● CAPTIVE WILD WOMAN. Universal, 1943. Acquanetta, John Carradine, Evelyn Ankers, Milburn Stone, Lloyd Corrigan. Director: Edward Dmytryk.

● JUNGLE WOMAN. Universal, 1944. Acquanetta, Evelyn Ankers, J. Carrol Naish, Samuel S. Hinds, Lois Collier, Milburn Stone, Douglass Dumbrille. Director: Reginald Le Borg.

● JUNGLE CAPTIVE. Universal, 1945. Otto Kruger, Vicky Lane, Amelita Ward, Phil Brown, Jerome Cowan, Rondo Hatton. Story & screenplay: Dwight V. Babcock. Director: Harold Young.

   Among movie studios, Universal is fondly remembered for classic horror films like Frankenstein, Dracula, The Wolfman and the sequels they spawned, but the studio put out a good number of lesser efforts, and even a few second-string series, haunted by bush-league monsters who somehow never hit the big time.

   One recalls (not fondly) the Spider Woman and the Creeper, both spawned by the superior Sherlock Holmes series, and both duller than dishwater. But perhaps the most persistent of the minor monsters was Paula the Ape Woman.

   Captive Wild Woman (1943) initiated the series and it opens with a credit thanking Clyde Beatty for his “inimitable talent and contribution to this film.” Said contribution consists of stock footage from an old circus serial, and why they refer to Beatty as “inimitable” I don’t know, because Milburn Stone imits him all through the movie, as a lion tamer whose every foray into the cage becomes a long-shot of the back of Beatty in the earlier film.

   In defense of Milburn Stone, who became a respected character actor on Gunsmoke, I have to say that he puts in a very convincing performance when called on to play Beatty’s back, and it’s only when he goes through the tame leading-man motions that interest flags.

   Unfortunately, there’s rather much of this, as the plot of Captive Wild Woman meanders its way from a circus milieu to the den of a mad scientist (John Carradine) experimenting on the sister (Martha Vickers) of leading lady Evelyn Ankers, who put up with quite a lot of that in those days.

   Carradine extends his research so far as to steal a gorilla from the circus and turn it into a near-human woman (Acquanetta, “the Venezuelan Volcano”) using glandular injections from Vickers, whereupon the writers decide to get silly and have Carradine take Paula the Ape Woman back to the circus, where she promptly falls in love with Stone and becomes part of his act.

   But Stone is already engaged to Ankers, and when Paula gets jealous she morphs into a half-ape and must return to Carradine who is eager to extend his research even further, resulting in a four-sided triangle reminiscent of the lovers in Midsummer’s Night Dream, but without the class.

   All this is handled with some amount of style by Edward Dmytryk, a director going places (like Murder, My Sweet and The Caine Mutiny) who throws in the occasional camera angle or bit of moody lighting, but to little effect; Captive struts and frets its brief 60 minutes on the screen, signifying very little indeed.

       

   But any movie with a title like that was bound to draw customers, and returns on Captive were strong enough for Universal execs to order a sequel. Thus Jungle Woman appeared the next year.

   This is a strange one, even by B-movie standards, as if, pressed for time, producer Ben Pivar decided to simply re-run the fist movie. About a third of Jungle Woman is lifted bodily from Captive Wild Woman, as stars Milburn Stone and Evelyn Ankers reprise their roles from the first film in a framing device centered around testimony at an inquest involving another mad scientist (J. Carroll Naish this time) and a dead ape-woman (Acquanetta again) found on the grounds of his sanitarium.

   Said framing takes up the whole first part of the Jungle Woman, with Ankers and Stone recalling events in flashback from the earlier film, which appear in no particular order, making this thing look like a Resnais film, as the past rises to feebly haunt the present with little coherence or cohesion.

   Finally, re-runs exhausted, a new cast appears, and they proceed to tell a story in flashback (did some of this anticipate film noir?) filling out the running time with an account of how Naish, visiting the circus sometime during the first film, was impressed enough to acquire the body of the ape woman, revive her, and start a movie of his own, leading to the unpleasantness that awaits those who dabble in things man wasn’t meant to etc, etc..

   Well, sixty minutes pass in this manner, leading to a wrap-up that would have been fairly shocking, had anyone been paying attention. As it is, the final scene gets tossed off like the rest of the movie, and I, for one, was left wondering what they must have been thinking of when they committed this crime against Cinema.

   Somehow, though, Universal thought the concept was worth another try, and the next year saw the release of Jungle Captive. This is marginally better than Jungle Woman, and if you look up the term “faint praise” in the Dictionary, you may find the words “marginally better than Jungle Woman.”

   Actually, Captive benefits from the appearance of Otto Kruger as this year’s Mad Scientist, who begins by electronically reviving dead rabbits and, with the reasoning of his ilk, decides the next logical step is to steal the body of the Ape Woman from the morgue and revive that.

   Kruger handles all this with commendable restraint, and somehow puts Real Feeling into lines like “I need your blood,” though things get a bit much when he decides his ape woman (played by Vicky Lane this time) needs a new brain and proceeds to check out his predecessor’s brain-transplant instructions (written on a 5×8 note card) and borrow a book titled Brain Surgery!

   Maybe because it eschews the flashbacks, Captive seems to move at a faster pace, with some creepy support from Rondo Hatton as “Moloch the Brute” and effective makeup for the ape woman.

   There’s also an appearance by Jerome Cowan (of whom more later) playing his usual clueless role as a detective, and Vicky Lane, though she gets no lines and has little to do, is a distinct improvement as the new Ape Woman: her strong features and large, expressive eyes remind one of the girls in drawings by Gene Bilbrew, and make me wonder what sort of career she might have made for herself with better luck than this.

       

GOOD GIRLS GO TO PARIS. Columbia Pictures, 1939. Melvyn Douglas, Joan Blondell, Walter Connolly, Alan Curtis, Joan Perry, Isabel Jeans. Director: Alexander Hall.

   A decent screwball type of comedy, one with a complicated plot, relatively speaking, and one that’s actually quite funny. Not of the side-splitting slapstick variety, but one that’s amusing all the way through.

   Melvyn Douglas plays a tweedy sort of visiting professor from England who befriends a waitress (Joan Blondell) who works at a hamburger joint close to campus.

   Her goal in life: to coerce a male student with a rich father who objects to their friendship to pay up with a trip to Paris. Blackmail? Yes, and Professor Brooke (that’s Douglas) tries his best to make her see the error of her ways.

   But here’s where a “flutter” somewhere inside her helps. That’s her conscience talking.

   And here’s where it gets complicated. Brooke’s future brother-in-law is Jenny Swanson’s next target, and somehow she works her way into his home (and Brooke’s fiancée) before Brooke himself gets there before the wedding – mostly by ingratiating herself with the patriarch of the upscale Brand family, played with the utmost gusto by Walter Connolly, who’d rather be back home in Minnesota than in New York City and having to deal with the pair of spoiled socialites he has as children.

   It is difficult to say exactly how this not very unique storyline leads itself to humor, but it does. Both Melvyn Douglas and especially Joan Blondell lend their physical talents to the proceedings as well as using their lines to good advantage, acting and reacting.

   That Melvyn Douglas and Joan Blondell end up with other may come as a surprise to perhaps one or two viewers of this film, but it will be obvious to everyone else within the first five minutes. Nonetheless it is touch and go for them for a good long time.

[UPDATE]   Later the same day.   As perhaps even intermittent readers of this blog will recall, Douglas and Blondell also appeared together in There’s Always a Woman. It came out the year before (1938), and I reviewed it here.

   But I watched this one first, wrote this review, and forgot to post it until now. (This was back in April when I was having problems with my hip.) I thought the earlier film was a little too mean-spirited, but it was obviously the story and not the two co-stars, since (as you’ve just read) I found this one to be exactly what screwball comedies are supposed to be: a little wacky and fun to watch.

   Having also now read the comments on both movies posted on IMDB, there is also the possibility that I am out of step with (almost) everyone else. As the old saying goes, “Humor is a funny thing.”

   And, for whatever it’s worth, a note on IMDB says “Originally titled Good Girls Go To Paris, Too, but the censors objected.” Hmm. You’ll have to think about that one — but not too long.

DEPARTMENT S. Syndicated in United States. ITC Production. 28 episodes. 60 minutes. 1969 through 1970. Created by Monty Berman and Dennis Spooner. Executive Story Consultant: Dennis Spooner. Produced by Monty Berman. Creative Consultant: Cyril Frankel. Musical Director: Edwin Astley. Cast: Peter Wyngarde (Jason King), Joel Fabiani (Stewart Sullivan), Rosemary Nicols (Annabelle Hurst), Dennis Alaba Peters (Curtis Seretse). Available on DVD but not in Region One format for the US.

   In the 1960s the Beatles were not the only British to invade American pop culture. “Mod” fashions from London and the British TV and Film spies quickly followed. James Bond led the way, followed by The Avengers and a group of ITC-produced TV spies/detectives such as those in Department S.   * (See FOOTNOTE.)

   Department S was a small branch of Interpol made up of four people dedicated to solving the unsolvable crime. Or to quote a BBC2 introduction to the series (available on YouTube as “Department S: The Gen”), “If its too hot for the cops, a might complicated for the military, call Department S.”

   Jason King was a flamboyant, best selling mystery writer who had a love for women and liquor. His fictional detective Mark Caine was in a series of books with such titles as Don’t Look Now But Your Clutch Is Slipping. King would often use Caine’s intuitive methods to help solve the mysteries facing Department S.

   Jason King was played by Shakespearian actor, Peter Wyngarde, who Sir John Gielgud said was England’s most underrated actor. Wyngarde was a fan favorite, especially with women. The popularity of Wyngarde’s Jason King would lead to the character getting his own series in 1971.

   Stewart Sullivan was the team’s field leader. A man of action, his methods were more procedural such as questioning the suspects.

   Annabel Hurst was the beautiful computer scientist whose beliefs in the scientific method of crime solving often put her in conflict with Jason’s more human deductions. Her clothes, what little she wore, were the latest in 1960s fashion.

   Curtis Seretse was the bureaucrat in charge of Department S. According to the BFI website Screenonline, the use of a black actor for the part was “a bold piece of casting for its time.”

   The four characters set up the ultimate conflict of mystery’s solving methods, with one method always successful in explaining the strangest twist.

   Department S shared some characteristics with the more popular and famous The Avengers. Both featured the wild fashion of 60s London and highly stylized writing and direction. Most obviously, both series had a fondness for over the top bizarre plots.

   In the first episode, “Six Days” (written by Gerald Kelsey and directed by Cyril Frankel), a commercial plane arrives at a London airport with all on board believing they are thirty minutes early, when they are really six days late. This episode can (for now) be seen on YouTube and is highly recommended. (The link will take you to Part 1 of 4.)

   While still fun to watch, the cult favorite has its flaws. There were the typical television mystery annoyances such as a chase because no one thought to guard the exits. But the biggest problem for the modern viewer is what the viewers at the time enjoyed most, the now camp character of Jason King.

FOOTNOTE:   The ITC series was made for the American television market, even using the American commercial format and length. It might have appeared in the U.S. first. This would explain why IMDb and BFI have different air dates for the series.

   IMDb has the series lasting two seasons. Season One lasted eight episodes from March 9, 1969 through April 27, 1969. Season Two lasted twenty episodes from October 1, 1969 through March 24, 1970.    BFI has the series lasting two seasons but starting September 3, 1969 and ending April 3, 1970.

THE TEXAN. Paramount, 1930. Gary Cooper, Fay Wray, Emma Dunn, Oscar Apfel, James Marcus. Based on the story “The Double-Dyed Deceiver” by O. Henry. Director: John Cromwell. Shown at Cinecon 44, Hollywood CA, Aug-Sept 2008.

   Another film from the vaults that has probably not been seen since its initial release. Gary Cooper plays the Llano Kid, an outlaw with a price on his head, who falls in with a crooked lawyer who persuades him to join him in a scam to rob a South American widow by persuading her that the Kid is her long-lost son, returning to his mother after years of wandering.

   The plan goes well until the Kid develops a conscience and wants to back out of the agreement. Emma Dunn plays the mother, Senora Ibarra, with Fay Wray her niece, with whom the Kid, predictably, falls in love.

   There’s a nice O. Henry twist to resolve the story (no, the Kid does not turn out to be the son) and it’s a good-looking production that lets the characters and their relationships build slowly before the action-packed climax.

Editorial Comment:   The cover illustration based on the film, shown above, was done by Norman Rockwell. The original painting recently sold at Sotheby’s for nearly six million dollars.

   If you own a copy of the Library of America’s Dashiell Hammett volume Crime Stories & Other Writings (2001) and also a copy of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine for July 1945, then, whether you know it or not, you have two different versions of Hammett’s Continental Op story “The Tenth Clew” (Black Mask, January 1, 1924).

   The first difference between the two leaps out: the last word of the title is spelled “Clew” in both Black Mask and the Library of America collection but Fred Dannay changed it to the more common “Clue” when he reprinted the tale in EQMM.

   To appreciate the final difference between the two requires a little knowledge about the story’s plot. Leopold Gantvoort, a 57-year-old widower whose net worth is around $1,500,000, is planning to marry a much younger woman, but he’s murdered before the marriage takes place and also before he’s signed a new will leaving half his fortune to her.

   The Op exposes her as a confidence woman and the murderer as her scam partner, who’s been posing as her brother. Here are the last few sentences as Hammett wrote them.

   What’s wrong here? Since Gantvoort was killed before either changing his will or marrying the woman, there’s no way on earth she could have inherited half his estate! Fred Dannay obviously caught this flub, and spared Hammett some potential embarrassment by taking it upon himself to rewrite those lines.

   Very shortly after this story appeared in EQMM, Fred included it in the digest-sized paperback original collection The Return of the Continental Op (Jonathan Press pb #J 17), which was published in the first week of July 1945, a month or two before Hammett came back to the U.S. from Army service in the Aleutian Islands during World War II.

   If any reader of this column has a copy of that edition, which I don’t, I’d love to know whether the text of this story is Hammett’s original or Fred’s revision. (My hunch is the latter.)

   Settled back into civilian life, Hammett started teaching an evening course on mystery writing at the Jefferson School of Social Science, a Communist-affiliated institution on New York’s Sixth Avenue, and Fred joined him regularly as unofficial co-instructor.

   When Return was reprinted in ordinary paperback format (Dell pb #154, 1947), the last paragraph of the story was unaccountably back in its original form. Had Hammett objected to Fred’s bold attempt to spare him a few blushes?

   Erle Stanley Gardner’s pulp stories of the early 1930s, and his early novels as well, were hugely influenced by Hammett although in later years he resented having the fact pointed out.

   In Chapter 20 of one of those early novels, the non-series whodunit This Is Murder (1935, as by Charles J. Kenny), a suspect has just been exposed as an ex-con. “Where was your first conviction?” he’s asked. “In Wisconsin.” “You served a term there?” “Yes, sir, at Waupum.”

   In fact the name of the town is Waupun, which locals unaccountably pronounce Wau-PAN. According to Wikipedia the place was supposed to have been named Waubun, which is a Native American word meaning dawn of day, but some state bureaucrat misspelled it and the mistake has never been corrected.

   The town’s chief industry is prisons — three of them! — but it’s also known for having more outdoor sculpture per capita than any other city in North America. The most famous such piece in Waupun is the “End of the Trail” sculpture: a young warrior on his horse contemplates the end of life as his people had known it.

   I saw it when I passed through the town years ago. The Library Bar on Waupun’s Main Street served the finest fries I’ve ever eaten. My buddy Joe Google tells me it’s no longer there. Drat!

   I am finishing this column on June 27, two days short of what would have been the 100th birthday of my favorite American composer. The centenary of Bernard Herrmann (1911-1975), who’s best known for having scored films like Citizen Kane, Vertigo and Psycho, is being celebrated throughout the music world, and Varese Sarabande Records has just made a huge contribution to the festivities by releasing The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, Volume One.

   Herrmann wrote original scores for 17 Hitchcock Hour episodes during the program’s second and third seasons (1962-64), and this handsome two-CD set contains eight of them, more than two and a half hours of primo Herrmann never before available in audio form. Volume Two, let’s hope, will bring together the other nine — and soon. As I wrote in an earlier column, no one does ominous like Herrmann does ominous.

DASHIELL HAMMETT – The Dain Curse. Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover, 1929. Reprinted many times since.  TV movie: 1978 (with James Coburn as “Hamilton Nash”).

   Not all Hammetts were created equal. Case in point: Hammett’s second novel, his famous family slaughter saga, The Dain Curse. Less viscerally organic than his first crime tale, Red Harvest (1929), it is also, in my opinion, vastly inferior both to his immediately following works, The Maltese Falcon (1930) and The Glass Key (1931), and even to his last novel, the slick (if rather facile) The Thin Man (1934).

   I am hardly the first person to note flaws in The Dain Curse. A quarter-century ago, in his entry on the novel in 1001 Midnights, Bill Pronzini observed that The Dain Curse was “overlong and decidedly melodramatic.” Indeed it is!

   Where in Red Harvest the gang violence culminating in massacre that Hammett chronicles seems to rise naturally out of the darkest strains of indigenous Americana, in The Dain Curse the bloodletting is tied to an impossible plot that resembles the more absurd Golden Age British detective fiction that Hammett purportedly despised.

   If you were to ask me which 1929 detective novel is the more ridiculous when looked at objectively, The Dain Curse or S. S. Van Dine’s The Bishop Murder Case (though Van Dine was not British, he clearly was heavily influenced by the sort of classical detective story we associate most with British writers), I would be hard pressed to name the latter title, even though it involves an unbelievably baroque plot involving multiple slayings carried out on the basis of nursery rhymes.

   At one late point in the The Dain Curse, Hammett’s detective, the Continental Op, stops to list for a friend the myriad acts of bloody mayhem that have occurred around him of late. I have to say I found this list hilarious:

   This passage makes Philo Vance’s “psychological” lectures at the end of The Greene Murder Case (1928) and The Bishop Murder Case seems overwhelmingly convincing by comparison. Unfortunately, it is reflective of the many pages in the novel given over to the Op’s inevitably tedious explanations of an extremely convoluted but ultimately not very rewarding mystery plot.

   To be fair to Hammett, with The Dain Curse (as with Red Harvest) he was faced with the task of stitching together a novel from short stories. To make The Dain Curse stick together in one piece he was forced to use as glue the criminal mastermind gambit.

   This device usually is not convincing in Edgar Wallace novels either, but then Edgar Wallace is not universally acclaimed today for having heroically and almost single-handedly (with some help from Raymond Chandler) introduced realism to the Golden Age mystery story.

   This is not to say that there are not interesting points to The Dain Curse. There are times when one pleasingly can hear the wisecracking voice of Philip Marlowe and that smart ass legion of private eyes who jauntily followed Hammett’s Continental Op and Sam Spade down those mean streets:

   And then there is simply the thrill in The Dain Curse of Hammett’s sharp and direct depictions of drug dependency and pure, elemental brute violence (which in 1929 must have been really thrilling — or appalling, depending on the reader):

   Although I think that, in contravention of academics who have given much serious study to it, Hammett’s treatment in The Dain Curse of a religious cult is more pulp fiction than deep thinkin’, nevertheless I was greatly amused by this sardonic observation from the Op:

   They brought their cult to California because everybody does, and picked San Francisco because it held less competition than Los Angeles.

   Too bad Hammett (and the Op) missed the Swinging Sixties!

   Overall, however, I would say that The Dain Curse is neither a great crime novel nor even a very good one, really — though it undeniably has importance both in the study of Hammett’s development as a writer and in the development of American detective fiction.

   But when it comes to melodramatically and improbably cursed genteel families and wildly overcomplicated murder plots, give me S. S. Van Dine any day of the week. Indubitably, his Philo Vance is the go-to guy when one is faced with that sort of the case.

DANIEL STASHOWER – The Adventure of the Ectoplasmic Man. William Morrow, hardcover, 1985. Penguin, paperback, 1986. Titan Books, trade paperback, 2009.

   I’m a sucker for Sherlock Holmes stories written by hands other than Conan Doyle not because I think they’re good, but because I’m always hoping they will be. I had read some good things about this book so with fingers crossed I decided to try it.

   Watson, on the death of Houdini, sends Houdini’s widow a manuscript detailing the adventure where Holmes untangled, in 1910, a plot to discredit Houdini, who was performing in London, and blame him for murder and crimes against the state.

   The book could be described, I suppose, as a romp rather than an accurate pastiche. Holmes is larger that life, naturally, but his techniques seem a little far-fetched and it was surprising that he knew how to fly a plane. Still it was a light and fast read, and I have to say I quite enjoyed it, without, for a moment, taking it seriously.

Bibliographic Notes:   (1) Ectoplasmic Man was nominated for an Edgar (Best First Novel) by the MWA in 1986.

   (2) Several years after this book appeared, Daniel Stashower wrote a series of three novels in which Harry Houdini himself was the primary detective:

      The Harry Houdini series —

1. The Dime Museum Murders (1999)

2. The Floating Lady Murder (2000)
3. The Houdini Specter (2002)

   The American TV police procedural and the British TV senior police detective drama of the 1950s were never the high watermark of the small-screen genre, but their influence on the formats and styles of following crime series lasted for decades.

   For instance, the roots of Stephen Bochco’s highly-influential Hill Street Blues (NBC, 1981-87) or the James Arness seen-it-all-before cop series McClain’s Law (NBC, 1981-82) may be traced back to Jack Webb’s 1950s Dragnet.

   Likewise, the British police dramas of the 1970s — such as New Scotland Yard (ITV, 1972-74), The Sweeney (ITV, 1975-76; 1978), even the North of England-located Strangers (ITV, 1978-82) — may trace their heritage back to the TV Scotland Yard detective stories of some twenty years earlier.

    The following, therefore, is simply an overview of two significant phases in the history of the TV Crime & Mystery genre.

The Story You Are About To See (USA: 1950 to 1959). In 1950, Senator Estes Kefauver established a Senate committee to Investigate Crime in Interstate Commerce. It became known as the Kefauver Committee. Its New York hearings were televised to an enormous audience, who witnessed a parade of the most notorious American gangsters treat the Committee with utter disdain.

   The TV viewers, naturally, were hungry for more, and TV fed them with Treasury Men in Action (ABC, 1950; 1954-55; NBC, 1951-54), a dramatization of true cases about counterfeiters and gangsters in U.S. Treasury files, and actual cases from police files in Racket Squad (CBS, 1951-53), with Reed Hadley starring and sometimes narrating in the role of a police captain.

   In 1951 came Crime Syndicated from CBS (1951-53) offering dramatizations of actual cases from the Kefauver hearings. Rudolph Halley, former chief counsel for the Senate crime investigations, fronted the series. December 1951 saw the advent of Dragnet (NBC, 1951-59; 1967-70). The TV child of actor Jack Webb, who produced, directed and starred in the series, Dragnet soon became not only the most popular show on US television during the 1950s but changed the face of the TV genre forever.

   Perhaps the first ever police procedural on TV, Dragnet was a highly stylized but thoroughly enjoyable collection of statistics (time, location, weather), police jargon, and the general drudgery of everyday police work. The stories were borrowed from the files of the LAPD. The relentless questioning of witnesses overshadowed any rare instances of gunplay. The episodes concluded with an update of the criminal’s fate.

   In short, Dragnet was one of the most remarkable programs of its era. Webb and his Mark VII Productions went on to produce some of TV’s most successful procedural series (Adam-12, O’Hara U.S. Treasury, Emergency!).

   Law enforcement procedurals (‘based on the files of…’) soon gathered momentum, then flooded the small-screen (until the ‘adult’ Western genre arrived). Police anthology Gangbusters (NBC, 1952) was followed hotly by Police Story (CBS, 1952), City Detective (syndicated 1953-55) and The Man Behind the Badge (CBS, 1953-54).

   Legal procedurals also came into play, with Public Defender (CBS, 1954-55) and Justice (NBC, 1954-56), the latter from stories based on the files of the Legal Aid Society.

   One of the more notable police procedurals of the period was The Lineup (CBS, 1954-60). The drama starred Warner Anderson and Tom Tully as a detective partnership and was produced in cooperation with the San Francisco P.D. The Lineup was CBS’ answer to the highly successful Dragnet on NBC. Nevertheless, as a taut, well-written, filmed series, it stood its ground firmly (in its semi-documentary fashion).

   Multiple other ‘based on the files of..’ series filled out the decade, among them (their titles being self-explanatory): The Mail Story (ABC, 1954), Paris Precinct (ABC, 1955), Highway Patrol (syndicated 1955-59), State Trooper (syndicated 1956-59), The Tracer (syndicated 1957-58), based on the files of Tracer Co. of America (N.Y.), Official Detective (syndicated 1957-58), from stories in the title magazine, Harbor Command (syndicated 1957-58), a sort of Dragnet in a nautical setting, and U.S. Border Patrol (syndicated 1959).

Scotland Yard’s War on Crime (UK: 1954 to 1965). The British view of the Law and its various mechanisms, especially concerning Scotland Yard, was seen at first through a series of BBC documentaries and drama-documentaries (TV reconstructions) that extolled the virtues of the British police and legal services.

   For instance, Murder Rap (1947), from Scotland Yard casebooks, Armed Robbery (1947), based on real-life Scotland Yard cases, It’s Your Money They’re After (1948), concerning post-war black marketeers, and War on Crime (1950), a series virtually celebrating ‘from the files of…’ Scotland Yard.

   At this time, it dawned on BBC Television that the perceived glamour of ‘Scotland Yard’ was an exportable commodity.

   The Oct-Nov 1951 drama-documentary series I Made News, a dramatization of a criminal who had made the UK news that week, was the first to introduce the real-life character of Detective Superintendent Robert Fabian, head of Scotland Yard’s famed Flying Squad (the Cockney rhyming slang was ‘The Sweeney,’ as in Sweeney Todd).

   The drama series Fabian of the Yard (BBC, 1954-57), filmed by Trinity Productions/Antony Beauchamp Productions for BBC, became as popular and as influential to the British TV genre as Jack Webb’s Dragnet (NBC, 1951-59) had been, in its way, to the 1950s American TV genre.

   In truth, there was absolutely nothing astounding about the plots, save for their being based on real-life cases. But it was while emphasising the exploits of Detective Superintendent Fabian (during an era when people were defined by the superiority of their work) and the activities of Scotland Yard, it can be summed-up fairly as a good police procedural (for the mid-1950s) with actor-star Bruce Seton’s calm, perceptive doggedness leading the painstaking investigation work. In retrospect, perhaps more a measured film noir than a high-octane police thriller.

   No sooner had it aired when the BBC received a complaint from Scotland Yard accusing the series’ producers of misrepresenting Metropolitan Police procedure as well as over dramatizing some events (apparently, it was the sadistic method used by the wife-murderer in the “Brides of the Fire” episode).

   However, Fabian of the Yard made a big impact on 1950s British TV viewers, with series’ star Seton and the real-life Bob Fabian elevated to a god-like status. The series also scored financially via showings on NBC in 1955 (sometimes as Inspector Fabian of Scotland Yard) and as the syndicated Patrol Car. Two feature films (of re-edited episodes) were released to cinemas as Fabian of the Yard (in 1954) and Handcuffs, London (1955). The real Robert Fabian of the Yard died in June 1978 at the age of 77.

   Other UK series attached to the theme of Scotland Yard, by title or through deed, included the atmospheric whodunit dramas of Colonel March of Scotland Yard (shown via ITV, 1955-56; syndicated in the US; produced circa 1952 and 1954). It was loosely based on the 1940 story collection The Department of Queer Complaints by John Dickson Carr (writing as Carter Dickson). The series featured an eye-patched Boris Karloff, a detective who concentrates on bizarre crimes.

   Robert Beatty was a Canadian Mountie (a Detective Inspector) attached to Scotland Yard in Dial 999 (ITV, 1958-59) and solved various London-located crimes. (999, incidentally, is the UK police emergency number, similar to 911.) Man from Interpol (ITV, 1960-61) featured a special agent (played by Richard Wyler) from the Scotland Yard branch of Interpol. In 1961, a Scotland Yard operative, Det-Insp. Bollinger (Louis Hayward), and his police dog appeared as The Pursuers (ITV). Unfortunately, all were standard small-screen cops-and-robbers dramas.

   Stryker of the Yard, with Clifford Evans (as Chief Inspector Robert Stryker), was a peculiar one. Apparently, it first appeared as a series of B-movies in British cinemas during the early 1950s. Then, they were re-edited and shown on NBC in 1957. As a TV series, it also showed up as half-hour episodes on UK’s Associated Television (ATV) from November 1961 to January 1962. A compilation film, Stryker of the Yard, was released in 1953.

   Perhaps the most popular (post-Fabian) Scotland Yard detective series of the 1950s (and 1960s) was No Hiding Place (ITV, 1959-67), featuring the crime-busting investigations of Chief Superintendent Lockhart (played with suitable bank manager authority by Raymond Francis). While this British ‘age of acquiescence’ continued to be ruled by the authority figures of Scotland Yard, it wasn’t too long before Lockhart replaced Fabian as the omnipotent one in the viewing nation’s hearts.

   The series was oddly reminiscent of the Edgar Lustgarten Scotland Yard B-movies shown in the UK from around 1953, with detectives that looked like insurance salesmen constantly springing out of dark cars.

   No Hiding Place evolved from two earlier series: The Murder Bag (ITV, 1957-59) and Crime Sheet (ITV, 1959), two police detective series also popular with 1950s UK viewers. In retrospect, however, No Hiding Place was a rather routine detective drama series, not always persuasive (though some robbery/murder scenes were quite convincing) and — apart from Francis’s dogged detective character — often uninteresting in performance. Plot-wise, coincidence was stretched almost to breaking point.

   On a final but justly deserved Scotland Yard-related note, Gideon’s Way (ITV, 1964-66), based on the character and stories created by John Creasey (writing as J.J. Marric), was an uncommonly intelligent filmed drama series with John Gregson as Commander George Gideon. In many ways it may be regarded as the UK’s television equivalent to America’s excellent Naked City (hour series; ABC, 1960-63). In the former, London was the multi-shaded central character; the latter explored the unpredictable New York City.

   Another significant element of the history of the TV Crime & Mystery was the Anthology series (now a long-forgotten small-screen form); its sometimes brilliant crime and mystery plays and its fine coterie of writers (teleplay or novel). Part 5 intends to look at this Theatre of Crime (ranging from Suspense to Kraft Mystery Theatre to The Short Stories of Conan Doyle).

Note:   The introduction to this series of columns by Tise Vahimagi on TV mysteries and crime shows may be found here, followed by:

Part 1: Basic Characteristics (A Swift Overview)
Part 2.0: Evolution of the TV Genre (UK)
Part 2.1: Evolution of the TV Genre (US)
Part 3.0: Cold War Adventurers (The First Spy Cycle)
Part 3.1: Adventurers (Sleuths Without Portfolio).

FLY-BY-NIGHT. Paramount Pictures, 1942. Richard Carlson, Nancy Kelly, Albert Bassermann, Miles Mander, Edward Gargan, Adrian Morris, Martin Kosleck, Walter Kingsford, Cy Kendall, Nestor Paiva, Marion Martin, Oscar O’Shea, Mary Gordon, Clem Bevans. Based on a story co-written by Sidney Sheldon. Director: Robert Siodmak.

   It was a cold and stormy night. The lightning crashes, the thunder rolls, and the rain is coming down in torrents. The gates of the Riverford Sanitarium are locked up tight. Nonetheless one of the inmates, locked up behind steel bars, kills a guard and makes his way over the wall.

   Eluding the guards on his trail, he finds his way into Dr. Burton’s car — temporarily out of gas and marooned — and at gunpoint forces the young physician to aid and abet his getaway. He’s no maniac, he tells the doctor. He works for a famous chemist who’s invented a substance called G-32 that a gang of spies are determined to get their hands on.

   Leaving the hotel room where they’ve holed up at for a short moment, Burton (an equally young and very earnest Richard Carlson) returns to find the man dead, murdered by one of his own scalpels. Do the police believe a word of this? Not for a minute.

   Now on the run himself, Burton commandeers the aid of a young and beautiful brunette (redhead?) staying in a room below, a sketch artist named Pat Lindsey (Nancy Kelly, to those of us who’ve read the credits). And they’re off and running, in one of the most amusing screwball mysteries I’ve had the occasion to watch in a long long while.

   Not laugh-out-loud funny, but amusing in the sense of a smile to yourself when another “I can’t quite believe this” scene comes along. Besides their finding a secure hideaway with a rustic justice of the peace and his family, who have their own ideas as to why they’re on the run, there’s some absolutely top notch stunt work involved, as the pair jump from the lady’s automobile they’re driving, up onto a car carrier filled with new cars, hopping into one of them, then releasing it backwards onto the highway, all while going full speed away from both the police and the gang that’s not far them.

   Whew! This movie was not at all what I expected from the opening scene, which I described in a lot more detail than I will the couples’ further quarreling adventures, which I will leave to you find and discover on your own, and delightfully so, if you do.

   Of the cast, most of them were only names to me. Richard Carlson, of course, and Nancy Kelly (sister of Jack Kelly) who later on won a Tony and was nominated for an Oscar, but the others, while they were all terrific in their parts, they don’t win awards for movies like this one. (But maybe they should.)

NINA KIRIKI HOFFMAN – The Thread That Binds the Bones. Avon, paperback original, 1993.

   I don’t find much fantasy that I like anymore, whether it’s a function of my own jaded sense of wonder or they’re just not writing ’em like they used to. I enjoyed this one.

   It’s the story of a strangely talented young man who blunders into an even more strangely talented family living in the Oregon boondocks, and what happens between them. Reminds me a bit of Suzette Haden Elgin’s Ozark novels, though it isn’t as good. The plot has holes in it, but the writing’s good, and the characters are engaging.

Editorial Comment:   I haven’t finished looking through all of Barry’s old reviews, but this is the first I’ve come across that’s either a fantasy or science fiction novel. By my usual standards it’s too short to post, but I thought in this case I’d make an exception.