YOU’RE A SWEETHEART. Universal, 1937. Alice Faye, George Murphy, Ken Murray, Andy Devine, Charles Winninger, William Gargan, Frank Jenks, Donald Meek. Music director: Charles Previn; dances staged by Carl Randall. Director: David Butler. Shown at Cinefest 28, Syracuse NY, March 2008.

   Don King (Ken Murray), a bumptious promoter, hires waiter Hal Adams (George Murphy), to pass as an Oklahoma millionaire and drum up support for his Broadway show starring Betty Bradley (Alice Faye).

   Betty is unaware of the deception and falls in love with Hal who may be working as a waiter, but is a terrific song and dance man.

   The plan to keep the show afloat goes off track, but if you don’t think there’s going to be a happy ending, you should swear off musicals. Faye and Murphy are splendid co-stars, and the cast of talented supporting actors provides sterling support.

   Both Faye (at Fox) and Murphy (at MGM) will appear in bigger budgeted films, with more illustrious casts, but they’re just fine in this ingratiating musical comedy.

MY NAME IS MODESTY. Miramax, 2004. Alexandra Staden. Raymond Cruz, Fred Pearson, Eugenia Yuan, Nicolaj Coster Waldau. Screenplay by Lee Batchler & Janet Scott Batchler, based on the characters created by Peter O’Donnell and “In the Beginning,” the Modesty Blaise comic strip by Peter O’Donnell & James Holdway. Directed by Scott Spiegel.

   The history of this one isn’t very promising — Quentin Tarantino had acquired the rights to film the character of Modesty Blaise from the comic strip and novels by Peter O’Donnell, and in order to keep them he needed to get something on film. As a result he produced this made for DVD release feature as a sort of prequel to a real film.

   The good news is that it is better than any previous Modesty Blaise film or television appearance, and better than it had to be.

   In fact, for now, it is the definitive Modesty Blaise on screen. The story takes place before Modesty meets Willie Garvin, and before she became the “Mam’zelle,” mistress of the criminal organization known as the Network. This is very much the story of how she came to hold such a position.

   The film is short and the story succinct. Modesty Blaise (Alexandra Staden) is in Tangier working at the casino owned by her criminal mentor, the head of the Network. As the film opens he is planning a major drug deal (despite Modesty’s disapproval) and as a result the vault at the casino is filled with money.

   Myklos, (Nicolaj Coster-Waldau), a charismatic young terrorist with a grudge against her boss, kills him and takes over the casino after closing time taking Modesty and a handful of employees hostage.

   To keep herself and the other hostages alive, Modesty convinces Myklos that they must wait for her bosses second in command (Raymond Cruz from TNT’s The Closer) to return to open the safe, and engages him at the roulette wheel and in a desperate ploy: for every game he wins she will tell another chapter of her life beginning with how she came to be named Modesty Blaise, and for every three in a row she wins he will let a hostage free.

   Thus Modesty reveals the story of her origins as an orphan in war-torn Bosnia (updated from the original post WW II era) and how she met Lodz, the old man who became her teacher and traveling companion. As the suspenseful cat and mouse game proceeds Modesty carefully plays Myklos and reveals her compelling story from how she wandered over Southern Europe and North Africa to how she became involved with the Network after the old man’s death when she was caught stealing in the bazaars of Tangiers by her mentor in crime.

   Done on a small budget and with mostly unknown actors, this shouldn’t work, but ironically those things become virtues, and while Staden is too slight to really capture the Modesty of the comic strip and books, she has the exotic look, Khirghiz eyes, and screen presence to suggest both the complexity and strength of the character, and when at the end she rips off her skirt in the true Modesty style to go into action, the well-choreographed fight could have been story boarded from the panels drawn by artist James Holdway.

   Modesty wins the day, and even offers an ironic thank you to the dead Myklos, who has inadvertently delivered the Network into her hands. She cancels the drug deal, and informs her now second in command that they will deal with the problems that causes when it comes. The film ends as the legend is born.

   There is a nice touch, too, as one of the hostages, the bartender, who has overheard her life story as she recounted it to Myklos to stall him, asks her just how much of what she told them was true.

   With a Giaconda smile she replies: My name is Modesty.

   After the awful Joseph Losey film with Monica Vitti and Terence Stamp as Modesty and Willie, and the misguided television pilot designed to move the characters to California with Ann Turkel miscast, it is nice to finally see a respectful and intelligent adaptation of O’Donnell’s popular cult favorite.

   My Name is Modesty is nothing more than an appetizer, but as such it does what a good appetizer is designed for and whets the appetite for the main course.

   Even if the main course never comes, this remains a faithful and heartfelt tribute to the real thing and the DVD includes a nice making of video, insightful audio commentary by the screenwriters, director, and producer, a video interview with the late Peter O’Donnell on the creation of Modesty, and an illustrated retrospective of all her comic strip adventures replete with detailed synopsis.

   All in all this is a class act all the way, like the lady it celebrates. It is the real Modesty Blaise, and that’s all any of her fans have ever asked for.

CRAIG RICE – The Corpse Steps Out. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1940. Reprint hardcover: Tower Books, 1945. Reprint paperbacks: Pocket #476, October 1947; International Polygonics, 1989.

   Paperbacks published by International Polygonics Ltd. are worth noting for quality and variety. Recently IPL has been publishing Craig Rice’s series regarding John J. Malone, aided and abetted by Jake and Helene (nee Brand) Justus, and has already published her very scarce first novel, Eight Faces at Three.

   Now comes the almost as scarce and equally enjoyable second Malone mystery, The Corpse Steps Out (1940), a wild and wacky mystery set in pre-World War II Chicago. Appropriate to the time, many of the cast of characters work in radio, and their fear of sponsor censorship is important to the plot. (Chicago at one time was an important center of national radio.)

   This is a classic case of “murder without tears,” and even the incredible amount of booze consumed by the characters seems inoffensive, though, with hindsight, we know how harmful it is.

   Included is a brief biography of Rice by William Ruehlmann which is crammed with information. Rice had a terrible alcoholism problem which contributed to her death and “wrote the binge but lived the hangover,” according to Ruehlmann. Her brief, unhappy life ended at age forty-nine in 1957; her enjoyable mysteries live on.

SON OF DRACULA. Universal Pictures, 1943. Lon Chaney Jr., Robert Paige, Louise Allbritton, Evelyn Ankers, Frank Craven, J. Edward Bromberg. Story: Curt Siodmak; screenplay: Eric Taylor. Director: Robert Siodmak.

   Lon Chaney Jr., last mentioned for his performance of Witch Woman [reviewed here], also starred in of one of Universal’s more successful chillers, Son of Dracula directed by Robert Siodmak, who went on to create some iconic films noir, including The Killers and Christmas Holiday.

   Siodmak handles the tale of Count Dracula coming to modern-day America in search of fresh blood with authentic creepiness, possibly remembering the expressionist German Horror films of his youth and bringing them to America as well.

   Aided by John P. Fulton’s special effects, he gives the film a splendidly gothic look, with eerie mists and floating coffins, and even elicits an off-beat performance from Chaney fils, whose hulking vampire suggests some of the virility Chris Lee brought to the part years later.

   I should also note that Robert Paige, as the hero of the tale ranks a few notches above the average bland leading man in a monster movie. Classic horror films have a perversity that has always appealed to me, in that the Monster is generally more sympathetic, or at least more interesting, than the putative good guys.

   Not here. As Son of Dracula develops, Paige becomes not so much hero as patsy, set up by a scheming girlfriend for a grisly fate, and struggling throughout with forces that outmatched him from the start.

   In fact, Siodmak reused the plot in basic outline in one of his grimmer noirs, Criss Cross (1950) with Burt Lancaster, Yvonne De Carlo and Dan Duryea in the thematic roles done here by Paige, Louise Allbritton (very effective as a literal femme fatale) and Chaney Jr. And Paige (who had a title role in the Monster and the Girl a couple years earlier) invests the part with real pathos.

   In keeping with this moody, fatalistic feel, Son wraps up on a haunting note, with the hero still wanted for murder and haunted by a love that he betrayed.

   It makes me wonder what the little kids thought of all this as they left the theater back in the 40s, particularly since Son of Dracula was double-billed with Universal’s The Mad Ghoul, a surprisingly classy B-feature with echoes of Caligari and an ending that copies the opening of a 1937 Woolrich story, “Graves for the Living.”

SHE ASKED FOR IT. Paramount, 1937. William Gargan, Orien Heyward, Vivienne Osborne, Richard Carle, Roland Drew, Harry Beresford, Miki Morita. Director: Erle C. Kenton.

   William Gargan is well-known name to long-time classic movie fans, even though I remember him most (and first) as PI Martin Kane on the radio. The rest of the cast is all but unknown to me.

   Orien Hayward, for example, who’s married to William Gargan’s character at the beginning of the movie, if you ever expect to see her in a movie, it will have to be this one. Except for a small uncredited part in one other, Her Husand Lies (also Paramount, 1937), she never made another.

   I don’t know why. She’s a pert young blonde who more than holds her own as Penelope, the female half of the Stafford family. She’s married to Dwight Stafford (that’s Gargan), and a more profligate and wastrel couple you cannot imagine, living high in society solely on the basis of a monthly allowance from Dwight’s (very) rich uncle.

   When the check doesn’t arrive at the beginning of one month, they are in deep financial trouble. They rush over to the uncle’s home, only to find that he has just died, the victim of a hit-and-run accident, the other party unknown.

   Forced by bitter necessity to make a living on their own, his cousin having shut the horn of plenty (and their only flow of income) down on them, Dwight, a big fan of mystery fiction, decides to become an author. The first big twist in the tale is that he does, and in a big way. The second big twist is that after several successful books, Dwight tells Penelope he’d rather go fishing than write another book. (His literary muse is gone.)

   And so is Penny, off to Reno for a divorce. Dwight, on the other hand, decides to pose as his own character and go into the detective business, and after a considerable amount of muddling around, he solves the case, the first one that comes in the door.

   I’ve gone into more detail than I might for some movies for two reasons. First of all, it’s an interesting set-up, and secondly this is a relatively difficult movie to find. There’s a long synopsis on IMDB (one which will unfortunately tell you everything, and if you read it, you will absolutely never need to see this movie), but at this point in time, there isn’t a single comment that’s been left, nor an external link, except one to this blog, as soon as it can be done. (It usually takes a couple of days.)

   Should you go to a more than usual amount of effort to find this movie? My advice is no, don’t bother, unless I’ve made the set-up sound as interesting as I tried to. But when I said that the case itself is muddled, I meant it, and more: all the way through, the vibes are off.

   The Staffords’ problems, that of the lazy rich, are difficult to identify with, to put it politely but succinctly, and most of the other characters are only crudely drawn, with one of them being out-and-out repulsive.

BYRON PREISS, Editor – Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe: A Centennial Celebration. Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover, 1988. Softcover editions: Perigee Press, 1990; ibooks, 1999. [Note that the latter adds a new introduction, two new stories, and a map of Philip Marlowe’s Los Angeles.]

   Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe: A Centennial Celebration may be the only anthology I choose to list in my Crime Fiction Bibliography. Chandler was born in 1888, created Philip Marlowe, and the world — at least the crime fiction world — has never been the same. So some of the current top practitioners here pay tribute to both.

   Marlowe stars in all twenty-three stories, set explicitly in years from 1935 to 1959, and they resonate not so much with Chandler’s writing style (which most of the authors don’t try to imitate) as with the times and places, with the ambiance of the private eye on the Chandlerian mean streets.

   Some stories are distinctly more effective than others, but in the main this is quite enjoyable. And at the end, in “The Pencil,” Chandler himself shows us all how it should be done.

TORBEN NIELSEN – An Unsuccessful Man. Harper & Row, US, 1976; published in Denmark in 1973 under the title Galgesangen, translated by Marianne Helweg.

   A young man hangs himself, on the face of it the result of unrequited love. Detective Superintendent Ancher has a suspicious mind, however, and digs up the remarkable facts that the dead man was singing as his head, went into the noose, and that his fiancee was expecting his quick return to her apartment.

   The story is Danish modern in tone and attitude, polished and uncluttered. Ancher is another Maigret, with the same unmistakable traits of patience and unyielding tenacity. A sex killer, crazed and despicable, confuses matters slightly but not yet nearly so much as an ending that needs much more explanation to be wholly satisfactory.

[UPDATE] 01-23-11.   Nielsen had one other mystery translated into English: 19 Red Roses (Collins, UK, 1978), a translation of Nitten Rode Roser, (Denmark, 1973; no US edition).

    I’ve been omitting my old reviews as short as this one is, especially when they’re of books as unknown as I suspect this one to be. I decided to include An Unsuccessful Man to demonstrate that publishing Scandinavian mysteries is nothing new. What’s new is that they’re popular and publishers are making money with them.

MILWARD KENNEDY – Poison in the Parish. Victor Gollancz, UK, hardcover, 1935. No US edition.

   After a late death certificate and six months of rumor, the odious Miss Tomlin, who died at the Guest House — “a boarding-house where the inmates pay high for insufficient fare in order to avoid damage to their gentility” — is disinterred.

   Since an unusual amount of arsenic is found in the body, the police suspect murder. To get help in their investigations, the Chief Constable asks Francis Anthony to listen to the local gossip and report on his findings.

   Idled by a game leg and messed up intestines, Anthony at first is loath to take part. Only the fact that his beloved niece is enamored of Miss Tomlin’s nephew, who, along with his sister, may be a suspect, induces Anthony to accede to the Chief Constable’s wishes. Anthony hopes to prove that Miss Tomlin’s death was either accident or suicide.

   In his dedication, the author says to a “friend”: “In your omniscient superiority you have pointed out that in all my books, of which you have read so few, the characters are unpleasant: here is an attempt at something different.”

   The characters are quite pleasant, although [one] Miss Figgis is not exemplary. Fair play is lacking, but the astute reader — not that any such bother to peruse my reviews — will note an early oddity and begin building a case against one individual.

   Well written and amusing.

Bibliographic notes:   Of the sixteen books published by the author (Milward Kennedy Burge, 1894-1968), including one as by Robert Milward Kennedy, this seems to have been the only mystery tackled by Francis Anthony. Two were cases solved by Inspector Cornfold; Sir George Bull was the sleuth of record in another pair.

   Kennedy also wrote two books as by Evelyn Elder, one of which, Murder in Black and White, has recently been reprinted in the US by Ramble House.

THE GOOSE AND THE GANDER. Warner Brothers, 1935. Kay Francis, George Brent, Genevieve Tobin, John Eldredge, Claire Dodd, Ralph Forbes, Helen Lowell. Director: Alfred E. Green.

   If I were still keeping up the pretense that this blog covers crime films only, I could get away with covering this short but very funny screwball comedy because, in fact, there is a crime involved. But I gave up that particular restriction or limitation some time ago, as regulars visitors to this blog have long ago realized, right along with me.

   So forget about the crime for a minute – I’ll get back to it – and let me tell you instead that this is a very funny screwball comedy. Maybe it came along too early to be officially classified as the latter, but it is very funny, so it’s a comedy, and once I tell you about the story line, you will be awfully hard pressed to not call it one of the screwball variety.

   It’s rather complicated, the story line, that is, but I’ll give it my best shot. Georgiana Summers (Kay Francis) is divorced from Ralph Summers (Ralph Forbes), who was stolen from her by the new Mrs. Summers (Genevieve Tobin), whom she (the first Mrs. Summers) overhears making plans for a weekend getaway with Bob McNear (George Brent). Hoping to embarrass the pair, especially the new Mrs. Summers, she makes plans to trap them in her home (thanks to a phony gag about a smallpox quarantine) and (setting it up even further) having her ex find them there.

   Foiling her plans, however, are the two crooks alluded to earlier in this report, the Thurstons (John Eldredge and Claire Dodd) a married couple who are also jewel thieves and who get trapped in the same snare at Georgiana’s home that she set for the cheating pair she intended it for.

   I am perhaps not telling this funnily enough. Trust me on this, but maybe you have to be there, too. There is some serious explaining to do on the part of everyone involved to keep all of their secrets from each other, each one trying to outdo the other, with lots of squirming and wriggling going on as they do so, especially when the local police yokels come calling. Making matters worse, Georgina and Bob McNear (George Brent, as you may recall) find themselves attracted to each other.

   Two additional points. There is more than a hint of the risque in the events that unfold in this film, with infidelity one of the major points of the plot. Other reviewers have noted this too, even going so far as to suggest that the story line was written before the Code came in under full enforcement, only to have it tamed down a little, or perhaps even a lot. They may be right.

   Secondly, depression era movie audiences must have loved seeing how the rich folks lived, and they must have loved it even more when these very same rich folks made fools of themselves.

   Which they do several times over in The Goose and the Gander, and the result is very funny, as I may have mentioned before. I laughed out loud several times, and I almost never do that, especially when I am watching a movie alone, as happened to me this time.

   If you’re a Kay Francis fan, she’s in fine form in this one, and you shouldn’t miss it. If you don’t know who Kay Francis is, then The Goose and the Gander is a fine one to begin with.

WILD HORSE MESA. Famous Players-Lasky, 1925. Jack Holt, Noah Beery, Billie Dove, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., George Magrill, George Irving, Edith Yorke, Bernard Sigel, Margaret Morris, Eugene Pallette. Based on the novel by Zane Grey. Director: George B. Seitz. Shown at Cinefest 28, Syracuse NY, March 2008.

   The fellow who introduced the film referred obliquely to a very warm relationship between Zane Grey and female star Billie Dove. You can’t blame Grey. She’s very appealing, and after some initial palling around with Fairbanks, she finally settles on the character’s older brother (Jack Holt) when he shows up to get the plot really moving along.

   Noah Beery is the totally reprehensible villain, but he’s matched (if not in charisma, at least in villainy), by another of Dove’s admirers, Bert Manerube (played by George Magrill).

   Manerube conceives the dastardly plan of driving horses into a canyon whose exit is blocked by a barbed wire fence that he argues will bring the horses up short. They won’t, he claims, run into the fence in their eagerness to escape their pursuers.

   When Holt points out the fallacy in this plan, Manerube joins forces with Beery and the action doesn’t let up until the final romantic fade-out. Among the film’s many pleasures are the performance by the magnificent white stallion who leads the wild horses and the beautiful photography by Bert Glennon, who would be a member of John Ford’s regular crew, with Stagecoach among his credits.