It is no surprise that the term film noir is French, given how avidly Gallic filmmakers and/or critics (some were both) embraced what we now know as noir fiction and its cinematic counterpart, or that they turned to the former as source material. The novels of David Goodis, for example, were adapted into not only the Bogart/Bacall vehicle Dark Passage (1947) but also the likes of François Truffaut’s Tirez sur la Pianiste (Shoot the Piano Player, 1960), based on Down There (1956); Henri Verneuil’s Le Casse (aka The Burglars, 1971), based on The Burglar (1953), filmed Stateside in 1957; and La Lune dans le Caniveau (The Moon in the Gutter, 1983), directed by Diva (1981) phenom Jean-Jacques Beineix.

   While Henry Farrell may be best known as the original author of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1960), and thus the “Godfather of Grande Dame Guignol,” Truffaut’s 1972 adaptation of his 1967 novel Such a Gorgeous Kid Like Me (aka Une Belle Fille comme Moi [A Gorgeous Girl Like Me]) is surely noir, and Truffaut also filmed two books by the arguably definitive noir writer, Cornell Woolrich: The Bride Wore Black (1940), part of his celebrated series of “Black” Novels, and Waltz into Darkness (1947), published under his pen name of William Irish.

   Made in England, Truffaut’s controversial 1966 version of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953) had been a considerable departure, his first film in English and in color and his only SF effort, shot by future director Nicolas Roeg rather than usual cinematographer Raoul Coutard. But he was back on his literal and metaphorical home turf with La Mariée Etait en Noir (The Bride Wore Black, 1967), shooting in France and adapting another noir novel with familiar faces both behind the camera (Coutard and co-scenarist Jean-Louis Richard) and in front (Jeanne Moreau, Jean-Claude Brialy).

   The legendary book-length interview Hitchcock/Truffaut (1966) had recently been published, and the fact that the Master of Suspense’s Rear Window (1954) was also based on Woolrich story is one aspect that makes this perhaps Truffaut’s most Hitchcockian work, as is carrying over composer and Hitch mainstay Bernard Herrmann from Fahrenheit in their second and final collaboration.

   The film is basically a quintet of set pieces in each of which the title character, Julie Kohler (Moreau), kills a man, making sure he knows her identity, e.g., she pushes Bliss (Claude Rich) from his balcony during a party when he tries to retrieve her windblown scarf; lures Coral (Michel Bouquet) to a rendezvous where she poisons him; and leaves Rene Morane (Michel Lonsdale) to suffocate in a sealed closet while his son, Cookie (Christophe Bruno), slumbers upstairs.

   Flashbacks gradually reveal that she is avenging the death of her childhood sweetheart, David (Serge Rousseau), shot dead on the church steps after their wedding as the five fooled around with a loaded rifle across the street. The film addresses neither how Julie tracks down the men — strangers drawn together on a single occasion, sharing only a predilection for guns and women (the latter ultimately their undoing), who fled, never to meet again — nor whether David’s accidental killing justifies theirs.

   Julie clearly has her own idea of justice, leading her to call the police and clear Cookie’s teacher, Miss Becker (the striking Alexandra Stewart), as whom she posed, by providing details only the killer could know.

   I don’t know how, or even if, the novel tackles any of these questions, yet in a sense, it doesn’t matter; we don’t turn to Cornell Woolrich for rigorous logic but for his fever-dream imagination and style, and Truffaut himself, obviously interested more in the effect than in explanations, begins to play with our expectations as Julie’s next target, Delvaux (Daniel Boulanger), is suddenly arrested for unrelated crimes, so she turns to the last on her list, artist Fergus (Charles Denner).

   When she begins posing for him as the bow-wielding huntress (how apt!) Diana, we suspect how he will meet his end, yet for the first time, she seems hesitant after Fergus, anticipating Denner’s role as Truffaut’s L’Homme Qui Aimait les Femmes (The Man Who Loved Women, 1977), avows his amour.

   It is around this point that Truffaut uses maximum cinematic sleight of hand, misdirecting us with a subplot about how Fergus’s friend Corey (Brialy) remembers seeing Julie at Bliss’s party and tries to identify her.

   Having watched in step-by-step detail as she dispatched each of her previous victims, we are genuinely surprised when Truffaut abruptly cuts back to Fergus lying dead with an arrow protruding from his body, and even more so when the seemingly relentless avenger leaves an incriminating mural of herself on the wall, which along with her attending the artist’s funeral leads to her arrest and confession, albeit without explanation.

   But — as my first-time-viewer wife quickly deduced — it is all a means to an end, and as Julie, with knife concealed, delivers meals to inmates of the same prison where Delvaux is confined, we await the inevitable off-screen shriek as she finishes her mission.

   Asked by Le Monde in 1968 if Hitchcock had influenced the film, the director said, as quoted in Truffaut by Truffaut (*), “Certainly for the construction of the story because, unlike the novel, we give the solution of the enigma well before the end [as in Hitch’s Vertigo (1958)]…. Contrariwise, the desire to make the characters speak of everything else but the intrigue itself is decidedly not very Hitchcockian and more characteristic of a European turn of mind.”

   In 1978, he called it “the only one I regret having made… I wanted to offer…Moreau something like none of her other films, but it was badly thought out. That was a film to which color did an enormous lot of harm. [A permanent rift with Coutard reportedly left Moreau sometimes directing the actors.] The theme is lacking in interest: to make excuses for an idealistic vengeance, that really shocks me…. One should not avenge oneself, vengeance is not noble. One betrays something in oneself when one glorifies that,” as he opined to L’Express.

   Truffaut’s Woolrich adaptations were made with only one film (my personal favorite of his), Baisers Volés (Stolen Kisses, 1968), in between; the fatalistic nature of the second, Mississippi Mermaid (1969) — whose title seems more appropriate in French, La Sirène du Mississippi, given the sinister connotations of “siren” — makes it not too surprising that, per New York Magazine critic David Edelstein’s TCM introduction, it was his biggest financial failure, but I think it deserved better.

   The first of his features on which Truffaut had sole screenwriting credit, it updates Woolrich’s 1880 New Orleans setting to the contemporary French island of Réunion in the Indian Ocean, to which the ship Mississippi brings a woman (Catherine Deneuve) claiming to be Julie Roussel, the mail-order bride of Louis Mahé (Jean-Paul Belmondo, whom I have loathed since seeing Jean-Luc Godard’s seminal French New Wave debut, À Bout de Souffle [Breathless, 1960]). She doesn’t match the photo that Julie had sent him, but Louis clearly falls for her at first sight and marries her anyway.

   She says she sent a photo of a neighbor to ensure that Louis did not marry her for her looks, while he wrote that he was the foreman and not the owner of a cigarette factory, because he did not want to be married for his money. After “Julie” cleans out his bank accounts and disappears, Berthe Roussel (Nelly Borgeaud) arrives, and we learn that her sister was murdered aboard the ship by Richard (Roland Thénot), who later abandoned accomplice Marion Vergano, so they hire private detective Comolli (Bride alumnus Bouquet) to find the impostor.

   In France, Louis spots Marion in some news footage — precisely paralleling D’Entre les Morts (From Among the Dead, 1954) by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, the source novel for Vertigo — then locates and confronts her, but is unable to kill her; Louis shoots Comolli when he gets too close and refuses to take a bribe, and the couple’s peripatetic future as fugitives seems bleak, despite Louis forgiving Marion for trying to poison him and her declaration of love.

   When I saw this for the second time (c. 2014), the first being in the 1999 “Tout Truffaut” retrospective at the hallowed ground of New York’s Film Forum, it seemed surprisingly familiar. It’s true that at various times I have also read Waltz into Darkness (I was honored to be asked to weigh in on whether Viking Penguin, where I was then employed, should reissue it, which they did) and seen the 2001 remake, Michael Cristofer’s Original Sin, notorious for its steamy scenes between Antonio Banderas and Angelina Jolie — talk about something for everyone — but I think there’s more to it than that, perhaps something distinctively Woolrichian.

   His future biographer, Francis M. Nevins, Jr., wrote in Twentieth Century Crime and Mystery Writers that “love dies while the lovers go on living, and [he] excels at showing the corrosion of a relationship between two people,” plus the theme of imposture recurs in I Married a Dead Man (1948), also filmed in France as J’ai Éspousé une Ombre (I Married a Shadow, 1983), starring Nathalie Baye.

   â€œI read [the novel] when I was doing the adaptation of The Bride Wore Black,” Truffaut told Le Monde in 1969. “At that time, I actually read everything [he] wrote in order to steep myself in his work and to keep as close as possible to the novel, despite the unfaithfulness necessary in films. I like to know thoroughly any writer whose book I transpose to the screen [as he had with Goodis and Bradbury]…. My final screenplay was less an adaptation in the traditional sense than a choice of scenes. With this film, I was finally able to realize every director’s dream: to shoot in chronological order a chronological story that represents an itinerary…. [The] shooting began on Réunion Island, continued in Nice, Antibes, Aix-en-Provence, Lyons, to finish in the snow near Grenoble. The fact of respecting the chronology permitted me to ‘build’ the couple with precision….The Mermaid is above all else the tale of a degradation through love, of a passion.”

(*) Text and documents compiled by Dominique Rabourdin; translated from the French by Robert Erich Wolf (New York: Abrams, 1987).

      ___

Portions of this article originally appeared on Bradley on Film.

TWO MERRY ADVENTURERS. Germany, 1937. Also released as The Man Who Was Sherlock Holmes; original German title  Der Mann, der Sherlock Holmes war. Hans Albers, Heinz Rühmann, Hilde Weisner.  Screenplay by  R. A. Stemmle and Karl Hartl (the latter also director). Currently available on YouTube.

   An official entry in the Venice Film Festival, Two Merry Adventurers is a curiosity all around. It’s set in a never never land where everyone in contemporary Europe believes Sherlock Holmes to be real and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is still alive eight years after his death.

   The other curiosity is that this good-natured comedy mystery with musical interlude was made in Nazi Germany well after they had taken over all aspects of the German film industry. There is no sign of that in this film, not even subtly. It might as easily have come out of Hollywood or the United Kingdom in the same period, fast paced, funny, and light of step.

   Hans Albers, who would still be going strong twenty years later in German film, may seem an unlikely choice to play any variation of Sherlock Holmes. Blond, pale eyed, stocky, and ruddy cheeked, it’s quite a stretch to imagine anyone could see him as the image of Sherlock Holmes, but the titles to the film show countless covers to the German pulp editions of Holmes adventures that do show Holmes vaguely resembling Albers’ interpretation.

   Not that any of that matters. Albers was a natural on screen much closer to his American and British counterparts than most of his European contemporaries. His best film would probably be the 1943 fantasy The Adventures of Baron Münchausen, also an unusual film to have come out of Nazi Germany, certainly in wartime since it is not only a comedic fantasy but vaguely anti-war (while I can’t speak for this film, the cast and crew of Münchausen were apparently hiding several Jewish production members while making the film).

   Albers is Morris Flint, who with his companion Macky Macpherson (Heinz Rühmann, who would become the popular West German Maigret in the late Fifties and Sixties) has dressed as Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson (save only in German pulps did Holmes every wear a flat cap and checkered coat) stop a train on the way to Brussels.

   Though denying they are Holmes and Watson they act very mysterious and everyone jumps to the conclusion that they can’t be anyone else. What they are really after is a free ride and maybe a compartment, if they can scare any crooks on board by their appearance. Sure enough a pair of bank robbers jump train at the sight of them.

   In the compartment next to the crooks are a pair of young English women the crooks have tried to compromise. The girls are on their way to visit the estate of their late uncle near Brussels and collect on their inheritance, but for the time being that takes a back seat to Morris and Macky finagling a nice hotel room in the best hotel in Brussels and discovering among the criminals luggage a fortune in what they assume is stolen money.

   Having foiled bank robbers, the two are approached by the police to deal with a desperate case involving priceless missing stamps — that belonged to the two English women’s uncle.

   The boys are more than happy to help the two attractive women, only to discover their Uncle, far from wealthy, was hiding a massive international counterfeiting operations of not only money but collectible stamps.

   But there are also the real stamps used to copy the counterfeits from, and soon Morris and Macky find themselves surrounded in the criminals lair hoping the police arrive in time to save their necks.

   In capturing the gang though, they have exposed themselves and are put on trial by a tribunal for fraud, where Morris almost talks their way out of prosecution, but when things start to look bad Conan Doyle himself shows up and asks the court to spare the two who were just trying to start their own private detective business and never actually claimed to be Holmes and Watson.

   All Doyle wants for his efforts is to write their story, “The Man Who Was Sherlock Holmes.”

   It’s a surprisingly bright and brittle mystery comedy that moves at a rapid pace and turns on the charming lead performances by Albers and Rühmann, who went on to long careers in film as did screenwriter Stemmle and director Hartl.

   Accept it as pure cinema and it is an entertaining romp handsome to look at and harmless fun to watch. It makes for an oddity in the history of Sherlock Holmes films, but one well worth catching.

FREDERICK C. DAVIS – Deep Lay the Dead. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1942. Thriller Novel Classic #26, digest paperback, circa 1946.

   An extremely prolific contributor to the pulp magazines, where he published at least 1000 stories (among them dozens of the Operator #5 “hero pulp” adventures), Frederick C. Davis began publishing mystery novels in 1937. He produced close to forty books over the next four decades — sixteen under his own name, one as by Murdo Coombs (A Moment of Need, 1947), and the balance under the pseudonym Stephen Ransome.

   His fiction was among the most literate and entertaining of its day (if sometimes a little too casually paced), and stands up well to the test of time.

   Deep Lay the Dead is arguably his best novel. Ex-Dartmouth mathematics professor, cipher addict, and mountain climber Rigby Webb comes to an isolated corner of eastern Pennsylvania to confront a retired doctor named Chandler, whom he suspects of pulling strings to first get him fired from Dartmouth and to then keep him out of the army.

   His suspicions are accurate, but Chandler’s reasons are noble: He is working for the State Department and General Staff, attempting to design an “indecipherable cipher” so as to win supremacy over the Axis in signal communications. Getting Rig fired was the first of several tests of Chandler’s loyalty, all of which he has passed in admirable fashion.

   Rig agrees to work on the cipher project  with the doctor, but they don’t get very far with their collaborative efforts: One of the guests invited to Chandler’s country estate by his wife, Claire, is an enemy agent. Murder strikes, a howling blizzard renders the house party snowbound, and tensions escalate to a fever pitch as more violence erupts. Rig eventually unmasks the traitor and saves the day, and in so doing gets to use his mountain-climbing skills (but not in the way you might think).

   This is a tightly plotted, suspenseful novel built around a classic mystery situation. There is also some intriguing background information on codes and ciphers. (Another of· Davis’s strong suits was his ability to weave information on unusual and/or esoteric topics into his narratives.) Davis did have a tendency to truncate his action scenes, and the climax, while exciting, is much too abrupt; but the book’s strengths more than make up for this and a few other minor weaknesses.

   Davis created numerous series characters, for both his pulp stories and his novels. Professor Cyrus Hatch uses scientific methods and ratiocination to solve baffling crimes in several early novels, among them Coffins for Three (1938), Let the Skeletons Rattle (1944), and Thursday’s Blade (1947). And the semi-hard-boiled detective team of Schyler Cole and Luke Speare, who operate out of New York, is featured in such titles as The Deadly Miss Ashley (1950) and Drag the Dark (1953).

   Deep lay the Dead is the only non-series novel to appear under Davis’s own name; several others were published as by Stephen Ransome. Ten of his Operator #5 pulp novels were reprinted in the Sixties and Seventies under the house pen name of Curtis Steele; these carry such titles as The Invisible Empire and Blood Rein of the Dictator and provide plenty of campy fun.

———
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.

JACK VANCE – The Palace of Love. Demon Princes #3. Serialized in Galaxy SF, December 1996 through February 1967. Berkley X1454, paperback, October 1967. Cover by Richard Powers. Daw UE1442, paperback, February 1979.

   Keith Gerson managed to obtain a fortune for use in his life’s single purpose – revenge against his parents’ murderer. The hunt for the third is this story. The trail of Violo Falushe leads him to a mad poet Navarth; Drusilla, his ward; and then to the notorious Palace of Love. Falushe is killed and the love of Drusilla turned down.

   The first installment [of the serial version] is the best; at the beginning, trips to far-flung planets are a necessary part of Gerson’s hunt and are reminiscent of Delany in descriptive wonder. As the search narrows down, so does the tale itself slow down, to the pace of the final walk to the palace. The symbolism of that place escapes me, but there must be something more to it other than boredom.

Rating: ***½

WATCHER. IFCMidnight, 2022. Maika Monroe as Julia, Karl Glusman as Francis, Burn Gorman as Daniel Weber, Madalina Anea as Irina. Director: Chloe Okuno.

   I’m glad I didn’t read anything about Watcher before I went to see it recently at an independent movie theater in North Hollywood. That is to say: I knew nothing beyond the basic premise: a woman has a watcher/stalker problem. It’s a plot as old as time, especially when it’s a young woman who moves into a new apartment. This is territory that has been fodder for countless thrillers and slashers, some memorable. Many decidedly not.

   Does Watcher have anything it in that sets it apart from the dozens of similar movies that have come before it? Before I can answer this question, I must point out that the film doesn’t necessarily break new ground and that it wears its myriad influences on its sleeve. There’s Hitchcock, of course. Particularly Rear Window (1954).

   There’s also Roman Polanski. I’ve seen one reviewer make references to both Repulsion (1965) and Rosemary’s Baby (1967), but the film that came immediately to my mind was Polanski’s later thriller, Frantic (1988) in which Harrison Ford portrayed a doctor out of his element in Paris, searching for his missing wife. One salient aspect from that exceptionally well-crafted film that continues to stick in my mind is how Ford’s character finds the language barrier – he doesn’t speak French – to be a deeply threatening psychological barrier to his quest.

   That’s even more the case in Watcher, in which a youthful married couple moves from New York City to Bucharest, Romania. Julia (Maika Monroe) and Francis (Karl Glusman) seem to be very much in love and eager for a new chapter in their lives. Francis, who speaks Romanian, has been promoted to a marketing agency’s Romanian office. Julia, who we know was an “actress,” doesn’t speak a word. She is basically left alone to fend for herself in the couple’s apartment while Francis is off at work, making money and interacting with colleagues.

   What begins innocuously enough (or does it?) ends up as a waking nightmare. Julia, soon after moving into the decently outfitted apartment, sees what she thinks is a man staring at her from the building across the street. It doesn’t help her growing sense of isolation when she learns that there’s a serial killer – the media calls him “The Spider” – attacking young women in the neighborhood.

   Pretty soon, Julia is certain she is being stalked as prey. But no one believes her; at times, she almost doesn’t seem to believe herself. The movie skillfully plays with this ambiguity. What does it mean when someone who thinks they are being stalked begins to stalk their purported stalker? Is Julia being watched or is she the watcher?

   There’s very little actual violence in Watcher, but when it comes it comes brutally and most of all, loudly. Most of the time, what envelops the viewer is not blood and gore, but atmosphere. Dread, isolation, and madness are the name of the game here.

   The director makes the most of the on-location filming. Bucharest is as much a character in the film as Paris was in Frantic. The streets, museums, and the subway system all feature prominently in the visual narrative. Monroe’s acting is top notch, although it’s the subtly hidden interplay between her and the camera that makes her performance stand out. It’s well worth a look. One might even say it’s worth watching.

JONATHAN LATIMER – Headed for a Hearse. Bill Crame #2. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1935. Sun Dial Press, hardcover, 1937, as The Westland Case [photoplay edition]; Gregg Press, hardcover, 1980 [introduction by William L. DeAndrea]. Paperback reprints: Mercury Mystery #38, 1940s, abridged [digest-sized]; Century #136, 1950; Jonathan Press Mystery J-84, 1950s, abridged [digest-sized]; Dell #D196 [Dell Great Mystery Library #6], 1957, abridged; Macfadden, 1964; IPL, 1990. American Mystery Classics, softcover, 2022. <B>Filmed</B>as The Westland Case,  Universal, 1937, with  Preston Foster  as Bill Crane, Carol Hughes, Barbara Pepper, Frank Jenks as Doc Williams), Astrid Allwyn, George Meeker, Theodore von Eltz. Director: Christy Cabanne. Screenwriter: Robertson White.

   I’ve now read all five of the Bill Crane novels, albeit completely out of order. I’m pretty confident in saying that this one, Crane’s second outing, is clearly the best of them. It may even be the best medium boiled detective novel ever  — at least that I’ve encountered.

   It’s got everything and it’s tightly plotted in a manner I had no idea Latimer, at least in his Crane books, was capable of.

   It starts out with a Chicago death row inmate, Westland, scheduled to get the chair in six days for killing his wife.

   The murder victim was found in a locked room, her keys next to her, and Westland the only other one with keys. There’s no other plausible entrance than the locked door. She was shot with a service era Webley, a rare gun one of which is owned by Westland. But it’s been missing since the murder. He was convicted on circumstantial evidence. But the electricity in the chair doesn’t care.

   So Crane gets called in. And he tries really hard to keep it together thru the first half of the novel. But the fun really starts begin when his dipsomania kicks in. Drunk to the point of near incoherence on a combo of bourbon, absinthe and gin, three days prior to electrocution, he’s finally in fine form. He’s hilarious (‘she’s no mercenary — she belongs to a much older profession than that’), and booze is to Crane’s wiles what spinach is to Popeye’s biceps.

   Crane starts methodically, but even (and especially) in his drunken inspiration, he dances circles around the cops and criminals alike. He really is, as is his wont to bray, a ‘great detective’.

   He picks the lock to the locked room mystery, and in the nick of time.

   It nicked my time too, keeping me up til 3 am last night to see what happens. Which never happens. Like Crane, I need my sleep. And when I sacrifice my precious sleep to finish a book that’s got 100 pages left — lemme tell ya: the thing is good. It’s funny, it’s tough, and it’s a real honest to goodness mystery with a detective that actually detects — not just a bull in a china shop hoping serendipity strikes. But that too.

   So, like I said, the thing’s got everything. And it’s tight. It works. It’s really good. So there you go.

IN THE LINE OF FIRE. Columbia Pictures, 1993. Clint Eastwood, John Malkovich, Rene Russo, Dylan McDermott, Gary Cole, Fred Dalton Thompson, John Mahoney. Directed by Wolfgang Petersen. Currently streaming on Netflix and Hulu.

   As a thriller starring Clint Eastwood as a grizzled, aging Secret Service Agent obsessed with guarding the President from a dedicated assassin, In the Line of Fire was both a critical and commercial success. It’s not difficult to see why. First, there’s star power in Clint Eastwood, cast as the lead. Bitter, determined, and prone to acerbic quips, Frank Horrigan (Eastwood) is a late fifty-something who has the unfortunate distinction of being the only currently operative agent who was with John F. Kennedy on that fateful day in Dallas. Some thirty years later, Horrigan can’t seem to shake the feeling that, had he made different decisions, he might have been able to stop Lee Harvey Oswald.

   When Horrigan begins to investigate yet another potential threat to the president, he immediately finds himself embroiled in a deadly cat-and-mouse game with James Carney (John Malkovich). Portrayed with an intensity that matches – and often overwhelms Eastwood’s – Malkovich’s Carney is a skilled, but deeply paranoid antagonist.

   Malkovich, never one too phone in a performance, takes the role and imbues it with pathos. Carney – who likes to be called “Booth” – is a man who passionately believes that the country he once served has abandoned him. And he thinks he has found a kindred spirit in Horrigan. Little does he know that behind the gruff, sullied exterior, Horrigan is a true believer and dedicated patriot who, despite it all, still believes in his career choice.

   Horrigan’s personal life and code of honor is explored not so much by what he says – his rhetoric always seems to more aggressive than his heart – but how he conducts himself with others. That’s why his would-be romance with fellow agent Lilly Raines (Rene Russo) and his friendship with his younger partner Al D’Andrea (Dylan McDermott) are so key to the film. Neither is a distraction.

   Rounding out the cast are a coterie of actors who were quite familiar to contemporaneous audiences. John Mahoney, best known for his portrayal as the father on Frasier, is cast as the head of the Secret Service. Fred Dalton Thompson, politician as well as actor, portrays the president’s Chief of Staff. Look for Steve Hytner (Kenny Bania on Seinfeld) as Secret Service Agent Tony Carducci and a youthful Joshua Malina as Tony Chavez, another agent.

   Speaking of the 1990s, there’s a very early 1990s aesthetic to In the Line of Fire. The cinematography, the action sequences, and the somewhat sanitized interiors squarely places the film into the same time frame as JFK (1991) and The Fugitive (1993). Compared to 1970s cinema, early 1990s films are a bit flatter, less gritty, and more polished – even if the plot involves an unhinged assassin or conspiratorial villain.

   This past week was the second time I’ve watched In the Line of Fire. The first must have been around the time it was released. While it still holds up as a solid work of film making, I can’t say that it was necessarily as enjoyable this time around. A lot of the plot seems to repeat itself, with Horrigan and his colleagues constantly chasing false leads. And the prime piece of evidence that enables Horrigan to discover Carney’s alias – a scrap of paper with something written on it – seems a little too pat.

   Still, it’s an exceedingly watchable film with a strong cast. I just wish the director had leaned a bit more into Carney’s madness. But then again, had he done so, it would have been Malkovich’s film, not Eastwood’s. Maybe that could have worked even better?

TRANCE.  20th Century Fox, 2013. James McAvoy, Rosario Dawson, Vincent Cassel.  Screenplay by John Hodge, Joe Ahearne (his story). Directed by Danny Boyle. Currently streaming on HBO Max.

   This twisty after the caper heist film somehow went under my radar when it came out in 2013, and that’s a shame because it has an excellent lead cast and a story with more twists than a bag full of Twizzlers.

   Simon (James McAvoy) is a curator at an auction house, and we discover fairly early in the narrative, the inside man in a heist masterminded by Franck (Vincent Cassel), thanks to his crippling gambling debts. During the heist Simon inexplicably attacks Franck and is struck by him knocking him unconscious.

   When Franck gets away with the McGuffin, Goya’s “The Ascension,” which just brought $26 million at auction, he finds the painting missing, and when he finally catches up with Simon after he gets out of the hospital, he claims amnesia from the head injury.

   Franck and his partners are less than happy.

   Suggested by a series of big art heists of the general era, this one goes in for a series of revelations related to Simon’s memory while stringing the viewer along with not only unreliable narrators, but unreliable narration and storytelling.

   No one is telling the truth in this movie, and yet again and again they are telling you exactly what you need to know to figure this out. In that sense Agatha Christie could not have laid out a better set of clues and red herrings, some of which I warn you are not the red herrings they seem.

   After torture fails, Franck and his team decide to try psychology and see if Simon’s traumatic memory loss can be retrieved by hypnosis. The therapist Simon chooses from a list of top therapists given him by Franck is Elizabeth (Rosario Dawson) whose successful practice consists of mostly phobics, people wanting to lose weight, and chronic smokers.

   She trips almost immediately to the phony identity they have set up for Simon, and by the second visit has spotted he is wired so they can listen. At that point she meets with Franck and agrees to help recover Simon’s memory if she is in on the profit.

   Now as she plays a dangerous game between the infatuated and traumatized Simon and the attractive and suspicious Franck and the gang he may not be fully able to control, she must breakdown one roadblock Simon has put up after another, as the changing story of what happened to him between the head injury and losing the painting is dragged out, but not always as true as it might seem.

   Simon’s arc changes under McAvoy’s strong performance as we get subtle glimpses that neither things nor Simon are exactly what we think.

   I will warn, or tease, you there is significant full frontal nudity in this one, and also point out it is not at the least exploitative, but a vital clue and plot point that, like dozens like it planted and dropped along the way, absolutely pays off toward the end, as one revelation after another comes at the viewer without ever becoming parodic.

   Stylish, original, not derivative despite the Hitchcockian touches, with forays into Cornell Woolrich country as well as Patricia Highsmith in a world inhabited by near sociopaths, Trance keeps you on the edge of your seat and the edge of your conscience as you try to outguess, and largely fail despite some easy ones planted to let you think you are ahead of the game/ It is not only the screenwriters and director, but the characters who switch power roles from one scene to the next.

   You won’t watch this one casually while doing something else. If you want to keep up you will have to pay attention and even then you may have to go back to see if they really did play fair surprisingly often.

   In that sense it is at much a detective story as suspense, crime, or a caper, but one where you never quite trust the detective and shouldn’t.

   Granted there are a few of the inevitable plot holes where coincidence plays too large a role, particularly one they do make a halfhearted effort to pretend they covered, but generally from the opening to the final shot you have a perfectly good shot at outwitting this film, though I’m willing to wager you won’t, at least not as completely as you think you have.

   Danny Boyle, the golden boy of British film had some fun doing this far less consequential film but he knocks it out of the park with sharp performances, an ever twisting plot, and handsome visuals, none of which you dare to ignore.

   What is real and what has been planted, the nature of memory and the way it can be manipulated and lies to us, all those serious questions are posed, but in terms of one of the better outright old fashioned psychological thrillers of recent years.

   It began, I suppose, with Lord Peter Wimsey. Early in the Golden Age of English detective fiction between the World Wars, Dorothy L. Sayers’ first Wimsey novels created the sub-branch of the genre whose hallmarks were donnish wit, literary allusions and a contemporary sensibility. Near the end of the period in which this type of whodunit flourished, the mantle passed from women authors like Sayers to men, notably Nicholas Blake, Michael Innes and, a few years later, in the middle of World War II, Edmund Crispin.

   All three names were pseudonyms, the mystery-writing bylines of gentlemen with other careers. Blake, the one we are following today, was equally well known as C. (for Cecil) Day-Lewis (1904-1972), who along with his friends W.H. Auden and Stephen Spender was ranked among the foremost young poets of the post-WWI generation. Lovers of that form of literature remember him as England’s Poet Laureate from 1968 until his death, and for movie buffs he’s perhaps best known as the father of actor Daniel Day-Lewis.

   I can’t remember when I began reading Nicholas Blake novels or even whether it was before or after we read the Day-Lewis translation of the Aeneid in high school. In any event it was generations ago. Recently I decided to revisit Blake and see how his work stands up today.

   His debut novel, A QUESTION OF PROOF (1935), opens at Sudeley Hall, a preparatory school of the sort in which Day-Lewis spent several years as an instructor. Of the eighty-odd boys that it houses, the richest and most despised is Algernon Wyvern-Wemyss. His classmates refer to him as a squit and a worm, and if THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS hadn’t taught Brits to love the sweetly singing little amphibian known to biologists as Bufo bufo, no doubt they would have called him a toad.

   On the end-of-term day when the inmates’ parents are invited to the school for fun and games, this young fiend is found strangled to death inside a hollow haystack which a few hours earlier had been the scene of a passionate rendezvous between one of the school’s instructors and the lovely young wife of its pedantic and tyrannical headmaster, who is also the dead boy’s uncle and only living relative.

   Could the lovers have been caught in the act by the kid, and could one or both of them have strangled him to keep his mouth shut? There are of course more than two suspects, including some other instructors and the headmaster, who inherits most of his swinish nephew’s money. (With his complete lack of interest in law, Blake does nothing to explain how this came about.)

   But the young man who visited the haystack is so deeply under suspicion that he sends to London for his old Oxford friend Nigel Strangeways, a Holmes-like consulting detective.

   At first Nigel comes across as something of a silly-ass character, demanding endless cups of tea, singing an aria from Handel’s ISRAEL IN EGYPT during a wild auto chase (the first of many physical action scenes in Blake novels), submitting to a schoolboy secret society’s initiation rite that involves, among other things, putting a chalk mustache on the statue of a “nimph” in the village square.

   But most of the time he plays his detective role well, preferring psychological to physical clues (of which there are none), recognizing that one unanswered question—why was the dead boy not seen by anyone in the hour or so before his death?—is the key to his murder.

   When a second murder takes place, a stabbing with an improvised stiletto during a cricket game between the students and their fathers, he concludes that the answer to another question—how was the stiletto made to disappear?—will solve both this crime and the earlier one. For Yanks there may be a bit too much schoolboy and cricket jargon but on the whole this is an excellent debut novel, deserving all the accolades it has garnered since its first publication.

   The title of the second Strangeways exploit and much of its plot are taken from an obscure (except to specialists) Jacobean melodrama. THOU SHELL OF DEATH (1936) is a quotation from Cyril Tourneur’s THE REVENGER’S TRAGEDY (1607), a play which becomes increasingly relevant as we progress through the book.

   On a recommendation from his uncle, an Assistant Commissioner at Scotland Yard, Nigel travels to rural Somerset a few days before Christmas to investigate three threatening letters that have been sent at the rate of one a month to Fergus O’Brien, a World War I air ace who, somewhat like Lawrence of Arabia, has retired to the countryside.

   The most recent letter prophesies that O’Brien will die on the day after Christmas, also known as Boxing Day and the Feast of Stephen, the day on which good king Wenceslas in the carol went out. The reclusive war hero is uncharacteristically hosting a house party over the holidays, a party consisting of a woman explorer whose life he had saved in Africa, her financially desperate brother, a shady roadhouse proprietor, O’Brien’s discarded mistress, and an old Oxford don who had been one of Nigel’s professors.

   Sure enough, O’Brien is found shot to death on Boxing Day morning, and over the next few days there’s another death, this one by poison inserted in a peanut, and a near-fatal bludgeoning. Many chapters are filled with complex alternative theories of the crimes, propounded by Nigel and a Somerset officer and Inspector Blount of Scotland Yard, but the reasoning remains on a speculative level until Nigel travels to rural Ireland in search of O’Brien’s mysterious pre-war past.

   SHELL is more of a full-blooded detective novel than A QUESTION OF PROOF, with a particularly brilliant “player on the other side” (although how this adversary came to know so much about the works of Cyril Tourneur remains unexplained) and abundant quotations and allusions ranging from the tale of Hercules and Cacus and the epistles of St. Paul through Shakespeare (and of course Tourneur) and finally a few of Day-Lewis’s contemporaries.

   Nigel no longer guzzles tea by the potful as he did in his first outing but at one point, having missed his dinner, he snarfs a gargantuan impromptu meal—a pound or so of cold beef, ten potatoes, half a loaf of bread and most of an apple pie—-and later, just as in A QUESTION OF PROOF, he breaks into song during a wild auto chase.

   American readers might be put off by the number of minor characters who speak in regional or ethnic dialects as if they were in a Harry Stephen Keeler novel, but at least the accents are more authentic than the ones HSK dreamed up. (*)

   The poisoned peanut in the second Blake novel is (dare I say it?) a mere bag of shells compared with the murder method in the third. There were signs in that second book that Nigel was beginning to fall in love with Georgia the daredevil explorer. At the start of THERE’S TROUBLE BREWING (1937) they’re married. Nigel is still a consulting detective but has developed a sideline as an authority on poetry, and on the basis of his book on the subject he’s invited to deliver a lecture before the Literary Society in the Dorsetshire town of Maiden Astbury.

   The Big Daddy of the place is the owner of the local brewery, whom, if I weren’t so fond of Bufo bufo, I’d describe as a toad of the first water. He bullies his wife and all but cuts her out of his will (which I don’t think possible under either English or American law, but we’ve seen before that Blake has zero interest in legal issues).

   He also sexually harasses young women, requires his laborers to work inhuman schedules, makes life hell for his socially conscious younger brother, blackmails into silence the local doctor who has documented the brewery’s unsafe working conditions. He even beats his fox terrier! It’s because of this dog, who was found two weeks earlier in one of the brewery’s pressure vats, literally boiled to death, that the Big Daddy character prevails on Nigel to stay in Maiden Astbury for a while and investigate the animal’s murder.

   Nigel spends the next day touring the beer factory and interviewing its principals but his detection is interrupted by the discovery inside the same pressure vat of a human skeleton, apparently that of Big Daddy, although Nigel and the local police inspector seem to be familiar with Conan Doyle’s THE VALLEY OF FEAR and the early Ellery Queen novels since they seriously consider the possibility that the boiled corpse is someone else.

   Suspicion spreads among various characters and several highly speculative alternate theories of the crime are articulated. In due course come two more murders and a midnight climax in the eerie brewery that may remind some readers of a 1930s cliffhanger serial, although Blake is careful to keep Nigel from acting like a serial hero.

   With each chapter prefaced by a literary quotation—from Shakespeare and Bacon and Ben Jonson through 19th-century figures like Byron and Coleridge and Dickens to the poet A.E. Housman, who had died in 1936—this is a fine example of the kind of detective novel whose earliest protagonist was Lord Peter Wimsey.

   Blake’s fourth novel was the only book of his that became the basis of a feature-length film by a prestigious director. I’ll discuss both the book and the movie when I return to Blake later this year. His fifth novel was almost made into a movie by another prestigious director—or more precisely by a young man who quickly became one of the most prestigious directors of all time. When I take up Blake again I’ll tell that story too.

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION – February, 1967. Edited by Frederik Pohl. Cover by Jack Gaughan. Overall rating: 3 stars.

HAYDEN HOWARD “Our Man in Peking.” Novella. Esks #6. Dr. West is sent by the CIA to China, where Esks have been welcomed and have multiplied to overwhelming numbers. His purpose is unknown, implanted hypnotically in his subconscious, but once they meet, he discovers he has telepathic control over Mao III. Mental torment can be worrisome. Some story was omitted since he was left frozen in a Canadian prison in the December issue; details should be in order. ***½

UPDATE: I no longer recall anything about this series, but Howard wrote a book titled The Eskimo Invasion (Ballantine, paperback, 1967) which is described on ISFDb as a “fix-up” of some or all of the Esk stories, of which there were seven. A review on Amazon says: “An Eskimo community finds an alien space probe which quickly hybridizes the locals with alien DNA, leading to a new species called ‘Esks.’ The Esks are so lovable that no one is able to say no to them. And from there, it goes straight to crazytown.” As for my unhappiness about a gap between the story in the December issue and this one, there was no story in between.

PHILIP K. DICK “Return Match.” A raid on an outspacer’s gambling casino yields a pinball machine that builds its own defenses; and the best defense… Not to be put down easily. (5)

WALLACE WEST “The Last Filibuster.” What might happen if legislators and other leaders were forced to do the fighting also. (3)

RICHARD WILSON “They Hilariated When I Hyperspaced for Earth.” Novelette. Young Harmish of Auxor seeks the help of UN Sechen Nboto to initiate progress in his homeworld, but returns with the number man. Amusing at times. (3)

UPDATE: The interior artwork for this story was by Vaughn Bodé, which seems quite appropriate for what I called an amusing tale.

CHRISTOPHER ANVIL “The Trojan Bombardment.” Warfare based on giving enemy what his wants rather than what he needs has one longrun drawback. (2)

THOMAS M. DISCH & JOHN T. SLADEK “The Discovery of the Nullitron.” Pseudo-scientific report. (1)

R. A. LAFFERTY “Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne.” With the aid of a computer, scientists change the presence by altering the past. Idea not very new. (1)

UPDATE: My rating for this one is surprising. Lafferty was generally a favorite of mine.

JACK VANCE “The Palace of Love.” Serial, part 3 of 3. Look for my full review soon.