THE BIG COMBO. Allied Artists, 1955. Cornel Wilde, Richard Conte, Brian Donlevy, Jean Wallace, Robert Middleton, Lee Van Cleef, Earl Holliman. Screenplay: Philip Yordan. Cinematography: John Alston. Director: Joseph Lewis.

   Wilde, a detective investigating mobster Conte’s activities, is obsessed with breaking up Conte’s operation and winning his mistress (Jean Wallace) for himself.

   Superbly scripted, directed, and photographed, this film by a director I had never heard of reminded me how little I know about this period. There is a brilliant beginning as Wallace runs down an alley with the fluidity of a trapped moth in beautifully composed and lighted frames.

   One of the strongest performances of his career is given by Brian Donlevy as a deposed monster chief who’s now relegated to backing up Conte. He wears a hearing aid, and Conte likes to torment him by turning up the mechanism and shouting, but he turns it off when Donlevy is gunned down by the Conte’s two henchmen (Lee Van Cleef and Earl Holliman). The guns blaze in complete silence as the shots light up the dark and the film.

   The reaction of the more knowledgeable members of the audience was that this is certainly a fine film but the Lewis’s masterpiece is Gun Crazy (1950).

LAWRENCE BLOCK – Out on the Cutting Edge. Morrow, hardcover, 1989. Avon, paperback, 1990.

   Apparently, after the flashback story for the sixth book in this series (When the Sacred Ginmill Closes), Block is finally ready to bring his now-sober sort-of-PI Matthew Scudder back into the present day with #7.

   Out on the Cutting Edge feels at times a little tentative — as if Block is still working out what to do with a protagonist who spends his free time at AA meetings and not passing out after blurry nights of drinking Bourbon. The mystery here is a perfectly capable one: a young aspiring actress from the Midwest goes missing in the big city, and her father hires Scudder to get to the bottom of it.

   But what remained in my mind long after the book was finished was not the crime and detection, but rather the wonderfully drawn characters and Scudder’s internal musings and travails. Maybe that’s what Block is most interested in writing about after all.

   Mick Ballou, son of an Irish butcher, plays a big and robust role in Cutting Edge, and even though his resume might raise some eyebrows he seems to be a good friend for Scudder, and I have to think we’ll be seeing more of him in future installments — he’s too good a character not to bring back.

STEPHEN MARLOWE – The Second Longest Night. Gold Medal #423, paperback original; 1st printing, October 1955. Gold Medal 1003, reprint, 1960.

   Here on the right is a photo of the box of Gold Medal paperbacks that I’m starting to work my way through. I’m choosing at random from these that you see here as well as the shelf in my closet where I have something like a thousand more.

   But the box is handier, at least for now. That’s another New Year’s resolution: to clean up the upstairs study enough so that I can actually reach the shelf in my closet.

   The Second Longest Night is one I’d never read before, not until last night. I’d have been 13 at the time it was published, and I didn’t start buying any of the Gold Medal’s straight from the spinner rack at the local supermarket and reading them for another two years or so. It’s the first recorded adventure of Stephen Marlowe’s Washington DC-based private eye, Chester Drum, who tells the story himself.

   There were 20 of these cases in all, including Double in Trouble, a cross-over case solved with Richard S. Prather’s Shell Scott, a book I hope to be able to re-read again soon. As I recall, when I read it when I was 17 or 18 (and never since), it was a doozy.

   In The Second Longest Night, the case is personal. Drum’s ex-wife Deidre (divorced) has just committed suicide, and her father, a lame-duck Senator, wants Drum to find out why. There are also rumors that she was flirting with joining the Communist Party, which in 1955 would have raised all kinds of questions.

   Later on, Drum’s adventures were more and more involved with foreign espionage, but I had always assumed his earlier ones took place in and around the DC area. While this one starts there, it also takes him to the jungles of Venezuela before heading off to San Diego before the case is closed.

   Why Venezuela? As it happens a third-string diplomat for the Venezuelan embassy is responsible for the death of the man Drum had asked to look into the case for him, and while Drum does not consider himself a vigilante avenger, he does feel responsible. (The suave and sinister but nevertheless minor flunky invokes diplomatic immunity before scramming out of the US.)

   Encountered along the way are two women, naturally, one a young perky reporter who is also on the case, and the dead woman’s sister, but while Drum is attracted to each in their own way, the first has a Congressman fiancé, and the second is married to a well-known astronomer based in California, hence the trip to San Diego.

   The action is fast and furious at times, and at others rather sluggish. There a lot of plot crammed into 160 pages, much of it background material for all of the many players involved. As for the solution to the matter, I really don’t think it works. Maybe it might have in 1955, but I don’t really think so, and certainly not today. Unfortunately I cannot say more without Telling All.

GORDON’S WAR. 20th Century Fox, 1973. Paul Winfield, Carl Lee, David Downing, Tony King, Gilbert Lewis, Carl Gordon, Nathan C. Heard, Grace Jones. Director: Ossie Davis.

   I’m pretty sure Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) was the first time I saw the prolific actor/voice actor Paul Winfield in a movie. If you recall that particular installment of Star Trek film franchise, Winfield portrayed Captain Clark Terrell, a Starfleet officer who fell under the spell of Khan Noonien Singh (Ricardo Montalban).

   Truthfully, “fell under the spell” is sanitizing it a bit. In a grotesquely memorable scene, Khan inserts an eel-like creature, one with the mind control powers no less, into Terrell’s ear. The slug in the brain transforms Terrell (Winfield) into a zombie-like puppet under Khan’s control.

   Anyway, that subplot made some sort of impression on me. (I also remember spilling soda on myself in the theater when the slug, and some blood as well, finally emerged from Winfield’s head.)

   So I suppose I’ll never forget Winfield’s distinct voice, nor his singular presence as a character actor. Indeed, the same thing happened to me when I saw James Cameron’s Terminator (1984), in which Winfield portrayed a cynical, world-weary Los Angeles police lieutenant.

   Rewind a decade or so from Star Trek II and Terminator and you’ll find Winfield in an earlier role, playing a former Army officer in Gordon’s War, an unusually serious, albeit commercially unsuccessful, Blaxploitation action film.

   Directed by Ossie Davis, the movie features Winfield in a lead role. He portrays Gordon Hudson, a Vietnam Vet who returns home to Harlem only to find his wife, and his neighborhood, a victim of the heroin trade. In a straightforward plot, one unfortunately bereft of nuance, Gordon enlists his old Army buddies to wage a small guerrilla war against the pimps and pushers that have infested his home turf.

   There are some outstanding fight scenes and a great car-meets-motorcycle chase scene toward the end of the movie. Winfield is great. But, overall, the film feels just a bit too predictable, too formulaic. No big surprise: the head honcho of the drug trade is a wealthy white guy. It’s a vigilante movie without much depth.

   But if you like films set in gritty Manhattan, in those decades before hyper-gentrification took hold and there was a bank and a yogurt shop on every corner, Gordon’s War is worth checking out. I watched the movie on a DVD released by Shout! Factory. It’s not the greatest print in the world, but it’s perfectly acceptable. Still, I think this is the type of movie that needs to be seen in 35 mm, in a theater with an audience that can collectively cheer on Gordon’s war against the criminal element.

HORACE McCOY – Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye. Random House, hardcover, 1948. Paperback reprints include: Signet 754, 1949; Avon, 1965.

KISS TOMORROW GOODBYE Warner Brothers, 1950. James Cagney, Barbara Payton, Helena Carter, Ward Bond, Luther Adler, Barton MacLane, Steve Brodie, Rhys Williams, Herbert Heyes, John Litel, William Frawley. Based on the novel by Horace McCoy. Director: Gordon Douglas.

   In 1948, just two years after Lindsey Gresham wrote Nightmare Alley, successful novelist and screenwriter Horace McCoy penned the unforgettable Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, which is the sort of thing you’d get if Proust wrote for Black Mask: a head-long, careening, totally amoral thriller about an escaped con on a crime spree — typical hard-boiled stuff, but couched in syntax that requires a dictionary close at hand.

   Ralph Cotter, the anti-hero of the piece is an alienated super-intellect (or a Sadistic Grad Student) and his first-person narration bandies terms like propliopith-ecustian (primitive) once or twice a page. McCoy laces the tale with ramblings like:

   That sort of thing. And lots of it. Incredibly, McCoy also provides a fast, taut violent tale set in a vivid background of casual corruption and dreamy decadence. An exchange early on, between our “hero” and the cell-mate he will shortly kill before escaping from the chain-gang, sets the tone:

   And so it goes. McCoy parades his cast of killers, bought cops, paid-off politicos and shady ladies with an alluring personal style I found hard to put down and impossible to forget. Like Nightmare Alley, this is not to every taste, but for those who like this sort of thing, Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye is required reading.

   By the way, there’s a bit in the book where the wealthy daughter of a powerful politician, intrigued by Cotter’s deadly charm, runs away with him for what they called in those days, a night of illicit passion. When her Dad and his rented cops burst in on them, they claim to have been married, then hustle to an out-of-state chapel before he can check up on them.

   Hold that thought a minute, we’ll get back to it. Meanwhile, I should add that this review is based on the unabridged Avon reprint from 1965. The Signet edition is abridged by about a third and includes a snide comment from McCoy on Paperbacks and their readers.

   Someone called the film of Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, “Vicious and uncompromising.” Well, it is enjoyably vicious, thanks mainly to the punchy direction of Gordon (Tony Rome, Rio Conchos, etc.) Douglas, and there are some dandy turns from the likes of James Cagney, Luther Adler, and especially Ward Bond and Barton Maclane (who performed similar function in The Maltese Falcon) as a pair of badly-bent cops, but Harry Brown’s script throws w-a-a-y too many sops to the censors to keep its integrity.

   For starters — literally — McCoy’s tale is presented within a frame, showing, the denizens of his shady universe brought to trial for their misdeeds. During the course of this proceeding, the characters get on the Witness Stand and relate the story in flashback, testifying to things they couldn’t possibly have seen and incriminating themselves and others with cheery abandon. And the Night of Illicit Passion? In the film, when Daddy bursts in on the young couple, they’ve already had their quickie wedding, and are lying in twin beds wearing pajamas looking about as depraved as Ozzie and Harriett.

   I sometimes think only an artist of unflinching vulgarity like Gordon Douglas (who also directed Liberace’s only movie, Sincerely Yours, and did it with a straight face) could have taken material as gutless as this and still made a fairly worthwhile film out of it, and only with a cast as good as he got. Recommended, but with reservations.

HORACE McCOY – Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye. Random House, hardcover, 1948. Paperback reprints include: Signet 754, 1949; Avon, 1965. Film: Warner Brothers, 1950 (with James Cagney, Barbara Payton & Helena Carter).

   Although a veteran of Black Mask, Horace McCoy resented his “hardboiled” classification, considering himself mainstream, and wrote only one genuine crime novel. Set in the Thirties during the Dillinger days, Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye is one of the finest gangster novels ever written.

   Young hoodlum Ralph Cotter (an alias) escapes from a prison farm, killing one of his own confederates in thee process, a characteristically misanthropic move for this self-described possessor of a “psychopathic superego.” Helping in the jailbreak is the murdered confederate’s sister, Holiday, with whom Cotter immediately shacks up.

   Now in a medium-size, nameless city, Cotter pulls a petty robbery, again killing a man in the process. He and his aptly named associate, Jinx, are thereafter shaken down by local corrupt police. This is an opportunity the shrewd, college-educated Cotter seizes upon, launching a scheme to blackmail the police into aiding and abetting his future crimes.

   His rocky relationship with Holiday — a jealous girl who nonetheless sleeps around indiscriminately on Cotter — alternates with an even stranger relationship with a spoiled society girl who has suicidal tendencies and an interest in the occult. Cotter links up with Cherokee Mandon, a slick shyster with underworld connections, and soon Cotter and his various cronies (including Mandon and the corrupt cops) are planning a reckless robbery that will require taking four lives.

   The fascination of Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye is its stream-of-consciousness first-person narration, and its exceptionally well-realized psychotic narrator. Unlike the simplified Cotter of the James Cagney screen version (1950), McCoy’s protagonist is a complex, not exactly sympathetic character, but certainly an engaging one. (Cotter prefigures similarly psychotic — and posturing — narrators in the work of Jim Thompson.)

   A violent deed in his past, tied to his adolescent sexual awakening, has sent Cotter into a world of crime where he feels at home. Nonetheless, it is contact with the respectable world, not the criminal one, that leads to his downfall, This is the central irony of a book that McCoy clearly intended to be his masterpiece.

   Critics have seldom agreed with McCoy’s estimation of Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, but the critics have underestimated this work. Cotter is a deeply flawed, pretentious narrator — which has led to the writer being dismissed as deeply flawed and pretentious. Taking Cotter at face value, at his word, is dangerous; critics have tended to assume that McCoy agrees with Cotter, who says archly, “Use me not as a preachment in your literature or movies. This I have wrought, I and I alone.”

   McCoy, of course, does not believe that Cotter is a man in control of his destiny: Cotter is a pitiful, guilt-ridden soul misshapen by childhood trauma. Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye is a long book, but it is fast moving, deftly plotted and vividly written.

         ———
   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

Editorial Comment: Following my review of Never Say No to a Killer, by Jonathan Gant (Clifton Adams), Dan Stumpf left a comment pointing out some similarity between that book and this one, which came earlier. I’d have to agree that Gant’s book may easily have been inspired by this one — no more than that — but you may go back and read that review, then come back and read this one, and decide for yourself.

LINE OF DUTY. BBC-2, five 60-minute episodes, 26 June to 24 July 2012. Lennie James, Martin Compston, Vicky McClure, Neil Morrissey, Craig Parkinson, Gina McKee, Kate Ashfield. Screenwriter: Jed Mercurio. Directors: Douglas Mackinnon & David Caffrey.

   Lennie James plays DCI Tony Gates in this first series of a well-written police procedural drama produced by BBC Two in England. Gates is a highly decorated and widely admired police officer, a black bespectacled man, almost professorial in nature, happily married with two young daughters whom he adores. He has his place in the sun, and yet.

   As in all good noir dramas, for that is exactly what this is, what goes wrong? Firstly, Gates is having an affair with a former lover, who (we learn later) once jilted him but has come back into his life, with a vengeance. But secondly, what it isattracts the attention of AC-12, the British anti-corruption unit that’s the equivalent of Internal Affairs in the US, is merely a free sandwich at a lunch counter.

   From this small beginning, things escalate faster than Gates can control them. His extramarital lover asks him to cover up a hit-and-run accident she has had. A dog, she says at first, but Gates soon learns that it was her accountant who is dead. AC-12 also suspects that Gates’s success is due to “laddering,” which means he has been adding charges to criminals already in custody, thereby boosting his conviction numbers.

   Hot on Gates’s trail from the outside is DS Steve Arnott (Martin Compston) while working undercover at the same time from the inside is DC Kate Fleming (Vicky McClure), and soon the previously unshakeable Gates has fewer and fewer options, especially once it is learned that his lover had made some bad enemies, enemies who begin targeting Gates as well.

   There are lots of twists and turns in the plot before the five episodes are finished, with biggest surprises coming (not surprisingly) almost every time the 60 minutes allotted per episodes are up. One might think that DS Arnott, as the leading protagonist, would be the one the viewer is meant to side up with, but the young bantam-sized and policeman, newly transferred from an anti-terrorist squad which made a terrible mistake in a recent would-be raid, besides his obsession to bring down Gates, has issues of his own to work through, .

   It is Gates, really, whose fate is slowly twisting in the wind, who is the more fascinating, and yes, sympathetic character. The story has several layers, all of which are very well developed. It is difficult to not start the next episode in recently released set of DVDs as soon as the previous one has finished.

   The police work as shown seems real. Policemen need approval from superiors at each step of the way — there is little room for mavericks to go out on their own — paperwork is always there to be done, and risk assessment and the cost of overtime always have to be considered.

   But it’s the story of good versus evil, and the people who are caught up in it on a daily basis, that makes this series a success, and when it gets personal, as it does in also every minute of this 300 minute production, so much the better.

BILL S. BALLINGER – Portrait in Smoke. Harper, hardcover, 1950. Signet #897, paperback reprint, September 1951. Film: Columbia Pictures, 1956, as Wicked As They Come (with Arlene Dahl, Phil Carey & Herbert Marshall).

   Ballinger pioneered a new novelistic approach in the mystery field, one that he utilized in several novels: first-person narration told from the point of view of a professional or amateur detective, alternating with third-person narration involving one or more of the other characters in the story. This enabled him to tell two different yet parallel stories that intersect at or near the end, thereby heightening suspense throughout.

   Portrait in Smoke is the first of his split-narration novels, and the book that firmly established his name in the mystery field. The first-person narrator is Danny April, the new owner of a small-time collection agency in Chicago, who finds in the agency files an old photograph of one Krassy Almauniski, a local beauty queen, and falls so in love with her image that he is compelled to track her down.

   Interwoven with the details of his increasingly puzzling and sinister search, which leads him from the stockyard slums to a modeling school and the Chicago opera, is the third-person chronicle of Krassy’s life after winning the Stockyard Weekly News beauty contest — an account that is anything but a Cinderella story.

   The dust jacket blurb says that Portrait in Smoke has “depth and power, unusual suspense, brilliant irony, hard-boiled wit, one of the most fascinating heroines in current fiction, and a whiplash ending.” It isn’t that good, but it is a first-rate crime novel that deserves attention from the contemporary reader.

   Whether it is Ballinger’s best split-narration novel is debatable; some aficionados of his work prefer The Wife of the Red-Haired Man (1957), which has a more complex plot and a more dazzling surprise at the end. Also good are The Tooth and the Nail (1955) and The Longest Second (1957); the latter title has one of the most frightening first chapters in all of suspense fiction.

   In addition to the many novels under his own name, Ballinger also wrote two under pseudonyms: The Black, Black Hearse (1955), as by Frederic Freyer; and The Doom-Maker (1959), as by B. X. Sanborn.

         ———
   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

JONATHAN GANT – Never Say No to a Killer. Ace Double D-157, paperback original; 1st printing, 1956. Published back-to-back with Stab in the Dark, by Louis Trimble.

   Jonathan Gant, as it turns out — I didn’t remember it when I picked this one out from my upstairs book closet on Monday — was a pen name of Clifton Adams, who wrote a few other tough crime novels for Gold Medal, but was mostly known for his westerns. One of Bill Crider’s Gold Medal columns for Mystery*File talks about him extensively, and you can read it here.

   As a tough guy, Roy Surrat, the protagonist in Never Say No is as hard-boiled as they come. In prison for five years for what he calls a botched bank robbery, he kills two guards in making a well-planned escape. The only thing that goes wrong, he discovers, is that his primary accomplice, a former cellmate, is dead.

   As part of the escape plan, he’s picked up instead by Dorris Venci, the dead man’s wife. Suspicious at first, he decides to take her up on getting rid of Alex Burton, the ex-governor of the state. Dorris is sure had her husband bumped off, and she’s afraid that she is next. One big bonus is the evidence Roy’s former partner in crime had accumulated against all his enemies — big time crooks, all of them, some in high power.

   Blackmail, any one? The more Surrat entrenches himself into the dirty politics of Lake City (no state mentioned), the more you know he’s heading for a fall, and as in all good noir dramas, fall he does — which includes falling for Alex Burton’s girl friend, maybe not the smartest thing in the world, and dumping Mrs. Venci, which may be even a worse mistake.

   But in good noir novels do the protagonists listen to you, the reader? No, and women are always (or almost always) their means to a bad end. (I hope I didn’t give anything away.)

   It’s a good story, but in all honesty, as the leading man in this quickly-paced melodrama, Roy Surrat is a difficult character to swallow. He’s a mad dog killer, but he tells his story intelligently and is well-versed in Nietzschean philosophy. While I don’t remember him describing himself, he also seems attractive enough to women, although at least one of them has a serious character disorder herself.

   But no matter — Surrat’s downfall is of his own making, and if you’re clever enough, Jonathan Gant plots the tale carefully enough that maybe you can spot the clue that starts Surrat’s fate unraveling in the wrong direction right at the time it does.

BEACH BLANKET BINGO. American International Pictures (1965). Frankie Avalon, Annette Funicello, Deborah Walley, Harvey Lembeck, John Ashley, Jody McCrea, Donna Loren, Marta Kristen, Linda Evans, Timothy Carey, Don Rickles, Paul Lynde, Donna Michelle, Buster Keaton, Earl Wilson. Director: William Asher.

   You’d be hard pressed to get me to describe a coherent plot, at least in any traditional understanding of the term, in Beach Blanket Bingo. Directed by William Asher, the American International beach party movie stars Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello in a celluloid mélange of singing, slapstick vignettes, and comic antics.

   In this installment of the popular beach movies series, the romantic singing duo try their hand at skydiving; meet an upcoming female singer, Sugar Kane (Linda Evans) and her agent; and watch in skepticism as their friend named Bonehead (Jody McCrea, son of Joel) gets romantically entangled with a mermaid.

   While quite a bit of the humor in Beach Blanket Bingo falls flat, as if the movie’s creators were just trying way too hard to get a guffaw out of teenage movie audiences, some of the borderline absurdist humor works extraordinarily well.

   This is in no small part to the fine work of Timothy Carey as South Dakota Slim, a psychotic pool player; Paul Lynde as Sugar Kane’s ruthless agent; and Don Rickles as the owner of a skydiving school. All three men, each of whom was well known to audiences in the 1960s, maintain a singular presence in this silly, although quite enjoyable, little genre-defying film.

   And speaking of cameos, look for Earl Wilson as well as the legendary Buston Keaton in one of his last film roles.

   Speaking of Buster. What makes Beach Blanket Bingo worth watching, especially for people who truly love cinema, is that the movie is really best understood as a tribute to the silent film era, an homage which reaches its peak in the final scene in which Frankie saves Sugar Kane from the increasingly unhinged South Dakota Slim’s (Carey) clutches. It’s something right out of The Perils of Pauline.

   And just in case the audience didn’t get the reference, two of the characters are there to remind you that what you’re watching is a tribute to something very special in cinematic history that existed long before Frankie and Annette came on the scene.

   Beach Blanket Bingo may not be a great movie in the traditional sense. It’s unlikely often discussed in film schools. But it is nevertheless kind of a perfect movie for those people who appreciate that cinema, when done correctly, can provide immeasurable, if only temporary, escapism from everyday life.

   So, is Beach Blanket Bingo a serious film? Not at all. But is it, provided you’re in the right mindset, an entertaining (if a bit stupid) movie? Definitely.