JAMES E. MARTIN – The Mercy Trap. Putnam’s, hardcover, 1989. Avon, paperback, 1990.

   James E. Martin, policeman in Norwalk, Ohio, turned special investigator for the State of Ohio and now retired, authored a mystery in 1973 (The 95 File) and now returns with The Mercy Trap, the first of a series about private eye Gil Disbro.

   Disbro comes full-grown out of the standard P.I. womb: former cop, former husband, getting his sex without commitment, a man with his own particular standards which are at once adaptable and firmly held. He walks the mean streets of Cleveland, retrieving bail jumpers for a bondsman between real jobs.

   Here a mission of mercy comes his way: wealthy contractor Howard Eberly’s adopted daughter is dying for lack of a kidney transplant, and Eberly wants her real mother or other close relative found as a possible donor. Not a quest likely to involve violence, though a twenty-nine-year-old trail with the mother’s true identity carefully hidden may prove a tad faint.

   But the traces are quickly picked up by Disbro’s capable hands, though along the way (but where? and why?) he seems to have stepped on somebody’s toes. Martin’s narrative is compelling, his sense of plot and pace sure. I’ll await the next Disbro with much anticipation.

       The Gil Disbro series —

The Mercy Trap. Putnam 1989.
The Flip Side of Life. Putnam 1990.
And Then You Die. Morrow 1992.
A Fine and Private Place. Morrow 1994.

WICHITA. Allied Artists, 1955. Joel McCrea, Vera Miles, Lloyd Bridges, Wallace Ford, Edgar Buchanan, Peter Graves, Keith Larsen, Walter Coy, Jack Elam. Director: Jacques Tourneur.

   The first time the viewer sees now legendary figure Wyatt Earp (Joel McCrea) in Wichita, he’s an absolutely miniscule figure on horseback perched on a hill off in the distance.

   A solitary man overwhelmed by nature, Earp is initially portrayed as extraordinarily reluctant to be the arbiter of law and order in the rapidly growing city of Wichita, Kansas. Earp’s also got a strong fatalistic streak, going so far as to tell a potential love interest after a bank robbery that “things like that are always happening” to him. As if he were just an object swept to and fro by the winds of History.

   Directed by Jacques Tourneur (Cat People, Out of the Past), Wichita is not only quite good Western, it’s also a superbly well-crafted character study of how frontier violence fundamentally alters the course of one man’s life. With a supporting case that includes a youthful Lloyd Bridges as a villain and Peter Graves as Earp’s brother, Morgan, the film is definitely worth a look.

   The story follows Earp (McCrea) as he journeys, both literally and metaphorically, from a lonesome figure on horseback to a married man tasked with establishing law and order in Kansas. Soon after the film begins, Earp encounters a cowboy encampment. After some initial pleasantries, his relationship with the men begins to sour – and how! – after two of the men attempt to steal from him as he sleeps. Although this initial encounter is brief, it sets the stage for what is to come.

   Earp journeys onward alone, stopping briefing in front of a signpost indicating Wichita is ahead. The sign also notably states, in all capital letters, that “Everything Goes in Wichita.” Soon two fast moving stagecoaches barrel down on him, pushing him off to the side. The first stagecoach has a banner on the back with the very same words, while the second has one that reads, “Wine, Women, Wichita.” From that moment onward, the viewer knows that the rapidly expanding city is going to be both a somewhat lawless town, but also a frontier town where a man can reinvent himself.

   Earp’s plan is to be a businessman in town. That plan goes by the wayside once he witnesses the aforementioned cowboys arrive in town and, in a drunken frenzy, shoot up Wichita, killing an innocent young boy in the process.

   That’s when Earp decides he will take the mayor up on his offer and become a U.S. Marshal. Supporting him in his endeavor is Bat Masterson (Keith Larsen). The rest of the movie revolves around not only the conflict between Earp and the cowboys, but also a growing rift between Earp and Sam McCoy (Walter Coy) over Earp’s strong-arm tactics. Earp also falls for McCoy’s daughter, Laurie (Vera Miles) in a somewhat clichéd subplot that doesn’t really do much for the film, but may have been intended as a box office draw.

   There are several scenes in Wichita that merit particular consideration. The first is Earp’s initial encounter with the cowboys. When he first meets them, he’s elevated on horseback. They are sitting. We quickly learn he’s a stoic figure, with his first words to them (and in the movie) as follows: “Howdy! My name’s Earp, Wyatt Earp.” While all of the cowboys are dressed in a dark colors, Earp is wearing a clean, bright red shirt. This marks the beginning of a personal journey that will culminate in his fight against the darkness and disorder symbolized by these ragged men.

   The sequence in which the cowboys shoot up the town, injure a woman, and kill a young boy through carelessness also is likewise worth watching closely. These events prompt Earp to accept the position as U.S. Marshal. Look for the notable, stark contrast between the bright saloon and the dark, foreboding street.

   Inside the saloon, there are many women, resplendent in a multitude of colors. Outside, on the dusty street, there are loud men in dark clothes engaging in recklessness and violence. By stepping out into the grey netherworld of the Wichita streets, Earp becomes the de facto protector of the town’s innocent women and children and a protector of Wichita’s desire for domesticity.

   Finally, there’s a harrowing scene in which the cowboys shoot Sam McCoy’s wife. Again, the killing wasn’t so much intentional, as the result of lawlessness. The gunmen ride in front of McCoy’s house, shooting into it. We see McCoy’s wife fall to the ground and bullet holes lodged in the family house’s front door. This senseless act of violence again prompts Earp into action, making the final break between Earp the businessman and Earp the lawman.

   Wichita has a lot to recommend it. With a running time of a little less than ninety minutes, the film has decent pacing and enough action to keep a viewer engaged. McCrea is generally very good in this, as is Peter Graves.

   The film’s biggest downside is the fact that the plot is just a bit too predictable. Much like in Law and Order, which I reviewed here, the hero is a U.S. Marshal who defeats the bad guys and gets the girl. What sets Wichita apart, however, is its significantly better cinematography and use of symbolism to tell the story of Wyatt Earp before he arrived in Dodge City.

BLACKOUT. Hammer Films, UK, 1954. Lippert Pictures, US, 1954. Originally released in the UK as Murder by Proxy. Dane Clark, Belinda Lee, Betty Ann Davies, Eleanor Summerfield, Andrew Osborn. Based on the novel Gold Coast Nocturne by Helen Nielsen. Director: Terence Fisher.

   Dane Clark (1912-1998) is one of those actors that you, if you are, as I am, in middle age, have almost assuredly seen on television earlier in your life, even if you don’t match the name with the face. I recall him playing an FBI agent in Season One of Angela Lansbury’s beloved mystery series, Murder She Wrote, the “Watson” in that episode to Lansbury’s Jessica Fletcher. I don’t know why I remember this character, but I suppose I have to chalk it up to Clark’s acting skills, having seen some of his other genre film work of late. He’s good!

   Dane Clark was known in the 1940s as the “B-list John Garfield,” but I don’t believe this appellation does him justice. (It’s a bit like when the great Ida Lupino is dismissed as the “poor man’s Bette Davis.”) Dane Clark was his own man. Both John Garfield (born Jacob Julius Garfinkle in 1913) and Dane Clark (born Bernard Zanville in 1912) were Jews from New York City, but Clark came of much more comfortable circumstances than Garfield, graduating from Cornell and getting a law degree before ending up in acting (after stints in boxing, baseball, construction, sales and sculptor’s modeling — he had found lawyers weren’t doing too well in the Depression either).

   In 1941 Clark married the artist and sculptor Margot Yoder (a distant relative of my family) and the next year appeared in several films (uncredited): The Pride of the Yankees (“Fraternity Boy”); Wake Island (“Sparks”); and, most notably, Dashiell Hammett’s The Glass Key (“Henry Sloss”).

   By the end of World War II Clark was getting bigger roles, including that of the Bohemian artist in the Bette Davis identical twins melodrama A Stolen Life (1946); the escaped convict who has a desperate romance with Ida Lupino in Deep Valley (1947); and, in the Oscar-nominated film Moonrise (1948), the tormented Danny Hawkins, who is in love with gorgeous Gail Russell and has, most inconveniently, killed her fiancee (played, very briefly, by Lloyd Brides). Today Moonrise pops up on lists of greatest noir films though regrettably it’s not available on DVD (you can see on it Amazon instant video, however).

   If you look around, you should be able to find on DVD some of Clark’s work as a lead actor in late 1940s and 1950s crime films (when he really came into his own as an actor), including Without Honor (1949), Backfire (1950), Highly Dangerous (1950; screenplay by Eric Ambler), Gunman in the Streets (1950, with Simone Signoret), Never Trust a Gambler (1951), The Gambler and the Lady (1952), Blackout (1954; Murder by Proxy in UK), Paid to Kill (1954; Five Days in UK), Port of Hell (1954), The Toughest Man Alive (1955) and The Man Is Armed (1956).

   I’ve recently seen several of the above films, the first being, for the purpose of this review, Blackout.

   Blackout, as I have discussed on my own blog, is an English adaptation of Helen Nielsen’s Chicago-set hard-boiled crime novel, Gold Coast Nocturne (1951). Although transferring the setting from Chicago to London is slightly awkward, to be sure, overall I was really rather impressed with this film. It is quite faithful to the novel, even using some of the dialogue.

   As the beleaguered hero, Casey Morrow, an American out to solve a murder he wakes up to discover he’s suspected of having committed, Dane Clark is excellent, as are the two lead women, Belinda Lee (sexy blonde heiress Phyllis Brunner) and Eleanor Summerfield (wisecracking artist Maggie Doone). A couple crucial supporting performances could have been stronger, but overall I would quite recommend this film.

       TO BE CONTINUED…

Editorial Comment:   This review first appeared in slightly different form on Curt’s own blog, The Passing Tramp.

RICHARD HULL – The Ghost It Was. Putnam, US, hardcover, 1937. First published in the UK by Faber & Faber, hardcover, 1937. Penguin, UK. paperback, 1950.

   Looking for employment that doesn’t require any work, Gregory Spring-Benson checks out journalism. Unfortunately, The New Light wants experience or at least a good story. A potential story is what Spring-Benson discovers when he finds that his estrange — and strange — uncle has purchased an allegedly haunted house in Amberhurst.

   The possibility of the story, plus maybe getting his uncle, notoriously stingy, to part with some money, stirs Spring-Benson to go to Amberhurst.

   There, after some travail, he meets some cousins who are not much better than he, although probably not much worse. The house’s ghost — both fake and maybe real — appears, perhaps committing a murder and then definitely committing one.

   A bit too much coincidence and little doubt about who the murderer is, if it wasn’t the spook, are the weak points here. Still, Hull always amuses and entertains with his odd characters. His works are well worth looking for.

Bibliographic Notes:   Richard Hull was the pseudonym of Richard Henry Sampson, (1896-1973). His first novel, Murder of My Aunt, published in 1935, is perhaps also his best known. It has the honor of being included as one of the Haycraft-Queen cornerstones of mystery fiction. Hull has in total 15 entries in Hubin.

THE SPOILERS. Universal Pictures, 1942. Marlene Dietrich, Randolph Scott, John Wayne, Margaret Lindsay, Harry Carey, Richard Barthelmess, George Cleveland, Samuel S. Hinds. Based on a novel by Rex Beach. Director: Ray Enright.

   The Spoilers stars John Wayne, Randolph Scott, and Marlene Dietrich in a tale about claims jumping and legal corruption during the Alaskan gold rush. Based on a Rex Beach novel and directed by Ray Enright, the film is a slightly above average period Western. There’s some great onscreen chemistry between Wayne and Dietrich, a beautifully filmed scene of a locomotive at night, and one of the most extensive saloon fight scenes that I’ve come across in recent memory.

   Set in Nome, Alaska, the story follows the conflict between miner, Roy Glennister (Wayne) and a corrupt gold commissioner by the name of Alex McNamara (Scott). The two men also each have their eyes on saloon owner beauty, Cherry Malotte (Dietrich), who has yet another suitor in the lovesick Bronco Kid (Richard Barthelmess).

   McNamara’s underhanded attempts to achieve title to Glennister’s gold mine sets the story in motion. Aiding him in his task are corrupt Circuit Court Judge Horace Stillman (Samuel S. Hinds) and his lovely niece, Helen Chester (Margaret Lindsay), who grows increasingly ambivalent about her role in the whole sordid scheme.

   Both Wayne and Dietrich are quite good in their roles. More importantly, each of them appears to be having a good time working on the project, making their screen time together a fun experience for the viewer. It’s Scott, however, who steals the show in his portrayal of the villainous McNamara. There’s just something so incredibly devious about his character. He’s sort of what you’d imagine a frontier claims jumper would have been like — a bit genteel, at least on the surface, but also ruthless and more than willing to get his hands dirty should the need arise.

   Maybe that’s why in the film’s final sequence, when he and Wayne’s character get into a lengthy, brutal bar fight, you both want to see him get his butt kicked and to see him get in a few good punches himself. He’s a bad guy all right, but not one without his charms.

   Given that The Spoilers benefits from great cast, a decent plot, and a good amount of rugged frontier action, you’d think that it would have more of a critical reputation than it does. Part of this likely stems from the fact that the two male leads, John Wayne and Randolph Scott, each went on to much bigger and better projects, leaving affairs like this in their dust.

   The fact that The Spoilers can feel considerably dated at times doesn’t help matters, either. Case in point: the film’s blatantly transparent attempt to utilize racial humor. This is exemplified in a scene in which Wayne’s character is effectively wearing blackface and fools Cherry’s maid into thinking he is Black. It was surely intended to induce guffaws from the audience, but now it just falls flat. While I do recognize that there was likely no conscious decision to be derogatory toward Blacks in the film, I don’t believe most audiences today would find value in the movie’s usage of blackface for comedic relief or think Wayne in blackface was particularly humorous.

   In conclusion, The Spoilers is a solid frontier Western with some very good scenes and a notably strong performance by Randolph Scott. It’s by no means a bad film. It just doesn’t stand the test of time that well.

   Not a review per se but something I wanted to put out to the others here and see if it got any reaction. A College Professor once told me that the function of Innocence is to be destroyed. Well maybe, but I’m not sold on the notion.

   I was discussing Out of the Past and a few other films yesterday, and reflecting on the value of Innocence: When I first watched Out, I knew nothing about film noir and so wasn’t prepared for the plot developments or the ending — which made them much more powerful.

   Nowadays you can’t get close to it without knowing in advance that it’s one of the essential noirs, and setting your expectations accordingly. Similarly, there;s something magical about being 15 and watching The Maltese Falcon or Angels with Dirty Faces, not knowing the endings. Or being 19, going to an all-night drive-in-movie triple feature and seeing Night of the Living Dead before it had such an awesome rep, when it was just another monster movie.

   In each case, my enjoyment of the film was keyed by not expecting, not knowing in advance… Doesn’t happen much anymore. These days I’m more likely to hear a film praised or a scene described or a book synopsized, and build up my expectations. By the time I saw The Searchers I’d heard so much about it, it couldn’t possibly live up to my mental hype; had to see it a few more times to really appreciate the film for what it was.

   So I’m just wondering if anyone here has similar memories of reading or watching something that turned out to be a classic, and if you can still recall that first youthful thrill of discovery.

   Or am I just getting into my dotage?

CRUEL GUN STORY. Nikkatsu, Japan, 1964. Originally released as Kenjû zankoku monogatari. Jô Shishido, Chieko Matsubara, Tamio Kawaji, Yûji Odaka, Minako Katsuki, Hiroshi Nihon’yanagi. Director: Takumi Furukawa.

   I’m not going to fake it. This is the first Japanese crime film I’ve seen in a good long while, and there’s no way I can possibly place it in any kind of context where it belongs. I don’t know the actors nor the director, nor what the intentions were of the people who were responsible for the making of the film — only the results, as I saw them.

   But on the basis of this first toe-in-the-water attempt on my part, I’m enthusiastic enough to try another, and perhaps even soon. I feel as though I’m on the verge of entering a very big field here, and I hope it doesn’t go to my head.

   Just released from prison, a small-time gangster named Togawa (Jô Shishido) discovers that he has a benefactor who negotiated his release, and expensively, and that he is expected to reciprocate. (It wasn’t that he was a gangster that sent him to prison, it was for the murder of the man who ran over his sister with a truck, causing her to lose both legs.)

   The job he’s supposed to do? Nothing more than to hold up an armored car, along with a easily supplied crew of assistants. The prize: millions of dollars yen being transported from a race track to a nearby bank.

   Togawa agrees. His sister needs an operation, he believes. And as they always do in heist films like this, things go wrong. And boy howdy, do they ever go wrong. The body count is as high as any movie I’ve seen in recent months, including lots and lots of American-made westerns.

   Although filmed in black-and-white, and often dazzlingly so, please do not think of this as a film noir. It’s only a heist film populated by lots of guns and gangsters, flawed by a plan which could never have worked in the first place, and done in by plain old greed, pure and simple.

   My July column, the longest I’ve ever written, was completely devoted to the Mike Hammer TV series of 1958-59 but there are a couple of related items that I couldn’t squeeze in last time. I trust no Hammerhead will mind if I begin with these.

   Two questions surrounding the series caught my attention as I was fiddling with the column. First, was there a Hammer pilot episode and if so which was it? The order of original broadcast in New York or any other city doesn’t help because it was different in every market and completely up to the station owning the local rights. Copyright registration dates don’t help either, nor does the order in which they appear on the recently released DVD set. If the episodes had production numbers, I haven’t been able to find them.

   However, I think I’ve solved the puzzle while slowly making my way through the set. Throughout the series the role of Hammer’s friendly enemy Captain Pat Chambers is played by Bart Burns. But in one early segment there’s a plainclothes cop who’s referred to only as Pat but is clearly meant to be Chambers. The actor who plays him is not Bart Burns but Ted De Corsia, who also played Sergeant Velie for much of the run of the Adventures of Ellery Queen on radio.

   The episode is “Death Takes an Encore,” directed by Richard Irving and written by Frank Kane based on one of his short stories about New York PI Johnny Liddell (“Return Engagement,” Manhunt, February 1955, collected in Johnny Liddell’s Morgue, Dell pb #A117, 1956). For my money, that was the pilot.

   The second question also involves Frank Kane. Back in the late Forties he wrote around 45 scripts for that classic radio series The Shadow, and for several years there have been rumors that at least one of his Hammer scripts was a rewrite of one of his Shadow scripts. But which?

   I believe I’ve solved that puzzle too. Another early episode written by Kane, “Letter Edged in Blackmail,” shares a springboard with Kane’s Shadow script “Etched with Acid” (March 17, 1946): the protagonist in both tries to shut down a racket in which wealthy women with heavy gambling debts are forced to fake robberies of their own jewels. As neither Mike Hammer nor The Shadow would ever dream of saying: Q.E.D.

   Death has claimed two actors who were well known for having played TV detectives. Efrem Zimbalist Jr. was the first to go. He died on May 2 at age 95, reportedly while mowing the lawn of his house in the horse-ranching community of Solvang, California.

   People of my generation first got to know Zimbalist on the Warner Bros. TV series 77 Sunset Strip (1958-64), in which he starred as ultra-suave PI Stuart Bailey. No sooner had that series left the air than he started playing Federal agent Lewis Erskine on the even longer-running The FBI (1965-74).

   When I met him — very briefly, at a film festival in Memphis — he was over 80 and still looked great. Judging from the photos of him I found on the Web, he still looked great in his 90s. Way to go! May we all be so lucky.

   The other recently deceased tele-icon was James Garner, who at age 86 was found dead in his Los Angeles home on July 19. Like Zimbalist he was best known for two long-running TV series but his were in different genres.

   His earliest claim to fame was as star of the Warner Bros. Western series Maverick (1957-63) but his interest for us stems from his years playing an un-macho PI in The Rockford Files (1974-80).

   In his autobiography The Garner Files (2011) he claimed that Bret Maverick and Jim Rockford were basically the same character, but he never said and probably never knew that the character from which both were sort of spun off was an icon of U.S. detective fiction, namely that quintessential American wiseass Archie Goodwin.

   I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: if only there had been a Nero Wolfe movie with the middle-aged Orson Welles as Wolfe and the young Garner as Archie!

   Both Maverick and 77 Sunset Strip were created by the same man, who was also a co-producer and, as John Thomas James, a frequent scriptwriter for The Rockford Files .

   He first came to attention, however, as a mystery novelist. Roy Huggins (1914-2002) debuted in the genre with The Double Take (1946), whose protagonist, PI Stuart Bailey, was a character and first-person narrator owing a great deal to Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe and very different from the suave and perhaps a bit bland Bailey of 77 Sunset Strip.

   Anthony Boucher’s review for the San Francisco Chronicle (February 3, 1946) was spot on as usual: “Mr. Huggins adds nothing to the established hardboiled formula but does an unusually able job within its possibly overfamiliar frame.”

   At that time, with Dashiell Hammett having written nothing since The Thin Man (1934), “the established hardboiled formula” meant Chandler. The latter may not have read The Double Take himself but he clearly found out about it and, as witness his letter to fellow pulp veteran Cleve F. Adams (September 4, 1948), he was not amused.

   Somebody else informed Chandler that “the publishers told Huggins, in effect, that it was bad enough for him to steal my approach and my method or whatever, but stealing my characters was going a little too far. I understand there was some rewriting, but cannot vouch for any of this.”

   The letter to Adams can be found in Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler, ed. Frank MacShane (1981), pp. 125-126. This is the only reference to Huggins in the index to MacShane’s book, but a careful reader will find Chandler revisiting the incident in later correspondence. Writing to spy novelist and later Watergate conspirator E. Howard Hunt on November 16, 1952, he says:

   Exactly nine months later, on September 16, 1953, writing to a master at his alma mater Dulwich College, he adds a bit more detail to the story.

   These quotations come respectively from pp. 334 and 352 of MacShane’s collection.

   Huggins’ Hollywood career began when The Double Take sold to the movies and he was hired to write the screenplay for what was released as I Love Trouble (1948), with Franchot Tone as Bailey. By the time Chandler died, in 1959, Huggins had created Maverick and 77 Sunset Strip and both series were prime-time hits, but the creator of Philip Marlowe watched very little TV and may never have known that a sardonic prophecy he had made in his letter to Cleve Adams had come true:

   Which is precisely what Huggins did.

PHANTOM OF CHINATOWN. Monogram Pictures, 1940. Keye Luke, Grant Withers, Lotus Long, Charles Miller, Huntley Gordon, Virginia Carpenter, John H. Dilson. Screenplay: George Waggner. Director: Phil Rosen.

   The final film in Monogram’s Mr. Wong series, Phantom of Chinatown is notable for being the only movie in which an American actor of Chinese heritage, rather than the veteran horror film actor Boris Karloff, portrayed the Chinese-American detective.

   With a screenplay by George Waggner, director of Man Made Monster, which I reviewed here, and The Wolf Man, it’s also a fairly good, if at times excruciating slow moving, mystery and spy film, set during an era when Imperial Japan threatened the territorial integrity of China.

   Directed by Phil Rosen, Phantom of Chinatown doesn’t have a phantom or anything supernatural in it at all. It’s simply an entertaining and overall well-crafted mystery story with a dash of international intrigue. There are also some memorable scenes, including one with a trap door, which fans of 1930s pulp fiction, will most likely appreciate.

   Most importantly, however, the film has Keye Luke as the youthful Jimmy (not Mr.) Wong. Fans of mystery films will know Luke primarily for his portrayal of “Number One Son” in the Walter Oland Charlie Chan films or for his role as Kato in The Green Hornet. Indeed, Phantom of Chinatown was the only film in which Luke was both the star and lead character.

   In many ways, that’s a real shame. Luke’s portrayal of Jimmy Wong, although a bit too stiff, wasn’t bad at all. In fact, he was quite fun to watch, particularly in those scenes in which his character appeared to have a better understanding of the case at hand than Captain Street (Grant Withers). It’s too bad, then, that the filmmakers didn’t realize that Withers’s height advantage over Luke would, in some ways, make his character appear to almost overshadow Jimmy Wong.

   The story follows Jimmy Wong (Luke) as he teams up with San Francisco policeman, Captain Street (Withers), to solve the murder of Dr. Benton, an archeologist who recently returned to the United States from Mongolia. The university professor brought back a scroll with him.

   And as it turns on, what’s written on the scroll has something to do with why he was murdered! Adding to the mystery is Dr. Benton’s Chinese secretary, Win Lee (Lotus Long), whom Captain Street initially suspects as playing a part in her employer’s murder. There’s also a butler, who’s of course a potential suspect, but he gets ruled out pretty quickly once he’s found with a dagger in his chest. The movie wraps up in a similar fashion as other B-film mysteries from the same era, namely with a final showdown and a generally satisfying, if somewhat clichéd, explanation of all that’s transpired.

   In conclusion, Phantom of Chinatown, while hardly ranking among the greatest of mystery films, is nevertheless worth a look. It’s just a fun little film.

FRAMED FOR MURDER. Goldsmith Productions, 1934. Wallace Ford, June Clyde, Bradley Page, Fuzzy Knight, Barbara Rogers, Shirley Lee. Also released as I Hate Women. Director: Aubrey Scotto.

   If you were to do an accurate measurement of how many of the 70 or so minutes of this murder mystery movie are those of an actual murder mystery movie and how many are those of a romantic comedy, I’d be willing to wager that it would come out to about half and half, plus or minus five minutes.

   The comedy is corny and the romance is sappy — who’d ever think of Wallace Ford as a romantic leading man? — but Wallace Ford as a hard-drinking newspaper reporter who accidentally ends up sharing an apartment with the widow (June Clyde) of a murdered millionaire who’s on the run from the police who think she had a hand in it — why that you might believe.

   The murder mystery portion of the movie is OK, which is the technical term used to describe a murder investigation that moves forward in fits and starts but hangs together at the end, sort of. Part of Ford’s problem, besides decides who gets to sleep in the one bed in the apartment they’re sharing, he or the widow, now a blonde, is another reporter intent on snatching the story right from under Ford’s nose.

   Also worth mentioning is the date of release of Framed for Murder, 10 May 1934, which according to my sources, makes this predate the enforcement of the Movie Code, and just barely, it shows. No pun intended. Besides the byplay about who sleeps in the bed, June Clyde’s character was previously seen hiding in a shower with no clothes on with another good-looking and easy-going lady who happens to be Ford’s next door neighbor. (All we really see is two pair of very shapely legs as they step in unison from behind the curtain.)

   The actual killer (Shirley Lee) is so far down in the list of cast members, that if you dig for her name, you might never be able to come up for air, but she does a night club act in the skimpiest of apparel that has to be seen to be believed. (This was her only movie.)

   How’s that for a come on?