THE BOOK OF ELI. Warner Brothers, 2010. Denzel Washington, Gary Oldman, Mila Kunis, Ray Stevenson, Jennifer Beals. Directors: Albert Hughes and Allen Hughes.

   I’ve become increasingly convinced that Denzel Washington is the auteur of the films that he appears in. That’s not to say that he doesn’t work with talented directors or that his co-stars aren’t often talented actors themselves. It’s just that Washington is able to portray so many different types of characters who find themselves in nearly impossible situations. In that sense, there is a common thread that runs through a lot of Washington movies. He often portrays a loner, a solitary man whose thoughts run deeper than one might expect.

   And you know what? That’s definitely true for his role as the titular character in The Book of Eli. Washington portrays Eli, a man living in post-apocalyptical America. He’s been spending his years walking through the wastelands that were once vital cities and towns, making his way to the West Coast. He’s carrying with him an extremely precious object. One that the audience learns is the last remaining copy of the King James Bible.

   As you might expect from what I just mentioned, the Christian symbolism and allegory is overt in this overall gritty feature. Eli is on a mission. One that he thinks is divinely inspired. And that mission involves his traveling on foot, through tough terrain and in the face of violent marauders, all the way to the West Coast so that he can hand over the Bible to people who will make proper use of it.

   The greatest obstacle to his completing his mission comes in the form of a would-be tyrant by the name of Carnegie (an over the top Gary Oldman) who wants the Bible in order to consolidate his control over a desperate, illiterate populace.

   Fortunately, Eli – a loner at heart – finally allows for companionship in his life, albeit of the platonic variety. Solara (Mila Kunis) is a girl held captive by Carnegie who decides she wants a better life and decides to join Eli on his quest. The two of them face down not only Carnegie and his henchmen, but also a husband and wife whose hospitality toward them may have less to do with kindness than with cannibalism.

   While I thoroughly enjoyed watching Washington’s portrayal of Eli, I ended up feeling that the story, while compelling, was just a little too straightforward. The Christian allegory was strong, and the message that the Bible could be used for good or for evil was loud and clear. But it just wasn’t enough to make me feel as though the movie would not have benefited from a greater degree of moral complexity.

   One final note: the movie, set as it is in a post-nuclear war America, is filmed in earth tones, almost sepia. Sometimes it works well. Other times, the unique color scheme only serves to draw attention away from the action on hand.

W. GLENN DUNCAN – Rafferty: Cannon’s Mouth. Rafferty #5. Gold Medal, paper back original; 1st printing, June 1990.

   There were six books in the Rafferty series, and you can find my comments on the previous entry, Rafferty: Wrong Place, Wrong Time (1989) here. I enjoyed that one, but I did add a caveat that “[b]oth of the cases Rafferty is working on turn out to be very light ones.”

   This one’s even lighter, I’m sorry to say. Rafferty’s home base is Dallas, but except for the location, you can see a lot of similarities between his character and that other more famous PI who worked in the Boston area. I use “worked” in the past tense, because another author is writing up his adventures now, and it’s like spinning the wheels on a car stuck in a snowbank. There’s lots and lots of action, but you get nowhere awfully fast.

   Which is a whole other review altogether, I grant you.

   Here’s the story in this one. While Rafferty’s on a surveillance case that he’s being paid for, he’s accidentally mistaken for a hit man, but when he does a civic duty as a private citizen and warns the cops, all kinds of warning signals go off. Rafferty, quite naturally decides to stay involved, on his own clock.

   There is a lot of the usual banter between Rafferty and the cops and Rafferty and his close lady friend Hilda Gardner, but this time around both it (the banter) and the story seem forced, and the ending, while it fits the story, seems to come out of nowhere. This one’s no more than average, all the way through.

JOHN CROWE – When They Kill Your Wife. Buena Costa County series #5. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1977. No paperback edition.

   As seems true about all the inhabitants of California, the residents of fictional Buena Costa county live in a world of intricately tangled relationships, the kind that too often result in murder. Even though they’d been separated for a year, when Paul Sobers’ wife is killed, he’s compelled to find out why, and a tightly closed corner of the world yields many secrets as he starts digging up the past.

   The result is a tale that’s even more complex and tortuous than the one Ross Macdonald tells, and occasionally the going gets heavy. The ending is not fair to the reader, but while the finale to a detective story sometimes comes as a letdown to the reader, this one’s actually better than any of the preceding parts — a triple-snapper!

Rating:   B

       The Buena Costa County series —

Another Way To Die (1972)
A Touch of Darkness (1972)
Bloodwater (1974)
Crooked Shadows (1975)
When They Kill Your Wife (1977)
Close To Death (1979)

DANCE HALL RACKET. Screen Classics Inc., 1953. Timothy Farrell, Lenny Bruce, Bernie Jones, Honey Bruce and Killer Joe Piro. Written by Lenny Bruce. Produced by George Weiss. Directed by Phil Tucker.

   There’s something sort of fitting about Lenny Bruce dong a tame 1950s skin-flick, but the good news here is that this film is too seldom shown to damage his reputation — which, come to think of it, he did pretty well all by himself. The other good news is that aside from Bruce, Dance Hall Racket is not a waste of anyone’s talent; the talents here assembled are perfectly suited to this sub-nudie effort, and navigate the seedy screen like they were born for it.

   We get Timothy Farrell as Umberto Scali, running a dime-a-dance joint as a front for various & sundry illegalities, such as murder, diamond smuggling and maybe a touch of prostitution; Lenny Bruce and Killer Joe Piro as flunky-hoods; Honey Bruce as a dancer who changes her clothes a lot, and Bernie Jones (formerly of Spike Jones’ ensemble) as a dumb Swede who stops the action every so often to tell excruciatingly bad jokes.

   Dance Hall Racket exists primarily as an excuse to show attractive young ladies in stages of undress, highlighted at various intervals by an actual glimpse of a bare breast (GOSH!) but there’s a sort of tawdry plot here: something about Timothy Farrell buying hot ice and planning to abduct a recently-released con and find out where he stashed the loot.

   We also get an undercover cop worming his way into Farrell’s scene and a neophyte taxi-dancer resisting temptation, but Dance Hall Racket is too disjointed to weave any of these threads together; like I say, it’s an excuse to look at nekkid wimmin, and a pretty feeble one at that, shot on shoe-box sets by a cameraman who looks like he was thinking of something else at the time.

   Getting back to the talented people who made this film, well, Lenny Bruce is legendary, and his wife Honey was played by Valerie Perrine (who got an Oscar nomination) in the biopic Lenny, but the others are almost as fascinating: Producer George Weiss started out with Test Tube Babies in 1948, went on to Glen or Glenda? (1953) and continued on into the 90s making films he should be ashamed of.

   Right after Dance Hall Racket director Phil Tucker tried going “legit” with Robot Monster, a legendary mess in fake 3-D, but was soon back to doing things like Strips Around the World and Bagdad After Midnite. He continued working sporadically in the movies as late as the 1980s.

   My favorite though is Timothy Farrell, here the gang boss, but in real life an L.A. County Sherriff’s bailiff (he appeared as himself the next year in A Star Is Born) who acted in nudie movies and religious shorts on the side. He eventually made County Marshall (despite having one of his films seized in a police raid) but was fired for using his deputies as political activists in 1975, indicating a personality much more interesting than this bizarre little film.

When The Death Bat Flies: The Detective Stories of NORVELL PAGE. Altus Press, hardcover, softcover, ebook, 2013. Introduction by Will Murray.

   This thick Altus Press edition collects over 800 pages of detective and crime stories by pulp wunderkind Norvell Page, best remembered today for helming the best of the popular adventures of Richard Wentworth, star of the eponymous pulp The Spider. It is accompanied by an informative introduction and biographical look at Page and his career by pulp expert and Doc Savage chronicler Will Murray.

   Page cracked the more highly regarded pulps like Black Mask, Dime Detective, and John Campbell’s Unknown, but by far his greatest output aside from the Spider epic was for the likes of Ten Detective Aces (his Ken Carter series), Detective Tales, Strange Detective Mysteries, and even the spicy pulps. Most of the stories collected here come from Detective Tales.

   Most of the stories are novellas running about seven chapters and around 30,000 words. These novellas feature tough cops, private eyes, amateur criminologists, and the like, and enough gunfire for several small wars. Never let it be said Norvell Page spared bullets even when his language was spare. A few of the novellas venture into weird menace territory, coming out of Strange Detective Mysteries and Strange Detective Adventures.

   If you like rough tough knock ’em sock ’em rock ’em action, relentless pace, breathless escapes, low-slung fast cars and faster women, gun-happy mugs and crafty villains, this book is a bonanza, with sleuths like Don Q. (Quixote) Ryan, big Swede Larsen, Richard Carter. John Stone (whose paralyzed face is mindful of Richard Benson, the Avenger), Aubrei Dunne (two-fisted inventor of countless gadgets, and star of the book’s title story), Bruce Shane (a two-gun man), Flinn McHurd, Walsh Devore, amateur criminologist, Grant Montana out to clear his Private Eye dad who did seven years for a crime he didn’t commit, and more.

   And that’s a random sampling just from page flipping.

   The shorts tend to be crime stories, fast moving, with a lot of impact, but not strong on originality. They are better than filler because Page was incapable of not writing compelling prose, but they wouldn’t make anyone’s best list. For all that they have impact.

   Page is a pulp master, not a great writer, certainly not a great innovator, but a skilled professional with enough personal demons and more than enough drive to make his work both interesting and fun to read. If you only know him from Spider reprints or his two collections of Prester John tales from Unknown, this is an ideal place to see him at work. More collections are coming, and I am particularly hoping to see the Ken Carter stories collected. Meanwhile sit back, pop some popcorn, and kick back. Norvell Page is taking you on a hell of a ride through the wild and woolly pulp jungle.

ALEX SAXON – A Run in Diamonds. Carmody #1. Pocket, paperback original; 1st printing, November 1974. Expanded from the story “The $50,000 Bosom,” Adventure, December 1970. Included in Carmody’s Run (Dark Harvest, hardcover, 1993) as by Bill Pronzini, along with three stories from Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine which appeared there also under the author’s own name. This latter book was reprinted by the Detective Book Club in a hardcover 3-in-1 edition.

   In spite of my affection for Bill Pronzini’s nameless private detective, enhanced no end by the latter’s love affair with Black Mask and the other detective pulps he collects, I find Carmody a more original creation, seemingly more free of the cliches of his particular subgenre.

   Carmody is a freelance contract man, providing bodyguards, new identities, black market commodities, what have you. Since his divorce he has moved his theater of operations from San Francisco to Europe and a villa in Majorca, which is where this adventure begins.

   Stolen diamonds are involved, which should be obvious from the front cover on. Somebody wants Carmody out of the way for a while, and a wild goose chase takes him to Amsterdam while dirty business is going on elsewhere. Carmody’s business success relies greatly on his reputation, and any embarrassment he received he must take as a personal matter.

   And revenge he gets. A number of deaths result, though not all at his hand. It’s an earthy, violent tale, just complicated enough to keep you guessing, and suspenseful enough to make one relish every minute of successful retribution to the disrespectful enemy.

   Carmody has previously appeared in a number of shorter stories, in magazines such as Alfred Hitchcock’s, but as far as I know this is his only novel. I sort of wonder if Pronzini had put his own name on it, whether this might have made more of an impression when it came out.

   Here’s the highest compliment I can give a book: this is the kind of tale I would write if I could.

DEAD PIGEON ON BEETHOVEN STREET. Episode 25, Season 1, of Tatort, Germany, 07 January 1973. Original title: Tote Taube in der Beethovenstraße. Glenn Corbett, Christa Lang, Sieghardt Rupp, Anton Diffring, Stephanie Audran, Eric P. Caspar. Screenwriter-director: Sam Fuller. Novelization: Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street, by Samuel Fuller (Pyramid V3736, paperback original, 1974).

   This is the story of a private eye named Sandy (Glenn Corbett) who comes to Germany on an extremely important case. He’s been hired an United States senator with presidential aspirations to obtain a negative that in the wrong hands could prove to be extremely embarrassing. His partner, who arrived before him, is dead. His objective: find the killer, infiltrate the gang of blackmailers, and save the senator’s hide.

   The killer, as it turns out, is a fellow named Charlie Umlaut. Sandy’s gateway to the gang is a girl named Christa (Christa Lang) who is also the girl in the compromising photograph. She also knows who the leader of the gang is (Anton Diffring), and to gain her confidence, Sandy poses as a rival in the blackmail business. But can Christa herself be trusted, even when propinquity (between herself and Sandy) takes the way of nature and least resistance?

   This was filmed at a low point in Director Sam Fuller’s career. The story had nothing (or very little) to do with the rest of the German series it was filmed as part of. But Fuller had name value, and he was given a a free hand, more or less — given budgetary considerations. The movie (which is what I will call it) is filmed in beautiful colors and fanciful camera angles, and in those two regards, I should consider it a huge success.

   But the story, at least in the longer, restored director’s cut (in the DVD recently released and remastered through the UCLA Archives) becomes repetitious and boring, and the acting is stiff and the dialogue on occasion seemingly ad-libbed. Christa Lang’s awkward body motions, speech patterns and facial expressions can easily become annoying, if you allow them. (She was married to Fuller at the time and until his death.)

   Some reviewers have really disliked this movie. Others call it a work of genius, calling it an inspired collision with (and combination of) Noir and the New Wave. I don’t know as I’d go that far, but Fuller usually knew what he was doing, and while I also don’t know if he did here, maybe he really did. Either that or the movie is a complete failure, and once that is admitted, then perhaps that’s what it was how it was intended, as a complete spoof of the crime genre.

   And maybe this review makes sense too, and maybe it doesn’t.

THE RETURN OF DOCTOR X. Warner Brothers, 1939. Wayne Morris, Priscilla Lane, Humphrey Bogart, Dennis Morgan, John Litel, Lya Lys, Huntz Hall, Olin Howland. Written by Lee Katz and William J. Makin. Directed by Vincent Sherman.

   1939 was the year that brought us Stagecoach, Gone with the Wind, Of Mice and Men, Wizard of Oz… and this, Bogie’s only horror film. He didn’t like it much, but it ain’t all that bad. It isn’t very good, either, but I found it fun.

   Wayne Morris, playing his usual likeable half-wit, is your typical movie reporter of the day: bluff, brassy and smart as a corn cob. As the story opens, he talks his way into an interview with a stage star (Lya Lys, in a rather good sub-Dietrich performance) only to find her dead in her apartment, her body drained of blood—and cue up the ominous music.

   Things take a surprising turn when Wayne’s paper splashes the story across the front page before telling the police, only to have the body disappear when the cops show up… then reappear alive (sort of; she now sports a goth look and talks like Robert Downey in his drug-using days) leading to Wayne getting fired by a typically apoplectic movie-style editor.

   Nothing daunted, our hero hooks up with his doctor buddy (Dennis Morgan) and consults with blood specialist Dr. Flegg (“Interesting stuff, blood!”) who assures him there’s nothing to see here, but….

   About this time we get a look at Dr. Flegg’s assistant, Doctor Quesne, and the jig is up, for it’s no less than Humphrey Bogart, made up like a reverse-Jolson, with pasty white face, dark lips and eyeshadow, with a shock of white in his hair. Doctor Flegg (John Litel, made up with satanic goatee and monocle) explains it all by saying Bogie’s “getting over a shock.”

   It would be easy to say the shock must be appearing in this picture, but as I said, it’s not all that bad. Return is done with typical Warners polish: elaborate sets, glistening photography (by Sid Hickox, of Dark Passage and Colorado Territory) and the usual cast of Warners bit players, all doing their reliable best and keeping a straight face when we learn that Dr Quesne is actually Doctor Xavier, an executed criminal brought back to life and now in need of human blood to keep going.

   I should add however that Return is also heavy-duty stupid. How so? Well for starters, we get a front-page headline of a murder out on the streets before the police can even get to the scene of the crime. Later, a detective tells Dennis Morgan that the coroner has ruled a death by natural causes — while the body is still lying on the floor!

   Further on, our persistent heroes, investigating the supposed death of Dr Xavier, go to the cemetery in the middle of the night and simply have the caretaker dig up the grave, which he does as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Xavier’s coffin turns up empty of course, whereupon the cops compound the stupidity by showing up to arrest Morris and Morgan for stealing the copse! Faced with all this, the notion of raising the dead seems but another improbability, and hardly noticeable.

   For those who don’t know how horror films end, I’m going to throw out a SPOILER ALERT! here and add that in deference to Bogie’s image, the writers allow him to perish shooting it out with the Law in a hail of police bullets. And it’s done well, an exciting moment in a film that can be fun if you’ll let it.

THE FAR FRONTIER. Republic Pictures, 1948. Roy Rogers, Trigger, Gail Davis, Andy Devine, Francis Ford, Roy Barcroft, Clayton Moore, Robert Strange, Riders of the Purple Sage. Director: William Witney.

   With William Whitney at the helm, you just know you’re quite likely going to get a motion picture with some down and dirty fighting in it. While The Far Frontier has some well-choreographed fight scenes, it’s more notable for “death by oil barrel.”

   What’s that, you ask? Well, for starters it’s a particularly brutal way to kill someone. There’s a scene, early on in the movie, in which sadistic human traffickers toss oil barrels down a rocky mountain cliff. In the barrels are the very persons who have hired them to transport them illegally across the U.S.-Mexican border.

   That scene, along with Whitney’s name in the opening credits, gives the viewer the sense that this entry into the extensive Roy Rogers filmography isn’t going to be one of the more innocent, child-friendly ones.

   Now, don’t get me wrong. There’s some singing and lightheartedness and Andy Devine, with that goofy and innocent smile on his face, is there to provide some comic relief to the proceedings. But overall, this Rogers film has a slightly darker story. One that involves coldblooded murder, amnesia, and a blood feud that finally comes to a violent conclusion.

   A final note: there are a few un-credited “actors” in The Far Frontier who portray characters who become essential to the plot.

   I’m talking about pigeons, carrier pigeons to be precise. These little birds are the means by which the film’s primary villain communicates with his minions. Fortunately, Roy is able to get one of the pigeons on the side of justice. Who said birds didn’t matter?