THE CLOUDED YELLOW. Carillon Films, UK, 1950. Jean Simmons, Trevor Howard, Sonia Dresdel, Barry Jones, Kenneth More. Director: Ralph Thomas. Currently available on YouTube here.

   Booted out of the British Secret Service after a long career but one failed mission, the only work ex-Major David Somers (Trevor Howard) can find is that of cataloguing the butterfly collection of the husband half of a couple living out in the country. (The title of the film refers to a particular specimen of butterfly.) It’s a relaxing job, but not quite what Somers was looking for.

   One mitigating factor, though, is the couple’s niece, Sophie Malraux (played to perfection by the always exquisitely beautiful Jean Simmons), who has been living with them since she was six. As the couple confide to Somers, the reason she often acts in such a “muddled” fashion, she that she was the first on the scene when she found the dead bodies of her parents, a murder-suicide, he is told.

   Then when the couple’s gamekeeper is found murdered, all the evidence points to Sophie. Not believing it for a minute, the obviously smitten ex-major and Sophie go on the run, all around England and constantly only a step or two ahead of the authorities. It is here, of course, where many reviewers bring up Alfred Hitchcock as an obvious point of comparison, and The 39 Steps in particular.

   Not so fast, I said to myself, however. The Clouded Yellow is good but certainly not that good. It’s fun to watch, but the first third moves awfully slowly, and the girl-and-guy-on-the-run story that follows has plot holes galore – not serious ones, but if you’re fond of picking nits in the movies you watch, you will find lots of nits to pick in this one.

   Please don’t take this comment too much to heart. Both the acting and the photography are fine, and any movie with Jean Simmons in it is well worth your time. My time, anyway, any time.
   

VANISHING ACT. CBS / Richard Levinson–William Link Productions, 04 May 1986. Mike Farrell, Margot Kidder, Fred Gwynne, Graham Jarvis, Elliott Gould. Teleplay by Richard Levinson & William Link, based on a play by Robert Thomas. Director: David Greene. Can currently be seen on YouTube.

   Harry Kenyon (Mike Farrell) is on his honeymoon in the Rocky Mountains after a whirlwind romance in Las Vegas with a woman named Christine Prescott. But their wedded bliss is soon interrupted and Harry reports her disappearance to Lieutenant Rudameyer (Elliott Gould), a New Yorker more interested in eating a corn beef sandwich specially imported from a delicatessen on West 87th Street. It seems to be a fuss over nothing as Christine (Margot Kidder) is quickly found – only Harry doesn’t recognize her and refuses to believe she’s his wife!

   Christine is convincing, however, and knows everything about both herself and Harry. Her reasons for disappearing are also plausible and readily supported by local priest Father Macklin (Fred Gwynne). Adding to his frustration, Harry can’t be sure whether the woman is crazy or a confidence trickster, though his frustrated protests make everyone else think it is he who is unhinged.

   This seems even more likely as the priest dies before his eyes and later reappears. Soon, Harry learns the truth of the affair, but this only plunges him even deeper into a conspiracy of which there is no escape.

   This was a made-for-television film featuring a line-up of familiar faces headed by M*A*S*H actor Mike Farrell. He brings an endearing everyman quality to the role of Harry, a fellow who veers from disputatious confusion to occasional bursts of triumph as he struggles to prove himself right.

   Interestingly, unlike similar films, we aren’t asked to question his sanity. Margot Kidder (Lois Lane in the Christopher Reeve-starring Superman films) is on sparkling form and veers effectively from innocently concerned spouse to roguish femme fatale. Herman Munster himself, Fred Gwynne, also appears as a politely perplexed priest who may know more than he’s letting on.

   Elliot Gould, meanwhile, is reliably excellent, appearing here as his 1970s film career (including a shot at playing Phillip Marlowe in The Long Goodbye) had shifted to the small screen where a couple of failed sitcoms led him to several one-off television dramas. As Rudameyer, he is not a million miles away from that other ramshackle lieutenant, Columbo, also from teleplay writers William Link and Richard Levinson.

   This film could have fit snugly into that series. It is, however, a remake of two previous TV films and a tangled list of other antecedents including the brilliant British noir Chase a Crooked Shadow, a couple of 1940s radio plays and a French play titled, among other things, Trap for a Lonely Man. It’s this which is officially credited for Vanishing Act, though all are plausible influences. It has also sprouted several foreign language remakes, most recently the 2019 Malaysian horror thriller Misteri Dilaila, which didn’t acknowledge this heritage.

   Anyone familiar with these versions may recognize the final twist as a variation on a theme, but for others it will be genuinely jaw-dropping, surely leaving them interested, maybe even outright eager, to see the film again in order to espy any hidden significances. With the exception of one or two minor holes which could have been easily exorcized, the plot holds together admirably well, stocking itself with surprises, mild comedy and an army of red herrings. A pleasingly puzzling mystery, this is one of the best films of its kind.

Rating: ****
   

ELSPETH HUXLEY – Murder on Safari. Superintendent Vachell #2. Harper & Brothers, hardcover, 1938. Perennial, US, paperback, 1982; Penguin, US, paperback, 1989. First published in the UK by Methuen, hardcover, 1938.

   From its map endpapers to its satisfying conclusion, this is a very good book:

   For the fan of the classical fair play detective novel, it includes plenty of mystery, good physical clues, and even footnotes showing the reader where the key points were mentioned earlier in the story. For readers interested in the interaction of. character, the story describes a diverse group of Englishmen and Englishwomen whose greed and lust provide the motives. For those interested in setting, Murder on Safari has excellent descriptions of the African plain in the mythical country of Chania.

   Above all, Huxley knows how to make a story move. The book begins with Superintendent Vachell of the Chania CID being persuaded to pose as a .Great White Hunter in order to discover who has stolen Lady Baradale’s jewels. But then murder rears its ugly head – very ugly indeed, as Lady Baradale is shot and her body picked by vultures, While investigating the murder, Vachell is attacked by a stampeding buffalo and he survives a plane crash – no armchair detecting for Elspeth Huxley.

   I have lost track of the volumes in the current reprint series, but if Murder on Safari is not included, some publisher should sense a good thing and make it available again.

Editorial Update: As it turns out, the book was reprinted in paperback soon after this review appeared (Perennial, 1982); and not only that, but a few years later on once again (Penguin, 1989).
   

      The Superintendent Vachell series –

Murder at Government House. Methuen 1937
Murder on Safari. Methuen 1938
Death of an Aryan. Methuen 1939

YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE. United Artists, 1937. Sylvia Sidney, Henry Fonda, Barton MacLane, Jean Dixon, William Gargan, Jerome Cowan, Chic Sale, Margaret Hamilton, Warren Hymer, Guinn ‘Big Boy’ Williams. Directed by Fritz Lang. Currently streaming on Amazon Prime, Criterion Channel and other platforms.

   An early entry in the “lovers on the run” crime film subgenre, You Only Live Once blends American sentimentalism with German Expressionist fatalism to a largely successful effect. Eschewing the gritty realism of Warner Brothers’ prison films for a more nuanced, psychological portrayal of a man caught up in a Kafkaseque predicament, the movie is too early chronologically to be properly considered a film noir. Nevertheless, it definitely contains numerous thematic elements which would become hallmarks of films noir in the 1940s; first and foremost, a doomed protagonist.

   Here, it is ex-convict Eddie Taylor (Henry Fonda). He is, as far as the audience can tell, an everyman just trying to get by in a cold world. At first glance, Taylor doesn’t have any particular character traits which would distinguish him from many other men. This is on purpose. But as the film progresses, the audience is made aware of one very salient fact; namely, that his first encounter with the legal system stemmed from an incident with frogs.

   But not in the way one might think. As a child, Taylor apparently watched another boy being horribly mistreating a frog. It upset him so much – the cruelty of it all – that he attacked the potential future sociopath. This sent him to on a path no longer of his own making. Shipped off to reform school, Taylor never once was able to get his life on track. All for protecting a helpless creature.

   Taylor explains the frog story to his new wife, the electrifyingly innocent Jo Graham (Sylvia Sidney). As he tells her that frogs cannot stand to live alone, the camera pans to a close up of two frogs living side by side. The symbolism may be a little too on your nose, but it works. Eddie and Jo are made for each other. They can’t survive apart.

   After Eddie is accused of a bank job that leaves six people dead, Jo does everything she can to support her one true love. But it’s too much for even intrepid public defender Stephen Whitney (Barton MacLane) who is, among other things, her boss. The story contains numerous twists and turns, invoking fatalism at nearly every corner. Just as you think things are going to look up for Eddie, everything goes dark again.

   The final fifteen minutes or so of the movie showcases Eddie and Jo reunited for the last time. Lovers on the run, hiding out from the law. But there’s no glamour, no romanticism in their perilous journey through the backroads of a rapidly transforming America. It’s just about surviving day to day. Frogs united together in a cruel, unjust world until the very end.

E. C. R. LORAC – Fell Murder. Inspector Robert Macdonald. Collins Crime Club, UK, hardcover, 1944. Poisoned Pen Press / British Library Crime Classics, US, trade paperback, January 2020.

   The fell country of Yorkshire is lovingly drawn by Lorac in this first story of Chief Inspector MacDonald’s encounters with these quiet, reserved farmers. The Garths have farmed here for generations. Now, in wartime, the farm is inhabited by old Mr. Garth, a tyrant in his family; his son Charles, home from Malaya because of the war; his daughter Marion, who farms as well as a man; and his son by his second marriage, Malcolm, who is lame. A Land Army girl, Elizabeth Meldon, works with them. Another son, Richard, was driven away by his father when he married the daughter of a tenant farmer,

   As the book opens, he has come back, his wife and child dead. He is there only to take a look, not to see the family, but the land. Marion is angry with her father because he won’t allow her to use modern farm methods; Charles, because his father works him bard and pays him nothing. Malcolm is a poet, something his father has no sympathy for. Then the old man is killed.

   There is a plethora of motives but little hard evidence against anyone, MacDonald arrives from Scotland Yard, and his own quiet ways put him in tune with the local people, who had been annoyed with the local inspector. Careful detective work brings about a solution that satisfies the mind, though my emotions protested a second, unnecessary death.

Editorial Update: While E. C. R. Lorac wrote over 40 books in her Inspector Macdonald series, it wasn’t until the recent burst of interest in vintage detective fiction that anyone could obtain copies to read. With several presses working overtime to get nice-looking reprints back in the hands of readers, it’s good to see a large number of Lorac’s books available again — and like this one, for the first time in this country. (And extremely cheaply, too, if you can read books on a Kindle.)

MICHAEL CONNELLY – The Poet. [Jack McEvoy #1.] Little Brown, hardcover, 1996. Grand Central, paperback, 1997.

   A question that most of us rarely have reason or take time to consider is, do we like a series most because we like the character, or because we like the prose? Then someone like Connelly writes his first non-series book, and we have a chance to see. You’ll have to wait a while, though; this has a publication date of January, 1996, but I’d bet [it will be out by] Christmas.

   Jack McEvoy is a Denver reporter. His twin brother was a Denver cop, until he killed himself. Jack begins a story on police suicides as a way of dealing with his grief, and discovers a pattern that stretches across the country, and points to a serial killer who is preying on policemen as well as the victims of the crimes they are investigating. Jack seems to be ahead of other reporters and the FBI, but he’s not ahead of the killer.

   The [rating of a] double-smiley-plus is for the first 95% of the book, and the frown is for the ending. Connelly is simply an excellent writer in terms of pacing, dialog, and characterization.

   I even thought the serial killer was well done, and I’m not much at all for serial killers. This was well on its way to making my best few of the year list, and then came the denouement. Of course I can’t give it away and tell you exactly what the problems were, but I can and will say that there was a double plot twist at the end, and that I found neither necessary and the last just not credible at all.

   Why in the hell Connelly thought he needed to do that I do not understand. It didn’t absolutely ruin the book for me, but it left a bad taste in my mouth, and kept it off my “best” list.

ROBERT W. TINSLEY “Smuggler’s Blues.” PI Jack Brady #1. First published in PI Magazine, Spring 1989. Collected in The Brady Files, Kindle edition, 2011.

   Jack Brady is a big guy, not easily intimidated. He’s a former Navy SEAL and now a PI whose home base in El Paso TX, which as far as I know is a first among fiction PI’s. At six feet four and 280 pounds, he also finds it difficult to find furniture that fits him. And with El Paso right on the border with Mexico, one suspects that many of the cases he gets involved with involve border incidents of one kind or another.

   This first case, “Smuggler’s Blues,” certainly does. Brady is hired by the brother of a man who died while being smuggled across the border, a Salvadoran who had recently been released from prison there for political reasons. The man supposedly drowned, and his death would have been written off as that, if Brady and his client hadn’t interfered.

   The story is too short to be more than an incident, and by itself leaves little impression. Brady, who tells the story himself has just enough of a way with words to make the telling enjoyable. Efforts to sound like a tough guy are just a little iffy; a little more “down and gritty” would have helped. Chalk this one down as an early one in Brady’s career.
   

      The Jack Brady stories —

“Smuggler’s Blues” (Spring 1989, PI Magazine)
“Killer” (Winter 1989, PI Magazine)
“Graveyard Shift” (April 2002, HandHeld Crime)
“No Good-Bye” (June 2002, HandHeldCrime)
“Beating On The Border” (Summer 2003, Thrilling Detective Web Site)
“Hijack on the Border” (Oct/Dec 2003, SDO Detective)
“Horse of the Same Color” (Fall 2003, Hardluck Stories)
“Grasshopper” (Winter 2003, Hardluck Stories)
“Double Death” (February 2004, Shred of Evidence)
“A Kiss Is Just A Kiss” (April/May/June 2005, Futures)
“For Felina…” (Winter 2004, Thrilling Detective Web Site)
“Out of the Shadows” (June 2005, Mysterical-E)
“The Horse Holder” (Aug/Nov 2005,Shred of Evidence)
“Sweet Dreams”
“The Prodigal”
“Questioning the Dead”
“The Running Man”
“Moby Dick in a Can”

   These last five may be original to the Kindle collection.

UNDER COVER OF NIGHT. MGM, 1937. Edmund Lowe, Florence Rice, Nat Pendleton, Henry Daniell, Sara Haden, Dean Jagger. Screenplay: Bertram Millhauser. Director: George B. Seitz.

        Under Cover of Night features Edmund Lowe as a classy cop who matches wits for 24 hours with assorted ambitious academics competing to be named Department Head at a prestigious University. One of them is not above murder, and none of them is above lying, stealing or sleeping around to achieve their ends.

   This was written by Bertram Millhauser, who penned some of the better Sherlock Holmes efforts over at Universal, and here manages to make his cast both believably flawed and entirely sympathetic — with the exception of Henry Daniell, who rises to new depths of Nastiness as the Villain of the Piece, a prof who callously tosses a puppy out the window to provoke his wife (on whom he has been cheating while taking credit for her research) into a heart attack.

BRIGITTE AUBERT – Death from the Woods. Elise Andrioli #1. Welcome Rain, hardcover, 2000. Berkeley, paperback, November 2005. Translated by David L. Koral. Setting: Contemporary France.

   As the result of a car bomb, Elise Andrioli is a blind, mute quadriplegic. Left by her caregiver Yvette in a park to wait, Elise is befriended by Virginie, a seven-year-old who tells Elise she knows who is killing young boys. When Elise is attacked, she is faced with finding a way to communicate and to stay alive.

   Translated from the French, the story, for the most part, flows well and was only occasionally in the dialogue aware of it being a translation. Aubert did a very good job conveying the protagonist’s emotions of frustration, anger, determination, humor and fear. But that was the strength of the book. The plot became more convoluted as it progressed and the ending was anticlimactic as the mystery wasn’t resolved through a series of clues, but by the recitation of one of the characters. So, while I felt the character of Elise was well done, the overall story was only average.

Rating: Good

Bibliographic Update: A second book in the series, Death from the Snows (2001) closed Elise Andrioli’s list of appearances in print, at least to this date. Other crime and suspense thrillers by the author, over a dozen or so, appear to have been published only in France.

TECH DAVIS – Terror at Compass Lake. PI Aubrey Nash #1. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1935. No paperback or other later edition.

   This is a better-than-average Golden Age detective novel – indeed as a first novel it shows so much promise that I briefly toyed with the thought that “Tech Davis” may have been the pseudonym of a better-known writer. (No, not JDC; and I’m too uncertain to reveal my candidate.) At any rate, the book is well worth reading.

   It begins when a cocky but otherwise featureless young private investigator named Aubrey Nash receives a letter asking him to investigate a locked-room murder at Compass Lake: “If any man was ever sealed into a room and inaccessible, it was Powell and yet in the six hours that we slept someone entered his den, buried a dagger in1 his back, and left.”

   Nash however refuses to come. “Three days previously he had completed a case so persistently baffling and so challenging to his health – and even his life – that after solving it he had decided upon Europe and relaxation.” But when Nash receives a second letter telling him not to come, he can’t resist the challenge.

   Tech Davis, whoever he was, knew how to structure a book. After this intriguing introduction, the book goes back in time to provide the background events from the viewpoint of one of the characters. It turns out that there has already been an earlier murder, officially labeled a suicide, and like many detective novels written during the depression several minor characters are engaged in financial hanky-panky.

   The book includes two maps, one of a plan of the house, the other a drawing of the murder-room. Nash does a good job investigating the crime; the characters are acceptably delineated, and the solutions are good. Experts on locked rooms should be able to solve Powell’s murder more quickly than does Nash, but the book includes a clever, though unlikely, alibi for the first murder.

   Terror at Compass Lake shows signs of a neophyte – the middle of the book has too much padding – but I certainly will watch for copies of Davis’s later novels (two of them according to Hubin) about Aubrey Nash.

   
Bio-Bibliograhic Update: According to the current version of Hubin, we now know that Tech Davis was the pen name of Edgar Davis (1890-1974).

   The Aubrey Nash series —

Terror at Compass Lake (n.) Doubleday 1935
Full Fare for a Corpse (n.) Doubleday 1937
Murder on Alternate Tuesdays (n.) Doubleday

NOTE: This book was reviewed by Bill Deeck earlier on this blog. Check it out here. (That review includes one of the maps Doug refers to in this one.)