BLACK SPURS. Paramount Pictures, 1965. Rory Calhoun, Linda Darnell, Terry Moore, Scott Brady, Lon Chaney [Jr.], Richard Arlen, Bruce Cabot, Patricia Owens, James Best, Jerome Courtland, DeForest Kelley. Screenplay: Steve Fisher. Director: R. G. Springsteen.

   Let me explain the title first. Anxious to earn some money so he can get married, a ranch foreman (Rory Calhoun) goes after a bank robber named El Pescadore, and along with the $3000 reward money, he also earns the right to wear the outlaw’s trademark spurs. He also loses the girl he was going to marry in the process, and soon, as he captures bad guy after bad guy, he crosses the line and (ta-boom), he’s a Bounty Hunter.

   Which apparently is one rank lower than a scumlord, though it’s not clear from the move exactly why. We soon see that he’s crossed another line, however, as we find him promising to turn the small settlement of Lark, Kansas, into a helltown, forcing the railroad to move its forthcoming spur somewhere more profitable for the man he’s working for.

   Guess who’s married to the sheriff of Lark, Kansas? (If you don’t know, go back and read the first paragraph again.) Guess who gets religion fifteen minutes before the end of the movie? (Aw, you’ve seen it before.)

   Steve Fisher, who wrote the screenplay, was one of the better pulp writers of the 1930s before going to Hollywood, so the story is actually pretty good. It is certainly a step above the average Gene Autry picture, say, but it’s no classic either. The cast of veteran actors seem to know what they are doing at all times, but it’s a downright shame that Linda Darnell had to end her career as the madame of a traveling group of bordello girls — this was the last film she made before she died.

FRONTIER DOCTOR “Strange Cargo.” Syndicated; Hollywood Television Service. 23 May 1959 (Season 1, Episode 35). Rex Allen as Dr. Bill Baxter. Director: William Witney.

   For a small town western doctor and a relatively short career, Dr. Baxter certainly seems to have gotten himself involved in a good many dramatic medical crises. The single season of 39 episodes had one each and every week, and I don’t know, but the one in “Strange Cargo” may have topped them all: Bubonic plague. The Black Death.

   It begins with the death of a sailor on a ship heading from the seaport town of Vista, Texas, to New Orleans, then the trail leads to a pair of unscrupulous trappers back in Dr. Bill’s home town of Rising Springs. Along the way there were three deaths caused by the plague, one brutal shooting, a furious fist fight in the back of a runaway wagon, and a huge fire in a warehouse full of infected furs.

   Bill travels in a two horse buggy to get around, but don’t let that fool you. He’s pretty handy with his fists as well. Either they hired a lot of extras for a few scenes or they used stock footage from other films to a very nice advantage. All in all, a good way to spend 25 minutes of western adventure time, William Witney style. (He directed all but two episodes of the entire series.)

JOHN NEWTON CHANCE – Aunt Miranda’s Murder. Macdonald, UK, hardcover, 1951. Dodd Mead, US, hardcover, 1951.

   Aunt Miranda is Miranda Jeans, author of 49 novels of what appear to be romantic suspense. It is unclear whether Jeans, considering that she has been married three times, is the name under which her books appear. Some of her titles are High Honeysuckle, The Weak Avenger and The Wraith of Retribution.

   At age 84, Aunt Miranda feels that she is near death. Having been bothered by a ne’er-do-well nephew for some years and having no wish that her heirs should be bothered by him after her death, she threatens to kill him. The next day, the nephew’s body is found under the couch in the music room, shot to death with a pistol presented to her some years ago by an admirer.

   Covering up for Aunt Miranda becomes the order of the day, although no one seems sure that this aged lady did indeed murder her nephew.

   A splendid cast of characters makes for enjoyable reading and also tempts one to seek out other novels by John Newton Chance.

Bibliographic Notes:   Under his own name, John Newton Chance (1911-1983) wrote over 120 mystery novels between 1935 and 1989, many of them not published until after his death. Very few of them ever had US editions. Chance also had a number of pen names, one of which was John Lymington, which he used primarily to write science fiction. It’s under that byline that you can find his Wikipedia entry.

WITNESS TO MURDER. MGM, 1954. Barbara Stanwyck, George Sanders, Gary Merrill, Jesse White, Harry Shannon, Juanita Moore, with Claude Akins, Sam Edwards, Burt Mustin. Director of photography: John Alton. Director: Roy Rowland.

   Witness to Murder came out the same year as Rear Window, but this one came first. Both have the same basic premise. The witness in Witness is a single woman living alone in an apartment (Barbara Stanwyck) who is woken up by the wind during the night, goes to close the window and sees is a man (George Sanders) strangling a woman to death in a room across the street.

   She calls the police, but after the laxest investigation you can imagine (Strike One), they find no signs of the murder and think she dreamt or imagined the entire incident.

   She persists, however, arousing the deep-seated enmity of Sanders, who cleverly connives to convince the police that she is in serious need of psychiatric treatment.

   This in spite of the growing attraction between Ms Stanwyck and the police officer in charge of the case (Gary Merrill). An attraction that is never convincing, I’m sorry to say, which is Strike Two against this film. Totally convincing, however, is George Sanders’ usual strong performance as a totally amoral cad of a killer.

   Also on the plus side is the black and white camera work under the direction of cinematographer John Alton. A striking dark windswept street sets the tone from the very beginning, and stark shadows appear in almost every scene thereafter.

   In terms of noir film-making, the slickness of what MGM produced often worked against them, and the relatively few they made are considered far less memorable than those of smaller companies. In this one, though, the photography at least is top notch, indeed, Grade A from beginning to end.

   There is no chemistry between Stanwyck and Merrill, however, and with a story line that’s only moderately compelling, Witness to Murder simply is not in the same league as Rear Window. Not even close.

CAMILLA T. CRESPI – The Trouble with Thin Ice. Simona Griffo #4. HarperCollins, hardcover, 1993; paperback, 1994. iUniverse, trade paperback, July 2003.

   This is the fourth in this series, but it’s my first, and it almost wasn’t that. When I read the description of Griffo is “an ad exec … who loves to cook and solve murders” I nearly wimped out right there. Then I thought, well, maybe it’s the copywriter here who’s an idiot and not the writer. Let’s see.

   Simona and her New York Detective lover (and his 14 year old son) are spending Christmas in Connecticut, where a black friend of theirs is marrying a white man, and the couple is buying one of the town’s old mansions. The lady selling it to them is a member of the tows ruling class, and her announcement of the sale at dinner is greeted with something less than pleasure and acceptance.

   The same night she is drowned in an icy pond, and the bride-to-be is arrested for the murder. Simona’s lover is called away by a family injury, and she and the son are left to soldier one.

   It should be noted that there’s at least one facet of the book of which I heartily approve: a Cast of Characters at the beginning which should be de rigueur for any story with over five characters.

   Praise ends here. The blurb was right — Simona really does love to (*gag*) cook and solve murders. This is a better written version of the nonsense that people like Mary Daheim and Valerie Wolzien perpetrate, and while I recognize that there are those who like such, their rationale remains incomprehensible to me.

   I like my fiction to either be amusing or about people and premises that I can at least temporarily believe in, and neither of these attributes is in the slightest evidence here.

       The Simona Griffo series —

As by Trella Crespi:
   The Trouble with a Small Raise. Zebra 1991.
   The Trouble with Moonlighting. Zebra 1991.
   The Trouble with Too Much Sun. Zebra 1992.

As by Camilla T. Crespi:
   The Trouble with Thin Ice. Harper 1993.
   The Trouble with Going Home. Harper 1995.
   The Trouble with a Bad Fit. Harper 1996.
   The Trouble with a Hot Summer. Harper 1997.

THE RIFT. Trimark Pictures, 1990. Also released as Endless Descent. Jack Scalia, R. Lee Ermey, Ray Wise, Deborah Adair, John Toles Bey, Ely Pouget, Emilio Linder. Director: Juan Piquer Simón

   Judging from some of the comments that exist online, The Rift (aka Endless Descent) seems to have its fair share of detractors. In the DVD commentary at the end of the movie, one learns that even R. Lee Ermey seems to have a negative feeling toward the movie. To be honest, I think a lot of this scorn is undeserved. True, it’s a low budget feature. That much is obvious. And there are also the unescapable comparisons with much higher end creature features like Alien (1979) and Leviathan (1989).

   But do you know what? For a cheapie made in an old movie studio on the outskirts of Madrid and that was never released in the theaters, The Rift is actually a solid and downright enjoyable action-adventure movie with science fiction and horror themes running throughout. The plot is compelling, the action never lets up, and there special effects really aren’t half-bad. And the music by Joel Goldsmith, who went on to do the music for the television show Stargate, definitely adds to the suspense and the general air of creeping dread.

   Jack Scalia portrays Wick Hayes, an American scientist/engineer tasked with a mission. He’s to assist the U.S. Navy in a rescue and retrieval mission for Siren 1, a submarine he designed. Apparently the vessel has been lost at the bottom of the sea. With a crew lead by Captain Philips (R. Lee Ermey) and the scheming Robbins (Ray Wise), along with his ex-wife, scientist Lt. Nina Crowley (Deborah Adair), the Siren 2 gang embarks upon a daring rescue operation.

   The crew, along with Hayes, will soon discover that what caused the Siren 1’s disappearance wasn’t an accident at all, but rather the result of a grotesquely botched attempt to conduct biological warfare experiments underwater. Cue the monsters, animals and plants alike!

PATRICIA WENTWORTH – Dead or Alive. J. B. Lippincott Co., US, hardcover, 1936. Dell #2, paperback, 1943. Warner, paperback, September 1990. First Edition: Hodder and Stoughton, UK. hardcover, 1936. Dean Street Press, UK, softcover, 2016.

   Not a Miss Silver novel. According to Hubin, a fellow named Frank Garrett makes his third appearance as a series character in this novel, but until the ending (of which more later) his part in the story is so nominal as to be all but non-existent.

   The book definitely is part of a continuing series, however. There were two footnotes referring to people or events that happened in previous books, but not having access to them, I convinced myself to ignore them. I do not believe I missed anything; the footnotes were sufficient.

   More than anything else, when it comes down to it, Dead or Alive is a romance. When Bill Coverdale comes back to England from South America, he immediately calls on Meg O’Hara, whom he has loved (in vain) since she was fifteen. That she is now a widow may have something to do with this.

   Or is she? Widowed, I mean. She has been receiving strange notes telling her that her husband Robin is still alive. Is it possible that what was identified as his body after being pulled from a river was not him?

   Without a job, Meg is in poor straits, her only relative an absent-minded uncle who has isolated himself away on an island in a lake with only a covered bridge connecting him to his new home, with a newly acquired staff of unhelpful servants whose job it seems to be to keep Meg for seeing him.

   It turns out that Meg’s husband worked for Garrett (see above) who works for the Foreign Office. Bill turns to him for help, but all he is told is that Meg’s husband is definitely dead. Garrett has no explanation for what is going on.

   This is a story that’s charmingly told, if you’re still with me, and the trouble that Bill and Meg get into gradually gets worse and worse. At one point close to the end, they are both captured and near death, with no way out that I could think of, nor apparently could Miss Wentworth.

[PLOT ALERT] The ending is the most blatant use of a deus ex machina plotting device I have ever had the good fortune of reading. Worse, the crooks responsible get away, leaving the reader to figure out at this late date when and where they turned up next.

   And there’d better be a next time. Crooks this nasty need their comeuppance, and badly. But did I enjoy this one? You may ask, and in a word, believe it or not,the answer is yes. It’s not much as a detective novel, but as a romantic thriller, it’s top notch. Bill is stalwart and strong, whereas Meg, who starts out as being frightfully weak, shows a lot of fortitude and spunk by the time the book ends. You can’t blame the plot on them.

THE NAKED VENUS. Beaux Arts Films, 1959. Patricia Conelle, Don Roberts, Arianne Ulmer (as Arianne Arden) and Wynn Gregory. Written by Gabriel Gort and Gaston Hakim, who probably didn’t use their right names either. Directed by Edgar G. Ulmer (as Ove H. Sehested!).

   Over the years Edgar Ulmer has come in for a great deal of critical attention, mostly well-earned. Responsible film scholars, though, have ignored this opus from late in his career, probably because The Naked Venus represents Ulmer outside the legitimate cinema, directing a “Nudie”: the sort of film that played at seedy theaters to audiences of desperate men… and curious teenagers like me, when we looked old enough to lie about our age and sneak in. Or perhaps no serious critic wanted to admit they’d seen it.

   Well I have no such reservations, but I have to say The Naked Venus must have disappointed a lot of lonely men and curious boys, not to mention scholars of the Cinemah.

   The early scenes gave me some hope: Two detectives with a camera stalking through the woods find two women skinny-dipping and start taking movies. The stalking scenes are well composed, and the skinny-dipping is mildly sensuous; good so far….

   Then we cut to Paris at night, and we know this because we get about a dozen establishing shots of Parisian landmarks for ten minutes — ten very long minutes.

   When the Plot finally commences, it’s pure Soap, with a misunderstood young Nudist fighting her nasty mother-in-law and her weakling husband in a divorce case to keep custody of their daughter and redeem her reputation. And I’m here to tell you it’s a half-an-hour of nothing but Daytime Drama: no nudity, nothing sexy, just bad acting on cheap sets, done so haphazardly you can almost hear Ulmer saying, “Just shoot the damn thing and kill me.”

   Finally the heroine decides to get away from it all by visiting a Nudist camp run by Ulmer’s daughter Arianne… who keeps her clothes on. So I imagine the lonely old men and curious youngsters perked up (if that’s the right word) for fifteen minutes of documentary-style scenes of happy, healthy, good-looking naked people artfully keeping their crotches hidden as they swim, hike, have archery contests and — yes — play volleyball.

   But alas, this is followed by another forty-five minutes where our heroine goes to court. Things look dark as her naked life-style is dragged before the Judge. Then, when all seems lost, her lawyer brings in an Art Critic(!) who explains that the naked form is the basis of many highfalutin’ masterpieces. And that convinces the judge.

   The Divorce case is dismissed and her weakling husband breaks away from his domineering mother for a happy ending—for everyone but the paying customers, who suddenly realize they’ve sat through all this in vain: Not even a glimpse of epidermis for the last third of the film, just a movie shot as if the director were contemplating suicide.

   Now I am well known as the Boston Blackie of bad movies (“Friend to those who have no friend”) and I watched this with some anticipation, but even my love of awful filmmaking could not encompass this effort. The best thing I can say about The Naked Venus is that it will probably do Ulmer’s reputation no damage.

   Or not too much, anyway….

E. R. PUNSHON “The Avenging Phonograph.” First published in Black and White, UK, 12 January 1907. Collected in The Ash-Tree Press Annual Macabre 2000, edited by Jack Adrian, and Bobby Owen, Black Magic, Bloodshed and Burglary: Selected Short Stories of E. R Punshon (Ramble House, US, 2015).

   Before hitting upon the idea of writing detective novels to make a living, with some 35 cases of police constable Bobby Owen produced between 1933 and 1956, E. R. Punshon was a prolific author of dozens of tales for the British weeklies of the teens and 20s of the last century.

   Only a handful of these had even a hint of the supernatural or the macabre, and a trace of the latter is all that’s in “The Avenging Photograph.” It is the mayor of a small identified town who has committed murder and who is greatly relieved when the coroner’s jury brings in a verdict of suicide.

   Perhaps it is only conscience working its way through his mind, but suddenly the mayor has this almost undeniable compulsion (not really a conscience!) to tell someone — anyone! — that he did it. That he was the killer.

   Not being a king able to talk to the reeds, he finds himself buying a recording phonograph, one of those new machines which you can speak into and have your voice preserved on a wax cylinder inside.

   I won’t tell you more, except to say that the ten pages of this rather understated story should make a solid impression on anyone happening to read it, an opportunity, I imagine, not very likely to occur in its original publication, a magazine so rare that I doubt more than five copies may even exist.

DONALD E. WESTLAKE – Why Me. John Dortmunder #5. Viking, hardcover, 1983. Tor, paperback, April 1985. Film: Epic, 1990, as Why Me? (with Christopher Lambert as “Gus Cardinale”).

   Professional burglar John Dortmunder’s life has never been easy — in fact, most of the people who know hm well think of him as a jinx — and it gets even worse in this book, in which he accidentally heists the Byzantine Fire, only the wold’s most valuable ruby.

   On his neck immediately are the police, the FBI, the entire underworld (tired of being endlessly hassled by the police and the FBI) and skads of very religious assassination fanatics, in what becomes a major international affair. When he’s on his game, as he is here, Westlake can exhibit a sour, sarcastic view of the world with the best of them, and the book is simply hilarious all the way through.