A NIGHT IN CASABLANCA. United Artists, 1946. Groucho Marx, Harpo Marx, Chico Marx, Charles Drake, Lois Collier, Sig Ruman. Director: Archie Mayo.

   One of the later entries in the Marx Brothers film catalogue and a movie supposed made in order to help Chico Marx pay off his gambling debts, A Night in Casablanca was originally imagined to be a satire of Warner Brothers’ Casablanca (1942), the now classic film starring Humphrey Bogart. Aside from the setting and a Nazi connection, there isn’t all that much that binds these two films together. And to be perfectly honest, this Marx Brothers entry is nowhere near as appreciated as the comedians’ earlier films from the 1930s.

   Yet, it remains a worth a look for a few reasons. First of all, there are definitely some good verbal quips from Groucho, and Harpo shines as a mute who must convey his thoughts via music and mime. [See comment #3.] And at the end of the day, even a lesser Marx Brothers film with its zany antics and physical comedy is often better than a lot of the comedies that are produced and released into theaters today.

   For me personally, what made A Night in Casablanca worth watching was the fact that an escaped Nazi was the film’s antagonist. It was only one year since the Second World War had ended, and Hollywood had already discovered the allure of stories involving Nazis on the run and the notion of hidden Nazi loot and treasure.

   Unlike two other movies from the same year that featured Nazis running from their past – Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious (reviewed here) and Orson Welles’s The Stranger (reviewed here) – the Marx Brothers film plays the topic for laughs. Heinrich Stubel (Sig Ruman), the villain here, is more of a stereotypical and buffoonish Teutonic figure than either evil incarnate or an amoral opportunist. But the fact that he is supposed to be someone to root against is transparent.

   Here also is something I noticed and I thought I would mention. Groucho’s character, a hotel manager who helps bring Stubel to justice, is named Ronald Kornblow. Ignore the misspelling and you will notice it’s a very stereotypical German-Jewish name. I have to wonder if this was not deliberate, given the Marx Brothers’ own German-Jewish and Alsatian-Jewish origins.

From Atlanta-based jazz vocalist Virginia Schenck’s second album, Interior Notions:

DEATH IN PARADISE “Murder on the Honore Express.” BBC, UK. 10 January 2019 (Season 8, Episode 1). Ardal O’Hanlon (DI Jack Mooney), Joséphine Jobert (DS Florence Cassell), Don Warrington (Commissioner Selwyn Patterson), Tobi Bakare (Officer J. P. Hooper). Created by Robert Thorogood. Director: Paul Logue.

   Death in Paradise is a comedy-mystery set on the fictional Caribbean island of Saint Marie. The leading characters have changed over the years, but the cast as listed above make up the staff of the police department as of the beginning of the eighth season. (A ninth and tenth season have already been announced.)

   And as far as traditional mysteries are concerned, this one is as good as episodic TV can get. It isn’t quite a “locked room” mystery, but it is a murder such that there is no possible way for anyone to committed it. When a bus makes its final stop, a man sitting at the far back is found stabbed to death. None of the other passengers moved from their seat, and no could have gotten on without one of them noticing.

   The small police force are stopped, but that does not stop hem from following up all the leads they can. Quite curiously, though, all of the passengers are discovered to have motives, including the driver.

   Adding to the viewer’s enjoyment of following the investigation along is the humorous byplay between the main characters, with a new one joining the team next week. Saint Marie may be dangerous place to live for some, but it certainly provides a colorful backdrop to the stories. (The series is filmed in Guadeloupe.)

   This the only episode of any season of the series I’ve seen so far. I probably shouldn’t started with Season Eight. I accomplished that only by mistake. What watching the first episode of this most recent season did do, though, was to convince me to go way back to the beginning. I have a lot of catching up to do!

   Based on the novel by Ross Thomas, Briarpatch, the TV series, will debut on the USA Network in February.

   “Rosario Dawson stars as a determined investigator returning to her hometown to investigate the explosive murder of her sister. From mysterious deaths and corruption, to occasional car explosions and zoo animals on the loose, it’s a wild ride through the town of Saint Disgrace.”

KAREN A. ROMANKO – Women of Science Fiction and Fantasy Television: An Encyclopedia of 400 Characters and 200 Shows, 1950-2016. McFarland, softcover, October 2019.

   Karen A. Romanko’s previous book, Television’s Female Spies and Crimefighters (McFarland, 2016) was noted here soon after it was published. As was the case for that book, the title should tell everyone at once what this one’s about, and I imagine the subject matter is of at least some interest to you all.

   As before, both the characters and the shows they were on are listed alphabetically, but interspersed one with the other. For example, the first profile entry is for Devon Adair, who appeared on the TV series Earth-2, followed by Bo Adams (of Believe), then by The Addams Family, with a lengthy overview of the series itself, which ran for two seasons on ABC, 1964-1966.

   The final two entries are for Young Blades, a series which ran for 13 episodes in 2005, and for Zaan, the blue-skinned alien priestess on Farscape.

   Following the main portion of the book is a listing of all the series which did not make the cut, but for which I for one could often make strong cases for inclusion. On the other hand, I did not write the book! An example of just one, however, is The Dead Zone, which lasted for five seasons, but since I do not recall any women in leading roles, I will concede the point.

   One character and series that is included, but which I question is Cinnamon Carter of Mission: Impossible fame. Many of team’s exploits were far-fetched, but that does not mean they were fantasy, either.

   Of special note is the historical overview at the front of book, putting into context many of the more important female heroes included in the book, beginning with Tonga and Carol Carlisle (of Space Patrol) and concluding with Peggy Carter, the starring character of her very own series, Agent Carter.

   And since the cutoff for inclusion this time around was 2016, perhaps it is not too early to ask for a revised and expanded edition in a few years or so. I’d buy it!

JOSEPH CONRAD – Lord Jim. William Blackwood & Sons, UK, hardcover, 1900. Previously serialized in Blackwood’s Magazine, October 1899 to November 1900. Film adaptations: Lord Jim (1925), directed by Victor Fleming; and Lord Jim (1965), directed by Richard Brooks and starring Peter O’Toole as Jim. Comic Book: Classics Illustrated #136, 1947?. Art by George Evans.

   Sometime last April, I found myself unaccountably seized by a compulsion to read a Great Novel: Something on the order of Faulkner, James or Kesey. I thought also, though, that I might try a foray into High Adventure, so I ended up ploughing through Joseph Conrad’s turn-of-the Century-epic, Lord Jim.

   This entry is hardly the place to launch a critique into waters already charted, plumbed, tested and trolled to depletion by Academic Analyzers worthy, weighty and wise. And in fact, when I dissect the novel mentally, I find myself doing it in terms of old paperbacks and B-Movies. I should just say here that I was not sleeping very much or very well then, but as I tossed in bed, Lord Jim, with its dense prose and compelling story, was the perfect anodyne on a dark, restless night.

   Conrad’s prose is indeed tangled. At one point he takes nearly a paragraph to liken moonlight to sunshine, only to produce a metaphor so goldbergesque that by the time he’s though crafting it, it can but lie there on the page, whirring and wheezing to minuscule effect. His narrative style is likewise more roundabout than linear, with characters and events flashing forward and back through time with an abandon that recalls Marcel Proust and Phillip K. Dick in equal measure.

   Those characters and events, however, are inspired and wrought with nothing less than Pure Genius. The dramatis personae who strut on and off stage in Lord Jim are a colorful lot (low-brow that I am, I kept thinking of the thumbnail-sketch heroes and villains who keep appearing and disappearing in Winchester ’73.) evoked in wrenching, vivid, pulp-paper splendor that will stay with me long after Time has healed the wounds of Conrad’s primeval syntax. And the novel’s big set-pieces – the sinking of the Patna, the native revolts, the pirate siege — are magnificently foreshadowed, then packed word-for-word with all the excitement of a Talbot Mundy or H. Rider Haggard.

   Beyond all this, though, there is the haunting power of Conrad’s tale, with a moral in it somewhere, somehow, as complex and compelling as his prose. The notion of a man driven by a personal code somehow hinged on — yet apart from — the opinions of those around him, destroyed ignominiously by a world tragically unworthy of him, is one that will color the way I see things for some time. Which, to my way of thinking, is the measure of a Great Novel.

   By the way, do not, under any circumstances, try to watch the film of the same name Richard Brooks made back in 1966. No, I don’t care how cute Peter O’Toole was in those days — don’t watch it! Even at his least pretentious (The Professionals, Bite the Bullet) Brooks has a stultifying tendency to say what the thinks when he ought to show how he feels. Given the temptation of filming a Really Important Novel, he went after it like Ahab after the Whale — and ended up swallowing it whole.

THE INVISIBLES “Pilot” (Season 1, Episode 1). 01 May 2008. BBC, 60 min. Anthony Head, Warren Clarke, Dean Lennox Kelly, Jenny Agutter, Mina Anwar, Paul Barber, Emily Head, Darren Tighe. Creator/screenplay: William Ivory. Director: William Sinclair.

   The Invisibles was a short-lived British comedy-mystery series that consisted of six episodes and was never renewed. The episodes do not seem to have titles, so I’m calling this first one the pilot.

   And as the pilot it does a first rate job of establishing the characters and setting extremely well. Maurice Riley (Anthony Head) and Syd Woolsey (Warren Clarke) are two of three members of a gang of burglars, who retired when the third of them died. They were called “The Invisibles” by the press due to the fact that in all of the years they were in working together, they were never caught.

   Now some 15 years later, bored to death of easy living, the two remaining members find themselves in need to go back to work. Syd’s son is in a jam, moneywise, and against Maurice’s wife’s strict orders, back to their black-clothed clandestine activities they go.

   Things do not go well at first. Their skills are rusty, and security devices have been updated greatly during their years of retirement. But along the way their path leads them to the third member’s son (or he finds them), and at the end of the first episode they are ready to tackle the world in full gear again.

   Even in this first episode the two main characters have great chemistry together. It is as if they really were two mates who have known each other for a long time. The humor in that is raised by both their camaraderie and their struggles to get themselves in shape to work again is largely quiet and unforced, but none the less effective for all that.

   The complete series is available both on DVD and streaming on Acorn TV.

GEORGE P. PELECANOS – Down by the River Where the Dead Men Go. Nick Stefanos #3. St. Martin’s, hardcover, 1995. Back Bay Books, trade paperback,July 2011.

   I started the last Stefanos book, Shoedog, but couldn’t get into it and gave up. I’d forgotten why, though, so I gave this one a shot because of the title.

   Nick Stefanos is a PI and pat-time bartender in Washington, DC, He’s an alcoholic, too. One night he ends up down by the river at the end of M Street, passed out in the weeds. He comes to early the next morning,just enough and in time to hear a black man and a white man execute someone, who turns out to be a young black man.

   It’s not something he can forget or let alone, and he begins a journey that ends with more death, and leaves a trail of empty bottles and shattered lies.

   A few things come quickly about this one. First, it’s a great title. Second, I don’t like “heroes” who are as generally screwed up in the head as Stefanos is. Third, Pelecanos writes a mean, effective, dark brand of prose.

   All of which says, I guess, that he is a very good writer, but I don’t like what and who he writes about. I got awfully tit=red of the gulp-by-gulp, bottle-by-bottle accounts of Stefanos’s drinking, and of his repeated pissing in the street.

   I never had much of a taste for noir fiction, and if this isn’t that, it’s close. Nasty stuff, well done, and I think I’ll pass on the next course, thank you very much.

      The Nick Stefanos series —

A Firing Offens.St. Martin’s 1992.
Nick’s Trip.St. Martin’s 1993.
Down by the River Where the Dead Men Go. St. Martin’s 1995.
The Big Blowdown. St. Martin’s 1996. (*)
King Suckerman. Little 1997. (*)
The Sweet Forever (1998) (*)
Shame the Devil. Dennis McMillan 1999.
Soul Circus (2003) (*)
Hard Revolution (2004) (*)

   (*) May be only cameo appearances.

SEAN CHERCOVER – Big City Bad Blood. Ray Dudgeon #1. William Morrow, hardcover, January 2007. Harper, paperback, March 2008.

   The big city that the title of this first novel refers to is Chicago, and in it, just doing his job, PI Ray Dudgeon finds himself up against the Outfit — or better stated, caught in the crosshairs between two factions of the same.

   His client is a mild-mannered locations scout from Hollywood, who seems to have stumbled across a rental scam that so far has cost the lives of several of the inhabitants of a building he was looking at. His life threatened, want he needs to do is have Dudgeon act as his door-to-studio bodyguard.

   And Ray is more than tough enough to handle the job, but then again he doesn’t know ahead of time what he’s up against. Parts of this book are as brutal and hardboiled as they come, and deciding to stay with the case anyway, Ray also manages to lose the love of his life.

   I enjoyed the book, but as in most cases in which a PI is hired as a bodyguard, there is next to no detective work involved. I really don’t care for books in which the primary subject matter consists of gangsters, the Mob, or hoodlums in general, but if you do, then you may like this book even more than I did. (I also am no big fan of police procedurals any more, either. Fair is fair, I’d say.)

            —

Bibliograhic Notes:   Awards and award nominations for this book:

2008 Shamus Award for Best First Novel
Finalist 2008 Anthony Award for Best First Novel
Finalist 2008 Arthur Ellis Award for Best First Novel
Finalist 2008 Barry Award for Best First Novel
Finalist 2008 Thriller Award for Best First Novel

   There has been one followup novel in the series, that being Trigger City (2008), and several novelettes and short stories which either Dudgeon has appeared or some of the people he knows have lead roles in.

THOMAS CHASTAIN – Vital Statistics. J. T. Spanner #2. Times Books, hardcover, 1977. No paperback edition.

   Relatively few private eye novels appear any moe, and those that do often seem to have their existence pend soley on minor variations from the standard format. This one’s told in present tense, for example, but one soon learns to ignore that. The only other distinguishable feature is that J. T. Spanner’s office help consists of his two ex-wives, with both of whom he maintains most cordial relations.

   The case itself concerns a missing stewardess and the mutilated body of an unidentified young woman. Are they the same? The underlying background and mood are provided by the living entity called New York City, the provider as well of a myriad interesting facts and figures.

   Although nothing new really develops, it is a smooth and convincing effort, the only jarring moment coming with a distastefully violent means of forcing a final confession.

Bibliographic Notes: Spanner’s earlier case was entitled Spanner (Mason/Charter, 1977). There was not a third. Among his other crime novels, Chastain wrote five books about Max Kauffman, a Deputy Chief Inspector of the N.Y.P.D, including an appearance in the first Spanner book, and two additional cases for Perry Mason, written after the passing of Erle Stanley Gardner.