Five recent reprints from Perennial Library [as of 1989] testify to the remarkable quantity and quality we have come to expect from Michael Gilbert. His second mystery, He Didn’t Mind Danger (1947), has been reprinted in this country in paper for the first time in more than twenty years; Lancer had published it under its British title, They Never Looked Inside.

   We follow Major Angus McMann, who is shaken out of his boredom in post-war London when he gets involved with a particularly well organized gang of jewel thieves and finds himself not only helping Scotland Yard but even having his military commission reactivated. Some of Gilbert’s later work might be smoother but he has never been livelier, nor more readable.

   The Danger Within (1952) has a most unusual setting, an Italian prisoner-of-war camp for British soldiers, but it is one Gilbert knows full well because he was a captive during World War II, until he escaped. There is both humor and suspense as the British plan an escape, only to find there is a traitor in their midst whose identity must be detected.

   Death Has Deep Roots (1951) also has its roots in World War II. A British attorney (Gilbert’s profession) is asked to defend a young French woman accused of murdering her lover, a war hero. The legal pyrotechnics are well handled, but the book succeeds most notably with its compassionate picture of the characters.

   World War II’s black market continued during England’s post-war austerity far longer than in the United States, and in Fear to Tread (1953) a British schoolmaster innocently becomes involved with a criminal gang. Such is Gilbert’s skill that we identify compulsively with this amateur sleuth as he battles them.

   Blood and Judgment (1951) is an early case for one of Gilbert’s few professional detectives, Inspector (then Sergeant) Petrella of Q Division. Gilbert’s first series detective, Inspector Hazelrigg from Scotland Yard, was very intelligent but a bit bland. Petrella is young, enthusiastic, error-prone, but ultimately a hero who shows that, on the few occasions he essayed them, Gilbert was one of the best writers of police procedurals.

THE HATCHET MAN. First National Pictures / Warner Brothers, 1932. Also released as The Honorable Mr. Wong. Edward G. Robinson, Loretta Young, Dudley Digges, Leslie Fenton, Edmund Breese, Tully Marshall, J. Carroll Naish. Director: William A. Wellman.

   Recently watched: The Hatchet Man, a Warners thing from 1932 with Edward G. Robinson as a respected Chinese Executioner working for the Tong in San Francisco. When he’s ordered to kill his best friend (played with slanty eye and lilting diphthong by Irishman J. Carroll Naish), he promises to look after his buddy’s daughter, and see that he never causes her any unhappiness… According to custom, this also includes marrying her.

   Time passes. And it passes quickly, because this is a Warners film, and only runs 74 minutes anyway. The daughter grows up to be a very fetching Chinese-American (played by Loretta Young?!) who obligingly marries Robinson — now a prosperous businessman — because he’s nice to her and her father would have wished it.

   She predictably falls for a flashy Chinese gangster about five minutes later, but when Eddie discovers them together he recalls his promise to Naish and breaks Custom by not killing them both. Instead, he allows them to go off together, a move that causes him serious loss of face in the community and eventual financial ruin.

   More time passes. Even quicker. Robinson, now a migrant field hand, gets word that Loretta and her new husband were deported to China, where he has put her to work in a brothel.

   Remembering his vow still, he makes his way to China for a richly satisfying ending that somehow manages to be melodramatic and cynical at the same time.

   This was directed by William Wellman at his tough best, and a real treat.

ARTHUR LYONS – Other People’s Money. Mysterious Press, hardcover, 1989; paperback, 1990.

   The tenth case for private eye Jacob Asch is Other People’s Money, by Arthur Lyons. Mr. Saffarian asks Jacob to keep an eye on his daughter, who decamped from Istanbul with a furnace worker and lives with him in LA. Asch hires a team and they begin surveillance, reporting a few contacts to Saffarian, who then abruptly pulls Asch off the job.

   End of story, it might seem, except one of Jacob’s team disappears. Now on his own, Asch works his way into a scheme involving smuggled antiquities, an avaricious collector and museum director, and death, the latter in goodly quantities.

   Crisp narrative, wily plotting.

Note: Ray O’Leary reviewed this same title earlier on this blog some two and a half years ago. Look for it here. There were 11 Jacob Asch novels in all. A complete bibliography for Arthur Lyons was posted on this blog at the time of his death in 2008. Follow the link.

THE AMAZING TRANSPARENT MAN. American International, 1960. Marguerite Chapman, Douglas Kennedy, James Griffith, Ivan Triesault, Red Morgan, Cormel Daniel. Director: Edgar G. Ulmer.

   The Amazing Transparent Man is a low budget science-fiction film directed by Edgar G. Ulmer. As you might expect, there’s an evil villain with a dim henchman, a semi-mad scientist, and a guy and a gal caught up in the whole mix. Not to mention an uncredited guinea pig with the privilege of being made invisible first.

   Although The Amazing Transparent Man is not a particularly good film, it undeniably has its moments and low budget charms. While the acting is overall unmemorable, the special effects are actually fairly decent and the cinematography is quite good, particularly for an early 1960s science fiction B-film. The film’s music by Darrell Caluker, especially the eerie sequence during the opening credits, isn’t bad, either. In fact, it’s pretty haunting and worth listening to, even if you don’t make it through the rest of the movie.

   The plot is fairly straightforward, although awfully bleak if you actually stop and think about it. Bank robber Joey Faust (a mean-looking Douglas Kennedy) breaks out of prison and is picked up in a car by Laura Matson (Marguerite Chapman). She drives him to the home of Major Paul Krenner (James Griffith), who is holding German émigré scientist, Dr. Peter Ulof (Ivan Triesault) and his daughter hostage. Ulof mentions to Faust that the Nazis forced him to perform experiments in concentration camps, including unbeknownst to him, on his then wife. It’s all sorts of depressing.

   Krenner has been forcing Ulof to experiment with nuclear materials, with the ultimate aim of creating an army of invisible soldiers. It’s a plan that strains credulity, even for a science fiction film. The major’s plan is to have Matson and his henchman, Julian (Red Morgan) hold the fugitive Faust hostage, turn him invisible, and have him steal more nuclear material from a tightly guarded facility nearby.

   But the scheming Faust has other ideas. He realizes that invisibility has its advantages in the high-risk profession of bank robbery, and he convinces Matson to drive him into town for a heist. Problem is: the nuclear material providing him his new power was unstable, leading Faust to fade in and out of visibility, allowing bank employees to identity him. Faust and Matson then flee back to Krenner’s house in the country, where Faust and Krenner fight.

   Then all of a sudden, the whole place blows up in an atomic cloud, leaving you not feeling particularly sorry for anyone but the guinea pig. Dr. Ulof survives, but it doesn’t much matter since he’s dying of radiation poisoning. It’s an ending that I certainly didn’t expect , and it made the whole mediocre affair a much darker film than many other movies of its kind.

   In conclusion, Joey Faust is one mighty doomed protagonist. Looks like the tough guy would have been better off staying in the big house after all. But then again, there wouldn’t have been any movie had he done so.

  THREE VIOLENT PEOPLE. Paramount Pictures, 1956. Charlton Heston, Anne Baxter, Gilbert Roland, Tom Tryon, Forrest Tucker, Bruce Bennett, Elaine Stritch, Barton MacLane, Peter Hansen, John Harmon, Ross Bagdasarian, Robert Blake, Jamie Farr. Screenplay: James Edward Grant. Director: Rudolph Maté.

   When Captain Colt Saunders (Charlton Heston) comes home to Texas after the Civil War (he was on the losing side), he finds that carpetbaggers have infested the state and they have eyes on his old family ranch, all he has left in the world. But before he makes his way home, he somehow manages to find himself a wife, Lorna Hunter (Anne Baxter).

   It turns out, although he does not know it, that Ms Hunter has something a bit more than a shady past, but she is willing to take the gamble that no one will recognize her on the Bar-S Ranch and miles away from the rest of the world.

   It also turns out that Captain Saunders, a most righteous man, has a brother (Tom Tryon), who has only one arm, his left, and who is bitter about it. The local tax commissioner and his deputy, Northerners both (Bruce Bennett and Forrest Tucker) have their eyes on the ranch, and are far from scrupulous in their attempt to follow through on their ambitions.

   Running the ranch in the captain’s absence has been Innocencio Ortega (a most elegant Gilbert Roland, even in working clothes) and his five sons, three of whom are played by young actors who went on to even more fame later in their careers (see the tail end of the credits above).

   These are all the important threads of the story, and of course one of the tactics the crooked land-grabbers have at their disposal is using the fact that they know of Lorna’s past, and they are not at all reticent in revealing the secret to the tough but stubbornly aristocratic Captain Saunders.

   He does not take the news well. Nor does he take kindly to his brother turning against him. Charlton Heston is a good actor, but he can turn hammy at times, and here is one of those times. He also plays Captain Saunders as rather slow when it comes to the thinking department — a man whose mind is rather dim, to put it bluntly — and it does seem to fit the character.

   I think that Heston and Tryon do resemble each other enough to be brothers, as was not the case in Saddle the Wind, which Jon reviewed here a while ago, in which Robert Taylor and John Cassevetes were also supposed to be brothers, and not succeeding very well at it.

   The color photography in Three Violent People is wonderful — I leave to you to decide who the three people are; I still haven’t figured that out — but while all of the ingredients are there, with several very tense scenes leading up to the finale, the ending simply isn’t up to the job. It’s forced and it’s overly moralistic, and it didn’t have to be either one.

   It’s a case of being almost a great western, but it ends up barely holding onto its status as a very good one.

MOONLIGHT MURDER. MGM, 1936. Chester Morris, Madge Evans, Leo Carrillo, Frank McHugh, J. Carroll Naish, H.B. Warner, Grant Mitchell, Duncan Renaldo, Robert McWade. Directed by Edward L. Marin.

   A well done little programmer with Chester Morris as detective Steve Farrell a homicide cop who finds himself up to his neck in murder with an opera troupe playing at the Hollywood Bowl. This solid little murder mystery has an actual plot, clever murder method, an armful of suspects who have motive, and a nice twist you will only see coming because of the actor cast in the role.

   Leo Carrillo is Gino, opera star extraordinary, egotistical, vain, and ladies’ man playing the women in the cast off each other. His stand-in (Ivan Bosoff) wants to replace him on stage, conductor H. B. Warner is fed up with the whole cast, the young male ingenue (Duncan Renaldo) loves one of the women Gino is seducing, both young women (Benita Hume, Elizabeth Anderson) being played by Gino have motive, as does even his valet (Frank McHugh), as the only one who benefits from Gino’s will. Then there is mad composer J. Carroll Naish who is obsessed by Gino and overhears a threat to his life.

   Police Chief Quinlin (Robert McWade) doesn’t think there is anything to it, but young detective Steve Farrell does, and between Gino’s bouts with illness and the insane Naish, there is enough to keep him around, not to mention his attraction to Gino’s physician friend Dr. Adams (Grant Mitchell)’s niece Toni (Madge Evans), a scientist who clicks with him as you can only click in the movies. Then Naish escapes from Steve on the opening night of the opera and Gino collapses on stage, dead, in mid performance.

   Gino was murdered, but the poison was delivered airborne and he was on stage alone in front of thousands of witnesses including his doctor and the Chief.

   There is some neat detective work going on, and this relies much less on dumb luck than most film murder mysteries. All the suspects have legitimate motives, and each one is suspected in turn. There are red herrings, misdirection, dead-end clues, and when a second murder occurs under Steve’s nose he ends up back on the beat for concealing embarrassing letters written by the opera’s diva.

   Dr. Adams thinks he might find something at the site of the murder, but he is attacked too. He’s only shaken up, but Steve, on patrol at the murder scene, discovers the clue that will break the case, only to find himself confronted by two suspects, neither of whom he wants to believe could have murdered Gino.

   I won’t give away the murderer or the method. because both are better than you might expect, and for once the least likely suspect is both logical and has a legitimate motive that the movie has actually played fair with. If you were paying attention you could actually watch this and solve the case: for once nothing is concealed and and you have as much chance of solving the case as Morris’s Steve Farrell does.

   Like Edmond Lowe, Morris was born to play detectives. His rapid patter, razor profile, and direct acting style made him ideal for this sort of thing. You always felt there was a mind working behind Morris’s actions in this sort of film and that his brains weren’t all in his fists.

   The cast is solid, though Naish chews the scenery to the point you may want to commit murder yourself. He’s generally a fine actor, but some of the grimaces on his face may have you laughing too hard to actually pay attention to what’s happening on screen. He plays his madman so crazy you have to wonder he wasn’t already locked away for life before the film began. It’s about the only misstep in the film though.

   All in all, this little sleeper turns out to be a pleasant surprise, and a decent murder mystery you might well admire in a book, much less a film.

  THE KING MURDER. Chesterfield, 1932. Conway Tearle, Natalie Moorhead, Marceline Day, Dorothy Revier, Don Alvarado, Huntley Gordon, Maurice Black, Robert Frazer. Director: Richard Thorpe.

   People who read this blog on a regular basis are a lot more likely to recognize some of the actors and actresses who appeared in this movie, but I have to admit that until now I hadn’t heard of any of them. One I’d have liked to have seen more of in the film itself is Dorothy Revier, who had a long career in the silents before this one, as well as for another five or six years afterward.

   Unfortunately she had the misfortune of playing the blonde gold-digger (and blackmailer) who ends up (not surprisingly) being the first murder victim no more than 10 or 15 minutes into the movie.

   Given her rather shady way of making a living, in more ways than one, there is a long list of would-be killers, the sorting out of who might be the real one makes for a surprisingly entertaining 60 minutes or more. Even though talkies hadn’t been around for very long when The King Murder was produced, the people who made seem to have known what they were doing, even with the budget restrictions they must have been working under.

   Don’t get me wrong. The movie certainly shows its age, and the method used to kill Miriam King and an unfortunate police officer is awfully creaky, if not downright impossible. But for a murder mystery made in 1932, you can do a lot worse.

   And as a note in passing, the original review in Variety suggested that the movie is based on the 1923 unsolved Manhattan murder of Dorothy King, a model and nightclub hostess who may also have been a blackmailer. It was one of two similar murders dubbed “The Butterfly Murders,” both victims drawn to the glamor of Broadway, only to end up dead. If you’re interested, you can read more about it here.

  FREDRIC BROWN – The Screaming Mimi. E. P. Dutton, hardcover, 1949. Paperback reprints include: Bantam #831, 1950; Carroll & Graf, 1989. Film: Columbia, 1958 (Anita Ekberg, Philip Carey).

          – The Lenient Beast. E. P. Dutton, hardcover, 1956. Paperback reprints include: Bantam #1712, 1958; Carroll & Graf, 1988.

   One of the best mystery writers ever is well represented in current reprints. Fredric Brown was equally gifted in both the mystery and science fiction, and Carroll & Graf has published two of this best books in the former genre. The Screaming Mimi is one of the earliest, and best, books about a Jack-the-Ripper type series killer.

   Brown’s “fabulous clipjoint,” Chicago, is the well-realized setting, and the detective hero is, as in many Brown books, fascinating, albeit unlikely. Sweeney is a down-and-out alcoholic reporter: “… he was only five-eighths Irish and he was only three-quarters drunk.”

   Brown does a superb job of taking the reader into his confidence, and we read compulsively as Sweeney tries to stay sober long enough to find who is killing nightclub beauties.

   Among the similarities of Brown’s The Lenient Beast are a series killing and an alcoholic character, the wife of Tucson detective Frank Ramos. Otherwise, the books are very different except for their excellence.

   Re-reading Beast thirty years later, I was surprised how well it stood up. A bonus is Brown’s integration of the macabre lyrics of Tom Lehrer into this book.

GIRLS ON PROBATION. Warner Brothers, 1938. Jane Bryan, Ronald Reagan, Anthony Averill, Sheila Bromley, Henry O’Neill, Elisabeth Risdon, Sig Rumann, Dorothy Peterson, Susan Hayward. Director: William C. McGann.

   Girls on Probation stars Jane Bryan and Ronald Reagan. Although the title suggests that the film will be some form of woman’s prison drama, jail plays only a minor role in this altogether good, albeit uneven, crime film.

   Although it’s not a film noir, Girls on Probation is still very much product of the late 1930s and does have several characteristics of what would later be considered film noir. These include a (somewhat) doomed protagonist, a series of events that spin out of control, and a mise-en-scène with a foggy night and a cheap boarding hotel.

   The plot follows the steps, or should I say, missteps, of a rather naïve twenty-something woman, Connie Heath (Bryan). Her brutish, although well-meaning, father (Sig Rumann) makes her life miserable. Even worse for Connie is her misbegotten friendship with her friend, the scheming Hilda Engstrom (Sheila Bromley), a co-worker who ends up getting Connie mixed up in two criminal acts.

   The first involves the quasi-theft of a dress, which leads to a police record for Connie. The second, and far more serious one, is an armed bank heist pulled off by Hilda’s thuggish boyfriend, Tony. This leads to a stay in the local jail for the two girls. As for Tony, he gets hard time, but later breaks out of prison to join up with Hilda in the girls’ hometown. Since his character is never really developed beyond that of an armed thug, it’s hard to feel bad for the guy when the cops plug him and he plunges off a stairwell.

   Throughout the film, Connie’s just a bit too nice for her own good. Fortunately, local attorney Neil Dillon (Reagan) is around to save the day and make everything right again. He also happens to become Connie’s love interest, employer, and fiancé.

   Interestingly enough, Bryan, who retired from acting early, and Reagan would remain in touch throughout the years. She and her husband, drug store magnate Justin Dart, would form part of Reagan’s inner circle.

   In the pantheon of great crime films from the 1930s and 1940s, Girls on Probation probably really doesn’t really amount to all that much. The film’s ending, in particular, is a bit too sentimental, with Connie needlessly apologizing to the dying Hilda.

   Still, Girls on Probation is an above average film with consistently good acting from Bryan. Reagan’s pretty good in this one too, although he’d reprise the role of a prosecuting attorney to much fuller effect in Storm Warning, which I reviewed here. Both films are worth seeing, although the latter is a much more serious film.

NO HANDS ON THE CLOCK. Paramount Pictures, 1941. Chester Morris, Jean Parker, Rose Hobart, Dick Purcell, Astrid Allwyn, Rod Cameron, Lorin Raker, Billie Seward, George Watts, James Kirkwood, Robert Middlemass. Based on the novel by Geoffrey Homes (Daniel Mainwaring). Director: Frank McDonald.

   Given a little more in the way of production values, including some time to tinker with and upgrade the screenplay itself, this obscure little B-mystery could could have had a future. Chester Morris and Jean Parker play a couple of newly-marrieds in Reno, Nevada — he the well-known private detective Humphrey Campbell — whose honeymoon is interrupted and taken over by a few murders and a host of beautiful women as suspects, in all varieties: a redhead, a blonde and a brunette.

   Missing is the son of a wealthy rancher, and Oscar Flack (George Watts), Humphrey’s boss, is no one to turn down a big fee only because his star employee is on vacation. And since the incentive he offers is a fur coat to Mrs. Campbell, Humphrey cannot turn it down, nor can he persuade his beautiful bride to keep her nose out of his business. Especially when all of the women in the case are good-looking. (See above.)

   If you were to go online and look for other reviews of this comedy adventure of a movie, you’d find that everyone one of them is going to tell you how complicated the plot is, nor are they exaggerating. The pairing of Morris and Parker is delightful, and the comedy is mostly fine (I could have done without the dumb policeman), but if you can make sense of the mystery part of the story the first time through, or even the second, you’re a better person than I.

   I should point out that the version I saw on an Oldies.com DVD may be five minutes shorter than both IMDb and AFI say it should be, and if so, that might make a big difference. I have a feeling that what the makers of this movie wanted to do was put everything in that was in the original book, and it just couldn’t be done, whether in 71 minutes or 76.   [FOOTNOTE.]

   In any case, there was no chance for a series to have developed from this as a first one, if ever there was one in mind. Chester Morris immediately went on to bigger and better things as Boston Blackie, while Jean Parker, alas, had to settle for two later films as Kitty O’Day, which I also have on DVD and after watching this one I duly intend to watch any day now.

FOOTNOTE: As it turns out, the video copy I discovered on YouTube (see above) does have some if not all of the missing footage, all from the beginning. It is extremely helpful in making sense of much of what follows, but not all. I guess you get what you pay for.