LES MAUDITS. Ciné Sélection, France, 1947. Released in the US as The Damned (DisCina International ,1948). Marcel Dalio, Henri Vidal, Florence Marley, Fosco Giachetti, Jo Dest and Michel Auclair. Written by Victor Alexander and René Clément. Directed by René Clément.

   You probably don’t know about this film unless you caught it on TCM a year or so ago, and more’s the pity, because it’s what cineastes call A Real Grabber: a story of suspense and survival right up there with Wages of Fear.

   The Damned of the title are a group of high-ranking Nazis, well-connected sympathizers and their bed-warmers, slipping out of Germany via U-boat — ostensibly to carry on the fight from South America, but some have plans that have nothing to do with the Reich.

   When the General’s mistress is injured, Henri Vidal gets into the mix as a doctor kidnapped from a French port and carried off with the rest. Quickly realizing they plan to kill him, Vidal diagnoses a sore throat as a contagious illness to make himself less dispensable, and the result is a claustrophobic drama of manners as the Nazis and their sycophants quarrel and murder, and Vidal schemes to stay alive.

   Writer-Director René Clément paces the whole thing skillfully, alternating the cramped U-Boat conflicts with scenes above decks and on shore before it can get too confining. And he takes time to let his characters develop as he rings in plot devices like the fall of Berlin and the reactions to it. Like:

   In fact, a great deal of the interest here comes from the collapse of Germany and the efforts of the Nazis to dodge falling rubble. In South America they find their bought-and-paid-for friends hard to locate and unwilling to help. When they find a German Tanker ship and refuel, word of the armistice causes a mass desertion. And yet – this is the gripping part — they react with the steely viciousness that got them where they are, leading to some unsettlingly visceral moments. And at the same time, Vidal’s captive Doctor Guilbert keeps plotting his own escape, giving the film a sense of progress and anchoring us to a character we can identify with.

   The result is a film of complexity and tension, with unexpected twists and depth of writing that keeps one watching. Early on I likened this to Wages of Fear for its suspense and sensitivity, and the comparison is apt. This is a classic to watch and remember.

RICHARD ROSEN – Saturday Night Dead. Harvey Blisssberg #3. Viking, hardcover, 1988. Signet, paperback, June 1989.

   In this third adventure of PI (and former major league baseball player) Harvey Blissberg, the death of the producer of a late-night comedy show is designed to give him a smooth transition from sports-related mysteries to the world of show business. It doesn’t work. Compared to earlier entries in the series, it’s definitely not a step up.

   There are a lot of suspects, many of whom Harvey quickly eliminates. In fact, most of the clues point one way, but it still comes as a surprise when Harvey decides who the killer is with nearly 80 pages to go. On page 233 Harvey admits his reasoning was all guesswork.

   Neither exceptionally well told, nor more than merely bland. On the basis of this one, I think Harvey had better go back to playing the outfield.

       The Harvey Blissberg series —

Strike Three You’re Dead (1984)
Fadeaway (1986)
Saturday Night Dead (1988)
World Of Hurt (1994)
Dead Ball (2001) .

   The Icicle Works was a British rock band that produced five studio LPs in the late 1980s, and two compilation albums. Their name came from the 1960 short story “The Day the Icicle Works Closed” by SF writer Frederik Pohl.

   “Understanding Jane” is a track from their third album If You Want to Defeat Your Enemy Sing His Song, released in 1987.

GHOST TOWN. Bel Air Productions / United Artists, 1956. Kent Taylor, John Smith, Marian Carr, Serena Sande, John Doucette, Joel Ashley, Gilman Rankin, William ‘Bill’ Phillips (the latter uncredited). Director: Allen H. Miner.

   When it comes to westerns made in the 1950s, I find that independently produced black and white movies such as this one are often a lot more fun to watch than some of those filmed in color with big name stars. It may be my own skewed vision of the world, but I think the more personal approach says more to me than do pictures filtered through the eyes of corporate accountants, say.

   This one starts slow, but the story wouldn’t have worked as well as it does without establishing who exactly the characters are and what’s motivating them, beginning with the four passengers in a stagecoach heading west through Indian territory: a young woman from Boston going to meet the man she is going to marry; a Bible-thumping preacher who has nothing but brotherly love for the noble savages; a doctor who spends most of the day taking long swigs from a bottle; and a well-dressed but still shady-looking gentleman of uncertain profession (Kent Taylor).

   Along the way they are joined by the young woman’s fiancé (John Smith) and his crusty old sidekick Crusty (an unbilled Bill Phillips); an Army sergeant and his young son; and eventually a tongueless and disgraced Indian chief and his young mixed-heritage female companion.

   The stagecoach chased by a band of angry Indians, they manage to find refuge in an abandoned town, and that’s when all of their various secrets start to come out. None of these come as a complete surprise to those of us who have seen a lot of western movies, but it’s as smoothly done as it ever was ins bigger productions. There’s lot of action, too, for those who watch westerns only for the action.

   A couple of quibbles. The Indians at first abandon their chase when the stagecoach reaches the town — totally abandoned because of disease, they discover, and so, they assume, the Indians have marked the town as taboo. But for the sake of the story, though, once the fugitives are “safely” holed up inside the local saloon, the Indians show no signs of concern about bringing up the attack again.

   Which, of course, brings out either the best, or the worst, of each of those trapped inside, with very little ammunition to aid them.

   The other question I have is why on earth Bill Phillips gets no screen credit. He’s there primarily for comic relief, true, but he’s on the screen a lot more than some of the others who do get screen credit.

MAY EDGINTON “The Eyes of Countess Gerda.” Short story. First published in The Story-teller, UK, December 1911. Reprinted as “Johnnie Luck” in Pearson’s Magazine , US, March 1912. First collected in The Adventures of Napoleon Prince (Cassell, UK/US, hardcover, 1912). Also included in Johnnie Luck and Napoleon Prince: The Expanded Adventures (Coachwhip, paperback, February 2015). Reprinted in The Big Book of Rogues and Villains, edited by Otto Penzler (Black Lizard, softcover, 2017).

   When it comes to old and mostly forgotten stories such as this one, I usually rely on Otto’s introductions in any of the huge doorstop collections he’s done in recent years. He let me down with this one, though.

   Most of the introductory material is devoted to the author, whose full name was May Helen Marion Edginton Bailey (1883-1957), and the various stories she wrote that were turned into movies, such as “Purple and Fine Linen,” which became Adventures in Manhattan in 1936.

   Sometimes, though, ignorance is underrated. It may actually have helped in this case, not knowing exactly who Napoleon Prince was, nor his (apparently) two assistants, his sister (?) Mary and Johnnie Luck, who is also quite taken with the former. (Otto calls the sister Gerda, which is clearly in error, and the latter Dapper, which if true, the reference does not come up in this tale.)

   Which is an absolute gem in storytelling. When the three protagonists move into a rooming house together, separate rooms, they happen by chance to make the acquaintance of a young woman living in her own flat alone. Her eyes remind Prince of those of a woman he knew long ago, and eventually he gets around to telling Johnnie the entire unembellished story.

   Where the story is going from here is not exactly clear, bur the reader knows in general that something is in the works, but who is preying on who, and how? Those are the questions. This is an old-fashioned story, charmingly told, and all the pieces fit together beautifully, like clockwork. I called it a “gem” a bit earlier, and indeed it is.

Bibliographic Note:   The Cassell collection from 1912 contains 12 stories, while the much more recent volume from Coachwhip has 18, or all of the known Napoleon Prince stories.

RICHARD S. PRATHER – Strip for Murder. Shell Scott #12, Gold Medal #508, paperback original, 1955. Reprinted several times, including Gold Medal s1029, paperback, 1962.

   The twelfth Shell Scott adventure features what may be the perfect setup for the white-haired hero, murder in a nudist colony. Shell takes a case from wealthy Vera Redstone that takes him to Fairview after another detective she hired, a friend of Scott’s has been murdered, and Scott is in for a surprise when he arrives because no one bothered to mention he was going undercover with no cover so to speak.

   He’s in for no small shock when he is met by a very attractive and very nude young woman who casually informs him where he can remove his clothes.

   After some initial problems with the concept good old Shell gets in the ah … swing of things, and of course, being Prather, there is more than enough pulchritude, violence, mystery, and mayhem to keep the pages rapidly turning.

   One of the keys to Prather’s long term success was that on top of writing well and being the fastest quip in the West Shell Scott, while no genius, is a pretty good detective who manages to get involved in interesting cases with clever plots and solutions at the same time he stumbles across beautiful naked women, and increasingly finds himself shedding his own clothes — almost a running gag in the series over the years.

   The big influences on Prather were clearly Mickey Spillane and Mike Hammer and equally Robert Leslie Bellem’s Dan Turner, Hollywood Detective, who could almost be Scott’s libidinous father. Indeed, Prather’s clever idea, which many copied but few got half as right, was to marry the violence and brutality of Mike Hammer to the mindset of the Spicy pulps, particularly Bellem’s surreal Dan Turner.

   Prather wisely played down some of Bellem’s excesses, but he also took advantage of the freedom offered by the paperback revolution. Just a small random sampling gives you the idea.

   But simply to say “another naked woman” is like saying Mount Everest is higher than some hills.

   Or

   And

   And so Scott quips, dodges bullets, flirts with beautiful women, and eventually ends up jousting in full armor.

   The result was that Scott became what may have been the quintessential fifties and sixties private eye, a big white-haired ex-Marine in a big Cadillac and a tweed sports coat sporting a movie star smile, two lethal fists, and his .38. He was tough, no question of that, but as fast with a quip as he was with his fists, and as a result his adventures were the perfect read for the busy man looking for a smile and a thrill but nothing too challenging.

   Like peanuts, you never knew when you had enough Shell Scott. If Michael Shayne and Johnny Liddell were the ideal generic eyes and Hammer the toughest of the tough, Scott carved his own niche halfway between Hammer and Dan Turner, and skillfully mined it again and again, ringing more variations on the theme that it seemed possible whether Scott was swinging from a Hollywood movie set in a loin cloth being chased by gangsters or hiding behind a hollow rock exchanging shots on the set of an adult film in the desert.

   Strip for Murder wasn’t Prather’s first foray into a touch of the absurdist, but for me it marked the point when Scott’s adventures stopped being standard Private Eye fare and veered off into an altogether more surrealist venue. From this point on, the thin veneer of reality became almost transparent and Scott’s adventures took on their own special cachet in a world as much Pratherland as La La Land.

   After all the hi- and lo-jinks the book ends in a hail of gunfire as appropriate for any Shell Scott adventure. No one can say Prather didn’t choreograph action as well as he did all the tease.

   Once again Shell Scott survives, gets the girl, and solves the mystery all in a manner that despite the sexism is still highly entertaining to read today. Perhaps because Scott doesn’t quite operate in the real world, its a bit easier to ignore how much Prather was a voice of his time. Scott’s world is unique and his adventures take place in only a vague semblance of the private eye world we all know and love. The mean streets in Pratherland are a yellow brick road we gleefully follow to the wizard and we are seldom disappointed with what is behind the emerald curtain.

THE CASE AGAINST BROOKLYN. Columbia Pictures, 1958. Darren McGavin, Maggie Hayes, Warren Stevens, Peggy McCay, Tol Avery, Emile Meyer, Nestor Paiva. based on a True Magazine article “I Broke the Brooklyn Graft Scandal” by crime reporter Ed Reid. Cinematography: Fred Jackman. Director: Paul Wendkos.

   Based on article about massive corruption in the Brooklyn Police Department in the 1950s, The Case Against Brooklyn is a little known but still impressive example of late-in-the-game film noir. Frustrated by his inability to crack down on betting gangs in the New York City borough of Brooklyn, the D.A. co-opts the entire graduating class of new police academy cadets to work undercover for him.

   One of these, older than the others, is an ex-Marine named Pete Harris (Darren McGavin), who in search of both glory and a promotion, lets his job take over his life so completely that in the end his obsession has destroyed it as well. Even though happily married at the beginning of the film, in order to work his way into the gang, he romances a new widow (Lil Polombo, played magnificently by Maggie Hayes) so well that she finds herself falling in love with him.

   Although filmed on a low budget, the story doesn’t pull any punches, except perhaps how far Pete is willing to go with his faux romance with Lil. The cast may consist entirely of low profile actors, but they are all professionals, and they know exactly what they are doing. And as in all good noir films, the action is both snappy and violent, and the photography makes good use of interesting angles as well as darkness and the light and the shadows in between. And the ending? Well nigh perfect.

   Nicely done, all around!

Added Later: Here’s Walter Albert’s take on this same movie.

         February 5, continued.

   Since Ronald Reagan was speaking on the nation’s economy tonight, the start of the next program was delayed so that I ended up missing only the first couple of minutes. Thanks, Ronnie.

   Unfortunately, I did miss Magnum, P.I. altogether.

  A LOVE LETTER TO JACK BENNY. NBC Special, 120 minutes. Jack Benny (archival footage), George Burns, Bob Hope, Johnny Carson (all as themselves). Director: Norman Abbot.

   Most of this two-hour special seemed to be taken from Benny’s various farewell specials which he continued to do after he stopped doing a weekly series. (And I’ve just realized why. Wasn’t his weekly series on CBS? Right. Up until 1964, Jack Benny’s entire TV career was on CBS. He switched to NBC for a Friday night series in 1964-65, and from then on only the specials for NBC.)

   I happen to think that Jack Benny very well may have been the funniest person to appear o radio. He was a huge success on television as well, but on TV he depended more on guest stars than he ever did on radio. and this show reflected that perfectly. Besides lengthy clips showing the hosts of this show in action with Jack, we also see Jack with Gregory Peck, Frank Sinatra, Dinah Shore, Dean Martin, John Wayne, Ronald Reagan (the second time tonight), and on and on.

   On radio, and early pre-color TV, The Jack Benny Show depended almost entirely on Benny, and particularly on the character of Benny his writers created for him, and on his “family” of regulars: Don Wilson, Rochester, Dennis Day, Phil Harris, and of course, Mary Livingston.

   Obviously on a TV special of this magnitude we can’t really expect to see more than 15 minutes of so of three men sitting around listening to the radio. But I do get the uneasy feeling that someone who had never heard of Jack Benny before tonight might have gone away from watching this show believing that, yeah, he was funny but (without experiencing the close familiarity of Benny’s character, built up over a long period of time on radio and early TV) not that funny.

LIA MATERA – The Smart Money. Laura Di Palma #1, Bantam, paperback original, July 1988. Ballantine, paperback, 1993.

   Lia Matera, who has previously created one radical female attorney in the Willa Janssen books, produces another in Laura DiPalma, the successful defender of Wallace Bean, the assassin of two Republican pro-war Senators, and in this book, the first victim.

   The second is the current wife of Laura’s ex-husband, and it all begins with some related plans for revenge. The plot is complicated, but it’s fairly clued. Even more important to the story is the strong vitality of the characters, almost disconcerting.

Bibliographic Notes:   Lia Matera was the author of seven Willa Janssen between 1987 and 1998, plus five with Laura DiPalma in the years 1988 to 1995. That’s 12 in nine years. No wonder back then there it felt like there was another one just out from her. Her most recent work of fiction was a non-series short story in the January-February issue of EQMM.