CRIME, INC. PRC, 1945. Leo Carrillo, Tom Neal, Martha Tilton, Lionel Atwill, Grant Mitchell, Sheldon Leonard, Harry Shannon, Danny Morton, Virginia Vale. Director: Lew Landers.

   Some reviewers believe this to be one of bottom-rung studio PRC’s better efforts, and while this may be true, it doesn’t mean that it’s very good. The plot is perfunctory at best, and while viewers in 1945 may have enjoyed watching Martha Tilton sing, the songs do nothing to hold the rest of the story together, nothing more than an out-and-out crime film, some scenes of which are filmed in a nightclub.

   While Leo Carrillo gets top billing as a mid-level higher-up in a local crime syndicate, this is really Tom Neal’s movie, from beginning to end. He plays a brash young reporter (the only other kind in movies like this are the old embittered ones) who gets an edge on the police by befriending an upwardly mobile gangster (Danny Morton) who is making enemies of the gang currently in power.

   It may or may not be relevant that Martha Tilton plays the latter’s sister, so she gets to have more lines to say than in some of the other movies she was in. She acquits herself well, but then again so do most of the other players, most of them long-time veterans of movies like this. It’s only too bad they didn’t have better lines to say.

PAT McGERR – Save the Witness. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1949. No paperback edition.

   Traveling to Rio to report on politics there, Andy Callahan chooses to go by freighter. It will be relaxing, he thinks, and he will be able to finish Act II of his play. With a doctor aboard who gave his wife poison “accidentally” and the doctor’s cousin traveling with him given to discourse on the most personal subjects, trouble ensues.

   When the cousin is lost overboard, neither the captain nor most of the passengers, for varying at least to them valid grounds, want the death investigated. Callahan is sure it’s murder and sure the doctor did it. He is also certain there was a witness, keeping quiet for an unknown reason, whom he must discover before the witness becomes a victim.

   Good but not great McGerr.

Editorial Comment:   My review of Pat McGerr’s Follow, As the Night also includes a short career perspective of the author. (Follow the link.)

From Melody Gardot’s 2009 CD My One and Only Thrill:

ATTACK! United Artists, 1956. Jack Palance, Eddie Albert, Lee Marvin, Robert Strauss, Richard Jaeckel, Buddy Ebsen. Director: Robert Aldrich.

   Jack Palance, whose extensive movie career ranged from art house to grindhouse, starred in two World War II films directed by auteur Robert Aldrich; namely, Attack! (1956) and Ten Seconds to Hell (1959). I happened to watch the second of these two films about a year ago and went so far as to re-watch it about six months after that to get a better appreciation for Aldrich’s skillful – one might even say, singular – aesthetic.

   As far as war films go, Ten Seconds to Hell is a fairly untraditional one, both in terms of subject matter and visual presentation. In that movie, Palance, along with Jeff Chandler, portray defeated German soldiers tasked with dismantling unexploded Allied ordinances left in the obliterated cities of the newly defeated Third Reich. Filmed in black and white, the movie presents the men in shades of grey, reflecting their morally compromised position as former German soldiers now nominally working for the Allies.

   The film is not only bereft of active combat sequences, but it is also an exceedingly claustrophobic one, with scenes often filmed in confined, semi-interior settings in which the near possibility of death looms large over the proceedings. Death, such as it occurs, is the indirect, long-term result of prior human action rather than a fate delivered immediately at the hands of a gun or a tank turret.

   The same cannot be said for Attack!, the first of the two Aldrich-Palance war film collaborations. In this earlier film, death is a cruel, personal fate that comes as the direct, immediate result of human action or, as in the case of the opening sequence of the film, human inaction. The movie opens fairly quickly into a gritty combat scene. In a battle set outside a Belgian city, Lt. Joe Costa (Palance) is hoping to get support for his men, but unfortunately for his men that doesn’t come to pass. The reason, as we soon learn is that the company’s CO, Captain Cooney (Eddie Albert in a stellar performance) is a drunken coward who never wanted to be in combat and just wants to make his father proud.

   After the disaster on the battlefield, Costa, along with Lt. Harold Woodruff (William Smithers) are determined to let Lt. Col. Clyde Bartlett (Lee Marvin) know how little they think of Cooney. There’s a problem, however. Cooney hails from the same Southern town as Bartlett. Not only that, the two men have known each other since childhood and Bartlett once clerked for Cooney’s father, a local judge who we are to understand to be a big man in a small pond. Bartlett, who isn’t completely unaware as to what type of man Captain Cooney is, isn’t about to do anything to jeopardize his relationship with his friend’s politically influential father.

   When Cooney orders Costa and his men into a yet another unnecessarily dangerous combat situation, Costa loses his cool. He threatens Cooney with death should the clearly incompetent captain falter again in his judgment. Not surprisingly, Costa and his men get pinned down in a farmhouse, only to be deprived of assistance from Cooney. It’s at that moment that we realize that Costa was deadly serious about returning back to base and murdering his increasingly erratic and inebriated captain.

   This, of course, makes Attack! a particularly subversive combat film, one that the Defense Department officially refused to grant production assistance. The enemy as it is presented in Attack! is not so much the anonymous, nearly faceless German soldiers on the opposite side of the battlefield, but rather the company’s commanding officer.

   Albert portrays the drunken, cowardly Cooney with nearly perfect combination of pathos and rage, making him an individual to be pitied as much as feared. Trust me when I say that the scene in which the mortally wounded Costa returns to confront the drunken, whimpering Cooney is wartime drama at its best.

   Aldrich, far more than most directors, knew how to get the very best out of Palance, as his performance is simply breathtaking to behold in this gritty, morally complex war film. I wouldn’t go so far as to posit that Attack! is a particularly pleasant viewing experience, but it’s certainly a nearly unforgettable one.

TOM LEA – The Wonderful Country. Little Brown, hardcover, 1952. Bantam Giant, paperback, A1190, 1954. Reprinted many times since.

THE WONDERFUL COUNTRY. DRM Productions/United Artists, 1959. Robert Mitchum, Julie London, Gary Merrill, Albert Dekker, Pedro Armendariz, Jack Oakie, Charles McGraw, Leroy “Satchel” Paige, Victor Mendoza, Chuck Roberson and Chester Hayes. Screenplay by Robert Ardrey, based on the novel by Tom Lea. Directed by Robert Parrish.

   One of those instances where seeing the movie prompted me to read the book, which I found very different but just as fine.

   As the novel starts, Martin Brady enters the story as an unlucky rider who breaks a leg while on a gun-running errand in a Texas border town. As he spends months recovering, surrounded by curious townspeople and shifty business associates, we learn that when he was a boy of fourteen in Missouri he murdered the man who killed his father and fled to Mexico where he has made his living for the last fifteen years as a pistolero for a wealthy Mexican land-owner.

   We also learn about the citizens of the town and the soldiers at the nearby Army Outpost: Gruff & thoughtful Doc Stovall who sets Brady’s leg; Major Colton, the new Post Commander and his tearful, unhappy wife; Captain Rucker of the Texas Rangers and his fiercely loyal men; the shopkeepers and soldiers in and around the town…. Lea takes time to evoke them all but manages it without slowing his story down.

   Ah yes, the story: As Brady recovers he finds himself growing closer to the community. It seems no one is interested in the unsolved murder of a no-good years ago in Missouri. The townspeople are warming to him, and Captain Rucker would like to recruit a man who knows Mexico and can speak the language. Brady seems set to rejoin the human race…. until he kills a man in a fight and has to flee back south of the border again where more grief awaits him till he can find a way back into humanity.

   Lea has his own unique way of recounting Brady’s labors as a hired pistolero; he gives us the expected bursts of terse action, quite well handled, but what he concentrates on is the ordinary unglamorous hardship of getting around in a hostile land. He makes us feel the heat, the cold and the ache in your bones crawling through wet grass on a cold night, or the saddle-soreness of long, long rides and the gritty business of pursuing and fighting hostile Apaches, lending a tactile realism to things most Western writers just ignore. He also does a skillful job of keeping his bad guys off-stage, lowering like clouds gathering at the edge of the story, then thundering in for a torrential impact. The result is a book I’ll come back to again.

   They couldn’t capture all of this in the movie; the film is set in that perpetual sunny Summer that seems a staple of the Western; characters are changed around, the plot is simplified, but The Wonderful Country is a film to treasure.

   Robert Mitchum, a great actor who phoned it in too often, gives himself fully to the part of Martin Brady: scruffy and unshaven for most of the movie, he evokes that kicked-around look he did so well in Out of the Past, combined with the leathery toughness you need in a Western.

   He’s supplemented with a worthy cast. The movie doesn’t have time to for all the personal details in the novel, but makes up for it with sharp performances from memorable actors.

   Charles McGraw evokes Doc Stovall in a few telling lines and gestures; Pedro Armendariz and Jack Oakie strut their arrogance and cupidity; Albert Dekker, Satchel Paige and Gary Merrill make tough fighting men, and even bit players like Chuck Roberson and Victor Mendoza (both as local bullies) stay in the memory long after their brief time on screen has flashed by. And the nasties kept off-page in the book are given a few memorably menacing shots early in the film so they seem to come out of the story naturally when it’s time to bring them on.

   Best of all is Julie London as the unhappy officer’s wife. No tears for her, though; Julie plays it with a sexy toughness that seems to bubble up out of the Texas heat and spread across the screen. Add to that a manner of frank self-appraisal, and we get a characterization of unusual depth and a few surprises.

   Director Parrish handles the action well enough, but this is basically a film about the characters. And it’s a memorable one.

NEAL BARRETT, JR. – Pink Vodka Blues. St. Martin’s, hardcover, 1992. Kensington, paperback, 1997.

   I was familiar with Barrett as an entertaining, really quite good, science fantasy writer. However, though John D. MacDonald and others have crossed the genre lines successfully, it’s far from a sure thing, and I didn’t set my expectations too high.

   PVB is the kind of story that really doesn’t lend itself well to summarization. Russell Murray, an alcoholic small-time reporter, awakes with a strange woman in his bed and missing a day; not too uncommon for Russell. This time, though, his blank spot includes murder, Mafia hit men on his trail, and a Mafia boss’s boyhood chum who wants to be President.

   Russell ends up in a detox center and is befriended by Sherry Lou, a rich girl with a vodka jones. They flee together, hunting a briefcase he has lost which everyone seems to want, and trying to stay a step ahead of the hit men.

   The above doesn’t begin to give the flavor of the book. In some ways a black comedy, some ways a straight story, it is in all ways a bravura performance. Barrett has a marvelous ear for dialogue and a fine narrative skill. A good friend has said that this reminds him of Thorne Smith, and while I don’t see the similarity as strongly as he does, the comparison is not inappropriate.

   Russell and Sherry Lou are funny and human, and more than a little tragic. Barrett’s depiction of alcoholism is as matter-of-factly, even humorously, chilling as you’re likely to find. The plot is a little too wild to be realistic (a 70 year old granny hit-lady?), but I’m sure it was intended to be.

   I don’t usually like this kind of book — witness my aversion to Carl Hiaasen — but I liked this one. You’ll either love it or hate it, but you ought to try it.

THE ASSASSIN. United Artists, US, 1953. Originally released in the UK by General Film Distributors, 1952, as Venetian Bird. Richard Todd, Eva Bartok, John Gregson, George Coulouris, Walter Rilla, Margot Grahame, Sidney James, Eric Pohlman Screenplay by Victor Canning, based on his novel Venetian Bird. Director: Ralph Thomas.

   The Assassin is an effective British noir thriller shot on location in Venice that follows the fate of low-rent private detective Edward Mercer (Richard Todd), a tough and deceptively honest man, who steps into a nest of vipers when he arrives in Venice to find Renzzo Ucello, a member of the Resistance who helped an American trapped behind enemy lines in WWII. It seems the GI’s family wants to reward Ucello, and Mercer has been hired by a firm of lawyers in Paris to find the man and help him.

   Almost from the start things are dicey. Two thugs are following him and the only person he finds willing to talk about Ucello disappears and later shows up dead. The police in the person of Spadoni (George Coulouris) are none too friendly and he is being followed by Cassona (John Gregson) an undercover cop who works as a street photographer.

   The only help he gets is from an old friend, Rosa (Margot Grahame) who runs a minor racket as a medium and palm reader, and her boyfriend Bernardo (Sydney James) in the funeral business.

   Following Ucello’s cold trail he learns he was once a promising artist, but that he also has a streak of violence and a nasty record, he is also, the police insist, dead. Mercer is led eventually to Adriana (Eva Bartok) who is restoring a painting (the Venetian Bird of the title) for one Count Borla (Walter Rilla); there is a tie to Ucello, but he isn’t sure what, other than drawings of the bird done by Ucello.

   Much more discussion of the plot, and I would give things away. Needless to say the title of the film as released in the US refers to the latter half of the movie when Mercer stumbles on a fascist plot to plunge Italy into chaos and seize power by assassinating a popular visiting political figure, and Mercer finds himself the perfect fall guy with all hands turned against him.

   The mostly British cast with such familiar faces and names as Eric Pohlman (the voice of Blofield in the early Bond’s and the gypsy chief in From Russia With Love), John Gregson (Gideon’s Way on television and a popular leading man in films like The Cruel Sea), Sydney James (the “Carry On” films and countless comic roles), and Michael Ripper (many many films including Hammer horror) does remarkably well playing mostly Italian roles. Rilla is always a smooth villain, in these things, and it is nice to see George Courlouris in a more or less sympathetic role for a change.

   Richard Todd was an Oscar-nominated actor who had some success in American films (A Man Called Peter, Hitchcock’s Stage Fright, Lightning Strikes Twice), and returned a big name in British films in this era (The Dam Busters). His Mercer strikes all the right notes as a cynical man who mostly believes in his work and won’t be threatened or used without due payback, his willingness to follow the truth even when he is no longer being paid to is well within the hardboiled tradition of the American private eye, and readers may recall Victor Canning revisited the genre both in his Rex Carver series, and in The Rainbird Pattern, which became Hitchcock’s Family Plot. The romance with Bartok is well played, and without any phony sentiment. She is attracted to him but there are other things in her life, and he is falling for her, but aware she is involved in something dangerous.

   Victor Canning’s adaptation of his own novel is quite good. The film features some actual detective work, both of the legwork variety and the cerebral, the atmosphere of Venice is captured better here in black and white than it usually is in Technicolor, and there are several nice pieces including an exciting roof top chase with the real assassin, and violence when it does break out is sudden and has consequences. There is also a nice twist toward the end of the film you may not quite see coming that makes things considerably more complicated for the hero.

   Somewhere along the way this well done British thriller has gotten a bit lost. It can be hard to find though it has a good reputation; currently it is available on Amazon Prime. It is well worth looking up though, if only to see a master craftsman of the suspense, spy, and adventure school of British thriller (Silver Dagger winner) adapt his own work to the screen with a top notch cast capable direction and handsome use of location in one of the world’s great cities.

ANDREW BERGMAN – The Big Kiss-Off of 1944. Holt Rinehart & Winston, hardcover, 1974. Ballantine, paperback, March 1975. Perennial Library P673, paperback, 1983.

   Andrew Bergman’s novels about Manhattan-based private eye Jack LeVine are very much in the Raymond Chandler vein, which is not a bad vein to be in at all.

   From page 15:

   Jack is a big guy, bald, Jewish, once married but no longer, smokes Luckies, drinks Blatz, and is a very good guy for a Broadway chorus girl being blackmailed for making the wrong kind of movie to have on her side. What Jack doesn’t count on is that the case will end up with him deeply involved in the Roosevelt-Dewey election campaign of 1944.

   Mr. Dewey, in fact, makes a major appearance. Mr. Roosevelt does not. Mr. Bergman, who later on became a well-known scriptwriter and director, knew his way around a typewriter even at this early date, and the story goes down nice and easy. Very enjoyable.

Bibliographic Note:   There was one immediate followup novel, Hollywood and LeVine (Holt, 1975), then nothing was heard from Mr. LeVine for over 25 years, when Tender Is LeVine came out from St. Martin’s in 2001.

PATRICK QUENTIN – The Puzzles of Peter Duluth. (Richard Webb, 1901-66, and Hugh Wheeler, 1912-87.) Crippen & Landru Lost Classics Series, February 2016. Collection: 2 short stories and 2 novelettes. Introduction by Curtis Evans. Postscript by Mauro Boncompagni. Afterword by Joanna Gondris.

   Crippen & Landru — and Douglas G. Greene in particular — have once again done mystery readers a great service by collecting the very rare, less-than-novel-length fiction of Patrick Quentin featuring that slightly screwball duo of thespians turned amateur detectives, Peter and Iris Duluth. The stories are book-ended with a fine introductory essay about the author by Curtis Evans (“Puzzles for Posterity”), an amusing anecdote about Richard Webb (“Postscript: Puzzle for Proustians”) by Mauro Boncompagni, and a personal memoir about her great-uncle by Joanna Gondris (“Afterword on Hugh Wheeler”).

      The stories:

(1) “Death Rides the Ski-Tow.” Novelette. First appearance: The American Magazine, April 1941.

   Peter Duluth is a bibulous Broadway producer who, fortunately for him, is married to Iris, dazzlingly beautiful and, as subsequent events will show, the real brains of the outfit.

   In “Death Rides the Ski-Tow,” during a long winter’s night, Peter has one too many at a cocktail party and is staggering home in a steady fall of snow when he encounters a woman who, just moments later, is gunned down on the frozen street — but not before she unloads some vital information on him, practically painting a target on Peter in the process. Suddenly people he has never heard of are anxious to see him dead; thus begins a cat-and-mouse game between Peter and Iris and a ruthless gang of smugglers who won’t balk at murder to get what they want—and that includes a $10,000 hot dog.

   Comments: An extremely well-written story with vivid descriptions, nice bits of humor, and perfect pacing. As Curt Evans says in his introduction to the Crippen & Landru collection, it and its companion piece (“Murder with Flowers”) are “intriguingly kaleidoscopic affairs reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock films.”

(2) “Murder with Flowers.” Novelette. First appearance: The American Magazine, December 1941. Expanded into Puzzle for Puppets (1944) and subsequently filmed as Homicide for Three (1948).

   In “Murder with Flowers,” Peter and Iris learn that a rose by any other name would smell of murder — two of them, in fact, with a third homicide in the offing, the victims being drenched in blood-spattered flowers according to some sick psychotic revenge scheme. Peter and Iris, as usual, manage to get themselves inculpated in the killings and have to play hide-and-seek with the police while frantically trying to track down the guilty party. Although it’s certainly no day at the beach for our agile terpsichoreans (they do rumba extraordinarily well, these two), their perilous situation, against all expectations, does turn into a day at the circus.

   Comments: It may not be as good as “Death Rides the Ski-Tow,” but the plot holds enough interest and is more than adequately sustained by rapid pacing and amusingly eccentric characters.

(3) “Puzzle for Poppy.” Short story. First appearance: EQMM, February 1946.

   What do Peter and Iris Duluth, a last will bequest, a nervous guardian, and a pregnant St. Bernard have in common? It will take a realization on Iris’s part (one very reminiscent of a well-known G. K. Chesterton story) and a lucky shot by a precocious little girl with a charming lisp to expose (and we do mean “expose”) a carefully-planned murder plot against an unusual intended victim.

(4) “Death and the Rising Star.” Short story. First appearance: Better Living Magazine, June 1955; reprinted in EQMM, December 1957.

   For Peter Duluth (here flying solo without Iris), being a Broadway producer is hard enough, but when the leading lady for what he confidently believes will be a sure-fire hit becomes unavailable and her brilliant replacement gets herself neatly framed for murder, he could be forgiven for feeling that it’s just not his day; in order to extricate his rising star, get his play before the public, and avoid the breadline, Peter will have to set a trap for the real killer, without the slightest inkling of who it might be.

   Previous Mystery*File reviews and posts about Patrick Quentin:

The Crippled Muse (here)
A Puzzle for Fools (here and here)
Puzzle for Players (here)
Puzzle for Puppets (here)
Puzzle for Fiends (here).

REX DOLPHIN “Off the Map.” First published in Weird Tales, July 1954. Reprinted in 100 Wild Little Weird Tales, edited by Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, Robert Weinberg, & Martin H. Greenberg (Barnes & Noble, 1994).

   Rex Dolphin (1915-1990) was the pen name of one Reginald Charles Dolphin, a British accountant who also wrote under the pseudonyms Peter Saxon and Desmond Reid. His sole contribution to Weird Tales, a story entitled “Off the Map” appeared in the pulp magazine’s July 1954 issue.

   The product of a vivid imagination and a mind steeped in fantasy literature, “Off the Map” is a minor, albeit imperfect, gem of a tale. The story is based on a premise that readers of historical fantasy and weird fiction have surely encountered in myriad forms over the years: what if there’s a city that’s marked on an older map, but that doesn’t appear on any contemporary ones:

   
   The town in question is Wychburne, an English city that no longer appears in modern cartography. In “Off the Map,” the story’s unnamed protagonist-narrator sets out to discover what happened to this village. Does it still exist? And if so, what happens there?

   The story unfolds in a rather predictable manner, with one local who learns of the narrator’s quest showing his absolute displeasure with the notion. As it turns out, the village — or some phantasmagoric facsimile of it, does still exist. But the small burg’s historical trajectory has been scarred by the experience of a great plague, making this town off the map a burial ground for the ages.

   It must be said that, while “Off the Map” has a more interesting premise than a conclusion, the work does demonstrate that the writer was certainly well versed in both the style and substance of early twentieth-century high fantasy literature.