and lasting for hours.
Walking in the forest, Edward sees a “grotesque, half-bestial creature” on all fours, clad in bluish cloth, drink from a stream, and finds a rabbit with its head torn off; in a glade, three porcine humanoids gibber rhythmically with the refrain of “Aloola” or “Baloola.” Using a stone to fell the Leopard Man pursuing him through the forest, he finally makes his way back to the house, where Montgomery gives him a sedative, but no explanations. The next day, the cries of pain are clearly human, yet when Edward flings open the door that Montgomery had forgotten to relock, he sees only “something bound painfully upon a framework, scarred, red, and bandaged” before Moreau hurls him back inside his room.
Fleeing in fear of ending up as “a lost soul, a beast…after torture [and] the most hideous degradation it was possible to conceive,” he is led by an apelike Beast Man to the others, and taught the Law. “Not to [go on all Fours/suck up Drink/eat Flesh nor Fish/claw Bark of Trees/chase other Men]; that is the Law. Are we not Men?”; the chanting also deifies Moreau: “His [is/are] the [House of Pain/Hand that makes/Hand that wounds/Hand that heals/lightning-flash/deep salt sea/stars in the sky].” The Sayer of the Law notes, “None escape…the punishments of those who break [it],” whereupon Montgomery and Moreau appear, pursuing and cornering Edward on the beach, his fate presumably unspeakable…
They drop their revolvers, and he agrees to return to the house for Moreau’s explanation, which contradicts his assumptions about being rendered bestial; “that vivisected human being” he saw was the puma, one of the “humanized animals…carven and wrought into new shapes.” Deeming Edward’s focus on the pain he inflicts “the mark of the beast,” he says, “I am a religious man…I fancy I have seen more of the ways of this world’s Maker than you—for I have sought His laws, in my way, all my life…” Joined by Montgomery and six Kanakas—who later deserted, taking his yacht—he has devoted almost 11 years to “the study of the plasticity of living forms,” untroubled by ethics or his early failures.
But “the stubborn beast flesh grows, day by day, back again…I mean to do better things still. I mean to conquer that,” and his trouble with hands and claws, intelligence, and the emotions. Turned out when “the beast begins to creep back,” they gravitate toward huts built by the Kanakas, living “a kind of travesty of humanity,” governed by the Law, even marrying; “I have some hope of that puma; I have worked hard at her head and brain…” The 60+ surviving Beast People “had certain Fixed Ideas implanted by Moreau in their minds,” forestalling a violent uprising, but are constantly breaking the Law that “battled in their minds with the deep-seated, ever rebellious cravings of their animal natures.”
M’ling lives in “a small kennel [inside] the enclosure…the most human-looking of all…a complex trophy of Moreau’s horrible skill, a bear, tainted with dog and ox,” loyal to and trained in domestic duties by Montgomery, who is dismayed when he and Edward find a gnawed rabbit. “Some carnivore of yours has remembered its old habits,” raising fears of “the inevitable suggestions” of tasting blood, so Moreau insists on making an example of the presumed culprit, the Leopard Man, calling the Beast People with “a huge cowherd’s horn.” Reminded that a lawbreaker “goes back to the House of Pain,” he bolts, but as the terrified creature is encircled by both men and Beast Folk, Edward mercifully shoots him.
Weeks later, catastrophe strikes: pulling her fetters from the wall, the puma escapes into the wood, breaking Edward’s arm; with Montgomery and M’ling, he fights off aggressive Beast Men as they seek Moreau, who did not return from the pursuit. Told he is dead, the quick-thinking Edward says he watches from above and “has changed his body,” the old one found with its head battered in by the fetters and the mutilated puma nearby. Laying it on a pile of brushwood, they “put an end to all we found living” in the lab, but during a drunken “bank holiday,” Montgomery burns the boats, ending any hope of escape, while amid a riot that claims him and M’ling, Edward upsets a lamp, incinerating the enclosure.
Alone with the Beast Men, Edward asserts control, invoking the Law; arms himself with revolvers, hatchets, and whip; orders the bodies, including the Sayer of the Law, cast into the sea; drives off the Hyena-Swine, who had also tasted blood; and establishes an uneasy 10-month peace amid the huts of the rest, a Dog Man his inseparable ally. The inevitable reversion leaves their huts loathsome, so he builds “a hovel of boughs” in the enclosure’s ruins, but the Hyena-Swine kills the Dog Man and is in turn shot. At last, a boat with two rotting bodies—one apparently Davis—floats ashore, and after gathering what provisions he can, Edward drifts for three days until “a brig from Apia to San Francisco” finds him.
A vice president of the H.G. Wells Society and the author of an update, Moreau’s Other Island(aka An Island Called Moreau, 1980), Brian W. Aldiss writes in his afterword that Wells “followed his great teacher, Thomas Huxley, in his devotion to the fresh truths and insights that evolution was bringing to human affairs….We were up from the apes, not down from the angels. We carried in our anatomies proof of the ancestral beast….[The] island stands as a model for the world and Moreau himself as a model for God the cruel experimental scientist.” Unsurprisingly, the novel—which Wells later called “an exercise in youthful blasphemy”—was controversial, yet its notoriety helped make it a best-seller.
The first and decidedly best screen version, Island of Lost Souls(1932), was made before Wells adapted his own work into Things to Come (1936) and The Man Who Could Work Miracles (1937). Erle C. Kenton directed the rare foray into the genre by Paramount and, later, Universal’s Golden Age horror films The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942), House of Frankenstein(1944), and House of Dracula (1945). Displaying his diversity, he worked with W.C. Fields in You’re Telling Me!(1934) and Universal’s other cash cows, Abbott and Costello, in Pardon My Sarong, Who Done It? (both 1942), and It Ain’t Hay (1943), although replaced by Charles Lamont on Hit the Ice (1943) after problems with Costello.
Among those reportedly laboring on the long-gestating screenplay were Joseph Moncure March; Cyril Hume of Forbidden Planet (1956), also a mainstay of the Tarzan series; and Garrett Fort, whose seminal contribution to the Universal cycle includes early, uncredited work on the Wells adaptation The Invisible Man(1933). The eventual script credit went to Waldemar Young—a frequent collaborator with Lon Chaney and Tod Browning (e.g., London After Midnight, 1927)—and Philip Wylie, the co-author (with Edwin Balmer) of the novel When Worlds Collide(1933). George Pal produced the 1951 screen version, as he would the Wells-based The War of the Worlds (1953) and The Time Machine (1960).
Charles Laughton, who had made his Hollywood debut opposite Boris Karloff in James Whale’s The Old Dark House(1932) for Universal, dominates the film as totally as his character of Moreau does his creations. He went on to earn an Oscar for The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), plus nominations for Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) and Witness for the Prosecution (1957); star in perhaps the definitive version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame(1939); and direct one extraordinary film, The Night of the Hunter (1955). Cast as Edward Parker (né Prendick), Richard Arlen had a key genre role as the hero of The Lady and the Monster (1944), the first adaptation of Curt Siodmak’s Donovan’s Brain (1942).
Bankrupt after Universal—for whom he re-created his defining stage role in Browning’s Dracula (1931), which Fort co-wrote—terminated his contract, Bela Lugosi is the Sayer of the Law; Wally Westmore’s makeup was, ironically, perhaps as heavy as the one that made him reject Whale’s Frankenstein (1931). Selected in a nationwide contest among 60,000 entrants, fashion model Kathleen Burke played Lota, the Panther Woman, a new character developed by Fort and Wylie. Renamed, she is a fixture in the Burt Lancaster (1977) and Brando remakes, plus The Twilight People (1972), which—like Terror Is a Man (1959)—was an uncredited Filipino-American version produced by Eddie Romero.
The film benefits greatly from the work of cinematographer Karl Struss, an Oscar-winner for F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise (1929) and nominee for Paramount’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), and location shooting on both California’s Catalina Island and the S.S. Catalina, which fortuitously encountered actual fog, specified in the script. The S.S. Covena picks up the S.O.S. of the Lady Vain—also bound for Apia, where he is to marry Ruth Thomas (Leila Hyams)—and Parker, who has Montgomery (Arthur Hohl) send her a radiogram. Captain Davies (Stanley Fields) drops him with Montgomery and M’ling (Tetsu Komai); although offering passage to Apia, the whip-wielding Moreau has “something in mind.”
He wishes to know if Lota, presented as “a pure Polynesian” and enjoined to secrecy, will be attracted to Parker; she is, but cannot avert his horrifying look into the laboratory, and drawing the wrong conclusions, he tries to flee with Lota. They are stopped by the Beast Men, whom Moreau convenes with a gong, evoking a recitation by the Sayer of the Law, shown in extreme close-up and wringing every drop of agony from, “His is the House of Pain.” Back at the house, with childish glee, Moreau boasts, “Oh, it takes a long time and infinite patience to make them talk. Someday, I’ll create a woman, and it will be easier,” while “some of my less successful experiments” serve as slave labor, generating power.
Moreau asks, “do you know what it means to feel like God?”—almost verbatim the line that the censor insisted be obscured by a clap of thunder in Frankenstein one year earlier. The next day, the schooner in which Montgomery was to convey Parker to Apia is found “mysteriously” wrecked; when the Covena arrives, the American Consul (George Irving) forces Davies to reveal the truth, and has Captain Donahue (Paul Hurst) take Ruth to the island (latitude 15º s. and longitude 170º w., near Tonga, for you cartographers). There’s a priceless moment when Parker, having noticed Lota’s claw-like nails, bursts in saying, “Moreau, you don’t deserve to live!,” to which he urbanely replies, “I beg your pardon?”
After Parker refuses to play the mating game, Moreau laments to Montgomery that he’d been tipped off by “the stubborn beast flesh creeping back,” but he vows, “This time I’ll burn out all of the animal in her…time and monotony will do the rest.” He admits Ruth and Donahue, yet when Parker wishes to leave, he warns that traveling a mile back to the ship through his jungle at night would be dangerous, so they accept his hospitality. Their meal is interrupted by chanting, and Moreau observes, “the natives…are restless tonight,” plying Donahue with drink as Montgomery unusually abstains, but during the night, ape-man Ouran (wrestler Hans Steinke, “The German Oak”) seeks to break into Ruth’s room.
Finally fed up, Montgomery lets Donahue out to summon his crew, hoping to join them, but Moreau sends Ouran to strangle him, sealing his own fate—learning who ordered it, the Sayer proclaims, “Law no more,” and confirms, “He can die,” as does loyal M’ling in his defense, while Lota sacrifices herself to save the escapees from Ouran. The horrific ending (arguably more effective than Well’s anticlimax), as the Beast Men descend upon the screaming Moreau in his own House of Pain, resembles that of Browning’s Freaks(1932); both were released the same year and banned in Britain. Wells dismissed Island as a vulgarization of his work, but today it remains as an undisputed classic of the genre.
Up next: The Invisible Man
Sources/works consulted:
Aldiss, Brian W., afterword to The Island of Dr. Moreau, pp. 207-216.
Baxter, John, Science Fiction in the Cinema: 1895-1970 (The International Film Guide Series; New York: A.S. Barnes, 1970).
Bojarski, Richard, The Films of Bela Lugosi(Secaucus, NJ: Citadel, 1980).
Brosnan, John, Future Tense: The Cinema of Science Fiction (New York: St. Martin’s, 1978).
Clarens, Carlos, An Illustrated History of the Horror Film (New York: Paragon, 1979).
Dello Stritto, Frank, and Andi Brooks, Vampire Over London: Bela Lugosi in Britain (Los Angeles: Cult Movies Press, 2001).
Everson, William K., Classics of the Horror Film (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel, 1974).
Fischer, Dennis, Horror Film Directors, 1931-1990 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1991).
Gunn, James, editor, The New Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (New York: Viking, 1988).
Hardy, Phil, editor, The Overlook Film Encyclopedia: Horror(Woodstock, NY: Overlook, 1995).
Hardy, Phil, editor, The Overlook Film Encyclopedia: Science Fiction (Woodstock, NY: Overlook, 1995). Internet Movie Database (IMDb) Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDb) Island of Lost Souls, unsigned laserdisc liner notes (Universal City, CA: MCA Home Video, Inc., 1994). Wells, H.G., The Island of Dr. Moreau (New York: Signet, 1996). Wikipedia
SILVER CITY. Paramount Pictures, 1951. Edmond O’Brien, Yvonne De Carlo, Richard Arlen, Barry Fitzgerald, Gladys George, Laura Elliott, Edgar Buchanan. Michael Moore. Screenplay by Frank Gruber, based on the 1947 novel High Vermilion by Luke Short. Director: Byron Haskin.
Edmond O’Brien takes the lead in Silver City, an overall mediocre Western from director Byron Haskin, whose much better Denver & Rio Grande (1952), also starring O’Brien, I reviewed here on this blog a while ago. In Silver City, O’Brien portrays Larkin Moffatt, a mining assayer who becomes an unlikely hero when he comes to the rescue of the Surrencys – a father and daughter mining outfit.
Both father Dutch (Edgar Buchanan) and daughter Candace (Yvonne de Carlo) are facing immense pressure from claim jumper R.R. Jarboe (Barry Fitzgerald) and his henchman Bill Taff (Michael Moore). Complicating matters is the fact that Larkin has his own criminal past and an ongoing rivalry with his former employer, Charles Storrs (Richard Arlen) and his wife Josephine, who he was once romantically involved with. When all the characters gather in Silver City, Nevada, things come to a boiling point. That’s the plot in a nutshell.
The movie starts off slow, but it eventually finds a solid footing. Still, despite some fightfights and a well-choreographed final showdown at a sawmill, Silver City is a rather uninspired film. It simply doesn’t live up to its potential. If you haven’t seen this one, you’re not missing all that much.
