SHERLOCK HOLMES. Made for Cable-TV movie: HBO, 15 November 1981. Frank Langella (Holmes), Susan Clark (Madge Larrabee), Stephen Collins (Larabee), Richard Woods (Watson), George Morfogen (Moriarity), Laurie Kennedy (Alice Faulkner), Christian Slater (Billy the Page). Based on the play by William Gillette. Directed by Peter H. Hunt.

    Supposedly when American actor William Gillette was writing the play which would become his most famous role (his image as iconic as the Sidney paget illustrations from The Strand) he wired Arthur Conan Doyle as to whether it was all right to marry Sherlock Holmes to the heroine at the end of the play. Doyle’s famously terse cable in return was succinct:

    This filmed stage play, which aired on HBO originally, is the version that became a major hit on Broadway (Sherlock’s Last Case) when revised in 1987 with Frank Langella in the lead role (fresh from his hit in the revived John Balderston play of Dracula).

    Played with snap, flare, and a wink and a nod towards the audience, the plot involves Professor Moriarity’s convoluted plot to destroy Sherlock Holmes by drawing him into a complex plot involving the innocent Alice Faulkner, being held virtual prisoner by Moriarity’s cohorts, the Larrabees (Stephen Collins and Susan Clark).

    Langella and Morfogen have real fun as Holmes and Moriarity, and the highlight of the play is their game of one-upsmanship in a recreation of the famous meeting at Baker Street between the pair from “The Final Problem.” As the table turn from one gambit to the next the two actors show real passion for the performance.

    It’s worth watching the whole production for that scene alone, but fortunately you don’t have to. The old war horse of a play may wheeze a bit here and there, but thanks to a sparkling cast it is tremendous fun as well. Collins and Clark are particularly good as the Larrabees and Woods a stalwart Watson.

    But this is a star turn for the actor playing Holmes, and Langella knows it. He take possession of the stage at every turn, filled with kinetic energy and yet sprawling across the stage in lethargy like a great cat after a big meal at other times. Both Leonard Nimoy and Charlton Heston had some success with the play in other revivals after Langella, but it is hard to imagine anyone having the energy he displays here.

    Director Peter H. Hunt directed a good deal of television and also the film 1776. Clearly he knows how to shoot a film of a stage play with style and creativity.

    The Gillette play was previously filmed as a silent with John Barrymore in the role of Holmes, Roland Young as Watson, and Gustav Von Seyfertitz as Moriarity. That version is now available on DVD from Kino International.

    The play is very loosely the basis of the Rathbone and Bruce film The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes from 2Oth Century Fox with George Zucco as Moriarity. It was also loosely the basis for the Broadway musical Baker Street with Fritz Weaver and Martin Gabel as Holmes and Moriarity.

    Christian Slater, who plays the page Billy here, was in good company. In the original Gillette production in the West End of London the role was played by young Master Charles Chaplin, age thirteen.

    With Robert Downey Jr. playing a 21st Century take on the great sleuth currently on the big screen, it’s nice to return to this and see this version of the Gillette play showing such vitality.

Editorial Comment: For a delightful two-minute clip from the play on YouTube, go here. While there does not appear to be a commercial DVD of the HBO film, it is usually easily available on the Internet on a collector-to-collector basis.

    I’m afraid I’ve recently watched a lot of dreck, just for the sake of completeness. Things like William Castle’s abominable remake of The Old Dark House (Columbia,1963) and The Mad Monster (PRC, 1942) a film so cheap one is amazed by the very fact of its existence.

    Then there was The She-Creature (American International, 1956), a film with an odd patina of melancholy arising from the sight of its two stars, Chester Morris and Tom Conway, both promising young actors once, now trapped in this strange, low-budget miasma. At least it boasts a good monster.

    But there were a few gems, too: I re-watched a lot of the Universal Monster movies from the 1950s (The Deadly Mantis, Monster on the Campus, The Monolith Monsters, the Creature series, and my personal favorite, The Mole People, featuring a minimalist lost-civilization conquered by flashlights) and was pleasantly surprised by the air of professionalism about them.

    There’s even, from time to time, a moment of artistry or a flash of intelligence in the fast-moving flurry of destruction. Most horror buffs and film historians concentrate on Universal in the 30s or 40s, but I think these deserve a sharper look.

    After these came the zombie movies: White Zombie (1932, United Artists) inspired by W.B. Seabrooks’ eerie travelogue The Magic Island, the former a film with atrocious acting and worse script, but infused with a visual poetry that lifts its trite story to the level of a folk tale.

    This was followed by I Walked with a Zombie (1943, RKO Radio Pictures) which is Jane Eyre set in the West Indies, with Tom Conway (remember him?) as a brooding Rochester to Frances Dee’s doughty nurse.

    The last ten minutes of this thing is played out without dialogue except for a minute of voice-over narration by a narrator who isn’t even in the movie, producing a climax of pure abstract Cinema.

    Then last, but far from least, there’s King of the Zombies (1941, Mongram) where Mantan Moreland’s deft comedy relief easily steals the film from its nominal stars and monsters.

LAIRD KOENIG – Rockabye.   St. Martin’s, hardcover, 1981. Paperback reprint: Bantam, 1983. Made-for-TV movie: CBS, 12 January 1986. Valerie Bertinelli (mother), Rachel Ticotin (tabloid reporter), Jason Alexander (NYPD lieutenant).

    Novels of the occult and the supernatural are tremendously popular today, and part of the reason has to be the excuses they give people for avoiding the real world, the one they have to live in.

    Considering the unspeakable things that can happen to a kidnapped two-year-old boy in New York City at Christmas time, here’s a book that will scare the heck out of just about everyone, and get them back to reading about witches and demons and the like.

    In part, the police are also the villains in this one, giving up too easily on what they think is just another unsolvable crime. The boy’s mother, a traveler alone in the city, nevertheless refuses to concede defeat. Her only assistance comes from a sympathetic female newspaper reporter and an aging psychic-for-hire whom she really believes to be a fraud.

    Screenwriter Laird Koenig has an unerring eye for situations easily translatable into cinematic magic. You can expect to see it on a screen near you very soon. The mayor of New York City won’t like it, nor will police departments anywhere in the country. I can’t say that I’d blame them in the slightest.

  UPDATE [01-06-10].   I seem to have violated my own personal rule against reading children-in-jeopardy novels with this one, but without rules, how can there be exceptions?

    I’m glad to say that I recognized the cinematic potential of this book, however. The film took a few years before it was made, and it showed up only on TV, but made it was.

    Koenig also wrote the novel and screenplay for The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (1976), a Jodie Foster movie, and his paperback original The Neighbor (Avon, 1978) was the basis for a movie called Killing ’em Softly (1982).

    While Little Girl is cited in the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, neither of the other two are. I’ll drop him an email about them later today…

    Speaking of Michael Shayne, there were several different series of his adventures that appeared on radio. The first of these starred Wally Maher as Shayne, with Cathy Lewis featured as his secretary (and close companion) Phyllis Knight. While there was an earlier and much longer run on the West Coast Mutual-Don Lee string of stations, the series didn’t appear on the full Mutual network until 8 October 1946 and only lasting to 14 January 1947. The one I offer you here (click on the link) is generally referred to as “The Case of the Poisoned Fan,” but there is no announcement to that fact on the program itself.

    The show is very well done, even though there is nothing I can see that particularly identifies the radio version with Brett Halliday’s character — all they seem to have in common is the name. Shayne talks tough enough, pretty much as a generic PI is supposed to talk, but the puzzle aspect of this particular episode is the key element: How did the killer make sure the victim was the one who was served the poisoned coffee?

   One of the last books I read in 2009 was Losing Mum and Pup, satirical novelist Christopher Buckley’s memoir of his parents, who died within a year of each other.

    His father of course was that titan among supercilious sesquipedalians, William F. Buckley Jr., who while appearing weekly on his Firing Line TV series for decades and writing thousands of columns for his magazine National Review (often turning out 700 words in five minutes) also penned a series of novels starring superspy Blackford Oakes, completing each book in about two weeks.

    Christopher says nothing about his Pup’s contributions to mystery fiction but his memories of his Mum, who never wrote a word, reminded me irresistibly of another crime novelist. Mum, it seems, was a compulsive teller of tall tales. “I had heard [her] utter whoppers that would make Pinocchio look button-nosed,” says Christo.

    She loved to tell visitors that when she was small the king and queen of England stayed at her parents’ house in Vancouver, or that she had recently served as alternate juror on a famous murder trial.

    I never met any of the Buckleys but about 35 years ago I was invited to join the University of California’s Mystery Library project and thereby got to spend quality time with the project’s instigator: John Ball, author of In the Heat of the Night (1965) and creator of black detective Virgil Tibbs.

    John too was a Munchausen of the first water. The instant any famous name was mentioned in his presence, from Gene Autry to the Dalai Lama, he would claim to know the person well and toss off an anecdote. Shostakovich? “Ah yes, he played the piano for us in this very room when he was last in the States.”

    And what tales he’d spin about his hair-raising adventures around the world! Traveling in Asia, he was invited by the local police to help track down some notorious terrorist. On a secret mission behind the Iron Curtain he lured a Stasi agent who was shadowing him into a public urinal in East Berlin and killed him with one karate chop.

    If you knew a bit about his life — that he’d been a licensed pilot and had traveled widely in Japan and had reviewed classical music for a Brooklyn newspaper and was a police reservist and a martial arts maven — you could almost believe these yarns, which he garnished with vivid detail.

    Perhaps his biggest whopper, and one he should never have perpetrated because so many people saw through it, was that almost everything in the movie based on In the Heat of the Night had been taken from his novel.

    Of course, what made that film so successful was the conflict between Sidney Poitier as Tibbs and the racist cop played by Rod Steiger. Go try to find a smidgen of that conflict in John’s novel.

    John worshiped every badge he saw. In his world racist cops are like dry water, categorically impossible. Even on the plot level director Norman Jewison and screenwriter Stirling Silliphant junked much of the book, including everything about the murder victim trying to make that sleepy Southern town a Mecca for classical music.

    But even when we saw through John’s tall tales it was tremendous fun to watch him spin them. He was the kind of personality that made Casper Gutman say to Sam Spade: “By Gad, sir, you’re a character, that you are!” I thank Christopher Buckley for rekindling my memories of him.

    Another of the last books I read in 2009 came out earlier but so stealthily that few people know it exists. Rick Cypert’s The Virtue of Suspense: The Life and Works of Charlotte Armstrong (Susquehanna University Press, 2008) is just what its title indicates, the first full-length study of the woman who deserves to be called the female Cornell Woolrich if anyone does.

    At their finest, both could generate suspense like nobody else in the business, often with the aid of eye-popping coincidences and improbabilities that readers were usually too rapt to register. There were, of course, huge differences between the two. Armstrong (1905-1969) led a conventional life enriched by a husband (who was murdered a few years after her own death), children and many friends, while that loner’s loner Woolrich hardly had a life at all.

    Armstrong carefully revised and reworked her novels and stories while Woolrich wrote at white heat, creating an intensity beyond Armstrong’s but also committing countless linguistic howlers and blunders.

    Mysteryphiles may safely skip most of Cypert’s introductory chapter, which explores various psychological and aesthetic theories, but they won’t want to miss anything else. Another book on Armstrong is unlikely but, thanks to the excellence of this one, hardly necessary.

    Cypert had the full co-operation of Armstrong’s children and access to her extensive correspondence — with other writers, editors like Fred Dannay, and critics like Anthony Boucher, who adored her work and had much to do with her success. He is presently editing a collection of her short stories, which will be published by Crippen & Landru in due course.

    Cypert is a professor at Nebraska Wesleyan University, the alma mater of another famous female mystery writer. I suspect it’s not a Woolrich-Armstrong coincidence that he’s also written a book on Mignon G. Eberhart and co-edited a collection of her short stories.

    I’ve read little of Eberhart and only met her once, but on that occasion I just may have saved her from serious injury. One miserable winter afternoon in the Reagan era I was in New York and found myself with Eberhart, who was in her eighties at the time and quite tiny and frail, and Gloria Amoury, MWA’s executive secretary.

    All three of us needed to get from Point A to Point B and decided to share a cab. I was immediately behind Eberhart as she entered and one of her feet went out from under her on a patch of ice.

    Somehow my instincts kicked in. I formed my hands into a sort of seat and caught her bottom in it before she could fall.

    Could I be responsible for her having lived to the ripe old age of 97?

THE PHANTOM OF CRESTWOOD. RKO Radio Pictures, 1932. Ricardo Cortez, Karen Morley, Anita Louise, Pauline Frederick, H. B. Warner. Director: J. Walter Ruben.

   At one time The Phantom of Crestwood, a 1932 film, was hard to see. One of its infrequent appearances was in 1985 at Manhattan’s The New School, as part of one of William K. Everson’s film programs.

   Now, due to the magic of cable television, one must virtually ignore American Movie Classics to miss it. It is worth seeing, especially because it is representative of an era in which Hollywood made many detective movies in which audiences were encouraged to try to guess the murderer, whose identity was withheld until the end.

   There were clues, which is more than I can say for many novels nowadays. The film even starts with the famous radio announcer Graham MacNamee encouraging viewers to guess thc villain as part of a joint radio-movie promotion contest.

   The stars are Karen Morley, one of the lovelier actresses of the 1930s, and Ricardo Cortez (né Jake Kranz), whose Brooklyn accent somehow never made him too believable, especially since, even after the advent of sound, he was still cast as a “Latin lover.”

   He was the Tony Curtis of his day. In this case he plays a typically brash role, walking a tightrope between hero and criminal in a house cut off by a storm. The villain is not difficult to guess, and the sliding panels must have been corny even then.

   Still, the element of audience participation works after almost sixty years, and the seventy minutes of The Phantom of Crestwood pass quickly.

BRETT HALLIDAY – Call for Michael Shayne. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1949. Reprint paperbacks include: Dell 428, mapback edition, 1950, Robert Stanley cover art; Dell D269, Jan 1959, Robert McGinnis cover art; Dell 0952, Jan 1964, McGinnis cover.

   The opening of this novel might have been written by Cornell Woolrich. Art Devlin, a rising young executive, wakes up in a room in a cheap boarding house. He’s wearing clothes he’s never seen before and has a lump on his head.

   He also has some unwanted company, since there’s a dead man on the floor and a bloody blackjack beside him. All Devlin can remember is that some friends threw him a bon voyage party since he was going on a cruise for two weeks and he got pretty drunk.

   Then he discovers that 12 days have passed since that party: days he can’t remember. He gets a phone call from a woman claiming to be his wife asking him if he’s killed Skid Munroe (the dead man) and if he got the money Skid was carrying.

   Devlin takes a cab to his own apartment, but he has no money except for a roll of hundred-dollar bills, some of them bloodstained. He gets a couple of bucks for the cab fare from the desk clerk of his fancy apartment building and calls a doctor friend who finds his story hard to believe.

   Fortunately, for Devlin, he lives in Miami and is acquainted with a certain red-headed PI named Mike Shayne, who is the next person he calls.

   A fairly entertaining story, though I had no trouble spotting the killer almost from the get-go. As I said, the early part of the novel is very Woolrichian, with more than one reference to “a black curtain.” Of course, it differs when Mike Shayne enters the story because Woolrich’s characters don’t know PI’s like him.

STEVE BERRY – The Charlemagne Pursuit.   Ballantine; paperback reprint, November 2009. Hardcover edition: Ballantine Books, December 2008.

    I don’t think I could make you believe how much in awe I am of authors who can write mystery thrillers that are over 530 pages long, and in one of those new oversized paperback formats to boot.

    I enjoy reading them too – all those characters, both major and minor; plots and subplots – even though they take me almost two weeks of semi-steady reading to get through them.

    Definition: semi-steady. Fifty to sixty pages a night, sometimes nearly a hundred, especially when the end is in sight.

    I did not know that The Charlemagne Pursuit is the fourth of Steve Berry’s books that a fellow named Cotton Malone, a former Justice Department agent, is in, nor did I need to, but it was at least somewhat clear that he had been through the mill like this before. By the mill, I mean finding himself in next to non-stop adventure, although not all of the action involves him. At a full 500 pages’ worth, if it did, he’d be huffing and puffing like all get out when this one ends, and lo and behold, The Charlemagne Pursuit ends exactly where The Paris Vendetta (2009, with a brief preview provided) begins.

    This one involves some history (Charlemagne’s court and some historical documents found relating thereto); some leftover business left over from the World War II and the Cold War (a Nazi submarine landing in Antarctica, a US submarine trapped under the Antarctic ice in 1971); and some current day ideas about the possibility of a master race and civilization that lived in early historic times – before the Romans, before the Greeks, before the Phoenicians, before everybody.

    And the spark that kindles the whole affair: Cotton Malone’s father was one of the men aboard the experimental sub who died in it when it sank, and whose death has been covered up ever since – by whom, and why?

    There are a lot of deaths that occur along the way (but none terribly gory), many of them orchestrated by someone still in power in the US, and the others by a pair of maniac-obsessive sisters whose father and grandfather (a former Nazi) left them an heritage of secrets, but about what they do not know.

    There is also plenty of action, as if I hadn’t said (or hinted at) before. I kind of wish it hadn’t all ended quite so abruptly, but even the longest of 530 page thrillers have to end sometime. If I haven’t made myself clear until now, I wouldn’t have minded if it had been longer.

       The Cotton Malone series —

1. The Templar Legacy (2006)

2. The Alexandria Link (2007)
3. The Venetian Betrayal (2007)
4. The Charlemagne Pursuit (2008)
5. The Paris Vendetta (2009)

THEM! Warner Brothers, 1954. James Whitmore, Edmund Gwenn, Joan Weldon, James Arness, Onslow Stevens, Sean McClory. Screenplay: Ted Sherdeman. Story: George Worthing Yates. Director: Gordon Douglas. 94 mins.

    “Oh, yeah,” you’re probably thinking, “the one with the giant ants.”

    After 55 years, I guess the bug’s out of the bag about who the “bad guys” are in Them! But what most viewers seem to miss is how closely this film hews to Jack Webb’s Dragnet formula. In fact, I think of Them! as a Dragnet episode with monsters.

    Them! neatly divides into three parts: The crime, the discovery of the identity of the perpetrators, and the pursuit and “capture” of the baddies in the denouement.

    The crime:   In the sparsely populated New Mexico desert, people are disappearing — and some are dying. Based on the available evidence, the police believe it’s the work of a psycho. How else to explain a caved-in trailer and a country store whose owner is found hideously mangled with his .30-.30 rifle broken like a matchstick but no money stolen from the till?

    This segment is played for mystery, shot in low light levels with darkly saturated areas often filling the screen — a very noir-ish look, if not in theme. Even though the first few scenes take place in bright desert sunlight, we’re soon moving with the investigating officers through the darkness of a dust storm to the discovery of the store owner’s bloody carcass.

    The whole sequence is played for maximum mysterious effect: the wailing of the wind; a lamp swinging in circles, blown by the wind because the side of the store has been pulled OUT, not crushed IN; a disembodied voice in another room that turns out to be a radio left turned on (and it’s clear we are meant to infer that the store owner didn’t have time to turn it off while he was being attacked); and the man’s crushed corpse, briefly glimpsed in the light of the swinging lamp.

    The discovery of the identity of the perpetrators:

    The middle section of Them! has the investigators searching for the cause of these atrocities. In another dusty desert wind storm the perps are finally revealed.

    The mystery is over; now it’s not a matter of whodunit but how do we catch ’em? After all, they’re from 9 to 15 feet long and couldn’t care less about arrest warrants. The lower level members of the gang are killed, but Mr. (really Mrs.) Big makes a getaway, and the chase is on.

    The pursuit and “capture” of the baddies in the denouement:   Catching Mrs. Big proves to be a major headache, since she has nearly unlimited mobility because she can fly. The authorities try to keep the pursuit a secret as long as feasible in order to avoid panic.

    Finally, thanks to slogging, shoe leather grinding police work — tracking down every possible eyewitness report that might even be remotely related to their hunt — the investigators locate Mrs. Big in the sewers of Los Angeles (shades of The Third Man and also another film — see below).

    Sixty tons of sugar are stolen from a railway car in the marshaling yards, and a little boy has gone missing, two events that are closely related. Fearing the worst, our tireless investigators go from one thin thread to another in trying to find the kid, even interrogating the normally unreliable inmates of a nearby asylum.

    It’s a race against time now. Unless our heroes locate the perps’ hideout, it won’t simply be the life of one little boy that will be at stake but also — dare I say it? — the fate of the world.

    Not only does Them! remind me of Dragnet but it also invites comparison with He Walked by Night (1948), a suspenseful hunt-the-man-down film noir.

    Switch giant ants for Richard Basehart and you pretty much have Them! I regard He Walked by Night as the template which Jack Webb followed in his radio and TV series. In fact, Webb appeared in He Walked as, of all things, a crime lab technician.

    So there you have it: a Dragnet episode blown up to giANT proportions. Only the names have been changed to protect the … producers.

FLAME OF CALCUTTA. Columbia, 1953. Denise Darcel, Patric Knowles, Paul Cavanagh, George Keymas, Joseph Mell, Ted Thorpe, Gregory Gaye, Leonard Penn. Director: Seymour Friedman. Shown at Cinecon 45, Hollywood CA, September 2009.

   This technicolor feature, recently restored, was chosen to represent the screen career of Denise Darcel, the first of the weekend’s guest stars, and had not been viewed by any of the committee prior to the evening’s showing.

   The “Flame” (Darcel) is the leader of a group of rebels fighting to restore the legitimate monarch to the throne usurped by a villainous Prince (George Keymas). Patric Knowles is a British captain who is sympathetic to the Flame’s cause (and is also her lover) but, because of his country’s neutrality, can’t openly support the rebels’ cause.

   Anyone who thinks that sound “legitimized” film as an art medium would probably want to reconsider that position after a viewing of this film. At its conclusion, someone sitting behind me muttered “What a stinker!”, an opinion that many in the audience probably shared.

   I couldn’t find any record of appearances by Darcel in French films. She appears to have been performing in Paris shortly after the end of the second world war as a cabaret singer when she was brought to Hollywood, where her first film was Battleground.

   Over the next decade she appeared in a relatively small number of films, ranging from Tarzan and the Slave Girl to such major studio productions as Westward the Women, Dangerous When Wet, and Vera Cruz.

   Her last film was Seven Women from Hell (1961), and the remainder of her career consisted of numerous TV appearances (most often on variety and comedy shows appearing as herself), and a stage production of Sondheim’s Follies.

   It’s unfortunate that her Hollywood career was represented by this clinker. I was later able, thanks to Netflix, to watch Vera Cruz and Dangerous When Wet, either one of which would have been a more suitable choice to honor her. She was, however, enormously pleased to be invited, and was a gracious, if often incomprehensible interviewee.