RADIOLAND MURDERS. Universal, 1994. Brian Benben, Mary Stuart Masterson, Ned Beatty, Scott Michael Campbell, Jeffrey Tambor, Stephen Tobolowsky, Michael Lerner, Anita Morris, and too many comic supporting players to name. Check IMDb. Screenplay by Willard Huyck, from a story by George Lucas. Directed by Mel Smith.

   A Financial flop for Universal and Lucasfilms (but I kinda like it), this looks like His Girl Friday layered over Murder at the Vanities, transposed to a glittery world of Technicolor Art Deco.

   At the maiden broadcast of a new Radio Network, the owner (Ned Beatty) throws a lavish gala for prospective affiliates and sponsors while an unknown killer methodically murders various executives, announcing each killing in advance with a menacing bit of doggerel over the speakers. Meanwhile the staff hustles frantically to keep things running, scriptwriter Brian Benben struggles to keep his wife (Mary Stuart Masterson) from leaving him, and the various “talents” involved contend with scriptless dramas, dropped cues and a temperamental revolving stage.

    Radioland never achieves the bawdy gaudiness of Vanities or the cinematic chemistry of Friday, but what it lacks in charisma it makes up in chaos. Brian Benben spends the whole film dangling from ledges or racing down hallways, chased by cops and/or sponsors, and often in a variety of disguises keyed to whatever musical number is up next.

   These musical numbers are a treat in themselves as bandleader Michael McKean re-jiggers his troupe to look like a panoply of Big Bands, from Xavier Cugat to Spike Jones, with stops along the way for dead-on recreations of the Andrews Sisters, young Frank Sinatra, and even Cab Calloway, all done so well I wished we could have stayed with them longer.

   But it ain’t so. Radioland keeps moving too fast for more than summary scraps of classic hits—though it does pause a bit longer for the ersatz Spike Jones insanity. Less happily, the Writer’s Room at the studio bubbles over with brilliant comics, none of whom get to do anything funny. Disappointing and wasteful.

   So it’s a measure of the movie’s energy that I forgave this mortal sin. Indeed, I barely noticed it. In the scheme of things, Radioland Murders doesn’t amount to much and never will. But it’s definitely a worthwhile time-waster.

MURRAY LEINSTER “The Sentimentalists.” Novelette. First published in Galaxy SF, April 1953. Reprinted in Year’s Best Science Fiction Novels: 1954, edited by Everett F. Bleiler & T. E. Dikty (Frederick Fell, hardcover. 1954).

   Read at this late date, some 65 years later (!!), this definitely falls into the category of traditional (old fashioned) science fiction. I don’t think it could be published today, but to anyone my age or so (plus or minus 10 years), it’s a delightful look back at our not hardly misspent youth.

   Two space-faring aliens, evidently male and female — though who could tell with all those tentacles and eye stalks — are taking a honeymoon across the galaxy, when the male (Rhadanpsicus) decides to stop at one of the outer planets of the system Cetus Gamma, where a disaster involving the local sun is scheduled to take place. The female (Nodalictha) amuses herself by watching the inhabitants of one of the inner planets and unaccountably finds herself fascinated by them.

   It seems that one of the colonists is having problems with his farm, and if his crops don’t come in, he will be forced to call it quits and work for the crooked company who had loaned him the money to begin with. At the end of his rope, he suddenly finds himself flooded with ideas for new inventions that will solve all of his problems. Nodalictha has interceded on his behalf, persuading Rhadanpsicus to help him. (Thank goodness for copy and paste.)

   And so Lon is able at last to marry Cathy.

   There’s no deep message here, as you have probably already guessed. But I for one do not always need messages, and perhaps you sometimes feel that way, too.

PROJECT GUTENBERG. Hong Kong/China. 2018. Originally released as Mo Seung [“unique”]; in Chinese: ç„¡é›™. Chow Yun-Fat, Aaron Kwok, Zhang Jingchu, Catherine Chow, Wenjuan Feng. Written and directed by Felix Chong.

   Lee Man (Aaron Kwok) is an artist suspected of being involved with the legendary counterfeiter The Painter (Chow Yun-Fat) in jail in Thailand. Transferred to Hong Kong to help in the investigation of Inspector Ho (Catherine Chow) into the Painter, the nervous and timid artist recalls his tumultuous history with the master counterfeiter.

   Told in a non-linear style, the film jumps back and forth showing how Lee failed in his career as an artist after going straight having started out as a counterfeiter, how he was estranged from his artist wife Yuen (Zhang Jingchu), and met the charismatic and brilliant Painter.

   Playing brilliantly on audience expectations of Chow Yun-Fat’s past films, the Painter is handsome, brilliant, a one-man army, and as Lee soon discovers to his distress, a ruthless, violent, and volatile criminal with international ties and a plan to counterfeit American dollars that is unprecedented in its ambition.

   Stylish set pieces, like a holdup of a special armored car carrying the inks used in printing dollars, shootouts in the style of John Woo, and an explosive gun battle with a greedy military leader wanting to buy the counterfeiting process Painter and Lee have created, punctuate the film, while the complex mix of characters and Chow Yun-Fat’s increasingly violent and inhuman behavior keep the viewer watching.

   And if all was going on was a story about the young artist being seduced by and eventually turning against the older smoother criminal who turns out to hide a monster beneath the cool exterior and about the cops closing in on them, this would be a well done action crime drama.

   But something more is going on with Project Gutenberg, and it becomes clear toward the end when almost everything you have seen before, an unreliable point of view character, and one shocking twist after another elevate this to something quite different than what you have been watching, or think you have been watching.

   Aaron Kwok and Zhang Jingchu are attractive leads, but the film works because of the viewers’ expectations and knowledge of Chow Yun-Fat’s film history as the charismatic gangster hero with the magic guns and charmed life. The whole movie turns on the viewer’s expectation that this is a different movie than it actually turns out to be, and that is what makes it work.

   It does drag a bit here and there, and some are going to hate the fact it has subtitles.

   But while this is no Usual Suspects (might as well mention it, everyone is thinking it), it does take a fairly standard story of a young man seduced into crime by an older more charismatic figure who proves to have feet of clay, and turn it on its head at every point while providing thrills and spills and then ripping the rug out from under the viewer repeatedly until he is beaten into admiring submission.

   Yes, unreliable point of view characters are kind of cheating, but only if the movie doesn’t deliver, and this one mostly does, right up to the shocking finale when the Painter gets his comeuppance.

   I warn you though, you may kick yourself a bit for having been taken in emotionally as well as by the clever plot twists or hate the movie for leaving you rugless on a cold bare floor when the credits roll.

  RICHARD NORTH PATTERSON – The Lasko Tangent. Christopher Paget #1. W. W. Norton, hardcover, 1979. Ballantine, paperbark, 1980.

   Yes, it sounds like a spy thriller, the paperback reprint is packaged as a spy thriller, but what this book precisely is not is — aw, you guessed it. It’s not a spy thriller.

   What it really is is a novel about the dirty business of laundering money. That is to say, it’s a detective story, and told in today’s most au courant Washington (DC) style.

   Lasko is the President’s favorite industrialist, but his background has more shade than Forest Lawn — not that anyone has ever proved anything. The President, who is unnamed, but — well, let’s just say that only the names have been changed.

   Christopher Kenyon Paget is a lawyer for the Prosecution Bureau of the United States Economic Crime Commission. (And I’ll wager you didn’t even know there was one.) He’s young, idealistic, very much a crusader for what he believes in. A chance tip about some possible stock manipulation takes him to Boston, where he watches in horror as his witness, who works for Lasko, is run down by a hit-and-run driver. Higher things are cooking.

   This is a cynical novel, Patterson’s first, and you don’t have to dig very far to discover it. According to inside the front cover, the author worked for the special prosecutor in the Watergate uncover-up, and his is the voice of authenticity. Paget continually has to fight pressure from higherups, without ever knowing who or where the enemy is. an he has a narrow escape or two before he does.

   On the other hand, none of this “real Washington” stuff is really new, and it’s all wrapped up in the end more tightly than real life ever seems to be.

       The Christopher Paget series —

1. The Lasko Tangent (1979).    [Winner of Edgar award for Best First Novel, 1980.]
2. Degree of Guilt (1992)
3. Eyes of a Child (1994)
4. Conviction (2005)

   Gothic romance author Jeanne Hines was born 29 July 1922 and died 23 August 2014, but her death has not been known to Al Hubin, author of the Revised Crime Fiction IV, until now.

   Under her own name, Hines wrote the following as paperback originals. All are presumed to be Gothic romances, which were extremely popular in the late 1960s through the 1970s.

The Slashed Portrait (n.) Dell 1973 [U.S. South]
Tidehawks (n.) Popular Library 1974
Talons of the Hawk (n.) Dell 1975 [Mexico]
Bride of Terror (n.) Popular Library 1976
The Keys to Queenscourt (n.) Popular Library 1976
The Legend of Witchwynd (n.) Popular Library 1976 [New Orleans, LA]

Scarecrow House (n.) Popular Library 1976

The Third Wife (n.) Popular Library 1977 [Mexico]

   According to her Wikipedia page, she also wrote seventeen romance novels as Valerie Sherwood and one as by Rosamond Royal.

   From the obituary pages of The Guardian:

    “The writer Margaret Hinxman, who has died aged 94, was one of the influential band of female critics who did much to encourage film in postwar Britain. She enjoyed a long and productive career on numerous magazines, including the influential Picturegoer, two national newspapers, the Sunday Telegraph and Daily Mail, and as a writer of fiction.”

   Only one of her mysteries has been published in the US. From Hubin’s Revised Crime Fiction IV:

End of a Good Woman (n.) Collins 1976 [Ralph Brand]
One-Way Cemetery (n.) Collins 1977 [Ralph Brand]
The Telephone Never Tells (n.) Collins 1982 [England; Ralph Brand]
The Corpse Now Arriving (n.) Collins 1983 [England]
The Night They Murdered Chelsea (n.) Collins 1984 [England] Dodd 1985
The Boy from Nowhere (n.) Collins 1985 [London]
The Sound of Murder (n.) Collins 1986 [Austria; Ralph Brand]
A Suitable Day for Dying (n.) Collins 1989
Nightmare in Dreamland (n.) Collins 1991 [Los Angeles, CA]

   A plot summary for The Night They Murdered Chelsea reads thusly:

    “As the much-hated matriarch of the television series ‘Wild Fortune’ receives her dramatic comeuppance and is strangled before millions of viewers, Dame Charlotte Saint-Clair, the actress who plays Chelsea Fortune, is herself strangled, and retired Detective Inspector Ralph Brand investigates.”

   Margaret Hinxman was born 08 October 1924 and died 16 October 2018, but her passing has not been known to the mystery community until now.

PAUL DOIRON “Backtrack.” Short story. Charley Stevens. Minotaur Books, ebook, June 2019. [See also Comment #3.]

First Sentence: There were four doctors staying at the hunting camp.

   Game warden Charley Stevens is called to the winter hunting camp in Maine where four doctors from Massachusetts are staying. However, one of them is missing. It’s up to Charley to find the missing man.

   The first thing to know is that this story does not feature game warden Mike Bowditch, but focuses on Charley Stevens, who had been Mike’s mentor. The story is also told, very effectively, in retrospect.

   A well-done short story truly is a work of art. Such is the case here. With a nicely done twist, Doiron takes the reader from suspense to something unexpected and poses an excellent question while dealing with the subject of regret.

   The thing with a short story is that one can’t say too much for fear of including a spoiler. What one can say is how much this story may make one think and question what one would do in the same situation. It may also make one want to read much more of Doiron’s work. The good news is that there is an impressive backlist.

   “Backtrack” is a perfect title for this excellent e-short. It really does take great skill to write a story this short which is this impactful.

Rating: Excellent.

Singer songwriter Sean Della Croce is being interviewed on WWUH, a local college radio station, right now: