The title track from trombonist and big band leader Ryan Haines’ 2005 album New Horizons:

NIGHT OF THE JUGGLER. Columbia Pictures, 1980. James Brolin, Cliff Gorman, Richard Castellano, Linda Miller, Barton Heyman, Sully Boyar, Julie Carmen, Abby Bluestone, Dan Hedaya, Mandy Patinkin. Based on the novel by William P. McGivern. Director: Robert Butler.

   Night of the Juggler isn’t for the faint of heart. While it’s not particularly violent or gruesome, it’s exceedingly gritty and seedy. But that’s what you might expect from a psychological thriller/action film set in the decaying streets of Manhattan and the South Bronx circa 1980.

   James Brolin portrays Sean Boyd, a former NYC cop turned truck driver, as he pummels and punches his way through Times Square and gang-infested streets. All in order to save his teenage daughter from a psychopath who, believing she was the daughter of a wealthy real estate developer, has kidnapped her and is holding her for a million dollar ransom. Brolin’s physicality is on full display here, as he doesn’t so much as act as he becomes a force of nature in the vein of Burt Reynolds or Liam Neeson at their best.

   Brolin’s character is also a Virgil figure, taking the viewer on a journey into Gotham’s most hellish and hopeless spots. It’s a bleak Inferno, one populated by peep shows, violent cops, ruthless street toughs, and crumbling infrastructure. The scenes in the South Bronx are a stark reminder of what that part of the city looked like some three and a half decades ago. As far as Times Square is concerned, the one featured in the film looks nothing like the posh family-friendly Disneyland that it is today.

   As a crime thriller, Night of the Juggler is a perfectly adequate film, but nothing more. As a time capsule into a barely recognizable New York, this somewhat forgotten feature is captivating, if unnerving, to watch.

BRAD SOLOMON – The Gone Man. Random House, hardcover, 1977. Avon, paperback, 1980.

   When Charlie Quinn’s not working as a Hollywood extra, he gets his kicks a a private eye in the city of dreams, a town not primarily noted for soft, tender feelings.

   The restrictions of the private eye novel being what they are, it’s no surprise to find yourself reading yet another case involving the missing son of a wealthy father who finds that hes hired more help than he’d bargained for.

   But with non-stop dialogue as pungent and striking as this, it goes down quickly and smoothly one more time.

Rating: B plus.

Bibliographic Notes:   Brad Solomon wrote one other PI novel, The Open Shadow (1978), but Quinn, whom I liked as character, is not in it, nor did he ever show up again. Bill Crider reviews that second Solomon book here. He found a lot of good things to say about it, and as I recall, I did, too.

Another long time favorite song of my wife Judy:

THE VILLAIN. Columbia Pictures, 1979. Kirk Douglas, Ann-Margaret, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Ruth Buzzi, Jack Elam, Mel Tillis, Paul Lynde, Strother Martin, Foster Brooks. Directed by Hal Needham.

   The most amazing thing about this laughless painful attempt at a live action Road Runner cartoon is just how plodding and unimaginative it is. Kirk Douglas is oily Cactus Jack Slade, an inept outlaw whose horse, Whiskey, has all the brains, and the best lines. He is hired by crooked banker Jack Elam (his comedic talents wasted) to steal the money he has loaned to miner Strother Martin from Martin’s daughter Charming Jones (Ann-Margaret) so he can foreclose and take control of the mine. Arnold is Handsome Stranger, the inept and brainless hero Martin persuades to accompany his daughter.

   That is pretty much it. Kirk plays Wily E. Coyote to Arnold’s clueless Road Runner in an endless series of gags as Cactus Jack finds more and more imaginative ways to fail in his attempts to steal the money and assault Charming’s virtues, which are on display for everyone to admire, while Handsome and Charming go their wearying way never noticing.

   This could have been fun. It is not. Every gag is set up by long tracking shots, and drawn out to the point every non laugh is telegraphed. No, telegraphed, telephoned, emailed, snail mailed… this film has all the pace of a high school documentary on how a bill passes through Congress. Even the stunts are done in endless slo mo and dragged to their death by Needham’s static camera, and apparent belief that the audience needs them spelled out as if they were pre schoolers.

   Look, look, see he’s grabbing that branch, he’s leaning out over the canyon, the branch is going to break off, see, see…

   The one-liners, delivered by a top notch cast, are also done as if the actors were waiting for the laugh track to kick in. This film has more pregnant pauses than a maternity ward full of premature labor patients. Paul Lynde has a few decent lines but his weird accent as Native American chief Nervous Elk and the dead slow delivery every actor gives their lines kills them. Every line is delivered with that strange other worldly slowness we recall from friends in college so stoned they were experiencing out of body phenomena. It’s as if the sound track was out of sync with the film, or maybe had been put with the wrong film entirely.

   I will be honest, I downloaded this for free off YouTube, and it wasn’t worth the cost. I am grateful I paid nothing to see this dog’s long painful death.

   I will single out the horse playing Whiskey, Douglas’s steed. The horse is a fine comedic talent with impeccable timing and an easy grace on screen. Sadly he is defeated by the incredibly inept direction, acting, stunts, papier mache boulders (you can actually see the seams), laughless screenplay, and over all gormless stupidity of the proceedings. When Ann-Margaret’s considerable charms are on such obvious display and I still can’t keep my eyes on the screen, the film is indeed hopeless. This one is worse than that.

   The villain here is the studio for not burning all the copies of this deadly dull thud ear film. It’s escape into theaters surely qualifies as some sort of war crime.

CARTER BROWN – The Coffin Bird. Signet P4394, paperback original; 1st printing, October 1970. Cover by Robert McGinnis.

   Private eye Danny Boyd is in Hawaii when this 27th of some 39 recorded case files begins. In the hotel room next door is a drop dead red-haired would-be Australian heiress (see the front cover) who hires him to pose as her third fiancé. The problem she needs to have solved? The first two ended up dead before they made it to the altar.

   Were their deaths accidents, or is something else going on? The two of them, Danny Boyd and Marcia Burgess, head off to Australia to find out.

   Boyd manages to get beat up once quite severely after he begins to poke his inquisitive nose around, but he’s the kind of guy who gives as well as he gets. He also has his usual way with women in this one, not that the women have any dimension to them beyond that of a Playboy centerfold. They are described largely by the clothing they wear, and then in even more detail by the parts of their anatomy that are not covered by their clothing.

   Not that Brown doesn’t try to do more in terms of making at least one of his female characters interesting. It seems that the delectable Marcia needs to be spanked with a leather belt before they go to bed, and there never was any doubt that they would, but this seems rather more unwholesome than I’d prefer to read about.

   It’s not much of a case, when it comes down to it, and I suspect that it may be a long while before I tackle another of Danny Boyd’s capers. It ends with a bit of dime store pop-psychology that may impress others more than it did me, or perhaps even myself if the rest of the book before this wasn’t so immodestly uninteresting.

One of my wife Judy’s favorite songs:

BANG BANG! Fox STAR Studios, India, 2014. Hrithik Roshan, Katrina Kaif, Pavan Malhotra, Danny Denzongpa. Directed by Siddharth Anand.

   This 153 minute action comedy/musical is nothing less than a remake/ripoff of Knight and Day with Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz, save this one is actually funny, the leads attractive, the action cartoonish but dazzling, and the plot halfway fun.

   Indian Super Criminal Omar Zafar (Danny Denzonpa) escapes from a super prison, murdering Colonel Nanda, who captured him, and announcing he wants an Indian national criminal to steal the Kohinoor diamond, the centerpiece of the British Crown in the Tower of London.

   That is no more said than it is done. Meanwhile in Simla province in the mountains, Harleen Sahani works at her boring job as a receptionist and the Bank of Shimla (their spelling) and lives with her grandmother who would like her life to be more exciting, like meeting the dashing thief who stole the Kohinoor from the British.

   Meanwhile, also in Simla, Rajveer (Hrithik Roshan) is meeting with Zafar’s men to sell them the diamond. Of course they plan to double cross him, but then he was going to double cross them as well.

   There’s a fight, a chase, Rajveer meets Harleen cute, there is another fight, meanwhile the Internal Security Service gets onto Rajveer’s presence in Simla and shows up, and Harleen is suddenly sought by both sides for being involved with him.

   The first big musical production number, a staple of Bollywood films of all genres, takes place after Rajveer and Harleen meet cute and before the second big fight/shootout. And we are off, he drugs her and then saves her from the ISS, they end up on the run, she’s a handicap, then a help, they fall in love, she believes he lied to her, she double crosses him, she goes back home, Omar Zafar kidnaps her, Rajveer shows up to rescue her and we find out what has really been going on all along …

   But along the way it is nice to see the beautiful winter scenery in Simla, and Abu Dhabi and Prague are lovely to look at… It’s that kind of film. It doesn’t have a serious bone in its head. But it is noisy, silly, handsome, funny, goofy in a likable way, and not half as annoying as I found Cruise or Diaz’s smug self-satisfied screen personas in the basic same story.

   Truth is, save for the musical numbers, this works much better than Knight and Day as both a love story and an action film. In fact some of the action scenes are actually exciting and there is a little suspense, which is more than I could say for Cruise and Diaz.

   Yes, it goes on too long, and you will most likely take a snack or bathroom break or fast forward through those endless musical numbers, but the last half of the film is an action fan’s delight, and the cartoonish violence much more fun than anything in Knight and Day.

MACUMBA LOVE. United Artists, 1960. Walter Reed, Ziva Rodann, William Wellman Jr. and June Wilkinson. Written by Norman Graham. Produced and directed by Douglas Fowley.

   Persons of a certain age will remember Douglas Fowley as Doc Holliday in the “Wyatt Earp” teleseries. Going back a little further, others may recall his turn as the harried director in Singin’ in the Rain. To me, he’ll always be the snaky bad guy of countless B-westerns, but it’s a safe bet that damn few will think of him as the auteur of Macumba Love, and I suspect his ghost will walk a little easier for it.

   Sad to think that a film with such a promising title proves a waste of time but the sad fact is that Macumba Love takes all the elements of a good trashy film— bad script, bad acting, low budget, sex, torture and voodoo—only to squander them.

   The story has potential: Walter Reed plays an investigative writer looking into the local folkways (this was filmed in Brazil, as was Love Slaves of the Amazons) up against a hostile voodoo queen, diffident authorities, and a strange moodiness on the part of his Latino girlfriend (Ziva Rodann, appropriately named “Venus de Viasa” here.)

   When Reed’s newlywed daughter (June Wilkinson) arrives with her husband (William Wellman Jr.) in tow, Ziva starts putting the moves on the young man, an enterprise helped along considerably by her dresses, none of which seem to cover her quite adequately. Meanwhile, the natives stay up late pounding drums and dancing around a fire, zombie-corpses wash up on shore, veiled threats are tossed about, Voodoo trinkets passed around like re-gifted Christmas presents, and Ziva gets less and less subtle about her campaign of seduction.

   Unfortunately, that’s about it. Instead of a plot developing, tension rising or anyone actually doing anything, we just get more drums, dancing, threats, trinkets and teasing. And then a little more drums, threats, teasing, etc. And then a little more…. you get the idea? The discerning viewer, having seen and appreciated films like Voodoo Woman or The Disembodied has come to expect the drums-and-dancing scenes; indeed, they’re practically the sine qua non of the genre. But one can only sit through a certain amount of it before a certain familiarity begins to creep in, and in this film it doesn’t so much creep as gallop.

   Or take the scene where the vamp lures the newlywed hubby to her boudoir: She invites him with a palpably fake pretext, he agrees and… and we get interminable shots of them riding along the beach in a carriage! By the time they reach her den of iniquity we’ve pretty much lost interest.

   Macumba Love has B-Movie street creds aplenty: Walter Reed, starred in Flying Disc Man from Mars and was a featured player in Superman and the Mole Men. Ziva Rodann worked in Pharaoh’s Curse and Forty Guns, and whoever designed her outfits seems to have enjoyed his work. Likewise June Wilkinson, who appeared (in the best sense of the word) in that classic The Immoral Mr. Teas And William Wellman Jr. … well he gets a scene staked out bare-chested for torture, if your tastes run to that sort of thing.

   With all this going for it, Macumba Love should have set a bad-movie standard all its own, but alas, it’s just too damn slow and repetitious, smothering its tawdry promise in tedium, doubly disappointing because an actor of Douglas Fowley’s sleazy expertise should have known how to do it right.

A GUNMAN HAS ESCAPED. Monarch Films, UK, 1948. John Harvey, John Fitzgerald, Robert Cartland, Ernest Brightmore, Maria Charles, Jane Arden, Frank Hawkins. Scenario: John Gilling. Director: Richard M. Grey.

   Sometimes films have more to offer in terms of historical interest than any entertainment value they may or may not have. In all honesty, if anyone could call this late 40s low budget crime drama from England anything more than mediocre, I’d have to consider their critical judgment something between low and none.

   But consider the date. For most of the players in this movie, the war was barely over and this was the beginning of long careers for them, mostly in TV when that came along, but movies as well. In fact one of them, Maria Charles, who plays a gun moll named Goldie and whose first movie this was, is still alive at the age of 86 and was on TV as recently as 2009.

   The director (and producer) of A Gunman Has Escaped, Richard M. Grey, made one or two other films then disappeared, and so did his production company. Perhaps the most well known of the actors was Jane Arden, whose second film this was, later became a noted film director, actress, screenwriter, playwright, songwriter, and poet. (You can follow the link to a long Wikipedia entry on her.)

   In this movie, though, she plays an unmarried and very naive farmer’s daughter who falls in love with one of three gunmen who botched a jewelry robbery, killing a bystander in the process, and who are now on the lam, and who take refuge on her father’s farm.

   This is a very short film, well under an hour in running time, and although almost all the violence is offstage, quite a brutal one. The actors all know their lines, though, and although the story is nothing more than perfunctory — I’ve told you all there is to know — I never had the urge to turn it off while I was watching.