“PROMISED LAND.” The pilot episode of Spenser: For Hire. ABC-TV. Season 1, Episode 1. 20 September 1985. Robert Urich, Barbara Stock, Avery Brooks, Geoffrey Lewis, Donna Mitchell, Ron McLarty, Ruth Britt, Richard Jaeckel, Chuck Connors. Based on the novel by Robert B. Parker. Director: Lee H. Katzin.

   The fourth of the Spenser novels, Promised Land was published in 1976, and was awarded an Edgar for best novel by the Mystery Writers of America in 1977. Fans of the series will also know that this is the book that introduced Spenser’s friend Hawk to the series, although for a while we do not know at the beginning whether he is a friend or not.

   It has been a while since I read the book, some 38 years, and while I don’t remember the details of the printed version, I think this two-hour TV movie version (before the commercials were deleted) follows the story line fairly well.

   To wit: Spenser is hired by a real estate developer to find his wife, who after 20 years has left him to find herself. A lot of women were doing that back in 1976. Unfortunately her two new friends are not only interested in women’s liberation, they are also in robbing banks and using the money to buy guns for South American revolutionaries.

   Also unfortunately the real estate broker has a gunman named Hawk on his trail. It seems he owes a lot of money to a crime kingpin named King Powers (Chuck Connors), and somewhat coincidentally Spenser, the tough PI from Boston, has had a brief run-in with Powers in recent days.

   And that about sums it up. Robert Urich as Spenser is tough enough to play the part and also soft enough, but to my mind’s eye, he doesn’t look the part. I happen to think that Spenser looks like his creator, Robert B. Parker in his younger days, in exactly the same way that Mickey Spillane was the perfect person to play Mike Hammer.

   At first Barbara Stock looked maybe five years too young to play Susan Silverman, but by the movie’s end, as she semi-rejects Spenser’s offer of marriage, she had at least started to convince me. Perfectly cast, however, is Avery Brooks as Hawk. He was so good, in fact, that when the primary Spenser series ended in 1988, Brooks was cast as the leading character in another series in 1989 called A Man Called Hawk. (It didn’t last long, however, only 13 episodes.)

   There is a lot of pop psychology that is at the root of this movie, which I am not saying is a bad thing, but it is something you should be aware of if pop psychology is not your thing. The series was filmed on location in Boston, and with real snow on the ground. There are also a lot of close-ups, which occur at regular intervals when certain conversations are deemed more important than others.

   But there is plenty of action, too. My favorite line, though, comes when the wife of Spenser’s client asks him, after she has been rebuffed after making what are called in the vernacular “romantic advances.” She looks at his shelf of books and asks, Have you read all of these?

   His reply: Yeah, and boy are my lips tired.

FROM HEADQUARTERS. Warner Brothers, 1933. George Brent, Margaret Lindsay, Eugene Pallette, Robert Barrat, Henry O’Neill, Hugh Herbert, Dorothy Burgess, Theodore Newton, Hobart Cavanaugh, Ken Murray. Director: William Dieterle.

   That’s quite a cast for a short 64-minute pre-Code detective story, with a director who may not have been known very well back in 1933 but one who, as you know full well, went on to much bigger and better things.

   And it’s quite a mixture. It starts out in near documentary fashion, as if to show the viewer of that era exactly what goes on behind the scenes of a full-fledged murder investigation by a big city police department, complete with fingerprinting, mugshots, line-ups, ballistics testing, ultraviolet rays (to read letters written in invisible ink).

   It’s also a very complicated murder mystery. What at first is assumed to have been a suicide, that of an aging Broadway playboy, turns out to be murder inside, with all kinds of people, it is soon discovered, coming in and out of his apartment all night long.

   It also turns out that the victim was not a very nice man, so almost everyone that was in and out of his apartment is also immediately a suspect.

   It’s also, alas, a comedy, at least in part, since in 1933 almost every detective puzzle mystery has to has lot of humorous shtick — such as a bail bondsman who is constantly walking up and down the halls of police headquarters looking for clients, and a police lab scientist just itching to get his hands on a lovely case of murder. Plus Eugene Pallette as the bullfrog-voiced and bull-headed police sergeant second in command of the case who’s never right about anything.

   There is a bit of romance in the story as well, but after all of the above, it’s very nearly squeezed out: the girl who is the first suspect on the list (Margaret Lindsay) is also the former girl friend of the police lieutenant in charge of the case.

   But all in all, I had a good time with this one, and if you’re fond of movies from this era, I’m sure you will too.

Editorial Comment:   If this review sounds to you as déjà vu all over again, you’re right. David Vineyard reviewed this same movie less than a week ago. Here’s the link. In the comments you will notice that I thought the movie sounded familiar. I did some hunting and I found this old review I wrote about ten years ago after seeing it on a home video tape from TCM. Never one to waste any words I’ve written, well what you see is the result. (I even used the exact same images.)

MAN OF THE WORLD. Paramount Pictures, 1931. William Powell, Carole Lombard, Wynne Gibson, Lawrence Gray, Guy Kibbee, George Chandler. Directors: Richard Wallace & Edward Goodman (the latter uncredited).

   For a film with a script written by Herman J. Mankiewicz, Man of the World is overall surprisingly bland. That’s not to say that William Powell isn’t a fine actor or that Carole Lombard isn’t dazzling; it’s just that the movie just sort of plods along, without enough tension to keep the viewer fully engaged with the story. True, there’s a surprisingly (spoiler alert) downbeat ending and some rather seedy insinuations about American expatriate life in the City of Lights, but there’s just not enough verbal sparring, let along physical action, to make this programmer anything other than an average pre-Code melodrama.

   Powell portrays Michael Trevor, a former newspaperman living as an expatriate in Paris. He tells everyone he’s an aspiring novelist, but had his run of hard luck and is really part of a small blackmailing ring. They target Americans living and working in France. In order to keep their names out of a scandal sheet that Trevor’s associates run, wealthy Americans end up forking over money to Trevor as a means of guarding their reputations. Little do they know that Trevor himself is the leader of the blackmailers and not the white knight he presents himself to be.

   Things change for Trevor when he falls for the niece of one of his targets, the lovely Mary Kendall (Lombard). He’s then forced to choose between his loyalty to his criminal associates, one of whom is his ex-lover and for his true affection for Mary. Set in the backdrop of early 1930s Paris, Man of the World is neither particularly comic nor romantic. It’s more of a character study of a lonely man who, no matter where he goes, finds he can’t escape what his life has become.

       I’m a few days late on this particular post. I hope you don’t mind:

FRANK GRUBER – The Gold Gap. E. P. Dutton, hardcover, 1968. Pyramid N2558, paperback, October 1971.

   Frank Gruber was a prolific pulp writer in the 30s who went full force with the future of publishing in the 40s, spending more and more of his time at the typewriter churning out hardcover novels, both mysteries and westerns, beginning with Peace Marshal, a western, in 1939, followed by The French Key, a Johnny Fletcher and Sam Cragg mystery, in 1940.

   As time went on, he also became a movie and TV screenwriter, creating in fact (according to Wikipedia) three TV series: Tales of Wells Fargo, The Texan and Shotgun Slade.

   I’ve never been a big fan of his writing, though, and while I give his books a try every once in a while, I often end up disappointed, more often than not. The Gold Gap came toward the end of his career, and while it has a few moments, they come too far and in between. As a pulp fiction writer, a Hammett or Chandler, Gruber was not, nor does he seem to have improved as time went on.

   Or in other words, tight and taut his fiction wasn’t. In the case at hand, the plot meanders all over the place until it reaches an ending that I defy anyone to explain, or care. There are two also long accounts of pool games in progress, a game better watched in person than read about in a tale in which they have no purpose being there in the first place.

   The story has something to do with a fortune in gold coins being found in Dien Bien Phu in 1954 by a ragtag group of three French Legionnaires. That’s the prologue. The tale itself begins in 1967, thirteen years later, in Beverly Hills with an ex-Navy commander named Sargent, a recent escapee from the Viet Cong, being treated to a free suit by a Hong Kong tailor. Then, with no qualifications for the job whatsoever, he is hired by a multi-millionaire to investigate the background of the girl he is engaged to marry. There has to be a catch, the reader thinks. Who knows what Sargent thinks. For a long while, irrelevant to the plot, he seems to take the job seriously.

   Add to the mix another fellow who says he works for the CIA and manages to offer Sargent taxi rides at opportune times, and in other hands, you would have the beginnings of what sounds like a decent tale. But none of the characters comes to life, and à propos de rien Sargent suddenly has the deftness with a pool cue to beat the champion of Cleveland’s upper society at the game, as described above. A poorly planned attempt to rescue the girl involved, otherwise a complete non-entity, ends the book with a dull fizz.

From jazz singer Chris McNulty’s 2005 album Dance Delicioso, a song written by Annie Lennox:

IAN FLEMING – Goldfinger. Jonathan Cape, UK, hardcover, 1959. Macmillan, US, hardcover, 1959. Signet S1822, US, paperback, June 1960. Reprinted many many times.

GOLDFINGER. United Artists, 1964. Sean Connery, Gert Frobe, Honor Blackman, Shirley Eaton, Tania Mallet, Harold Sakata, Bernard Lee and Lois Maxwell. Screenplay by Richard Maibaum and Paul Dehn, based on the novel by Ian Fleming. Directed by Guy Hamilton.

   These days it’s hard to convey to younger people just how big this movie was back in 1964. Of course, these days it’s hard to convey much of anything to younger people, but I digress…

   Back in the 1960s, Doctor No was a success, and From Russia with Love was a hit, but Goldfinger was a Blockbuster that played for months in the first-run houses and for weeks at the nabes. It led to imitations, spoofs, television rip-offs (some quite good), magazines, paperbacks, merchandising that ran all the way from kiddie toys to after shave, and a lot of teenage boys spending hours before the mirror practicing how to raise one eyebrow.

   Looking back almost sixty years after it was written, Ian Fleming’s novel seems closer to the pulps of the 1920s and ‘30s than to the 1960s of my childhood and young adultery, what with the diabolical plot, fiendish villain and ethnic minions, not to mention a dauntless hero daring death and danger daily. Fleming merely adds a bit of Esquire-style snobbery and a dollop of sex — tame by today’s standards, but then just about everything is tame by today’s standards.

   I have to say that Fleming’s prose is smooth and seductive, his action scenes terse and exciting, and his characters well-observed and colorful — not a bit believable, but suited to this pulp-story sort of thing quite nicely. I should add though that Fleming/Bond’s views on homosexuality seem not so much offensive as laughable; Bond attributes it to women getting the vote, and lesbian Pussy Galore falls into his arms sighing “I never met a real man before!” One has to wonder if Fleming was writing this with a straight face.

   In terms of plot, Goldfinger follows the path Fleming had been treading since Dr. No: As soon as Bond and the villain become aware of each other, a certain uneasy tension arises. There are some initial skirmishes, Bond gets captured and taken to the heart of the villain’s operation where he blows everything up and gets the girl. The metaphor of foreplay, penetration and explosion is so clear that again I have to wonder about the look on Fleming’s face as he pounded this out.

   The movie version stays fairly close to the book (they did that with the early ones) jazzing up the action scenes just a bit and injecting cinematic razz-ma- tazz wherever Fleming strayed into understatement. Of course, the Bond films have always made a point of perching on the cutting edge of fashion, and for this reason they look quite dated now, and the suits, cars and furniture seem to cry out “Howard Johnson’s!”

   Amid the frumpiness of all this, young Sean Connery somehow still radiates the kind of sex appeal one used to see in Gable, Flynn and Walter Albert; I don’t know if I’d turn for him, but I can see where Pussy Galore might. And I have to say the Ken Adam sets still pack a dazzle. Watching Bond battle Odd-Job in the glittering innards of Fort Knox took me right back to what are commonly known as Those Thrilling Days of Yesteryear.

   In the wisdom of my advancing years, however, I had trouble with one scene in particular. It’s not a major plot element but I’ll throw in a SPOILER ALERT!! In case anyone out there hasn’t seen it:

   Goldfinger summons all the big-wig crime bosses to his lair, explains his plot to them (while a hidden Bond takes copious notes) lures one to an early end, then kills them all. So if he was going to kill them, why did he do the lecture-and-side-show first? Was it all for Bond’s benefit? Or for the viewer? And could you even get away with naming a woman character “Pussy” these days?

   What are your thoughts?

FROM HEADQUARTERS. Warner Brothers, 1933. George Brent, Margaret Lindsay, Eugene Pallette, Robert Barratt, Hugh Herbert, Henry O’Neill, Hobart Cavanaugh, Ken Murray, Murray Kinnell, Kenneth Thompson Screenplay by Peter Milne & Robert N. Lee (his story). Director: William Dieterle.

   From Headquarters is a fast paced murder mystery taking place at police headquarters where Lt. Jim Stevens (George Brent) is investigating the murder of Broadway playboy Gordon Bates (Kenneth Thompson), who was shot with one of the antique guns in his collection. Complicating things is the fact Stevens is in love with Lou Winton (Margaret Lindsay), who overthrew him for Bates, and her younger brother is a suspect.

   What makes this stand out, aside from the players and director, is that there is an actual decent mystery here with well-placed red herrings, actual scientific detection, solid police work, and intelligent policemen, even Sgt. Boggs (Eugene Pallette, Sgt. Heath from the Philo Vance films), who may jump to a few conclusions but is no dummy.

   Suspects include the girl and her brother, the butler Horton (Murray Kinnell), safecracker Muggs Manton (Hobart Cavanaugh), and antiques collector Anderzian (Robert Barratt), with detection by Stevens and Boggs and Inspector Donnelly (Henry O’Neill) as well as various police technicians. Ken Murray, best known to most of us for his color home movies of Hollywood celebrities is a wise-cracking reporter, and Hugh Herbert an annoying bail bondsman with sharp eyes.

   The investigation takes place over a single day and reaches its climax with a murder in police headquarters itself, but along the way each suspect gets his or her moment, the focus twists and turns as false leads and new evidence emerge, and if the ending isn’t exactly a surprise (in fact it is literally the oldest cliche in the book) it is all so well handled and played you will likely not care.

   Frankly this one is better written and thought out with a better plot than most so called mysteries on television today, the police behaving as professionals, competent even when they aren’t terribly smart. With crisp pacing, decent writing, sharp direction, and good performances this little film is smarter and a better mystery than many of its better known cousins.

   I’ll even go so far as to say I don’t think you would have been unhappy if you had read it in a book, and even many film mysteries based on books can’t make that claim.

THE MAN FROM LARAMIE. Columbia Pictures, 1955. James Stewart, Arthur Kennedy, Donald Crisp, Cathy O’Donnell, Alex Nicol, Aline MacMahon, Wallace Ford, Jack Elam. Based on the novel by T. T. Flynn (Dell, paperback original, 1954). Director: Anthony Mann.

   The final collaboration between Anthony Mann and James Stewart, the gritty and taut Western The Man from Laramie has a lot to recommend it. Filmed on location in New Mexico in CinemaScope (one of the first Westerns to do so), the film has some absolutely beautiful Southwestern scenery.

   So much so that, despite the Shakespearean drama unfolding before your very eyes, you nevertheless are attuned to the relative insignificance of man’s petty foibles in the midst of Nature’s bountiful horizons and mountains. Be it menacing cliffs or a dusty frontier town, Mann captures the color, mood, and the very spirit of the myriad outdoor settings.

   Indeed, the crisp and memorable visual aspect of the film overshadows what is essentially a rather quotidian Western revenge story. Stewart, more than capable of playing a stoic man with torrents of rage gurgling under an outwardly jovial demeanor, is really very good. Even those who don’t particularly find Stewart to be on the same level as Wayne and Scott will find much to appreciate here.

   He portrays Will Lockhart, a former Army captain from Laramie, Wyoming, who is determined to find the man he holds indirectly responsible for his brother’s death at the hands of Apaches. This is what brings him to Coronado, a small dusty border town with a significant Pueblo Indian presence.

   It is here that he gets caught up not only in his own psychological desire for revenge, but also enmeshed in a range feud between the local power broker and cattle baron, Alec Waggoner (Donald Crisp) and local holdout, Kate Canady (Aline MacMahon). Complicating matters further is a menacing drunk portrayed by Jack Elam; Waggoner’s spoiled and violent son, Dave (Alex Nicol); and Waggoner’s devious foreman, Vic (Arthur Kennedy) who is set to be married to Waggoner’s niece, Barbara (Cathy O’Donnell). The plot veers from Greek tragedy to soap opera, never exactly finding a comfortable middle ground.

   But it’s not really the plot that matters in The Man from Laramie as much as the visual means by which Mann tells a story of a lone man set out for revenge in the midst of an expansive Western landscape. There are some extremely effective moments of violent retribution and menace. One gets the sense that Mann was trying very hard to say something about what happens when one gets the chance to peek behind the façade of self-made men.

   It’s also as if all that the frenetic activity that transpires in the movie has happened before and will happen again, all petty squabbles taking place in the shadows of mountains that will outlast the different human civilizations that will come and go in their majestic presence.
   

  MALCOLM DOUGLAS – Murder Comes Calling. Gold Medal 776, paperback original; 1st printing, June 1958. Reprinted as Night of the Horns under the author’s real name, Douglas Sanderson (Stark House Press, softcover, 2015), paired with Cry Wolfram, originally published in the US as Mark it for Murder (Avon, paperback, 1959) and in the UK under this title. TV adaptation: An episode of the anthology series Detective, UK, BBC-One, 25 May 1964 (Season 1, Episode 9), as “Night of the Horns.”

   I’ve had this book for over 50 years without ever reading it. Shame on me. It’s a noir novel that starts slowly but once you hit page 40 or so, it’s non-stop action from that point on until an hour or so later when you’re finally able to put the book down..

   The story is told by Bob Race, formerly of the D.A.’s office but now trying to make a living as a defense attorney on his own, struggling even though his father-in-law is the richest person in town. Even after two years Race is madly in love with his wife Eve, but he’s only getting by, but he’s well-liked and getting his name known by working on the behalf of not-very-well-to-do defendants whom he’s convinced are innocent.

   Which is how he gets caught in this book’s worth of whirlpool of events that turns his life upside down and sideways at the same time, completely, utterly and forever. One of his regular clients is the town gangster, who offers Race a job, that of taking delivery of a single suitcase, contents unknown, for a short period of time. Race, smelling a rat, refuses, but Kresnik knows how Race helped get his latest defendant off. Although the end was right, the means was a small gift of money to someone he shouldn’t have.

   At this point Race is done for, although not without a fight. But wait, there’s more. The wife of his downstairs neighbor suggests that Eve is not the wholesome wife Race has always thought her to be. Can she be believed? Several murders later, during and following a madcap trip to Mexico and back, with the surprise assistance of an old girl friend, he’s much the worse for wear, he survives, but barely.

   Once read, this is one you may not forget. I think all the pieces fit together, but while you’re turning the pages, probably as fast as you can, you aren’t likely to even be thinking about that. It’s survival that’s at stake, and that’s all.