MAKE MINE MINK. The Rank Organisation, 1960. Terry Thomas, Athene Seyler, Billie Whitelaw, Hattie Jacques, Elspeth Duxbury, Jack Hedley, Raymond Huntley, Kenneth Williams. Screenplay: Peter Blackmore, Michael Pertwee, Peter Coke (his play A Breath of Scandal). Director: Robert Asher.

   Mannish Miss Parry (Hattie Jacques) complaining about her buxom student, in a low cut blouse, not being ready for her debut in society: “She’s coming out next week and she’s not ready.”

   Major Rayne (Terry Thomas) face to face with the young lady’s cleavage: “It looks to me as if she’s already come out.”

   That sums up British comedies of this era, and the mix of droll wit, music-hall vulgarity, satirical barbs, and affectionate jape that mark the typical British comedy from the post war era on. Faced with Little Britain as the empire came apart and the economy struggled to rebuild; the British comedy came into a golden era not unlike the romantic and screwball comedies this side of the pond in the wake of the Depression. Hard times seem to be good for comedy.

   Major Rayne, Miss Parry, and Miss Pinkerton (Elspeth Duxbury) are boarders in the flat owned by Dame Beatrice (Athene Seyler) and kept in some line by Lily (Billie Whitelaw) the ex-con maid. Dame Beatrice doesn’t really charge what she should, and spends her time funding her favorite charities while neglecting herself. She doesn’t even have a new coat.

   Which is why when the arguing neighbors throw out a mink stole Lily picks it up — via Major Rayne’s fishing line. Dame Beatrice is pleased but horrified, and enlists Major Rayne, Miss Parry, and the nervous flighty Miss Pinkerton to return the fur after an attractive young policeman (Jack Hedley) shows up asking about furs.

   The Major (he was in the vital business of providing tea time to the troops) plans the campaign, and each is assigned a role. And despite a spate of miscalculations and miscommunication they succeed, returning the fur and even convincing the neighbor his senile mother in law had the fur all along.

   And they have a fine time doing it.

   That may be why when Dame Beatrice reveals she can no longer care for her numerous charities or continue their residence the four proto-felons begin to think in terms of heisting furs for fun and profit.

   Of course it might have helped if Lily wasn’t curious what was going on and dating that attractive young policeman Jim Benham.

   With the plot in motion the cheerful quartet set themselves increasingly difficult heists (always complicated by the exasperating Miss Pinkerton’s shambled nerves) until police and press are spreading sensational accounts of the daring criminal gang pulling off fur heists all over London. None of them actually work right, but somehow all of them are successful.

   There are other complications. Turning those furs into money being the first one. Just how does one find a fence? Major Rayne tries his hand at a rough club in the East End whose name he pried out of Lily (in a leggy funny awkwardly sexy scene where she thinks he is coming on to her after her shower) by claiming he was writing a novel (she was so relieved she would have told him anything).

   That excursion into the underworld is a fine little set piece of misunderstanding with Thomas waving Dame Beatrice’s pearls about and drawing absolutely no attention. And the reason is frustratingly apt.

   They do find a fence though — Dane Beatrice’s fashionable nephew the Hon. Freddie (Kenneth Williams much less broad than in his Carry On persona) who is delighted at the old girl’s new career — he even invites her to his casino night — all the best people, and the gang’s next target. Which gets really complicated when the police raid for real in the middle of the gang’s fake raid.

   Meanwhile Lily has found them out and is horrified. She even plans to take the blame and get the others off when Inspector Pape (Raymond Huntley) shows up the next morning with her young man in tow asking questions.

   Needless to say the ending is happy, Lily has her man, and the gang got away with it and learned their lesson swearing to never steal furs again. But Lily’s young man did mention to Dame Beatrice the police home for foundlings is desperately in need of help.

   And after all they only swore not to steal furs …

   I’ve always preferred Terry Thomas when his brash British snobbery and self satisfaction were combined with a bit of humanity and even reluctant humility. Fine as he was as dastardly cads, there was more there, and in films like this he was more than a cartoon. Good as he was in Snidely Whiplash mode, he could do more when he got the chance (A Matter of W.H.O.).

   Athene Seyler was a gifted veteran at the slightly dizzy grand dame game, and having the wonderful Hattie Jacques and Elspeth Duxbury in a single film is a coup. They were among the best the distaff side of British comedy had to offer at that point, and all three are at their bests here.

   Now Billie Whitelaw … yes, Billie Whitelaw … I don’t know what it is about Billie Whitelaw, she’s attractive, but not a sex bomb; she has a nice figure and very nice legs, but not exceptional; yet there’s that voice — a little husky with a hint of whiskey-throated seduction there; and that look — the Billie Whitelaw look — could melt glaciers; and there is just something in the way she walks, moves, even stands that is just plain sexy. Not all that long ago she showed up in one of the last seasons of The Last of the Summer Wine, and she hadn’t lost a whit if it.

   Did I mention Billie Whitelaw …?

   Make Mine Mink may not be at the level of the best of the Ealing comedies, but very close, more broadly observed than some of the legendary films of that era, but for that a very very funny caper film both gentle and barbed, sweet and a bit sexy, silly and rather touching. No it isn’t The Lavender Hill Mob, The Ladykillers, Tight Little Island, or The Titchfield Thunderbolt, but it is a delight, a romp, and a wonderful evening of sly humor and even belly laughs.

   Make mine Make Mine Mink.

COLLIN WILCOX – A Death Before Dying. Henry Holt, hardcover, 1990; paperback, 1994.

   A Death Before Dying is the latest of Collin Wilcox’s novels about San Francisco homicide department chief Frank Hastings. The ingredients are here: wicked men (with a dip of the hat to a famous murder case and Truman Capote’s novel In Cold Blood), personal involvement for Hastings, an array of characters, police procedure.

   But for me the story remained mechanical, without real emotion. One day Hastings encounters a childhood friend, now grown into a notable beauty. Desperate, too, it would seem, though she doesn’t say much about that.

   Too bad: the next view Frank has of her is her strangled corpse. The investigation begins: she lived well, without an obvious source. A kept woman, presumably, but by whom? Gradually the pieces begin to add up in very nasty fashion….

     The Lt. Frank Hastings series —

The Lonely Hunter (1969)
The Disappearance (1970)
Dead Aim (1971)
Hiding Place (1973)
Doctor, Lawyer…. (1975)
Long Way Down (1975)
Aftershock (1975)
The Third Victim (1977)
Twospot (1978; in collaboration with Bill Pronzini, whose Nameless detective also appears)
Power Plays (1979)
Mankiller (1980)
Stalking Horse (1982)
Victims (1985)
Night Games (1986)
The Pariah (1988)
A Death Before Dying (1990)
Hire a Hangman (1991)
Dead Center (1992)
Switchback (1993)
Calculated Risk (1995)

GUN FEVER. United Artists, 1958. Mark Stevens, John Lupton, Larry Storch, Jana Davi, Russell Thorson, Iron Eyes Cody. Director & co-screenwriter: Mark Stevens.

   Back in 1958 “adult” TV westerns were all the rage — Gunsmoke, Have Gun Will Travel and many others. And in many ways, that’s what I think Mark Stevens had in mind when he put so much effort into this movie: an “A” (for adult) western movie; what he also had was a “B” (for budget) expense account, and it shows.

   From the opening scenes on, however, this is one of the grimmer westerns I’ve seen in a while. The interior backgrounds, the homesteaders’ shacks and so on, all are stark and barren; outdoors it seems as though the wind in always blowing: with the incessant tumbleweeds and eternal sand in everyone’s faces, it makes you grit your teeth even to watch.

   Storywise, there’s not much to it. A young lad splits from his father’s gang when he decides the bloodletting has gotten too much for him. Six years later, he goes on a trail of revenge with his mining partner when the other man’s parents are brutally murdered — instigated by the outlaw he knows is his father. Confrontation is inevitable.

   Several other deaths occur along the way, most with guns, some with knives, some at the hands of Indians. Jana Davi, whom I don’t remember ever seeing before, plays an Indian married to a white man, a sympathetic role, but as a Native American Indian, I don’t think so. (And it did surprise me a but when I discovered that Larry Storch was the man behind the serapes of the Mexican bandit, Amigo.)

   Overall, though, no more than moderately interesting. The highlight for me was seeing at last (as far as I know) the man behind Russell Thorson’s voice. I’ve heard him many times on the radio, but while in 1958 he was quite a bit older than when he played the capable, easy-going Jack Packard on the old I Love a Mystery radio series, he still looked much as I’d pictured him.

[UPDATE] 01-14-14. From IMDb: “Maureen Hingert [aka Jana Davi] was born on 9th of January 1937 in Columbo, Ceylon, of Dutch ancestry, the daughter of Lionel Hingert and Lorna Mabel del Run.”

WARREN MURPHY – Dying Space. Pinnacle, paperback original, January 1982.

   Here is the forty-seventh in the continuing adventures of Remo Williams, aka “The Destroyer.” And right there this probably tells you all that you want to know about this book. Either you’ve bought and read it already, or you have absolutely no intention of doing either one. Go on to the next review.

   As for me, well, I’m somewhere in the middle. I think I have them all, but I also think I’ve read something like every seventeenth one. And only somebody who’s read them all could say for sure, but there must be hills and valleys, noticeable ups and downs within the series itself. So I don’t know, but I think this is a valley.

   For openers, this one has a lady astrophysicist with a yen for booze and Italian soccer teams. It has a mysterious, advanced computer of her own design, and somebody (something?) named Mr. Gordons, who is a deadly robot and an implacable enemy of Remo and his Korean mentor, Chiun. There is also, almost incidentally, a Russian plot to poison the moon.

   Apparently Mr. Gordons has been around before. He will also most assuredly be around again, as once again (WARNING: you may not want to know this ahead of time) he manages to escape total dismantlement and/or destruction.

   Otherwise, nothing much seems to happen.

   I laughed a lot, though. (To put that statement into proper perspective, I was supposed to.)

Rating:   C minus

PAT McGERR – Pick Your Victim. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1946. Dell #307, mapback, no date [1949]. Macfadden, paperback, 1970.

   An unusual mystery in that the murderer is known but the victim is not. Pete Robbins is in the Marines, stationed in the Aleutian Islands. In a package received by one of his friends is a partial clipping from a newspaper stating that Paul Stetson, managing director of SUDS — Society for the Uplift of Domestic Service — had strangled an executive of the company and had confessed to the murder.

   The clipping does not provide the victim’s identity. Robbins, who worked for SUDS before his induction in the service, relates the happenings at the company for his Marine friends so that they can have a lottery on which executive was murdered.

   The potential victims number ten. Each, from the history that Robbins relates, has given Stetson reason to kill him or her, even his best buddy from childhood.

   McGerr has done a fine job portraying the denizens of SUDS, some of whom are competent but all of whom have their own views of and goals for the organization. The characters’ flaws, the internecine battles, and the Washington politics are handled superbly. The mystery is a good one and well worth seeking out.

NOTE:   This book was previously reviewed on this blog by Marv Lachman. Check out his comments here. My own review of Follow As the Night includes a career perspective of the author, Pat McGerr.

VERNON HINKLE – Music to Murder By. Belmont Tower, paperback original, 1978. Leisure, paperback, later printing.

   A good friend sent me this mouldering paperback mystery, knowing of my fondness for mysteries with a classical music connection. And it begins with a discussion between two old friends of the performance of Ravel’s “Bolero” at a Boston Symphony concert they have just attended.

   I won’t pretend that this is a work for the ages, and the style is, at times, leaden, but the plot is neatly developed, concluding with a classical gathering together of all the suspects by the amateur detective who proceeds to pull the numerous threads together and reveal the murderer’s identity.

   The protagonist is a music librarian, a rather fussy bachelor who has a gift for puzzle solving and quickly succeeds in persuading the homicide detectives that he will be able to solve their case for them. This takes something of a stretch of the imagination, since it involves detective squads in both Boston and New York, and the librarian, one Martin Webb, conveniently is the first to arrive at both murder scenes, creating some question about his own involvement in the crimes.

   The characters include a somewhat comical Boston patrolman, a would-be novelist and his ex-wife and current girl friend, a YMCA desk clerk, and a gaggle of porn movie performers.

   Hinkle also published Murder After a Fashion (Leisure, 1986) and, writing as H. V. Elkin, a Western series. In an interview recorded in Contemporary Authors, Hinkle comments he regards “most fiction as mystery … in the sense that each piece … is a puzzle or a quest for unknown answers.”

   And that’s my Visit to the Dusty Archives for this session.

SOMEWHERE IN THE NIGHT. 20th Century Fox, 1946. John Hodiak, Nancy Guild, Lloyd Nolan, Richard Conte, Josephine Hutchinson, Fritz Kortner, Sheldon Leonard, Lou Nova, with Jeff Corey, Henry Morgan, Whit Bissell, and John Russell. Screenplay by Joseph L. Mankiewicz & Howard Dimsdale; adapted by Lee Strasberg, based on a story by Marvin Borowsky. Directed by Joseph Mankiewicz.

   The Red Scare of the post war era kept this terrific noir film from 20th Century Fox off television and forgotten for years thanks to the blacklist, and even today it is one of the harder major noir outings to find and one better known by genre historians than film fans.

   That’s despite the fact this one has everything, including a private eye, a sympathetic cop, a nightclub chanteuse with a husky voice, an amoral fat man, his brutal henchman, a haunted woman with a failing mind, a sanitarium where a madman holds the clue to the mystery, and a hero with amnesia.

   Perhaps because none of the iconic noir actors (other than Conte and to a lesser extent Nolan) are in it, and because Mankiewicz is better known for films like Gentlemans’ Agreement and Letter to Three Wives than this one, it is less appreciated. It often seems to be a forgotten noir despite the fact it is an A production with an A cast. It also has a smart script with more twists than Agatha Christie and direction by one of Hollywood’s best (Joseph L. Mankiewicz).

   George Taylor (John Hodiak) fell on a grenade to save his buddies in the South Pacific and now he has amnesia, a new face, and more than a little paranoia about it, enough so he doesn’t let the Marines know he doesn’t know who he is. Back in the states and about to be released by the service he finds a letter to a man named Larry Cravat from an angry woman that leads him to Los Angeles to find Cravat, who may know who he is.

   Following Cravat’s trail isn’t as easy as he thinks though. No one seems to know Cravat or George Taylor, and when he discovers Cravat left him a bag in unclaimed luggage he finds a gun and shoulder holster and a note that Larry Cravat left $5,000 in a bank account for him.

   The trail leads to a club called the Cellar where a pair of thugs get on his trail and he meets chanteuse Chris (Nancy Guild) whose girl friend was the woman who wrote the letter to Cravat. When he is hijacked by the mysterious Anselmo (Fritz Kortner), who has him worked over trying to learn where Cravat is, he gets dumped on Chris doorstep because her address was in his pocket.

   Chris is a sucker for a sob story (“You’re tough as a love song.”), and calls in her charming boss Max Phillips (Richard Conte) who suggests Taylor talk to cop Lt. Kendall (Lloyd Nolan), a sympathetic homicide detective who hates the movie cliche of cops always having their hats on.

   From Kendall they learn Cravat was a small time private eye who somehow got involved in a scheme to launder two million dollars in Nazi loot. The loot and Cravat both disappeared three years earlier leaving a dead body, the Nazi trying to launder the money.

   There was another man with Cravat that night, and Taylor begins to suspect it was him — but which of them killed the mysterious Steel?

   Taylor finds there was a witness to the shooting, Conway, but he was the victim of a hit and run and went insane, and is now in a sanitarium where no one is allowed to see him. Taylor gets to him, but not before Conway is stabbed by a small bespectacled man who has been following Taylor.

   The twists and surprises are too good to ruin with even a spoiler warning, so I won’t go any farther with the plot. I will say there are fewer holes in the plot than most noir films, and the twists my well surprise you the first time you see it. Certainly there are at least two good red herrings that don’t pay off the way you expect, but they do pay off. You may well be suspecting a Third Man payoff and get something much different.

   One thing to note is that most of the characters are well developed, and far from the cliches you expect. Fritz Kortner’s Anselmo is a former big time crook making a last desperate bid for the big time, and resigned to the fact he probably won’t get the brass ring. He’s almost sympathetic, and his last line is delivered with a sort of sad irony and a resigned shrug (“The jig is up.”).

   Josephine Hutchinson has a good role as the witness sister who has wasted her youth and beauty on her sick father and seems to know Taylor when no one else does. Hodiak plays well in this scene, at once hopeful and compassionate.

   Conte proves a tough good-hearted sort, a far cry from his usual bad guys, and it’s only at the end you may recognize the Conte you know. Finally there’s Lloyd Nolan as Lt. Kendall, a cop with a brain and a heart, who lets the players act out the drama while he waits to sort out the survivors, but can’t help having his favorites. He has little screen time, but makes the most of it, and the running gag about his lack of a hat is all the funnier if you recall his Michael Shayne almost never shed his chapeau. Henry Morgan, Whit Bissell, Jeff Corey, and John Russell all have bits.

   Hodiak is very good as the haunted man who can trust no one, not even himself. He is much more victim than tough guy, paranoid with good reason, and not certain he really wants to know the truth even if it has $2 million tied to it.

   It’s a role that could easily be played over the top or as a cliche, but Hodiak is believable and sympathetic as a man uncertain if he wants to know the truth.

   Nancy Guild is doing a road-show Lauren Bacall, down to the hairdo, but she does it well, and makes a satisfying substitute for Bacall or Lisbeth Scott, well worth looking at, and playing a woman who is leading with her chin going to bat for a man who may not be as nice as he seems.

   It’s not a particularly good part and probably the least well written in the film, but she makes up for that by managing to embody her character with strength and intelligence, and a kind of understated teasing sexuality.

   Somewhere in the Night is a slick well done studio noir and well worth seeing if you have missed it.

   The film’s last line is Lt. Kendall’s and a good one:

JUDGE JOHN DEED. BBC, Series Three; 4 90 minute episodes: 27 November through 18 December 2003. Martin Shaw (Judge John Deed), Jenny Seagrove (Jo Mills), Barbara Thorn (Rita ‘Coop’ Cooper).

   You may remember (but if you live in the US, probably don’t) that Deed is a pompous and arrogant judge who is a thorn in the side of the establishment because he refuses to bow to pressure from anyone, especially the government advisers who attempt to get him to toe the line on government policy. (The writer, G. F. Newman, is known for his antiestablishment views.)

   I endured rather than enjoyed the previous series, but I have to confess that I quite enjoyed this one. Typically Deed gets to the bottom of the case in front of him by asking more questions than either of the two competing barristers, to their extreme annoyance.

   One of the barristers in his cases always seems to be Jo Mills, his long time lover to whom he is always proposing. Sge sets the condition that he consults a therapist to confront his womanizing ways. He agrees and then rather predictably sleeps with the therapist.

   This is another of those series not to be taken seriously for a moment but at times is quite fun, although I suspect the writer would want us to take it rather more seriously.

PHILIP MacDONALD – The Rasp. British hardcover: Collins, 1924. US hardcover: Dial Press, 1925. Hardcover reprints (US): Scribner’s (S.S.Van Dine Detective Library), 1929; Mason Publishing Co., 1936. Paperback reprints (US): Penguin #586, 1946; Avon G1257, 1965; Avon (Classic Crime Collection) PN268, 1970; Dover, 1979; Vintage, June 1984; Carroll & Graf, 1984.

   Philip MacDonald’s 1924 mystery, The Rasp, was the first appearance of his series sleuth Anthony Gethryn. I read and enjoyed this quintessential English Country Manor Mystery and figured out whodunit by page 70, by which time

one character had left tracks to the scene of the crime at the time it was committed, so she couldn’t be guilty; another character was fund clutching the murder weapon, so he couldn’t have done it; another was seen rifling through the murdered man’s desk, a fourth had his alibi exploded as a tissue of deliberate lies, and a fifth confessed to the crime – -so they must have been innocent as well.

   There was, however, one character who did nothing incriminating, merely stood around expressing polite interest and helping when he could, and he … you guessed it.

Editorial Comment:   As it so happens, my review of this same book is much longer. You may find it here. But is longer better? You tell me.

SHANNON OCORK – End of the Line. St. Martin’s, hardcover, 1981. No paperback edition.

   This reads very much as it’s supposed to, which is to say like a story told by a liberated young lady working with some caution and care in a world dominated by men. T.T. (Teresa Tracy) Baldwin is an aspiring sports photographer for the New York Graphic. She also solves mysteries.

   A murder occurs at a shark-hunting tournament, and it goes without saying that [from an author’s point of view] the lesson learned from the popularity of Jaws is not lost on Shannon OCork before the case is closed. There are also some missing diamonds and an antagonistic small-town cop who is solidly in a rich man’s pocket.

   As a mystery, the story is sometimes a puzzler in more ways than one. Obvious questions (to the reader, at least) arc never asked, apparently never even thought of, until at length T.T. reveals she already knew the answers, far earlier than she ever let on.

   From another point of view, the broken style T.T. persists in using in telling her own story adds immediacy to the first part of the narrative, and a considerable amount of fast, page-turning excitement to the finale. In between, it simply becomes hard to read.

   Other than T.T., who is bright, smart-alecky, and certain to get ahead, most of the remaining characters are straight from summer stock. The ending is worth waiting for, however.

Rating:   B minus

Bibliographic Notes: T.T.Baldwin had a three book career. End of the Line was preceded by Sports Freak (St. Martin’s, 1980) and followed by Hell Bent for Heaven (St. Martin’s, 1983), neither of which do I remember ever seeing. As for the author herself, she was married for twelve years to mystery writer Hillary Waugh and in 1989 wrote a book for would-be mystery writers, appropriately titled How to Write Mysteries.