LAWRENCE BLOCK – The Sins of the Fathers. Dell 7991, paperback original, 1976.

   This is the first book appearance of Matt Scudder. ex-cop and unlicensed New York City private operative, and the title, saying as it does something about the private detective business in particular, fits perfectly.

   Dead is a Greenwich Village prostitute, and also dead is the accused, her roommate, the homosexual son of a Brooklyn minister. Since he hanged himself in his cell, the police have closed the case, but the girl’s father hires Scudder in a last attempt to learn to know more about the daughter he lost some time before.

   Scudder’s world is authentically rough and crude, not Miss Marple’s corner of the universe at all, but surprisingly Scudder manages the same sensitivity to his fellow world inhabitants, belying the unnecessarily crass blurb on the back cover.

Rating: B.

From this blues & soul group’s 2012 CD Soul Flower, a song written by Frank Sinatra:

SHOTGUN. Allied Artists, 1955. Sterling Hayden, Yvonne De Carlo, Zachary Scott, Guy Prescott. Screenplay: Clark E. Reynolds & Rory Calhoun. Director: Lesley Selander.

   When I recently discovered a DVD copy of Shotgun at a used record store, my first thought was: count me in! After all, I’m a fan of Sterling Hayden and definitely appreciate Zachary Scott’s presence in Westerns, particularly those where he portrays a slimy, half-good, half-bad character. Plus with Yvonne De Carlo as the female lead, I thought I’d stumbled upon a minor gem that I hadn’t heard of before.

   Alas, it was not to be. Shotgun is, in many respects, a complete misfire. It’s not that the movie doesn’t have some solid acting, and it’s not as if the script is a total disaster. It’s just that the film really has no particular cinematic presence, aside from being just another mid-1950s genre movie with mid-level star power. Simply put, there’s nothing new under western skies in this movie that you haven’t seen before.

   Hayden portrays the laconic Clay Harden, outlaw-turned-lawman. After his the shotgun-wielding outlaw named Ben Thompson (Guy Prescott) mows down his friend and colleague, Harden takes it upon himself to exact bloody revenge. He sets out, shotgun in hand, to Apache Territory to find Thompson.

   Along the way, he encounters the enigmatic but sexy wildcat Abby (De Carlo) and bounty hunter Reb (Scott), a man he knows from his past. There is romance, Apaches on the warpath, gun running, and a final duel. Some of it’s worth watching, but a lot of it feels like it’s all by rote and checking off boxes. Western tropes come flying like a shotgun blast in this one.

RICHARD STARNES – Another Mug for the Bier. Lippincott, hardcover, 1950. Pocket #858, paperback, 1952.

   While Senator Philander Chance is on the Senate floor trying to get a natural gas pipeline bill enacted, Courtney Mandrel, gossip columnist and TV and radio newscaster, is at the U.S. Capitol preparing to unleash scandal about the bill. Someone on the Hill then puts an end to Mandrel’s muckraking.

   Barney Forge, reporter for a wire service, finds Madrel’s body and moves it so a good guy won’t be accused. Forge then hies himself to Alexandria, Va., to consult Dr. St. George Peachy, elderly pathologist. In a complicated case with several other deaths occurring, one right in front of him that he was supposed to prevent, Peachy clears things up. Well, except for one or two details that I am still puzzling about.

   I don’t know how good a reporter Forge is, but he is a delightful character, as are his wife; Haggis the Airedale; and Ewe-All the goat.

      The Barney Forge & Dr. St. George Peachy series —

And When She Was Bad She Was Murdered. Lippincott, 1950.
Another Mug for the Bier. Lippincott, 1950.
The Other Body in Grant’s Tomb. Lippincott, 1951.

   I recently got me to watching some of Mae West’s old Paramount movies, and for a fat girl, she don’t sweat much. Even in a post-code vehicle like Klondike Annie (1936) she manages some saucy one-liners (a prim cabin-mate asks Mae if she snores, and she replies, “I never had any complaints.”) and when let go full-throttle in Belle of the Nineties (1934), the results are fine indeed.

   Directed by Leo McCarey in one of his Duck Soup moods, Belle features a sensuous musical montage at set at a revival meeting that I still don’t believe: one of those surprising moments of perverse genius that are why I watch movies.

   Mae’s film debut was in an odd little gangster flick called Night After Night (1932), based on a Louis Bromfield story, “A Single Night.” (There’s a quip there somewhere.)

   Directed with surprising competence by Archie Mayo, this offers Mae West in a picture-stealing supporting role as a former girlfriend of George Raft. Raft runs a classy speakeasy in the mansion formerly owned by neuveau-poor Constance Cummings, who is planning to marry Louis Calhern for his money, and obviously the accent here is more on romance than anything criminous, but there are some surprisingly edgy moments between Raft and a competitor who wants to “buy” him out, carried off neatly by`the actor’s casual flair for that sort of part.

   And there’s an odd, moving moment when Raft realizes just how little he means to Cummings that carries a dramatic punch almost amazing, coming from a shallow actor like this and a flat-footed director like Mayo. Add the effect of a brand-new Mae West sashaying around tossing off her own one-liners, and you get quite a nice little movie indeed.

   But alas. Alas I say. Since Mae West’s first film was in support of George Raft, I thought I’d follow it be watching her last film Sextette (1978) in which Raft has a cameo — along with Tony Curtis, Ringo Starr, Walter Pidgeon, Alice Cooper, Keith Moon and Rona Barrett. They’re the lucky ones: poor Dom Deluise and Timothy Dalton have to stick around for the whole picture.

   This is quite simply a bad movie. No, not simply Bad, but garishly, ennervatingly, appallingly awful and not even worth watching for its badness. The conceit here is that Mae West — eighty years old and looking every nano-second of it in makeup thick enough to embarrass Tammy Faye — is about to marry Timothy Dalton but is lusted after by hordes of handsome young men who keep rushing in and dancing around her.

   Meanwhile, Deluise tries to get her to make love to the Russian ambassador for World Peace and Dalton sings “Love Will Keep Us Together” while Mae looks off camera and reads her lines from a cue card. Her timing is shot, the wit is gone, and the whole sad effect is like watching the last appearances of once-snappy performers like Bob Hope or Muhammad Ali.

   This is a film you should cross the street just to keep from seeing, and one that will plague my mind in those long dark nights of the soul.

   Japanese animation, better known as anime, is a favorite of mine for many reasons, one of which is the music. An OP is the opening theme for the series. Check out four of my favorites opening themes (each under 2 minutes long).

MACROSS PLUS. (1994-95) English version. Performed by Michelle Flynn; composed by Yoko Kanno.

   No list of anime op should be without Yoko Kanno (Cowboy Bebop). This is from popular anime series that was a sequel to TV series Macross. The four part OVA (original video animation) and movie tell the story of three childhood friends that had grow apart. The two men rivalry grows when the female friend returns.

BACCANO! (2007) “Guns and Roses.” Performed by Paradise Lunch; omposer: Makoto Yoshimon.

   Anime TV series adapted from series of novels by Ryohgo Narita. Set for the most part in prohibition-era America with multiple storylines told in a chaotic fashion.

TRIGUN (1998) “H.T.” Composed by Tsuneo Imahori.

   This comedy-Western is the story of Vash the Stampede “The Humanoid Typhoon” and his adventures on the planet Gunsmoke with a 60-billion double-dollar bounty on his head.

R.O.D. – THE T.V. (Read Or Die). (2003) Composed by Talu Iwasaki.

   Like many anime series the series exists in many forms – novels, manga, OVA, TV series, and films. The various versions often have the same characters but in different situations. In this version three paper-manipulating sisters are bodyguards to a famous writer.

A. S. FLEISCHMAN – Shanghai Flame. Gold Medal #181, paperback original, 1951.

   Time out for a history lesson. At the time of this story, Shanghai was settling down under the rule of the Communists, and in this tale, the pursuit of a not-so-ordinary pack of playing cards takes place across a city increasingly dangerous to be a foreigner in, much less an American. Whites had not yet become a novelty, however, and displaced European refugees and all sorts of unsavory soldiers of fortune were still playing significant roles in the commerce and life of one of the Orient’s most exotic cities.

   What Cloud does is to smuggle himself into Shanghai, hoping to regain the love of a woman he’d once walked out on, but in these surroundings all that will take is a single spark for the volatile romance to burn itself away in a spectacular flash of unrequited love.

   To the intrigue in which the couple find themselves securely entangled, add a deadline for being able to safely leave the city, Chinese pirates scouring the coastline, and the several sides of a labyrinthic double-cross, and you have the kind of book that’s increasingly difficult to find these days when the whole world’s but a step away — the pure adventure thriller written for the fun of it.

Rating:   B.

SHE. RKO Radio Pictures, 1935. Helen Gahagan, Randolph Scott, Helen Mack, Nigel Bruce. Based on the novel by H. Rider Haggard. Directors: Lansing C. Holden & Irving Pichel. Shown at Cinevent 16, Columbus OH, May 1984.

   Star billing — the film festival’s much heralded centerpiece — was given to a 1935 version of H. Rider Haggard’s erotic fantasy She. It was directed by Irving Pichel (who was also busy acting that year in Dracula’s Daughter that year as Gloria Holden’s pasty-faced valet) and the enigmatic Lansing Holden, with familiar names from King Kong (composer Max Steiner and producer Merian C. Cooper) providing much of the visual and aural interest in this uneven film.

   The stalwart hero, Leo Vincey, is played in a forthright fashion by Randolph Scott, while Nigel Bruce is made to look silly in the throw-away role of the blustering English side-kick. Helen Mack has the thankless job of trying to distract the male viewers from the attractions of the good-bad Ayesha, queen/goddess of the lost city of Kor, which has been transported from Haggard’s African setting to an Asiatic ice-world which provides an excuse for the most striking set-up of the film: the discovery of a centuries-old European and a gigantic sabre-tooth tiger frozen into the ice outside the mountain entrance to the hidden city.

   Helen Gahagan, congresswoman and wife of actor Melvyn Douglas, played She with an effective mixture of icy imperturbability and melting languor. But her best moment had her still shrouded in the steamy mist to which she frequently retreated for mysterious purposes, intoning her lines in a voice that was strikingly similar to the voice of the evil, beautiful queen in the Disney Snow White.

   And this affinity was compounded by a shifting facial image like that of the mirror image in the Queen’s chambers a costume that was too similar to the costume for Disney’s queen not to have been adapted by him. This film would, I am sure, be a popular addition to Saturday afternoon and late night TV schedules, and it’s surprising that it doesn’t turn up more frequently.

CHARLES BEAUMONT “The New People.” First published in Rogue, August 1958. First collected in Night Ride and Other Journeys (Bantam, paperback, Mar 1960). Reprinted many times since, including in Perchance to Dream (Penguin, trade paperback, October 2015).

   It’s not every day that you discover that your neighbors are Satanists. But then again, the usual and the quotidian is hardly the terrain of writer Charles Beaumont. In “The New People,” one of the author’s stories assembled in Night Ride and Other Journeys (1960), the protagonist soon discovers that his typical suburban neighbors are anything but. It’s an altogether well constructed tale, one that ratchets up the suspense, all the while giving the reader the vague sense that he could just as easily find himself in the main character’s proverbial shoes.

   Beaumont, like Ira Levin and Stephen King following him, had a knack for taking the ordinary and making it extraordinary. Just lurking behind the niceties of Any Town USA and blissful marriages are secrets that are first gently, then abruptly, exposed. We never learn the name of the town where “The New People” takes place, but it’s hinted that it may be a place where Hollywood screenwriters reside.

   Soon after moving into their new home, husband and wife Hank and Ann, along with their adopted son Davey, begin to form social relationships with their neighbors. While Davey doesn’t want to have anything to do with the locals, Hank and Ann host a small gathering in their home for the new friends.

   As the night unfolds, one of the neighbors hints to Hank that he has secret, pertinent information that he must share. In a twist of fate reminiscent of the best conte cruels, Hank comes to learn that his newfound friend is anything but. Overall, a well-written story which bolsters my appreciation for Beaumont’s writing.