THE GOOD BAD GIRL. Columbia, 1931. Mae Clarke, James Hall, Robert Ellis, Marie Prevost, Nance O’Neil, Edmund Breese, Paul Porcasi. Director: Roy William Neill.

   It’s purely a wild conjecture on my part, but was Mae Clarke’s role in The Public Enemy, in which she had her most famous scene in a long career in the movies – you know, the one with the grapefruit? – came out in April 1931. Was it only coincidence that here she is now in the lead role in The Good Bad Girl, which was released in May of the same year?

   I’ll concede that the time frame is way too tight for there to be a real connection, but it’s a nice thought. One thing that I never realized, though, is that Mae Clarke didn’t have a screen credit in The Public Enemy, but her scene in it is a bit of screen business that if you’ve ever seen it, you’ll never forget it.

   Except for Mae Clarke, all of the people involved in the making of The Good Bad Girl had long careers in the silents. She started in 1929, though, and ended up lasting the longest of all her co-players: her last movie was Godfrey Cambridge’s Watermelon Man in 1970.

   Among director Roy William Neill’s final films were the 1940s Sherlock Holmes movies and Black Angel (1946), based on the Cornell Woolrich novel.

   Normally I’d be mentioning the last couple of items to help substantiate a case for this movie to be covered here in a blog devoted to mystery fiction in all its various forms, but in this case it’s not needed, as the part that Mae Clarke plays is that of a hoodlum’s moll who wants to leave him and the rackets he’s in.

   She has a new lover, you see, the son of wealthy parents who doesn’t know who she is, not even her name. When Dan Tyler (Robert Ellis) commits a murder and expects her to stand by him and provide an alibi he desperately needs, she refuses and leaves him up the creek (and in the Big House).

   You might call the story line as a very close kin to a month’s worth of early soap opera, or maybe it’s just plain melodrama. Either way, I emphasized the silent era background of all the players for a reason, that being that movies in 1931 often displayed an unsureness in how acting should be done, now that actors could talk, and how scenes should be played – both often very slowly and stiffly, not knowing how easily audiences were going to follow and respond.

   That’s the main downfall of The Good Bad Girl, it’s often too slow and stationary. Nor do the weepy parts connect very well with someone watching it today, not that I think the movie made much of a mark in 1931 either.

   You should not get me wrong. Even though Mae Clarke seems swallowed up in a role that’s several sizes too large for her, the movie’s watchable, and there are parts — such as the continual comical byplay between Marie Prevost and Paul Porcasi, the latter as a night club owner who’s Prevost’s very close friend, about the diet she’s determined to keep him on – that are relaxed, natural and highly enjoyable.

JACK FOXX – Wildfire.   Bobbs-Merrill, hardcover, 1978. Reworked and republished as Firewind, as by Bill Pronzini: M. Evans, hardcover, 1989; paperback reprint: Ballantine, 1990.

   A drought-stricken and dried up corner of northern California, an ultra-conservative logging baron with an illegal stockpile of guns and ammunition, and a marriage in trouble — all waiting for the right spark to set them off.

   There’s only one way out, and that’s by taking the most hair-raising train ride you’ve ever been on, traveling by antique steam locomotive through a countryside going up in flames.

   Even second-hand, this is without a doubt one trip you won’t want to be left behind on.

[UPDATE] 07-13-09.   The second version of this book puzzled me when I learned about it before posting this old review. I hadn’t known anything about it until I started looking up the publishing information about Wildfire, which as you see, I reviewed some 30 years ago. So I asked the author himself, Bill Pronzini. Read his reply, here in this later post.

BABY FACE. Warner Brothers, 1933. Barbara Stanwyck, George Brent, Donald Cook, Alphonse Ethier, Henry Kolker, Margaret Lindsay, Arthur Hohl, John Wayne, Robert Barrat, Douglass Dumbrille. Director: Alfred E. Green. Shown at Cinevent 19, Columbus OH, May 1987.

   Barbara Stanwyck is the star of Baby Face, the sordid tale of a girl from the wrong side of the tracks who rises to kept affluence in a series of bedroom maneuvers that redefine the term “permissible risque.”

   There’s a redemptive finale (which Stanwyck plays with a notable lack of conviction), but her hard-boiled, terse acting in this seventy minute film is riveting.

   There is a bit by John Wayne as one of the “Johns” she loves and dumps, while the other men in her life include Douglass Dumbrille, Donald Cook, and George Brent. Puzzle of the week: Who plays the man she finally really falls for and for whom she turns “good”?

   (This is like figuring out the murderer on the Angela Lansbury Murder, She Wrote series. Out of all the has-beens and never-were’s drafted for roles, who is the most unlikely and therefore most likely suspect?)

   Her role is tightly circumscribed, but within the assigned limits Stanwyck is superb. The more I see of her early work (and the American Movie Classics cable channel has shown several of her lesser thirties films), the more I am impressed by her.

   And then there is her unforgettable acting in Double Indemnity to crown a career that in recent years has shown all of the professionalism of this fine actress but with little of the distinctive beauty and intelligence of her early work.

[EDITORIAL UPDATE.]   Discovered in 2005 at the Library of Congress was a racier pre-release version of Baby Face that’s five minutes longer than the one seen by movie-going audiences in the 1930s. The unedited version is currently available on DVD.

SAFARI. Columbia, 1956. Victor Mature, Janet Leigh, John Justin, Roland Culver, Orlando Martins, Earl Cameron. Director: Terence Young.

   Pull out a chair and sit down a while. This movie is so filled with cliched situations and characters that if I were to list them all, you’d be here an awfully long time.

   On second thought, maybe I should only tell about the main ones, and in so doing, leave it to you decide how much time and effort you might want to spend in tracking down a copy:

    ? An expert African guide (Victor Mature) thirsts for revenge against the leader (Earl Cameron) of a gang of rebellious Mau Maus who killed his family while he was away.

    ? His license revoked for his own good, Ken Duffield is hired anyway by a wealthy hunter (Roland Culver) who is used to getting his own way and knows how to pull the right strings.

    ? Joining them on the hunt for a notorious lion is Sir Vincent’s fiancée (Janet Leigh) who used to be a showgirl but is now intent on bagging bigger game.

    ? Also on the safari is Sir Vincent’s personal assistant (John Justin), a man whose weaknesses his employer sadistically digs his knives into at every chance he gets, figuratively speaking.

   Dressed in tight-fitting jungle outfits during the day, and then in formal wear and the finest of negligees in the evening, Janet Leigh is present only as eye candy, for needing to be rescued when she wanders too far from camp, and for reawakening Victor Mature’s interest in life.

   Sir Vincent’s role is more complicated: to be an obnoxious boor of an employer whose every whim is to be obeyed, immediately, and of course you know exactly how far that’s going to get him.

   I think that about wraps it up. I hope not many animals were really shot and killed in the making of this rather mediocre movie, filmed in color on location in Kenya, or so I’m told. Quite possibly in its day it made a much greater impression.

GIL BREWER – The Red Scarf. Mystery House, hardcover, 1958. Paperback reprint: Crest 310; 1st printing, July 1959. First published in Mercury Mystery Book-Magazine, November 1955 (quite likely in shortened form).

   Motel owner Ray Nichols, hitchhiking home in northern Florida after a futile trip up north to raise capital for his floundering auto court, is given a ride by a bickering and drunken couple named Vivian Rise and Noel Teece.

   An accident, the result of Teece’s drinking, leaves Teece bloody and unconscious. Unhurt, Nichols finds a suitcase full of money in the car. Vivian, also unhurt, urges that they leave with it together before the police come, saying it belongs to her and offering to pay Nichols for his help. Against his better judgment, he agrees.

   It is only later, back home in the town of Lakeview, that Nichols discovers Teece is a courier for an underworld gambling syndicate and that the money really belongs to them. While he struggles with his conscience, several groups begin vying for the loot, including a syndicate man named Wirt Radan, the police — and Teece. Nichols and his wife, Bess, soon become targets, and Brewer leads us through a couple of neat plot turns on the way to a volatile climax.

   There is considerable suspense here, some strong characterization, and the various components mesh smoothly. Brewer’s prose is leaner and more controlled than in any of his other novels.

   Anthony Boucher said in the New York Times that The Red Scarf is the “all-around best Gil Brewer … a full-packed story.” This reviewer agrees.

   Nearly all of Brewer’s thirty other novels (all but one of which, are paperback originals) are worth reading. Especially good are And the Girl Screamed (1956), which has some fine chase sequences; The Angry Dream (1957), the second of Brewer’s two hardcovers and a tale of hatred out of the past, in a wintry northern setting; and The Three-Way Split (1960), a well-done story of charter boats and sunken treasure in a style reminiscent of Hemingway’ s To Have and Have Not.

         ———
   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.

GIL BREWER – A Killer Is Loose. Gold Medal 380, paperback original; 1st printing, March 1954.

   In the 1950s and 1960s, Gil Brewer occupied a major stall in the stable of writers of Gold Medal paperback originals, along with John D. MacDonald, Richard S. Prather, and Charles Williams.

   Brewer’s work was uneven but usually interesting and evocative, and quite popular from 1951 to 1958; his first novel, 13 French Street (1951), sold more than a million copies. Much of his fiction is built around the theme of a man corrupted by an evil, designing woman; but his two best novels, this one and The Red Scarf, are departures from that theme.

   Set in Florida, as is most of Brewer’s fiction, A Killer Is Loose is a truly harrowing portrait of a psychotic personality that comes close to rivaling the nightmare portraits in the novels of Jim Thompson.

   It tells the story of Ralph Angers, a deranged surgeon and Korean War veteran obsessed with building a hospital, and his devastating effect on the lives of several citizens. One of those citizens is the narrator, Steve Logan, a down-on-his-luck ex-cop whose wife is about to have a baby and who makes the mistake of saving Angers’s life, thus becoming his “pal.”

   As Logan says on page one, by way of prologue, “There was nothing simple about Angers, except maybe the Godlike way he had of doing things.”

   Brewer maintains a pervading sense of terror and an acute level of tension throughout. The novel is flawed by a slow beginning and a couple of improbable occurrences, as well as by an ending that is a little abrupt — all of which are the probable result of hasty writing. (Brewer once said that he wrote most of his early novels in a white heat of seven to ten days.)

   But its strengths far outnumber its weaknesses. Two aspects in particular stand out: One is the curious and frightening relationship that develops between Logan and Angers; the other is a five-page scene in which Angers, with Logan looking on helplessly, forces a scared little girl to play the piano for him — a scene Woolrich might have written and Hitchcock should have filmed.

         ———
   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.

MIDNIGHT MAN.   ITV1 (UK), May 2008. James Nesbitt, Reece Dinsdale, Rupert Graves, Catherine McCormack, Ian Puleston-Davies, Alan Dale. Screenwriter: David Kane; director: David Drury.

   This was a conspiracy story set in three one-hour parts, less adverts. The ubiquitous James Nesbitt starred as Max Raban, a journalist whose career took such a tumble when he revealed a source, a female friend who went on to commit suicide, that he is now resorting to raiding the bins of celebrities looking for anything he can turn into a story.

   Worse, he suffers from phengophobia, a psychological fear of daylight, so he only operates at night, hence the title.

   When his former editor sends him on a routine dustbin mission, it leads to a hit squad who are assassinating terror suspects, possibly on behalf of the government. Soon Raban is framed for a murder and he is desperately trying to stay at large long enough to find evidence of the conspiracy, while uncertain as to whom he can trust.

   The news I read of this were negative so I was in two minds as to whether to watch it or not but I’m a sucker for a conspiracy story, and I have to say I quite enjoyed it.

   Sure, at the end, you rack your brain to see if it all makes sense and it doesn’t always, but in general it built up a head of steam, had several of those moments when you gasp in amazement (well, you’re slightly amused by the plot twists) and, despite a rather perfunctory ending, it managed to hold the attention.

THE McKENZIE BREAK. United Artists, 1970. Brian Keith (Captain Jack Connor), Helmut Griem (Kapitan Willi Schleuter), Ian Hendry (Major Perry), Jack Watson (General Kerr), Patrick O’Connell (Sergeant Major Cox). Based on the novel Bowmanville Break by Sidney Shelley. Director: Lamont Johnson.

   Here’s the funny thing. The novel this movie is based on takes place in Canada, where there really was a semi-successful escape of Nazis from a prisoner of war camp in 1943.

   The McKenzie Break takes place in Scotland, another venue altogether, and as far as I’ve been able to determine, is totally fictional. It’s a film that boils down to a battle of wits between two men, Captain Jack O’Connor, an Irish journalist pressed into intelligence by the British, and Kapitan Willi Schleuter, a U-Boat Commander who’s become the spokesman for the German prisoners under circumstances that can only be called suspicious.

   Unorthodox means, in other words, are what O’Connor is expected to use, first to quash the continual defiance and uproar caused by the prisoners, which Major Perry is quite unable to handle, and to learn what it is that’s behind it.

   A tunnel, that is, and escape. O’Connor is a wily old bird, but the Germans are even wilier, and far more ruthless. Willi Schleuter, handsome and blond, also has an ever-present and wicked gleam in his eye.

   If you’re ever inclined to root for the underdog, you might even find yourself hoping that he’ll actually pull it off — escape, that is. It’s the only thing on his mind, and no person or other obstacle dare not stand in his way.

   Perhaps I was too used to seeing Brian Keith in situation comedy on TV. I did not expect to see a big, gruff, burly man with a strong rolling Irish accent with a way with the ladies. (There is a short bedroom scene with one of perhaps the only two women who appear in this movie, and both are discreetly and quite adequately covered at all times.)

   Major Perry’s problem is that he outranks O’Connor, but O’Connor is the one with the authority (and the pull) to do as he wishes — not that all of his plans work out as successfully as he so confidently expects they will.

   If I were to reveal that an escape does take place, I hope I am not revealing too much, one that leaves a lot of chaos — shall we say? — behind.

   But it’s here that the story line begins to sag a little. Make that a lot. There seems to be only one airplane that’s capable of tracking down the escapees, and who do you think is riding along? Three guesses and the first two don’t count.

   There is otherwise a lot of enjoyment that can be gotten from watching this movie, one that I didn’t even know existed until it showed up on cable TV the other day. Watch it if you can.

MASQUERADE. United Artists, 1964. Cliff Robertson, Jack Hawkins, Marisa Mell, Michel Piccoli, Charles Gray, John Le Mesurier, Felix Aylmer. Screenplay: Michael Relph & William Goldman, based on the novel Castle Minerva by Victor Canning. Directed by Basil Deardon.

   It’s the early sixties, and the British Lion’s bite isn’t what it once was. In the Arab state of Ramault, once liberated by the Brits in WW II, that means the treacherous leader has plans to rid himself of his nephew, the twelve year old heir to the throne, and sell out to the Russians, depriving England of those precious oil concessions.

   That’s why the Brits have called in Colonel Drexel (Jack Hawkins), the man who liberated Ramault and assigned him to kidnap and protect the young prince. Drexel, a latter day T.E. Lawrence, does things his own way, and he insists on his wartime ally American David Fraser (Cliff Robertson) as his aide in protecting the prince. The government isn’t sure. Fraser has a history of financial problems and a tendency to trouble.

    “Yes, David always was an Errol Flynn fan,” Drexel dryly observes, but he’ll have Fraser or no one, and Fraser needs the work. Currently he’s been reduced to posing as a male model for magazine ads.

   Still, Fraser is no happier about it than the government: “Drexel, I never worked with you. I always worked for you.” But when he faces the realities he agrees to follow Drexel one more time.

   But no sooner than they are set up in a villa where they bring the prince than Robertson finds himself seduced by lovely Marissa Mell and menaced by her boyfriend (Michel Piccoli) and the prince kidnapped from under his nose — all the Machiavellian work of his buddy Drexel, who after a lifetime of service to the Empire finds he is growing older and has nothing but a few ex-wives and no money to show for it. The ransom he gets for the boy will take care of that — and if that means setting up his old friend as the fall guy — well, Fraser is the adaptable sort. He’ll find a way out of it.

   Now Fraser is labeled a traitor and forced to rescue the boy, who still thinks Drexel is a hero and believes Fraser set him up to save himself, but that’s not his only problem, which include Mell and her circus folk in Drexel’s employ, a pet vulture, a phony private eye, and the one question he doesn’t want answered, how far will Drexel go? To kill the boy — or him?

   This clever spy spoof mixes humor with action and an unusually intelligent and quip-filled script handled by an expert cast who know their way around a dry line or a raised eyebrow. The scenery is handsome, the direction crisp, and the plot keeps twisting right up to the final scene. Robertson was born to play this sort of whimsical hero and Hawkins plays Drexel with some of the same style he brought to his role in The League of Gentleman, reviewed earlier by Steve here.

   It’s based on a novel by Victor Canning, a major British thriller writer who rivaled Eric Ambler, Geoffrey Household, and Hammond Innes in his day and whose works were frequently adapted to the big and small screen, including his most famous, and atypical book, The Rainbird Pattern, which became Alfred Hitchcock’s Family Plot.

   Canning’s books veered from adventure to Cold War dramas, from taut suspense to picaresque humor. Panther’s Moon, Queen’s Pawn, The House of Turkish Flies, His Bones Are Coral, The Great Affair, and Finger of Saturn are some of his better known titles.

   From the catchy title tune and the animated titles, to the little twist at the end, this is a too little seen spy parody from its era, directed with a light but sure hand by Deardon and acted with wit and tongue in cheek by the entire cast.

   If you’ve never seen this one and you like the better spy spoofs of the era — the best of which always seemed to be British — catch this clever and entertaining film. But don’t listen too closely to the title tune the first time you watch it. It gives away a few plot points, however unintentionally.

ROBERT EDMOND ALTER – Carny Kill. Gold Medal d1611, paperback original; 1st printing, 1966. Reprints: Black Lizard/Creative Arts, pb, May 1986; Vintage/Black Lizard, trade pb, March 1993.

   Let me state at the beginning that a novel of this type is not my customary reading of choice. Still, I was glad I read it. Alter has presented an absorbing setting and an engrossing albeit not wholly admirable main character.

   Leslie M. Thaxton, who prefers to be called Thax, seeks employment at Neverland in Florida, a borrowing of the Disneyland idea. This was, of course, before the construction of Disney World. One of the attractions is an old-fashioned carnival, and Thaxton, who has been a barker and prestidigitator, fits right in at the shell-game stand.

   Unfortunately, the owner of Neverland has married Thaxton’s former wife, a beautiful but unpleasant woman with a “cold, sensual, calculating look” who is a former knife thrower and has used Thax as an unwitting target. Even more unfortunately, the morning after Thaxton’s arrival his new boss is found among the alligators where the Swamp Ride is located, with one of his wife’s knives in his back.

   Thaxton is a suspect, along with his former wife. The evidence that she did it is so overwhelming that it is obvious that she didn’t do it. Luckily for her, a policeman with imagination is in charge and recognizes a frame-up.

   As pointed out previously, Thaxton is a most interesting character, with both depths and shallows. Well-read in the earlier adventure-type literature — particularly Robert Louis Stevenson — and intelligent, he also has a considerable chip on his shoulder and, whether the author intended it or not, is obviously a loser.

   He’s something of a philosopher, too, yet cannot see the parallel between his observations, “She smiled at both of us — a real earthy we-know-what-god-put-it-there-for-don’t-we-boys smile. She was about as tarty as they come,” and “I like bed. I like the female form. I damn well like the lust of female flesh — in bed, out of bed, anywhere.”

   Fawcett Gold Medal published this novel in those more innocent days when the “f” word was still being blanked out — presumably Black Lizard restores the missing letters — and the sex is suggested rather than explicit.

   (I will spare you my lecture as to how a useful word like “f—ing” has been so abused both orally and in print that it has become ,merely a weak and undefinable intensifier like “very.”)

   If you can accept Thaxton’s double standard, and even if you can’t, you should find this gripping reading.

Editorial Comment.   Following an article by Peter Enfantino on the primary M*F website, entitled “The AHMM Stories of Robert Edmond Alter,” is a nearly complete bibliography for the author. Follow the link, and tell the man behind the door that Steve sent you.