THE PLAYER. NBC, 2015; Thursdays, 10pm-11pm. Kung Fu Monkey Productions and David Entertainment in association with Sony Pictures Television. Cast: Philip Winchester, Wesley Snipes, Charity Wakefield, Damon Gupton. Created by John Rogers and John Fox. Executive Producers: John Rogers, John Zinman, Patrick Massett, John Davis, and John Fox.

   It is the new fall TV season, and time for new series to be judged. Some new series will join our list of series we watch every week, more new series will be rejected and forgotten. While not the worse of the new series this season (Fox’s Minority Report is the worse) The Player shows all the signs of a doomed series. Rejected by critics and viewers alike, a strange premise ineptly handled, The Player is one to watch soon before it is gone forever.

   The premise of The Player is that there is a secret society of the world’s very rich and powerful that has set up a system where they bet on crime. Created in America around the turn of the 20th Century, the game grew popular with the ruthless rich and powerful of the era. Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage created the first computer to help with the game and Thomas Edison got it to work. The game went global and quickly was out of control and started WWI. To regain control of the game the House was created. The House is run by the Pitboss who sets up the game, the Dealer who monitors the game and offers assistance to the final employee of the House –The Player.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikm12VQNIS8

   But this is NBC, a major free network, so it should come as no surprise that a premise open to thought-provoking discussions on the immorality of the bored rich gambling on the outcome of crimes would instead be a mindless fast pace violent implausible immortal action TV series with the inability to avoid any TV cliché ever written.

   The next clip tells us more about the people and their role in the game:

   The Player is Alex Kane, a former special op with a dark past, now living in Las Vegas as the World’s Greatest Security consultant. Philip Winchester (Strike Back) does what he can with his limited range to play this standard issue TV action hero.

   In the type of creative thinking typical for this series Alex’s best friend is Police Detective Cal Brown (Damon Gupton) who worries about his friend and is always the cop in charge when Alex destroys part of the city fighting bad guys. Alex’s love of his life is his ex-wife Virginia Lee (Daisy Betts). They love each other very much and have finally decided to get back together. That night while our hero and ex celebrate in bed bad guys attack and she is killed. But this is modern comic book inspired fiction, so is she really dead?

   Meanwhile at the House is the Pitboss Mr. Johnson played by Wesley Snipes (Blade) in not his best performance. Mr. Johnson is an evil soulless man who believes in blackmail, murder, whatever it takes to serve the House. He also believes in tough love when dealing with The Player.

   The Dealer is the blonde beauty Cassandra King. Charity Wakefield (Mockingbird Lane) has shown she is capable of portraying the series most conflicted character. She is aware of the immorality of the game but in some of TV’s lamest dumb-down dialog tries to convince Alex that they are doing good, saving the victims of crimes enjoyed by the evil rich gamblers.

   The series features more property destruction than a Marvel’s superhero movie, more pointless car chases and stunts than a Bond movie and a believability level that wouldn’t convince a 12 year old. The suspense is weaken by the number of deus ex machina devices used – from an all knowing computer named ADA that Cassandra can use to get Alex out of any jam to Johnson’s ability to call in a get out jail card whenever the cops get too close.

   You can view the pilot episode for free at iTunes. This is just one of many TV series that first episode can be downloaded for free at iTunes.

   The odds are against The Player. While handicapped by a bad time slot it has a strong lead-in (Blacklist). How much of the Blacklist audience it loses will tip you off on its future. Personally, I would bet The Player doesn’t survive to see January.

   
“The Gladiators.” An episode of Have Gun – Will Travel, 19 March 1960. (Season 3, Episode 27.) Richard Boone. Guest Stars: Paul Cavanaugh, Dolores Donlon and James Coburn as Bill Sledge. Teleplay: Robert C. Dennis. Series created by Herb Maddow and Sam Rolfe. Directed by Alvin Ganzer.

   Have Gun – Will Travel was seldom just an ordinary western, and on occasion barely a western at all, as in this episode which opens in San Francisco at our hero Paladin’s (Richard Boone) rooms in the Carleton Hotel where he is receiving an attractive young lady, Miss Alison Windrom (Dolores Donlon) of New Orleans, with seduction on his mind, as evidenced by the champagne that accompanies her to the room and his lounging jacket.

   Alas for our tarnished knight, Miss Windrom is concerned for poor Daddy back home (veteran actor Paul Cavanaugh), who has accepted a challenge to a duel:

      â€œHe’s a very proud man, Mr. Paladin, he’d rather die than yield.”

      â€œIs that a family trait?”

   It is the nineteen-fifties, and we know the seduction is not going to succeed, but the teleplay and Boone’s delivery of the lines makes no bones about what Paladin has in mind. It isn’t surprising audiences were ready for the much more successful James Bond a few years later. All this unfulfilled seduction and innuendo had to end at some point in a bedroom somewhere.

   Of course once he is hired, Paladin is all business. In that he, and most of the gunslingers in Westerns, very much resemble the work ethic of the private eye of pulp fiction, all business, no matter how attractive the distractions. In many ways Paladin is a private eye as much as a hired gun, though he is seldom cast in the role of detective.

   Over the course of the series we learn little of him other than he is an ex-soldier, fast with a gun, would rather talk than fight when possible, has exquisite tastes acquired if not born to, is possessed of a mordant and quick wit, and is cynical but still a romantic despite his jaundiced eye.

   He would like to be wrong about people and is gratified when he finds one of the few who defy is dark assessment of humanity. He is a man out of his time and place who probably would only really fit in San Francisco of that era or as an Elizabethan privateer. He is very much Chandler’s errant knight ‘good enough for any world,’ but his mean streets are most often dusty trails ending in a showdown.

   Miss Windrom is convinced the other party in the duel, the younger Mr. Beckley (George Neise) will step out if Paladin shows up as a proxy for her father. So Paladin gets dragged into it, protesting all the way, and steps into the looking glass with the Southern aristocrats who would rather die than yield, even if it means over the bodies of innocents.

   Or not so innocents, when Beckley hires his own proxy in the person of gunfighter Bill Sledge (James Coburn) from Texas, a man with a reputation with a gun equal to Paladin. The two men know of each other, and they meet on neutral ground with mutual respect for the other’s skill and professionalism. That paean to professionalism is also a throwback to the classic private eye of Hammett who is redeemed more by that trait than his humanity, the Code of the West is ironically largely the Puritan work ethic.

   Paladin considers the duel nonsense, and so does the dark but charming Sledge. Neither particularly wants to kill anyone, certainly not for two arrogant fools battling over some obscure point of honor, and it seems for a moment like the meeting on the field of honor and blood can be avoided if Paladin and Sledge refuse to fight, but Sledge can’t help but wonder which of them would win, and …

      Sledge: I never done much of this kind of fighting in Texas. Hear tell there’s rules.

      Paladin: You pay much attention to rules?

      Sledge: Never done yet.

   This episode is a tight little psychological game, as Paladin finds himself Alice surrounded by White Rabbits and Mad Hatters obsessed by ‘honor’ and inured to death. He finds the price of honor in this case too high, but no one else does, and as the tight little half hour goes on he inevitably will find himself on that field of honor and blood at dawn.

·       Paladin: “How much blood will you settle for?”

   The episode may surprise some who have a certain view of series drama from the Fifties. It is bitter, cynical, downbeat, dark, and unforgiving. That the conclusion is predetermined and unavoidable from the first makes it all the worse. It has the sharp taste of bitters without the gin, a nasty dose of quinine made palatable by watching two outstanding actors, both gifted at playing villain and complex hero, both with charm and cool to spare (had this episode also included those two other masters of small screen cool, Steve McQueen and Robert Culp, it could have frozen and shattered television tubes) in acutely observed and written roles clearly enjoying themselves.

   Coburn displays the vicious charm that worked equally well as dark hero or psychotic villain and would soon lead him to stardom, and Boone, who has the same qualities on screen, seems to enjoy his scenes with him, recognizing an equal. That, and the sharp observation of a world where honor encompasses wagering on death and wasting lives over obscure points make this episode a standout as Paladin learns the savagery of the “savage land” of the series theme song is nothing compared to that of the civilized world.

   Have Gun – Will Travel was always a well-written series, and thanks to Boone, always well-acted, but this one is a standout, a cynical little gem about the cost of violence and cultures that embrace it.

   It is also rare in that Paladin, the man who holds himself above the rest, is as compelled by his own code of honor as the men he condemns to see it out to the end, and in the final scene he is as disgusted with himself as them. This episode comes close to tragedy since no one in it escapes their hubris or pride whether they live or die.

   In the end, Paladin is a victim of his own honor as much as they are and bloodied by it as surely. His slight rebuff of all that has gone before in the final scene, when he throws a glass of champagne to the ground with a bitter comment and stalks off as the screen fades to black, isn’t satisfying for the character or for the viewer, and perhaps all the darker because we as voyeurs wanted to know which man would prevail as well.

   For a half-hour episode of series television from that time period “The Gladiators” bears a great deal of existential despair, especially for a Western. Even for a series as quirky and adult as Have Gun – Will Travel, this episode is savage and dark.

GAVIN LYALL – Venus with Pistol. Charles Scribner’s Sons, US, hardcover, 1969. Berkley S1920, US, paperback, December 1970. First published in the UK by Hodder & Stoughton, hardcover,1969. Reprinted many times in the UK in paperback.

   By reading this book, if ever you do, you will learn more about the dirty side of the world of fine art — the buyers, the experts, the hangers-on and wanna-be’s, the forgers, the smugglers — than you ever dreamed existed. This is the first of Gavin Lyall’s thrillers and suspense novels, fifteen in all, that I’ve ever found time to read, and I’m glad I finally did.

   This particular adventure is told by Bert Kemp, a low-key British antique firearms dealer who’s also known in certain circles as being quite adept at moving paintings across European borders without the niceties of paying duties — or even avoiding bans on such activity altogether.

   In Venus with Pistol (also the name of a painting that first in brought into the tale on page 203) he’s recruited by Dona Margarita Umberto, a lady with a lot of money after the death of her husband, but with no means of getting her hands on it, the money having been confiscated by the Nicaraguan government. But the lady has political ambitions, and what the officials in Managua will allow her to do, Bert is told, is to go to Europe and obtain works of art for a gallery for the people of her country. Her spending limit: two and a half million pounds.

   Well, sir. Bert is on board in less time than it takes to say where do I sign up twice, along with one head assistant named Carlos MacGrgeor and two local art experts, one male, one female. From here the entourage makes a grand tour of Europe, running into snags now and then as they go, but with Bert’s quick mind at work, mostly they work out of them — except for the knock on his noggin that costs him memory as to what happened, along with a missing painting, not to mention one murder, quickly covered up.

   What this reads largely like is a series of individual made-for-TV episodes, as they make their way from Paris to Vienna to Venice to Zurich and back to Vienna. But there is a continuing thread to them, as the plot zigs and zags and thickens along the way. Bert is a good man with a quip as well as having a solid knowledge of firearms, about which the reader also will find himself (me) learning perhaps even more about, the ins and outs of which being quite essential to the story, in more ways than one.

   The ending, though, is what brings all of the separate adventures together, as Bert works out some thoughts and deductions together that both he and I should have making all the time. There’s a bit of romance at the end as well, one that was highly anticipated (by me), nor I was disappointed.

The song “I’m Crying” first appeared in the US as a single in 1964 then on the LP The Animals on Tour (MGM, 1965), which I do not believe has ever been released on CD. Eric Burdon was the lead singer for The Animals, a British blues-rock group that was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994.

MONSTER ON THE CAMPUS. Universal International Pictures, 1958. Arthur Franz, Joanna Moore, Judson Pratt, Nancy Walters, Troy Donahue, Whit Bissell. Director: Jack Arnold.

   Don’t let the exploitation title fool you, as Monster on the Campus is actually a surprisingly captivating 1950s science fiction/horror film. Indeed, it’s of a quality far higher than a lot of the forgettable dreck churned out during the same era. Directed by Jack Arnold, this Universal-International movie stars Arthur Franz as Professor Donald Blake, a university scholar who, while researching a prehistoric fish, discovers a serum that – stay with me, folks – reverses the evolutionary process.

   As you might have guessed from the title and the premise, Franz transforms into a hairy apelike monster. He – or his monster alter ego — roams around a California university campus wreaking all sorts of havoc and mayhem. There’s murder, mystery, and a little on campus romance thrown in for good measure.

   Call it a werewolf film without lycanthropes or King Kong without Skull Island, but Monster on the Campus is actually something of a minor, if at times unpolished, gem.

   Filmed in black and white, with a good some particularly effective atmospheric moments, it also benefits highly from Arthur Franz’s strong performance. Although he was primarily a character actor, the other movies I’ve seen in which he had starring roles (The Sniper and The Atomic Submarine) have been taut, suspenseful thrillers that I was certainly glad I watched. The same can definitely be said for Monster on the Campus, a highly evolved creature feature that’s worth a look.

–

Frankie Laine sang the theme song in the movie, but British folksinger Sandy Denny does a considerably different version of it that I find hauntingly beautiful.

VOODOO WOMAN. American International Pictures, 1957. Marla English, Tom Conway, Mike “Touch” Connors, Paul Blaisdell. Written by Russ Bender and V. I. Voss. Directed by Edward L. Cahn

THE DISEMBODIED. Allied Artists, 1957. Paul Burke, Allison Hayes, John Wengraf. Written by Jack Townley. Directed by Walter Grauman

   Movie fans remember 1957 as the year that brought us Bridge on the River Kwai, Twelve Angry Men, Paths of Glory, and The Spirit of St. Louis, but I will always recall it fondly as the banner year that delivered not one but two ersatz jungle epics with schlocky monsters and witchy women portrayed by iconic starlets of that tawdry form.

   Voodoo Woman is a thing of shreds and patches, apparently thrown together by producer Alex Gordon in the wake of The She Creature — a remarkable film on its own — with bits and pieces of that film’s eponymous monster, director Edward L. Cahn and stars Marla English and Tom Conway, who sports the silliest headgear ever committed to film.

   Conway plays a Mad Doctor determined to combine “the white man’s science and the black’s voodoo” to create a monster that will do his bidding. Which may seem a bit redundant in these days of the Internet, but he finds the perfect subject for his experiments when Marla comes strutting into his Jungle Hell.

   Marla English had a rather brief and unheralded film career, but her appearances here and in The She Creature ensure her a place in the archives of tacky movies. In She Creature she projected a virginal impassivity that made her the perfect palimpsest for Chester Morris’s regressive enterprises. Here she gets to vamp it up as the most literal of femmes fatales, a woman literally consumed by greed who cheerfully drags her cast cohorts down with her.

   We first see Marla hanging out in some junglefront dive, plotting to track down hidden treasure in the tropical backwoods. Or what passes for the tropics here; mostly it’s the usual stock-footage long-shots intercut with a sound stage sparsely furnished with defeated-looking foliage and bespoke rubber undergrowth. There’s even a moment when Marla and her guide (Mike “Touch” Connors) cuddle around a campfire, and as the camera pans to take in their antics we see two stage hands jump out of the way!

   It all gets a bit hard to take seriously, particularly when Mad Doctor Conway decides amoral Mara is the perfect subject for his experiments in monster-making, and she agrees whole-heartedly, as a means to acquire the lucre stashed somewhere thereabouts. She is duly promoted to monster-in-chief (actually played by Paul Blaisdell, in parts of his She Creature costume, a plastic mask and mop-wig) and proceeds to wreak low-budget havoc about the place until we’ve reached a respectable running time and can end the suffering.

   Well it ain’t much, but director Cahn was a past master at moving things along quickly, hero Mike Connors shows plenty of the charm that led him to TV stardom, and Tom Conway does a splendid job of not dying of shame. With all this and Miss English too, Voodoo Woman ranks as a genuine Guilty Pleasure.

      

   Moving on to The Disembodied, I can praise it with faint damns by observing that it’s a bit less tacky-looking than Voodoo Woman. The fake jungle is a bit less threadbare, the costumes not so tacky, and star Allison Hayes makes a splendid entrance, trying to kill her husband with a voodoo curse.

   Allison Hayes was literally one of the giants of Really Bad Movies, with a starring bad-girl turn in Roger Corman’s Gunslinger, followed by Zombies of Mora Tau, The Undead, The Unearthly, The Hypnotic Eye, The Crawling Hand, and of course Attack of the 50 Foot Woman. Her very presence in a starring part guarantees a certain sleazy splendor, and Disembodied offers one of her best(?) roles as a part-time voodoo queen, slinking about in silky dresses, high heels and/or animal skins as she falls for a passing wildlife photographer (Paul Burke) and decides he’d be perfectly cast in her road-show production of Double Indemnity when tribal magic proves ineffectual in killing her husband.

   It seems Allison moonlights (again, literally) as the local Voodoo Priestess, and when Burke shows up with a dying buddy in tow, she saves the man’s life by cutting the heart out of one of her worshippers—some religions are just harsher than others, I guess, but it makes me glad I was raised United Brethren.

   Anyway, the voodoo magic saves the man’s life but it has the deleterious side-effect of turning him into a zombie, possessed by the dead native’s spirit. And I’m afraid that’s all the Monster we get for this picture.

   Director Walter Grauman is no Edward L. Cahn, either. Where Cahn moves through Voodoo Woman with commendable speed, Grauman lets Disembodied bog itself down in long stretches of needless dialogue, courtesy of writer Jack Townley, who spent much of his career writing for Gene Autry and the Bowery Boys. In their hands, Ms Hayes’ alluringly repellant screen presence goes for very little, and the surprising thing is that she manages to radiate so much energy and still not be the least bit convincing.

   So on points, I’d have to award the Oscar in the fakey-jungle-monster-movies category to Voodoo Woman, but for lovers of awful movies, both films are required viewing.

Theme title: “Venice After Dark.” From the compilation CD Mission: Impossible … And More!

BRETT HALLIDAY – What Really Happened. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1952. Paperback reprints include: Dell #768, 1954; Dell D381, October 1960 (Robert McGinnis cover, seen to right). Dell 9458, July 1963.

   I don’t usually read two books by the same author back to back, but I’d just finished Marked for Murder (reviewed here ), I’d enjoyed it, this was stored in the same box, and I was about to take a plane trip to Michigan, so why not?

   This one was almost as good as as the earlier one (seven years earlier, from Mr. Halliday’s perspective) and in some ways better. In one way, a rather distinct one, I enjoyed Marked for Murder more.

   Better — by which I mean more complicated, in a good way! — was the plot, not a better by a huge margin, but the puzzle aspect was what found fascinating. Private eye Mike Shayne (back in Miami) gets a call from a woman named Wanda Weatherby who’s in near hysterics. She asks him to come over at midnight, that she had sent him a letter that he would receive in the morning, but she’s afraid someone is about to kill her, and she needs his help now.

   What’s interesting — you do know that when Shayne gets there, Wanda Weatherby is dead, don’t you? — is that one by one, Shayne meets several people who have been blackmailed by Wanda Weatherby have gotten letters telling them she is going to hire Shayne and that if she is murdered, Shayne should do his best to convict the recipient of the letter.

   Question is, which one did do the killing? I don’t know, maybe this description of the basic story line sounds silly, but Halliday does a great job convincing the reader that it all makes sense. Once again both the plotting and the telling remind me of Erle Stanley Gardner and both his Perry Mason and Bertha Cool-Donald Lam stories (the latter as by A. A. Fair) in terms of the way Shayne manipulates the evidence and manufactures his own, all in the interest of his client, a good friend of newspaper reporter Tim Rourke, fully recovered from his bullet injuries in Marked for Murder.

   That said, I’ve just realized that I can’t tell you what it was that I liked less about What Really Happened. In my review of Marked for Murder, I said “This one was fun to read, in a timeless sort of fashion…” and unfortunately this one’s definitely stuck in the 1950s. It isn’t a big deal, since I read many other books that are stuck in the 50s all the time. It’s only in comparison with Marked for Murder that I bring it up at all.

From Judy Collins’ CD Judith, the title taken by songwriter Jimmy Webb from the SF novel by Robert A. Heinlein: