THE MAN BEHIND THE MASK. MGM, UK, 1936. Re-released as Behind the Mask. Hugh Williams, Jane Baxter, Ronald Ward, Maurice Schwartz, George Merritt, Henry Oscar, Donald Calthorpe, Kitty Kelly. Screenplay by Jack Byrd, Syd Courtney, Ian Hay & Stanley Haynes, based on the novel The Chase of the Golden Plate by Jacques Fitrelle (sic). Directed by Michael Powell.

   This short but fast moving and complicated thriller based on a novel by American mystery writer Jacques Futrelle (his name misspelled in the titles) has a better pedigree than most, with legendary director Michael Powell (half of the famous Archers production company with Emric Pressberger, and director of Black Narcissus and The 49th Parallel among others) at the helm and novelist Ian Hay working on the dialogue.

   Nonetheless it is strictly B movie material, though slickly done and masterly paced so you never have time to ask questions as the novel’s complex plot and myriad mixed identities and double crosses unfold. It plays out like an Edgar Wallace thriller more than a Jacques Futrelle mystery.

   Lord Slade (Peter Cawthorpe) is giving a masked ball to show off the prize of his collection, the golden shield of Khan. The police are in attendance in the person of Chief Inspector Mallory (George Merritt) dressed as Frederick the Great, and a mysterious fellow dressed as Voltaire (Henry Oscar) playing chess with him as they watch the shield.

   Also in attendance are Lady June Slade (Jane Baxter) his daughter, the mysterious East Indian Harrah (Gerald Fielding), Dr. Walpole (Donald Calthorp) the famous surgeon, and Marion Weeks (Kitty Kelly) the doctor’s wisecracking assistant and housekeeper (“I’m dressed as Shirley Temple as Madame Dubarry.”).

   Not in attendance are Lord Slade’s wastrel son Jimmy (Ronald Ward) who argued with his father over money earlier and threatened to hold up a bank to get money if he had to, or Nicholas Barclay (Hugh Williams) a dashing pilot who is in love with June, and disliked by this lordship.

   June and Nicky have plans though; he’s to wear a disguise and slip into the ball, and at midnight when the lights go down he and June will slip away and get married with a special license he has obtained. But before he can even don his costume, he’s shot by an intruder in a mask, an intruder he believes to be Jimmy because of a triangle tattoo on his wrist, a tattoo that Jimmy, Nicky, and their dead friend Allan Hayden (Reginald Tate) all got back in school.

   With Nicky out, a man dressed as the Red Death enters the ball with Nicky’s invitation from June and the help of the butler aiding in the elopement. When the lights go down and everyone unmasks he steals the shield, and takes the car with June in it, being wounded in the shoulder by a detective whom he runs over as he escapes. June knows he isn’t Nicky, but is now a helpless captive.

   Meanwhile the mysterious Harrah travels to the estate of the Master (Maurice Schwartz), the astrologer who paid to have the shield stolen, but who has been double crossed by the thief and by Nadja (Morya Fagan) a follower to report his failure.

   Soon enough Jimmy is cleared, but Nicky didn’t go to the police thinking Jimmy shot him and instead went to be patched up by Dr. Walpole, and now the police want Nicky for the theft and running over the policeman and they know the thief was wounded in the shoulder, while the only clue Nicky has to the real thief is a tie he left behind sold by a haberdashery in a poorer part of London.

   From then on it’s a chase with Nicky, Jimmy, the Dr,, and wisecracking Miss Weeks pursuing the thief and Nadja to rescue June and return the shield, the police after Nicky with the Dr. in tow, and Harrah and the Master’s gang pursuing Nadja and the thief for the shield and eliminating anyone in their way, and when the policeman dies, Nicky is wanted for murder.

   The film is a fast paced diversion, confusing at times, fun with a solid cast, but mostly of interest for the direction of Michael Powell and being based on a novel by Jacques Futrelle (albeit one far inferior to his short stories).

   The real highlight is some brighter than usual dialogue and the scenes in the Master’s observatory, giving the film an almost science fictional feel with Maurice Schwartz, eyes hypnotic and mad, and hair in the style of mad scientist everywhere since Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, part Mabuse, part Fu Manchu, and madder than a hatter. It’s a little forgotten gem among mad villains.

   A nod also to Richard Tate as Allan Hayden, who, sporting a black fedora and checkered overcoat, looks uncannily like the illustrations of Leslie Charteris’s The Saint that ran in Thriller. He’s good as an old school tie type who hasn’t quite forgotten the form.

   The ending is a little rushed, and there isn’t so much as a final embrace for Nicky and June, at least not on screen, but it’s satisfying in its own way.

Editorial Comment:   Most of the available prints of this film are less than an hour long, but this one (which I haven’t watched in its entirely) claims to be 1:33 long. If so, then IMDb does not know about it, stating that the original version is believed to be lost:

THE DROP. Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2014. Tom Hardy, Noomi Rapace, James Gandolfini, Matthias Schoenaerts, John Ortiz, Elizabeth Rodriguez, Michael Aronov. Based on the 2009 short story “Animal Rescue” by Dennis Lehane, who later expanded it into a novel titled The Drop (2014). Director: Michaël R. Roskam.

   It may be somewhat odd to begin a movie review with a brief allusion to the movie’s ending. But there’s a line spoken by one of the secondary characters at the tail end of The Drop that basically sums up the whole film. I’m not going to tell you who it is, of course, or what he says. Trust me when I tell you that it’s one of those lines, so rare in commercial cinema today, that makes you sit up and take notice.

   How perfect a line it is and one that goes a long way in distilling a complex, multifaceted film about two cousins running a small criminal enterprise out of their bar in working class Brooklyn. Cousin Marv (the late James Gandolfini) and his younger cousin Bob Saginowski (a perfectly cast Tom Hardy) are getting by, but are hardly living the high life. Years ago, Marv was forced to sell his establishment to Chechen gangsters. It’s something he’s never quite gotten over. Bob, on the other hand, seems to be perfectly fine with living a quiet, uneventful life as the bartender.

   In exquisite noir, or should I say neo-noir, fashion, the plot unfolds due to a series of coincidences, near coincidences, and bad luck.

   There are actually four separate strands to the compellingly bleak story that is The Drop. The first involves a plot hatched by Marv to steal from his own bar – technically, the bar owned by Chechen gangsters – in order to have money to keep his father on life support. The second concerns Bob’s interactions with a detective that he recognizes from church. The third revolves around the mystery surrounding the disappearance of a bar regular some years ago. The fourth story, and as it turns out the movie’s linchpin, concerns the budding romance between Bob and a local girl (Noomi Rapace). A romance, it should be noted, that begins when Bob discovers a beaten, abandoned dog in a garbage can in front of her home.

   It admittedly takes patience to watch and wait, as the story doesn’t unfold quickly. Rather the movie operates like a slow burner, amplifying the heat and the tension without the viewer exactly realizing what’s happening until it’s too late. There’s a big reveal in the end of the film, one in which the infamous line that I referenced at the beginning of this review is intimately tied to, but it’s also fun to watch everything leading up to that point.

   The cast is uniformly excellent and the movie doesn’t dumb things down for a mass audience. This is a sophisticated crime drama, one as much about characters and their personal journeys as much as about the crimes themselves.

NINA KIRIKI HOFFMAN “Vinegar and Cinnamon.” Lead (and cover) story in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, January-February 2017.

   In a world in which magic exists, but not everyone has the same ability to cast spells, one family undergoes a small tragedy when the twelve year old sister transforms her fourteen year old brother into a rat. It was in fit of anger, and once done, she does not know how to reverse it.

   Luckily Sam decides that he likes being a rat. His sense of sense of smell is enhanced tremendously, for example, even though his vision is restricted to seeing only objects nearby.

   Even emotions have smells: “vinegar surprise, hot-pepper anger from Ma; baking-bread love from Pa; and caramel love and salt-water dismay from Maura.” Maura does her best to change Sam back again and he finally agrees to let her try. Does she succeed? Read this delightfully enjoyable homespun sort of tale and find out.

   Nina Kiriki Hoffman has written 17 novels, some for pre-teens and young adults, including The Thread That Binds the Bones, reviewed by Barry Gardner here on this blog. Her short story “Trophy Wives” won a 2008 Nebula award.

“California Dreamin'” (John Phillips, Michelle Phillips) – 2:31
“Imprevu” (Johnny Richards, Lois Geraci) – 2:55
“Listen People” (Graham Gouldman) – 2:28
“What the World Needs Now Is Love” (Burt Bacharach, Hal David) – 2:50
“In Times Like These” (Bacharach, David) – 3:02
“Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)” (John Lennon, Paul McCartney) – 2:39
“Woman” (Bernard Webb) – 2:24
“Monday, Monday” (John Phillips) – 2:55
“Daydream” (John Sebastian) – 3:02
“Gotta Go” (Marty Paich, Rod McKuen) – 2:53
“The End of the World” (Arthur Kent, Sylvia Dee) – 2:53
“Husbands & Wives” (Roger Miller) – 3:10

FRANCIS BONNAMY – The King Is Dead on Queen Street. Duell, Sloan & Pearce, hardcover, 1945. Penguin #629, paperback, 1947.

   The combination of the Great Intellect and his Loyal Chronicler has been a mainstay of detective fiction since Watson first began keeping records. Academics with plenty of time on their hands to devote to travel and detection have also always been popular. Mix these elements with a colorful wartime setting in Alexandria, Virginia, and eclectic characters who are both native to the area and transient, and you have a perfect recipe for murder.

   Peter Shane, former professor and head of the Department of Criminology at the University of Chicago, and his assistant, Bonnamy, are now living in a third-floor apartment in Alexandria while on military assignment. Both are present at a neighborhood party when much-disliked Joe Long, a well-known photographer known as “The King,” is found dead — presumably from a fall down the steps of his home.

   When it is discovered that someone had tied a string across Long’s steps, Shane and Bonnamy must attempt to clear their friends and landlady from suspicion, and their investigation focuses on the interrelationships between the party guests, each of whom had an intense reason for wishing to see Long dead. Even the family dogs and the layout of the house do not escape the pair’s scrutiny as they study the past histories of this set of oddly associated people.

   Francis Bonnamy is a pseudonym for Audrey Boyers Waltz; she wrote seven Shane/Bonnamy novels, taking full advantage of local color and geography of Chicago, Maine, Arizona, and other interesting locales. All loose ends are convincingly tied up at the ends of these humorous books, and the treatment of Shane’s detective skills is particularly good.

   Other noteworthy titles are Death on a Dude Ranch (1937), which has a Wyoming setting, Dead Reckoning (1943), which deals with murder in Washington, D.C., and buried pirate treasure on Cape Fear; and Portrait of the Artist as a Dead Man (1947), which, like The King Is Dead on Queen Street, is set in Alexandria and involves interplay among a group of diverse people in the art world.

         ———
   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.

Bibliographic Note:   Other books in this series are: Death by Appointment (1931), A Rope of Sand (1944), Blood and Thirsty (1949) and The Man in the Mist (1951).

R. B. DOMINIC – The Attending Physician. Harper & Row, hardcover, 1980. Pinnacle, paperback, 1981.

   The pair of ladies who write as R. B. Dominic [Mary Jane Latsis & Martha Henissart], as well as the more famous Emma Lathen, obviously do not care much for doctors. This is the first murder adventure their series character hero, Congressman Ben Safford (D-Ohio), has stumbled across in some time. Where the medical industry fits in is right from the beginning, with a series of hearings Safford’s subcommittee as part of their investigation into widespread fraud in the Medicaid program.

   According to Dominic, doctors are an arrogant lot, but in works of fiction, at least, authors have a distinct advantage over the rest of us. They can make sure that at least one prime specimen chosen from among their targets of outrage gets, for once, what’s coming to him.

   Such as a mammoth malpractice suit, right after the subcommittee learns that one such doctor has falsely billed the same welfare mother for two hysterectomies and one abortion. And in that order, no less.

   Standing nervously in line to await the authors’ wrath are nursing homes and pharmacies as well. At times you may feel that the ensuing murder investigation has been all but forgotten, but have no fear. You’ll probably spot the culprit(s) easily enough without it. If you tend to agree with Ms. Dominic, the fun lies here in foiling villains of quite another stripe.

      The Ben Safford series —

Murder Sunny Side Up. Abelard-Schuman 1968
Murder in High Place. Doubleday 1970
There Is No Justice. Doubleday 1971
Epitaph for a Lobbyist. Doubleday 1974
Murder Out of Commission. Doubleday 1976
The Attending Physician.Harper 1980
Unexpected Developments.St. Martin’s 1984

PETER CHEYNEY – Uneasy Terms. Slim Callaghan #9. Dodd Mead, US, hardcover, 1947. Collier, US, paperback, 1989. First edition: Collins, UK, hardcover, 1946. Film: British Pathe, 1948, with Michael Rennie as Slim Callaghan.

   Earlier recorded cases of Slim Callaghan, it has been suggested to me, were ersatz American PI thrillers — Cheyney’s ham-handed attempts to imitate hardboiled fiction on the behalf of British readers — what those on this side of the ocean could have a steady diet of, if so desired, but something of a rarity on the other side of the Atlantic. This is a fact that I may have misunderstood — I have not read anything by Cheyney in many years — so corrections to anything I may say in this paragraph or what follows are more than welcome.

   It may be relevant that this was the last of Mr. Callaghan’s adventuress, not counting a large number of short stories. I say this because what I read was a very well done combination of the British manor house mystery and a case tackled by a semi-enigmatic tough guy private eye, and I enjoyed it very much.

   Dead is the stepfather of three very individualistic women: Viola, beautiful and charming but perhaps not as strong as she should be; Corinne, beautiful but a very smooth liar; and Patricia, quite young and a bit of a vamp, or her idea of a vamp, based on the motion pictures she has seen. It seems that someone had sent the dead man a letter that caused him to try to engage Mr. Callaghan’s services, but the delay caused by a mysteriously drugged drink on the latter’s end means that the two never actually meet, not until it is too late.

   The case is complicated, and Slim does not make Scotland Yard’s investigation any easier by messing around with the evidence at the crime scene. While skating on thin ice with a detective in charge named Gringall, who knows him from before, Slim has to sort through a tangled web of lies, many of which involve who tried to make phone calls and when (and from where); who was married to who and when; a blackmailer named Donelly, the kind of guy women can’t resist; and what a simple enough will (on the face of it) can unwittingly disrupt, if not destroy, the lives of the next generation several times over.

   There is also a fight scene worthy of a film director such as William Witney, a brutal one that Slim is able to walk away from, but barely. A pure brain wizard like Hercule Poirot, Slim is not. Even though I had the twist at the end figured out early on, this was a tough one to put down.

KING OF THE JUNGLE. Paramount, 1933. Buster Crabbe, Frances Dee, Sidney Toler, Nydia Westman, Robert Barrat, Irving Pichel, Douglas(s) Dumbrille. Based on the novel The Lion’s Way, by Charles Thurley Stoneham. Directors: H. Bruce Humberstone & Max Marcin.

   King of the Jungle was one of the earliest and best of the flood of sequels, ripoffs and imitations that followed the success of MGM’s Tarzan the Ape Man (1932) and while it doesn’t have much going for it in the Originality Department, it’s a lively and inventive little film well worth a look.

   The story (in which Philip Wylie had a hand) chronicles the adventures of a shrill little brat raised by Lions (sound familiar?) after his father — played in a short scene, back carefully to Camera, by Douglass Dumbrille, who turns up later in a different part altogether — is killed on Safari.

   The lad grows to strapping manhood in the form of Buster Crabbe, who would later play every pop culture hero known to kids in the first half of this century, becomes leader of the tribe pride, gets captured by Circus Folk and eventually travels to San Francisco, where he (WARNING!) successfully resists the lures of the Big City, gets the Girl, sets his adoptive family free and returns with the lot of them to Africa. (END OF WARNING!)

   Admittedly, it’s all pretty damsilly, but Crabbe is fun to watch, Francs Dee makes an intelligent heroine, and Sidney Toler turns up as a sympathetic Sawdust Impresario. There’s also a spectacular Circus Fire (re-used in Road to Zanzibar and godknows where else) an impressive Elephant Stampede through Downtown Frisco, and even a touch of Artistry here and there, as in the opening when the hero’s father gets his Safari Permit: the camera pans in on the document, then dissolves to a tracking shot, still moving, of the tattered document blown listlessly past dead bodies strewn about a ravaged camp site.

   MGM spent more and went further with Tarzan, but they never surpassed the charm and energy of this shaggy-dog one-shot.

ADAM HALL – The Scorpion Signal. Quiller #9. Doubleday, US, hardcover, 1980. Playboy, paperback; 1st printing, June 1981. First edition: Collins, UK, hardcover, 1979.

   Quiller is asked to cut short his latest recovery leave six weeks early. He might have refused, but the man missing was a friend of his; they’d been on assignment together more than once. Shapiro had been caught by the Russians and was being processed in the brainwashing facility at Lubyanka when somehow he managed to escape. But now he’s disappeared, and if the Russians have him and break him, all kinds of secrets will suddenly not be so secret any more.

   And so Quiller agrees to take the job. Not all goes as planned, though, not hardly. There are lots of twists and turns and narrow escapes on the part of Quiller, who is both very good at what he does and very lucky. It is the people that he meets that makes the story go on high cylinders most of the way, however. Some are on “our” side, some on “their” side, and some have their own agendas, which is all to the good, as far as the reader is concerned, especially this one.

   The ending, though, is all action — which I daren’t tell you about, because getting there is where all the fun is — and while Adam Hall (aka Elleston Trevor) does action well, the closing climactic scenes mean almost as little to me as the CGI effects and fast camera work in whatever the latest suspense thriller is that’s being shown right now in a theater near you.

   All in all, then, not a boring (or bad) book by any means, but I enjoyed a earlier read, Quiller, which came later in the series (and was reviewed here ), quite a bit more. Cerebral action means more to me, you see, than several chapters’ worth of automobiles chasing each other, even around the Kremlin, right in the heart of Moscow.

COLORADO SUNDOWN. Republic Pictures, 1952. Rex Allen , Koko, Mary Ellen Kay, Slim Pickens, June Vincent, Fred Graham, Louise Beavers. Director: William Witney.

   Brutality meets slapstick comedy in Colorado Sundown, a perfectly enjoyable if forgettable matinee Western starring Rex Allen and his horse Koko. Directed by William Witney, the film contains more than its fair share of well-choreographed fight scenes.

   But it’s also notable for its skillful inclusion of physical comedy, thanks in no small part to the presence of veteran character actor Slim Pickens. Similarly, the inclusion of talented African-American actress Louise Beavers in the cast helps make the film a little quirkier than what I had initially expected. Unfortunately, Beavers is relegated to portraying a servant, which makes some of the humor surrounding her character tremendously dated.

   The plot isn’t a terribly interesting or complicated one. Rex Allen gets caught in the middle of a feud between loggers and ranchers. The loggers, led by the cold-hearted Carrie Hurley (June Vincent) seeks to obtain a local ranch in order to gain access to the trees.

   Standing in their way are numerous obstacles, most prominently Jackie Reynolds (Mary Ellen Kay) who, along with Slim Pickens (portraying himself), has inherited a stake in the ranch. Hurley and her two brothers will go to great lengths, including murder, in order to advance their nefarious agenda.

   But no worry. Rex Allen is on the case and he’s determined to make sure justice is done. Not before he gets into a knockdown fistfight, complete with a bookshelf crashing down on the floor and blood on his face though. It’s a William Witney movie, you see.