Steve, From the videos you choose to show us on your blog, you and I seem to have a lot of the same tastes in music. I wanted to know if you have ever listened to Kirsty Maccoll, and mainly her Tropical Brainstorm album. She’s an English girl singing Spanish tunes, and for some reason the whole album works. The most famous song from it is “In These Shoes.”
Sad story, this album was released to great reviews and she ended up dying in a boating accident several months later.
I just had a friend borrow my CD and tell me how much he enjoyed her music, so when I was listening to the Marianne Faithfull song you posted, I thought of you, and hope you enjoy it. The rest of the album is great, but I’m not sure if any or all of the other songs are online.
I’ve not seen a James Bond movie since Casino Royale, the first one in which Daniel Craig had the starring role. I don’t see anything in this one that appeals to me, either, but there’s plenty of time for me to change my mind about that.
TOMBSTONE TERRITORY “Gunslinger from Galeville.” ABC, 16 Oct 1957. 30 min. Cast: Pat Conway (Sheriff Clay Hollister), Richard Eastham (Harris Claibourne of the Tombstone Epitaph / Narrator), Thomas B. Henry, Gilman Rankin. Guest Cast: Robert Foulk, Brett King, Carol Kelly. Writer: Andy White. Director: Eddie Davis.
The first two seasons of Tombstone Territory aired on ABC; the third and final season were shown in syndication only (ZIV). Each episode was supposedly based on a true story published in the Tombstone Epitaph in the 1880s. Only Richard Eastham, the publisher, and Pat Conway as Sheriff Clay Hollister were in all 91 episodes. No one else appeared more than a handful of times.
Even though the story itself is a rather fanciful one, the first episode, “Gunslinger from Galeville,” is a good one. Determined to collect taxes from everyone in the county, Hollister co-opts the services of outlaw Curly Bill Brocius (Robert Foulk) to help persuade certain recalcitrants to pay up.
It’s not easy, of course. The members of Curly Bill’s gang don’t know what’s come over their boss. One in particular holds a personal grudge against the sheriff, and lots of gunplay is the result. Curly Bill Brocius returned for a couple more episodes, but this was the only time that Carol Kelly appeared, as the owner of a small store in outlaw territory.
Pat Conway had a decent career in TV, mostly in westerns, but this series was his only steady job. He’s both tough and steady in this one, and he displays a small sense of humor along with the other two attributes — that plus being a fine hand with a gun. Richard Eastham was solid enough as the editor/publisher/narrator, but mostly he acts a well-established witness who is otherwise only along for the ride.
THE BRIDE AND THE BEAST. Allied Artists, 1958). Charlotte Austin, Lance Fuller, Johnny Roth, William Justine, and Ray “Crash†Corrigan as “Spanky.†Written by Adrian Weiss and Ed Wood Jr. 2nd Unit/Assistant director: Harry Fraser. Photographed by Roland Price. Directed by Adrian Weiss.
A classic in the annals of bad movies, with screen creds to go with it.
Readers here recognize Ed Wood’s name at once, but how many can recall Roland C. Price “the Vagabond Cameraman†who made Lash of the Penitentes (1936) at some risk to his life? Likewise, Ray Corrigan made his name in B Westerns and Jungle movies, but Harry Fraser wrote, produced and/or directed scores of them – all terrible.(See my reference to both gentlemen here. And speaking of credits, I just wish I could name the old tiger-hunt movie that died so this film could live.
Let’s get the plot out of the way first — which is more than the movie does. As the story opens, newlyweds Laura (Charlotte Austin) and Dan (Lance Fuller) indulge in some circular, pointless dialogue (a trademark of Ed Wood’s prose style.) en route to his castle/menagerie where the only animal seems to be a gorilla (Ray “Crash†Corriganâ€) kept in a cage in a dungeon-like room — there’s a refrigerator, but it’s lit by torches; architecture for Ed Wood was more about mood than function.
Anyway, Laura finds herself strangely attracted to the ape, and he to her. So much so that he breaks out of his cage, invades the nuptial chamber (with its twin beds) and is quickly shot dead by Dan.
The next day, Dan calls in his Psychologist-buddy (named Dr Carl Reiner, and yes, her name is Laura, but the Dick Van Dyke show was still a few years away.) to see why his bride is so upset (!), and the Doc immediately suspects it has something to do with a past life. Before you can say “Bridey Murphy,†he hypnotizes Laura and regresses her to a past life where she was a gorilla running through scenes from old jungle movies.
Next thing we know, Dan & Laura are on their Honeymoon, on safari in Africa (“Get some rest. Tomorrow we’ll be in Gorilla country.â€) and….
…And then the Gorillas go on sabbatical or something so we can watch another movie. Producer Weiss, an old hand with stock footage, throws in a line about tigers escaping from a shipwreck, the extras start wearing turbans and saris, and we spend the next half hour with Dan hunting tigers and trying to look like the guy in the other movie. Getting back to this movie, the gorillas don’t return till the last ten minutes, when they abduct Laura and carry her off to Bronson Canyon, that elephant’s graveyard of cheap movies, where Dan catches up and….
…and I don’t want to spoil it for you. But I will say that Charlotte Austin is a much better actress than one should expect in a mess like this. There are times she even convinces me that she’s haunted by her inner ape, just like it says there in the script. I’m not saying she’s another Ethel Barrymore, but I will observe that it’s easier to be convincing amid the splendor at MGM than in the squalor of Bronson Canyon.
Maybe Ms Austin’s to blame for it, but Bride/Beast just misses slipping easily into the so-bad-it’s-good bracket. Or perhaps I expected too much from a film with this pedigree. At any rate, Bride is firmly in the fun-if-you’re-in-the-mood rankings, and on that level I can recommend it highly.
FLETCHER FLORA “Loose Ends.” Novelette. Percival ‘Percy’ Hand. First published in Manhunt, August 1958. Reprinted in The Second Pulp Crime Megapack (Wildside Press, Kindle edition, 2016).
Fletcher Flora had one only series character in a long career of crime fiction writing, a policeman by the name of Lt Joseph Marcus, who appeared in six stories for the digest mystery magazines of the 1950s. He missed a bet, though, in not writing another story about Percy Hand. “Loose Ends” is a good one.
He’s hired In this one by Faith Salem, a very good looking woman, especially while tanning herself outside on her terrace. It seems as though he’s thinking of becoming wife number four to man with whom she presently has an understanding. She is wondering, though, why wife number three just suddenly disappeared without a trace. The police didn’t work very hard on the case, though, since the man she presumably was having an affair with disappeared at exactly the same time.
What Faith Salem wants Percy Hand to do is the obvious. Find out what really happened. And so he does, with adeptness and efficiency. Roots in the past are involved, as is true for a good percentage of all good PI stories.
And not only is Hand very good at his job, but author Fletcher Flora is also very impressive as a wordsmith whose words I ought to have reading all this time, and I’m sorry to say that I haven’t.
Some examples:
Faith asks: “Do you remember what happened to Graham’s third wife?”
“I seem to remember that she left him, which wasn’t surprising. So did number one. So did number two. Excuse me if I’m being offensive.”
“Not at all. You’re not required to like Graham. Many people don’t. I confess that there are times when I don’t like him very much myself.”
And:
I went on out and back to my office and put my feet on the desk and thought about her lying there in the sun. There was no sun in my office. In front of me was a blank wall, and behind me was a narrow window, and outside the narrow window was a narrow alley. Whenever I got tired of looking at the wall I could get up and stand by the window and look down into the alley, and whenever I got tired of looking down into the alley I could sit down and look at the wall again, and whenever I got tired of looking at both the wall and the alley, which was frequently, I could go out somewhere and look at something else. Now I simply closed my eyes and saw clearly behind the lids a lean brown body interrupted in two places by the briefest of white hiatuses.
One more. Percy has gone to see the missing man’s brother, a high class gangster. In the room is Robin Robbins (not her real name):
Silas Lawler says: “The man you are trying to insult, honey, is Percy Hand, a fairly good private detective.”
“He looks like Jack Palance.”
“Jack Palance is ugly,” I said.”God, he’s ugly,”
“So are you,” she said.
“Thanks,” I said.
“In a nice way,” she said. “Jack Palance is ugly in a nice way, and so are you. I don’t really care if you’re poor.”
THREE CAME TO KILL. United Artists, 1960. Cameron Mitchell, John Lupton, Steve Brodie, Lyn Thomas. Director: Edward L. Cahn.
The benchmark for movies such as this — a family being held hostage by a gang of killers planning to assassinate some high government official — is probably Suddenly, the film released in 1954 in which Frank Sinatra’s target is the President of the US. [My review of that film can be found here.]
Even though that earlier film is much more well-known, I found myself enjoying this one a whole lot more. The target is the head of some small (fictitious) Middle-Eastern country who is about to fly out of the US from the Los Angeles airport> The reason this film is a lot more believable and suspenseful (if those two qualities are not one and the same) is that Cameron Mitchell and Steve Brodie look exactly like the kind of guys who might be hired could carry out such an assignment. Tough and professional all the way.
It goes without saying– doesn’t it? — that they do get tripped up, but their plan is a good one, and they do come awfully close to carrying it out. This is a low budget film, but it’s still an enjoyable one, with one caveat I can’t help but mention. Whoever had the final say on this film must have thought the viewership was going to consist of folks with movie IQ’s of less than 80. All the ever present voice-over narration managed to do is to repeat in detail what was plain as day to see on the screen.
JESSE MILES – The Middle Sister. Jack Salvo #3 Robert Peoples, trade paperback, August 2019.
Jack Salvo is yet another LA PI — not, of course, that there’s anything wrong with that! — whose third recorded case involves a daughter who’s been missing for a week. As the title suggests, she’s the middle sister of three (age-wise) in a wealthy family, and since she’s known for having lived in the fast lane, including drugs, it comes as no great surprise to anyone that Jack finds her dead, presumably of an overdose of heroin that was purer than usual.
Jack senses that there’s more to the story, though, and decides to investigate her death a little longer, even if he’s no longer being paid for it. There’s a lot of scum in Hollywood: hangers-on, cheap grifters, wanna-be’s, never-will-be’s, out-and-out crooks, and so on, and it also comes as no great surprise that the trail Jack find himself following leads him through a subculture populated by all of the above.
Even though this is the kind of private eye story that’s been told many times before, the good news for PI Fans is that it’s better written than a lot of them. Jack Salvo, who’s also an adjunct professor of philosophy and logic on the side, is an amiable sort of guy with all he right kind of contacts and connections that a good PI has to have.
The less than good news is Jack Salvo doesn’t have the sort of quirks and/or sparks to his personality that might let him stand out more among the better known PI’s working the same beat. Nor does he have a philosophy of life that keeps the story from sloughing off in the middle of the case, as all PI stories= do, even the best of them.
For fans of LA-based private eye stories only, and Hollywood in particular. It helps, though, that there’s a lot of us.
Bibliographic Note: Jack Salvo’s previous cases are available on Kindle only: Dead Drop (2014) and Church of Spilled Blood (2016).
CHUKA. Paramount Pictures, 1967. Rod Taylor, Ernest Borgnine, John Mills, Luciana Paluzzi Luciana Paluzzi, James Whitmore, Victoria Vetri (as Angela Dorian), Louis Hayward, Michael Cole. Screenwriter: Richard Jessup, based on his own novel. Director: Gordon Douglas.
No one has ever asked me about anything like this, even if I’d been handy at the time, but if they had asked me, I’d had told them flat out, ditch both the prologue and epilogue that open and close this movie. The prologue tells the viewer too much, and the epilogue way too little.
It’s a shame. Without the prologue and epilogue. there’s a decent western movie in between, trying to work its way out.
It doesn’t quite succeed, mind you, but it’s there. Almost all of the action takes place at one of those forts in the Old West that seem to attract all of the misfits and rejects, officers and soldiers alike, that no other outfit wants or can tolerate for very long. This includes its commanding officer, played by John Mills, and whose fear of being thought of as a coward again prevent him from doing the obvious: abandoning the fort in the face of an impending — and non-defendable — Indian attack.
Ignoring the advice of another outcast, a wandering gunman called Chuka (Rod Taylor), who stays on hand only because of the presence of Luciana Paluzzi as Señora Veronica Kleitz. an aristocratic Mexican lady whom Chuka loved when he was younger, but whom he could not pursue because of the social gap between them.
The weaknesses and character flaws of the others are revealed gradually, but while I won’t go into them all, trust me, all of their flaws are considerable. You may be thinking that you have seen this movie before, and I cannot lie to you. I’m sure you have.
The story is capably told, however, cleanly and sharply, and Rod Taylor us, well, tailor-made, to play a big burly western frontier hero. And yet. And yet. If I were to be asked (and in this case, someone already has) what the movie adds to the overall panorama and lore of western movie-making, given that it was made in in 1967, I’d have to reply, in most definitive fashion, “Not much. Not very much at all.”
Devoted to mystery and detective fiction — the books, the films, the authors, and those who read, watch, collect and make annotated lists of them. All uncredited posts are by me, Steve Lewis.
