BLOOD & TREASURE. “The Curse of Cleopatra: Parts I & II.” CBS, 2 hours, 21 May 21 2019 (Season 1, Episode 1). Matt Barr as Danny McNamara, a former FBI agent who now works as a lawyer specializing in repatriating stolen art; Sofia Pernas as Lexi Vaziri, a thief and con woman partnered with Danny despite their tortured past; Oded Fehr as Karim Farouk, an Egyptian terrorist leader; Katia Winter as Gwen Karlsson, an Interpol agent assigned to the Farouk case; Michael James Shaw as Aiden Shaw (né Dwayne Coleman), an arms dealer with ties to Farouk; John Larroquette as Jay Reece, a billionaire and father figure to Danny who oversees his effort to stop Farouk’s plans to reunite the sarcophagi of Cleopatra and Mark Anthony to aid his cause. Directors: Part I: Michael Dinner; Part II: Alrick Riley.

   Thanks once again to Wikipedia for allowing me to summarize what’s going on in what’s really the first two episodes in last year’s first season of this new adventure series on CBS, or at least the players therein. But I imagine there’s enough meat there in the summary that I needn’t say more about the story.

   It seems to have done well enough in the ratings that it warranted renewal for a second time around, but on the basis of what I saw, it’s rather unlikely that be riding along with them. The production values are high, which as it should be, given that filming was done on location: in Montreal, Canada, Rome, Turin, Venice, Italy, Marrakesh, and Tangier, Morocco. The story is mediocre, however, being nothing more than watered down Indiana Jones, and while Sofia Pernas is extraordinarily adequate as eye candy, Matt Marr, her co-star in this venture, other than the inevitable stubble, has no screen presence whatsoever.

   I also think the idea of carrying one limp as dishwater story over twelve episodes was a bad idea, but I understand both the logistic and financial reasons for doing so. But carving a pie that’s luke warm at best into twelve slices, all you have is a semi-solid artificially flavored mess, no matter how you cut it.

MICHAEL COLLINS – Freak. Dan Fortune #11. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1983. Worldwide Library, paperback, 1990.

   One-armed Dan Fortune is hired by Ian Campbell, president of a computer firm, to find his recently-married youngest son and daughter-in-law. The couple have sold the house he gave them, cashed in some bonds and vanished. The only clue left behind is one word, “Freak”, written several times on a pad by the telephone. On starting his search, Fortune discovers he has competition in the hunt from someone leaving a trail of bodies.

   A pretty good effort, with interesting characters and a surprising (at least to me) twist at the end. Sometimes I suspect, though, that Collins forgets his hero has only one arm. The conclusion takes place in the wilds of Arizona, and Fortune has rented a rifle, which he doesn’t get a chance to use. While I’m sure that with proper time to set up his sights, a one-armed man could make a perfectly acceptable marksman, but I couldn’t help wondering if a rifle would have been Fortune’s weapon of choice for a running shoot-out.

   Truth be told, this is not a great movie. Far from it. The trailer definitely shows the highlights. The exciting parts. The chilling parts. But I have to confess, despite its low production values, I happened to enjoy this quirky late 1950s horror picture for what it was. First of all, the title alone is intriguing. The movie had been on my “to watch” list for years, but I only recently got around to watching it.

   Directed by Edward L. Cahn, whose Curse of the Faceless Man I reviewed here, the movie is rather talky at times, with numerous characters either sitting or standing around talking about ancient curses, Amazon tribes, and what not. But there are some good scenes, such as the ones in which the large and lanky witch doctor (clearly seen in the trailer) surreptitiously enters houses at night to do his dirty deeds.

   Speaking of dirty deeds, this one is – if you really think of it – pretty gruesome. I mean, the whole movie revolves around the concept of beheading the descendants of a man who purportedly mistreated a tribe. Neither groundbreaking nor a snoozer, The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake is a moderately entertaining low budget horror movie. Which likely explains why it aired so often on television in the 1960s.

IN BROAD DAYLIGHT. Made for TV movie. ABC, October 16, 1971. Running time: 74 minutes. Richard Boone (Tony Chappel), Suzanne Pleshette (Kate Todd), Stella Stevens (Elizabeth Chappel), John Marley (Lt. Bergman), Fred Beir (Alex Crawford), Whit Bissell (Capt. Moss), Paul Smith (Charlie). Producers: Robert Mirisch and Aaron Spelling. Writer: Larry Cohen. Director: Robert Day.

   It’s graduation day for retired actor Tony Chappel as he signs an autograph and leaves the rehab center. Kate Todd has been assigned as his personal assistant and sees nothing sinister in Tony’s vigorous efforts to reacclimate himself to a more or less normal life, as Tony insists on taking cabs and buses all around town from his beachfront home until he knows the routes by heart.

   Certainly his faithless wife Elizabeth isn’t alarmed, but there’s good reason why she should be: Tony plans to kill her and her lover at the earliest opportunity. Only three things stand in Tony’s way: a common object found in most American households, a smart police detective, and probably the biggest obstacle between Tony and his goal, a fact which we’ve known since the first scene, that he is totally and irremediably blind . . . .

   In a Wikipedia article about In Broad Daylight we learn that writer Larry Cohen thought Richard Boone was miscast, but we couldn’t disagree more. Boone is excellent, watchable in every scene, and interest never flags as the story unfolds, which, considering too many made for TV films, is saying something.

   Richard Boone is remembered primarily for his TV series, Have Gun – Will Travel (1957-63; 225 episodes), but if the script called for it he could be the meanest sonuvagun around (e.g., the John Wayne opus Big Jake, 1971).

   The supporting cast is filled with faces you might know but couldn’t put a name to. You probably remember Suzanne Pleshette and Stella Stevens, of course (who wouldn’t?), but there are great character actors here as well: John Marley (e.g., Cat Ballou, 1965), Fred Beir (well over a hundred guest shots, mostly in television), Whit Bissell (over three hundred appearances!), and, next to Bissell, possibly the most familiar face, Paul Smith, who specialized in memorable bit parts everywhere but did have steady work in The Doris Day Show (1969-71; 33 episodes) and a completely forgotten superhero sendup series, Mr. Terrific (1966-67; 17 episodes), as well as No Time for Sergeants (1964-65; 13 eps), The Gertrude Berg Show (1961-62; 18 shows), and Fibber McGee and Molly (1959; 4 episodes).

   Veteran television director Robert Day would go on to work on one of our favorite Levinson & Link efforts, Murder by Natural Causes (1979), which we hope to get to soon.

   Despite the writer’s misgivings, we unhesitatingly recommend In Broad Daylight. It’s a worthy installment in “The Perfect Murder” subgenre.

   To my mind, Judy Roderick was one of the finest blues/acoustic folk singers of her time. From her LP of the same title, released in 1965, this song has been recorded by many artists since, including The Grateful Dead, usually as “I Know You Rider.”

THE FUGITIVE “The Other Side of the Mountain.” ABC, 01 October 1963 (Season 1, Episode 3). David Janssen. Guest Cast: Sandy Dennis, Frank Sutton, Ruth White. R.G. Armstrong, Barry Morse, Bruce Dern. Narrator: William Conrad. Screenwriters: Alan Caillou & Harry Kronman. Director: James Sheldon.

   A few nights ago, I watched “The Other Side of the Mountain,” a season one episode of The Fugitive. In this episode, Richard Kimble aka The Fugitive (David Janssen) runs afoul of the local authorities in a dying West Virginia coal mining town. The sheriff is portrayed by R.G. Armstrong, while his deputy is played by a youthful Bruce Dern who, as of the time, had not yet appeared on the big screen. The episode is a fairly strong one, bolstered by the presence of stage actress Sandy Dennis, who plays a local girl who provides sanctuary to Kimble. She also, not surprisingly, falls in love with him and all but begs him to take her with him.

   I enjoyed the episode quite a bit. Seeing Dern as a smarmy lawman eager to pick a fight with Kimble was something else. Dern, unlike Armstrong, Dennis, and two others, was not given guest star status. He really was a supporting TV character looking for bit parts at the time.

   Fast forward six years. Or, in my case, one day. And I sit down for an episode of Lancer (“A Person Unknown”), the CBS oater recently brought back into public consciousness for its “appearance” in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019). In this episode, Johnny Madrid Lancer (James Stacy) runs afoul of a powerful man and his son. He not only is wounded in a fight. But is falsely accused of murdering his Mexican friend. A crime he did not commit. As it turns out, the injured Johnny has to hide out in an out of the way farmhouse in which he is provided succor by a young girl (Quentin Dean in her final acting role). Sound somewhat familiar?

   One more thing you should know. The person hot on his trail, the very same person who is the real murderer is portrayed by none other than Bruce Dern. One could not help but compared Dern’s performance in the 1963 episode of The Fugitive with that from this Lancer episode from 1969. Dern had, by this point, definitely come into his own as an actor. Here he had all but perfected the sneering, quasi-psychotic villainy that was so disturbingly effective in The Cycle Savages (1969) which I reviewed here.

   His scenes with Quentin Dean, who had appeared with Charlton Heston in Tom Gries’s excellent Will Penny (1967) which I reviewed here are just as effective as his first scene in which he taunts Johnny’s Mexican friend before killing him. All told, it’s a solid episode from a Western TV series that did not last very long, but benefited immensely from having some of the best character actors from its era as guest stars.
   

NOTE: Dern makes his first appearance in the video above at roughly the 7:00 mark.

JON MESSMANN – A Bullet for the Bride. Ed Steel #1. Pyramid N2792, paperback original, September 1972.

   Once again what we have here is a PI hero who doesn’t have a PI license, but that doesn’t make him any less of a PI, does it? When he’s approached by a would-be client and after hearing her story, tells her to go find a private eye, guess what? That’s when we know that he really is one. She needs him to investigate the woman who’s gotten herself engaged to her father – one of the richest men in the world – and she doesn’t think she’s on the level.

   To back up a little, Steel is retired, lives in Miami on a boat, but a fellow named Byron Ryberg, who was his boss during the Korean War when they both worked for the CIA, still sends jobs his way, such as this one. Ryberg is concerned that the girl is right, and if she is, and maybe if she’s working for the wrong hands, maybe the good guys would like to know about it – given that, as I said, the father is one of the richest men in the world.

   On the downside of this story is that Steel is one of those men who, when they meet a woman for the first time, measures their worth by gauging the size and bounce of their chest. On the other hand, he’s a whiz at running a boat, which comes in very very handy several times during the course of this book.

   Which is a case of Travis McGee (as you may have already noted yourself) meets James Bond. The stakes are, as it so happens, a whole lot higher than in any of the McGee books, but yet Steel has nowhere near the innate suaveness of Mr Bond. The book consists of long periods of introspection and talkiness, punctuated by short bursts of violence. He does bed the lady, but thankfully without going into details.

   The ending strongly hints at a followup adventure, but it never happened. Messmann did go on write six book in his Jefferson Boone, Handyman, series, and 15 books in the Nick Carter series. His largest claim to fame, perhaps, is writing most of the first 200 books in the adult western series, The Trailsman, as Jon Sharpe.

CAROLINA GARCIA-AGUILERA “The Right Profile.” Short story. Maria Magdalena “Maggie” Morales #1. First published in Hit List: The Best of Latino Mystery, edited by Sarah Cortez & Liz Martínez (Arte Público Press, 2009). Probably never reprinted or collected.

   As a Cuban-American private eye based in Miami, Maggie Morales seems to work exclusively for a low level attorney named Bobbie O’Meara. (She tries to get paid in advance but doesn’t always succeed.) In this case, her only appearance on record, her assignment to get the goods on an ex-husband who claims he can’t pay the money he owes to his former wife because he can’t work. He’s a photographer by trade, and in court, he’s an awfully good faker.

   Posing as a client who needs a photo shoot done, Maggie gets the evidence that proves otherwise, with a final shot back at the man in court that he richly deserves. It’s a minor case, but even so, it provides the reader a solid ten minutes of reading fun. The author, Carolina Garcia-Aguilera, a PI herself, is better known for the six novels she has written about another Cuban-American private eye by the name of Lupe Solano, also based in Miami.

DUFFY. (Columbia Pictures, 1968. James Coburn, James Mason, James Fox, Susannah York, John Alderton. Screenplay: Donald Cammell and Harry Joe Brown Jr., both of whom are credited with the story along with Pierre La Salle. Directed by Robert Parrish.

   Nothing ages worse than old hipster unless it is old hipster comedy, dripping with pretension as only hipsters could drip pretension, and imagining mostly overage pre-hippy/Eurotrash types planning a big caper.

   Luckily for everyone involved this one has James Coburn and Susannah York (“I may be a hooker, but I am absolutely not a slut.”) to deliver actual cool and real sensuality to what would be without them as painful to watch as John Alderton’s rather thick English twit performance here.

   Coburn is Duffy, a former con man and smuggler recruited by half brothers Stefane and Antony (James Fox and John Alderton) and Stefane’s girl Segolene’s (York) plot to play pirate robbing the ship the Osiris out of Tangiers carrying a fortune belonging to their cynical and cruel father J. C. Calvert (James Mason).

   It would help if Mason’s character was at least nasty. As is his greatest sin seems to be rightly thinking his sons are useless and a dunce, and he isn’t far off.

   And I would point out that since this is an English film with English characters it would help if the characters weren’t given silly names like Stefane, Antony, and Segolene with no explanation.

   The boys remember Duffy who was a mate on their father’s yacht when Stefane and Segolene come up with the idea and convince the retired crook to go into the caper with them despite his reservations. While they stay in Tangier at Duffy’s place (decorated in porn chic for lack of any other description to fit the absolutely tasteless decor), York and Duffy become involved as the time for the shipment grows closer and their plans go into effect.

   Among the better things about this are the location shooting and gorgeous cinematography, if only someone had told Cammell and Brown (whose career is as spotty as Cammell’s) they weren’t actually the least bit hip, and Parrish had not let himself be convinced they were this might have been a pretty good caper film, but as it is the heist itself is anti-climactic and boring.

   As it stands everyone is too old and stuck with terrible dialogue:

      â€œI hope Stefane is okay. I hope Stephane hopes I’m okay.”

      â€œIt has occurred to me I’m getting used to you finally, and I probably love you in the worst possible way, I guess.”

   It’s no “We’ll always have Paris.”

   Cammell did somewhat better with his own film Performance (still pretentious, but interesting) and Demon Seed (which he hated and tried to make into a comedy), but basically this film is as problematic as his career. Even Coburn stumbles over some of the dialogue that sounds as if it was written as a Mad Magazine parody of Jack Kerouac.

   But Coburn can’t help but be Coburn and even here is ultra cool, while York is incredibly sexy despite it all, those icy eyes fascinating, though she and Coburn both scored better in the altogether more satisfying Sky Riders.

   James Mason is James Mason no matter what he is in, and that is always a bonus.

   There is a twist if you make it that long, but it really isn’t enough to lift this above the level of interesting. And honestly, if you didn’t guess the twist from the start, you weren’t paying attention.

   But I will give it that the end and Coburn being Coburn plus Lou Rawls singing “I’m Satisfied” end it better than the rest of the movie deserves.

   Arguably this might have been better seen in a theater in 1968 when I was 18, but I don’t think so. I didn’t take drugs then either, and only that could help this.

   What a huge waste of talent and beautiful scenery.

   A song I think we can all identify with: