THE BAND WAGON. MGM, 1953; Vincente Minnelli, director. Screenplay by Betty Comden & Adolph Green; Sol Polito, cinematographer. Fred Astaire, Cyd Charisse, Nanette Fabray, Oscar Levant, Jack Buchanan, James Mitchell, Thurston Hall, Robert Gist. Shown at Cinecon 41, September 2005.

   This dazzling musical was programmed to introduce Nanette Fabray’s guest appearance. In his introductory remarks, Broadway and film musical historian Miles Kreuger tried to make a case for the film as the best of the MGM musicals for being “truest” to the theatrical experiences of Comden & Green, but even Fabray objected to this downgrading of Singing in the Rain.

   (I think that Swing Time and Meet Me in St. Louis are both at least as good as the Astaire/O’Connor miraculous pairing, but I won’t press this point.)

   Where The Band Wagon suffers is in the obligatory ballet, ‘The Girl Hunt,’ clever in its apparent references to Mickey Spillane (thanks, Jim) but with none of the ebullient vitality of the big ‘Broadway Melody’ number in Singing in the Rain.

   Still, it’s one of MGM’s best musicals. The ‘Dancing in the Dark’ duet of Astaire and Charisse is arguably the dance highlight of the film, with Astaire’s opening number in the game arcade not far behind. Then there’s Thurston Hall, who as the show’s major backer still breaks me up in his brief scene outside the theater after the disastrous first night of the Oedipal musical.

   Fabray shared memories of her work on the ‘Triplets’ number, and she proved to be still as attractive and spirited as she was over a half-century ago.

   Certainly not the discovery of a lost masterpiece, but a reminder that the genre is better defined by its high spots rather than the lesser films we often see revived.

[EDITORIAL COMMENT.]   The links I’ve added to Walter’s review lead to clips from the film I discovered on YouTube.    — Steve

ROSS MACDONALD – The Drowning Pool.

Bantam, paperback reprint; movie tie-in edition, 1970s. Hardcover first edition: Alfred A. Knopf, 1950. Many reprint editions, both hardcover and soft.

   I wasn’t thinking very much about it, so when I picked this book up and started to read, I found myself caught up in a small time warp, which caught me by surprise, but it was one of my own making.

   I’ll explain.

   On both covers, front and back, there are a dozen or more color shots taken from the movie, released in 1975. Lots of photos of Paul Newman, in other words, in all kinds of situations, plus a handful more with Joanne Woodward in them — all rather tiny, but the immediate effect was to put me in a mellow 70s sort of mood, when both Paul and Joanne were much younger, and so was I.

   So when I hit page 9, where Lew Archer stops at one of those old-fashioned motor courts that consists of small cottages that the owner walks you down to and lets you inspect the accommodations before you register, it was jarring, and it immediately sent me back to the copyright page only to discover that — whoa! — the book came out in 1950.

   It wasn’t a 1970s book, at all. (And it took only a little more effort to look up the fact that The Drowning Pool was only the second novel that Archer appeared in; the first was The Moving Target, from 1949. Where does the time go?)

   We don’t learn a whole lot about Archer’s background in this book. Previously married and now separated, or perhaps more likely, divorced, that’s about all we learn about him — except for his strong standards of right and wrong. Beware to the client who hires him and changes her mind. Once hired to do a job — in this case, to discover who sent a woman with an already shaky marriage a letter that threatens to tell all — he’s in it to the end.

   Beginning with a marriage on the rocks, Archer’s slow but methodical investigation expands to include a daughter who at 15 is too young to attract the such serious intentions from the family chauffeur; her grandmother, the matriarch of the family; a police chief who is obviously smitten with Archer’s client; a weak-kneed husband who never had to work a day in his life; and oil — which means money, trouble, and murder.

   It’s a complex case, laid out by Macdonald in simple fashion. It would have been easy to make a tangled mess of the various threads of the plot darting here and there — Archer is on the road a lot, and in serious trouble more than once — but the telling is clean, straight-forward, and filled with enough picturesque similes and metaphors to fill a book.

   Here are just a few — I can’t resist:

   Page 77:   “For an instant I was the man in the [distorted] mirror, the shadow-figure without a life of his own who peered with one large eye and one small eye through dirty glass at the dirty lives of people in a very dirty world.”

   Page 79:   [talking to a very young prostitute] “Her breasts were pointed like a dilemma. I pushed on past.”

   Page 82:   “[Graham] Court was a row of decaying shacks bent around a strip of withering grass. A worn gravel drive brought the world to their broken-down doorsteps, if the world was interested. A few of the shacks leaked light through chinks in their warped frame sides. [The office] looked abandoned, as if the proprietor had given up for good.”

   Right now I don’t remember much of the movie, whether it followed the book very well or not, but either way, I think I’ll always have Paul Newman in mind when I read any of the Archer books. This one is a good one, and while all the clues point one way, except for one or two puzzling gaps, which — as it turns out — are nothing to be concerned about. Macdonald knew what he was doing, and any loose ends are firmly nailed down, solidly, to perfection, and with no seams showing.

LIGHTNING STRIKES TWICE. RKO Radio, 1934. Ben Lyon, Thelma Todd, Pert Kelton, Walter Catlett, Laura Hope Crews, Richard ‘Skeets’ Gallagher, Chick Chandler. Director: Ben Holmes.

   Sometimes lightning strikes twice. Of all the titles of all the movies in the world, this is the second under this title to be reviewed on this blog. The second was filmed in 1951, a noir movie with Ruth Roman and Richard Todd. There is absolutely no resemblance between that movie and this one.

   I’ve categorized this one as a mystery movie – and that’s exactly how it starts out – but truth be told, as it always should, except for little white lies, this turns rather quickly into a comedy film, a rather silly one, but it was at the silliest parts that I laughed the most.

   Opening scene: the rain is coming down in buckets, a bolt of lightning strikes, and two or three shots ring out. A policeman nearby calls in to headquarters, and he’s felled by a bullet — or so it seems. No body is found, compounding the mystery.

   Meanwhile, or rather the next morning, the two males occupants of the large mansion nearby, long-time buddies (Lyon and Gallagher) and the cook wake up with a hangover, or the long-time buddies do, to find that they have house guests: a pair of vaudeville performers (Pert Kelton and Walter Catlett) from the night before whom, at it turns out, were in an auto accident involving the two long-time buddies and (unbeknownst to the latter) were put up together in one of the upstairs bedrooms.

   Problem: the butler is missing, and Steve Brewster’s fiancée (Thelma Todd) is arriving with her father the same day his aunt (Laura Hope Crews) is due in for a visit to meet the newly intended bride. Somehow she confuses the rather risque Pert Kelton for the bride-to-be (don’t ask), Catlett as her father, and the butler is still missing.

   In the meantime, two policemen are futilely (and humourously) wading around in a nearby underground sewer system trying to find their way out. Don’t ask.

   As a leading man, Ben Lyon is fairly inconsequential, and Thelma Todd’s part is rather minimal. If it weren’t for the giddy antics of Pert Kelton and Walter Catlett, I’d have nothing to tell you about. You should see that latter’s attempt, at Steve Brewster’s request (plus $150 in cash), to show that madness lies in his family, allowing the impostering twosome to get out of the house and away from Aunt Jane, who unaccountably finds them adorable. Don’t ask.

   Laugh? Yes, I have to admit that I did, and (somewhat embarrassingly) all alone in a room by myself.

   The leading players were largely unknown faces to me, including even Thelma Todd, although I’ve seen them on the screen many times before. Lacking any scenes from the film, I’ve included photos of the four stars. They’re studio shots only, but all of them were taken around the time the movie was made, give or take a few years. Working their way downward, then, in order: Thelma Todd, Ben Lyon, Walter Catlett, Pert Kelton.

FREEMAN WILLS CROFTS – The Hog’s Back Mystery. Hodder & Stoughton, UK, hardcover, 1933. Paperback reprint: Pan #52, 1948. Trade paperback: House of Stratus, 2000. US title: The Strange Case of Dr. Earle, Dodd Mead & Co., hardcover, 1933.

   Three mysterious disappearances from homes arrayed around the ridge formation known as the hog’s back? Sounds like a case for Inspector (soon to be Chief Inspector, on the strength of this case) French!

   One of Crofts’ most praised books yet one of the hardest to find (it’s a little more available under its clunky American title, The Strange Case of Dr. Earle), it’s a book for the true Crofts’ devotee, with a solution hanging mostly on locations, movements and alibis.

   There’s something intriguing about those multiple disappearances of seemingly blameless people, however; and the way French goes about solving the case, with no nonsense about love interest and such, also has interest.

   Crofts provides a little human interest in the beginning; but by the time of the final disappearance, he leaves off with the personal element and concentrates on French’s investigation, which is probably just as well with this author.

   Nor are there any of those foreign trips, something Crofts so loved to detail, with the action being confined within a narrow compass. A small-scale work, but very much the sort of thing Crofts does so well, for people who like Crofts.

   Historical note: John Rhode published the somewhat similar The Venner Crime the same year (though it depends characteristically on science rather than alibis). More I won’t say, except to ask, do great detective novelist minds think alike?

THOMAS PERRY – Metzger’s Dog.

Charles Scribner’s Sons, hardcover, 1983. Paperback reprint: Charter, 1984. Trade paperback: Random House, 2003.

   This is a joyous romp of a thriller featuring the funniest band of brigands since Donald E. Westlake’s Dortmunder gang. While pulling a routine caper — a small matter involving a million dollars’ worth of cocaine — the gang inadvertently comes into possession of a Toyota-size dog and a worthless-looking manuscript.

   Immelmann, Kepler, Chinese Gordon, and Margaret the moll keep the surly canine only because Gordon’s cat, Dr. Henry Metzger, takes a fancy to it. The manuscript is more promising — it’s about psychological warfare, and they figure the CIA will pay plenty to get it back.

   A deal is struck, but the public servants of this great nation prove untrustworthy. Double-crossed, the tiny gang of four decides to teach the mighty CIA a lesson it’ll never forget. And then the real fun begins.

   Besides having one of the smartest mouths in the West, Chinese Gordon can think of dazzling plans on a moment’s notice. His revenge plot is a dandy; even the CIA’s ruthless Ben Porterfield, (“a man who had eaten armadillo. That said it all.”) can’t keep up with him. In fact, he can seemingly be outsmarted by only one being on earth — his own cat, Dr. Henry Metzger.

   A dynamite read-the plot is ingenious, the dialogue terrific, and the comedy wild and wacky.

   Perry’s previous book, The Butcher’s Boy, is totally different from this one — a tense thriller about an assassin and the government worker who must apprehend him; it won the MWA Edgar for Best First Novel of 1982. His latest title is Big Fish (1985).

         ———
   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.

THE CANADIAN. Famous Players-Lasky, 1926. William Beaudine, director; adapted by Arthur Stringer from W. Somerset Maugham’s play, The Land of Promise; Alvin Wyckoff, cinematographer; Thomas Meighan, Mona Palma, Wyndham Standing, Dale Fuller, Charles Winninger, Billy Butts. Shown at Cinecon 41, September 2005.

   For me, this was the revelation of the convention, an outstanding silent film, with superb photography by Wyckoff, dead-on performances by every member of the cast, with Mona Palma lighting up the screen as the English woman, brought up in modest but cultivated circumstances, who goes to live with her brother on a remote Canadian farm in a desolate landscape.

   To escape the indignities she feels she’s enduring from his wife and the rough farmhands she marries his foreman who’s shown her some kindness, a decision that she quickly regrets.

   Every performance is true to the character, seemingly natural and unaffected, the soul reflected in characterizations where there’s not an excessive gesture. The subtitles are almost superfluous, the drama playing out in the visuals, with moments that are almost unbearable in their intensity. It’s this kind of experience that makes attending film conventions an adventure with a potential for transcendence.

   (Fellow attendee Jim Goodrich’s comment on this sentence was “Wow!” Could he be suggesting that I was tripping here?)

[EDITORIAL COMMENT.] The photo of Mona Palma is probably not related to the film, but after reading Walter’s review, I knew you’d like to have an idea of what she looked like at the time. Born in 1897, Mona Palma made only seven movies, all between 1923 and 1927, three of them as Mimi Palmeri. She died in 1989.

   Thomas Meighan is the tall fellow dominating the scene above, which was taken from the movie, and of course that’s him again in the publicity still on the right. His career was quite a bit longer than his co-star’s, consisting as it did of 82 movies between 1914 and 1934. Until talkies came along, he was quite a popular star.

   To make this post a little more crime-related, Meigan’s first movie was Dandy Donovan, the Gentleman Cracksman, in which he played the title role, and his first sound film was The Argyle Case (1929) in which he again played the leading character, this time homicide investigator Alex Kayton.

ELIZABETH PETERS – Crocodile on the Sandbank. Dodd, Mead & Co., hardcover, 1975. Paperback reprint: Fawcett Crest, 1976. Many other reprint editions, both hardcover and soft.

   Crocodile on the Sandbank is a wonderfully amusing romp in Egypt in the 1880s with all the trimmings — dahabeeyahs (houseboats), royal tombs, and mummies, both dead and walking. Into the world of archaeology blunders a self-proclaimed “middle-aged spinster” (age thirty-two) who has used her newly inherited fortune to leave England and her avaricious relatives.

   Sensing herself to be plain, Miss Amelia Peabody has decided against marriage, saying, “Why should any independent, intelligent female choose to subject herself to the whims and tyrannies of a husband? I assure you, I have yet to meet any man as sensible as myself.” But then she meets Radcliff Emerson, a voluble and single-minded sociologist. A Tracy-Hepburn relationship immediately develops.

   Where she meets Radcliff is at an archaeological dig he and his brother share on the Nile. Amelia and her companion, a young woman she befriended in Rome, have stopped there for a brief visit, but the short stay they envisioned is lengthened by a series of threatening events, endangering the artifacts and finally the lives of the four protagonists.

   The story is told from Amelia’s viewpoint. She is exceptionally well educated, full of endurance, and never, never forgoes her principles. Peters’s skill is in keeping the friction inherent in this situation amusing, yet making the characters just realistic enough to be credible and immensely likable. And though the reader realizes the outcome of the plot before Amelia does, it doesn’t matter, it is the interchange between the characters that is the delight of the book.

   In further adventures, presented in the form of Amelia’s memoirs — The Curse of the Pharaohs (1981) and The Mummy Case (1985) — she marries Emerson and returns to the Nile with an expanded cast of characters, including her precocious son, Ramses, and an Egyptian cat, Bastet.

   Peters (whose real name is Barbara Mertz, and who also writes as Barbara Michaels) has written such other entertaining novels as The Jackal’s Head (1968), Borrower of the Night (1973), The Copenhagen Connection (1982), and Die for Love (1984).

         ———
   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.

ELIZABETH PETERS – The Camelot Caper.

Avon, paperback reprint, 2001. Meredith Press, hardcover, 1969. Hardcover reprint: Detective Book Club [3-in-1 edition], September 1969. Other paperback editions: Dell 3521, 1970, as Her Cousin John; Tor, 1988,1990.

   Elizabeth Peters is one of the smoothest writers around, and she has been for quite a long time. This one was written in the heyday of the gothic romances, and her take on the damsel-in-distress-while-traveling-alone sort of tale is absolutely priceless, not to mention rollicking and sometimes rowdy.

   Jessica Tregarth has been called to England by her dying grandfather, and she is to bring the ring her father, disowned by his father, took with him when he left for America. When she reaches England, the ring suddenly seems to attract a pair of villains, intent on stealing it from her, in any way that they can.

   Of course there is a hero to come to her aid and assistance, one David Randall, the author of the very same gothic paperback Jessica is reading on page one. It’s cut and chase, and backtrack and chase again, but in reverse. The bus ride in Chapter Two is worth the price of the book itself.

   Farce, though, or even near farce, is very difficult to maintain, and even more difficult when the structure of a plot starts to work its way in. The second half of the book (once David and Jessica finally reach her grandfather’s dilapidated, run-down mansion) does not nearly match the story one has been led to expect — anticipation is one thing, fulfillment is another.

   It would make a great movie, though. Cybil Shepherd, say, and any handsome and dashing good-looking British actor for the other. Considering all of the medieval cathedrals they dash in and out of, not to mention Stonehenge at midnight — and of course the Arthurian connection — Hollywood’s missing a good bet here.

IT CAN’T LAST FOREVER.

Columbia, 1937; Hamilton McFadden, director; Ralph Bellamy, Betty Furness, Robert Armstrong, Raymond Walburn, Thurston Hall.

Specialty acts include The Dandridge Sisters, with a 13-year-old Dorothy performing as the middle sister, and a brief, unbilled appearance by Donald O’Conner in a tap sequence, his first role in the movies. Shown at Cinecon 41, September 2005.

   This film’s strong suit is the polished performances by the cast. Raymond Walburn takes top honors as a bogus mind reader who’s promoted by struggling theatrical agents Bellamy and Armstrong who conceive the ill-fated idea of staging a robbery to showcase their client’s talent.

   Unfortunately, Walburn’s role is too quickly reduced and Bellamy replaces him as the mind reader on a spectacularly successful radio show. The film moves quickly at 67 minutes and is one of those pleasant musical oddities that Cinecon and Cinevent are particularly adept at recovering.

    [EDITORIAL COMMENT.]   The crime content of this film, I suspect, is minimal, but from Walter’s description, I’m going to say that it’s there. If I’m wrong, the error is mine, not Walter’s!       — Steve

HAKE TALBOT – The Hangman’s Handyman. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1942. Pulp magazine reprint: Two Complete Detective Books #24, January 1944. Trade paperback: Ramble House, 2005.

   Some peculiarities of construction prevent Hake Talbot’s first novel from attaining the first rank, but it remains an engaging curiosity with plenty of atmosphere. A few years down the pike, he would write Rim of the Pit, one of the great detective novels of the twentieth century, and while this is far from that, it has its moments.

   Rogan Kincaid makes a memorable entrance, dripping in oilskins, on the morning after an orgiastic dinner at The Kraken, the baronial stone mansion on its own island off the Carolina coast. Only Rogan could have braved the storm, Rogan Kincaid, the man’s man, dangerous gambler whose exploits around the world are legend in the underworld.

   But he’s not all bad, he’s sensitive and loves to give women a good time. As showgirl Nancy Garwood struggles to tell him what happened the night before, bits and shards of memory return to her until, with a scream, she recalls a repressed memory, that their host, Jackson Frant, the owner of The Kraken, had been cursed by his half brother Lord Tethryn of England, according to the old family curse, and he had instantly died.

   Laid up in his bed, he now awaits the police. When Rogan goes to see Frant, he can barely make out the features of his old friend: a seemingly supernatural power connected to the family curse (“”Od rot you!””) has caused decay to happen at super-fast rates — the body seems as if it has been dead for weeks instead of mere hours!

   Talbot drapes layers and layers of medieval and early American horror/folktale material on the bones of his fragile story. You can tell he really loved his research. As Rim of the Pit depends on the native American legend of the Windigo, The Hangman’s Handyman just drips and squelches with Undine trivia. You will believe that a heap of seaweed can stand up of its own volition, move across the room towards you, and strangle you to death!

   Much of the action of the book turns into an “origin story” explaining the true and romantic background of the hardened gambler who calls himself Rogan Kincaid. This part of the story: unbelievable to the point of being ridiculous, and I notice that Talbot discarded Kincaid’s aristocratic origins by the time he embarked on the superior work of Rim of the Pit, but Talbot completists won’t mind a little icing on their cake.