THE NIGHT WALKER. Universal Pictures, 1964. Robert Taylor, Barbara Stanwyck, Judith Meredith, Hayden Rorke. Rochelle Hudson. Opening narration: Paul Frees. Screenplay: Robert Bloch. Director: William Castle.

   â€œ…when you dream, you become … a Night Walker!” Or so goes the closing line of the opening narration, by the voice that also often did the lead-in to Escape, the greatest suspense radio show of all time. Sorry to say, in spite of all the talent that was involved in the making of this movie, it’s all downhill from here.

   It might have the murky reception our local cable company gives us of WTBS, but I think the plot was pretty murky to begin with. Barbara Stanwyck is married to an older man, rich, blind, and jealous – a dangerous combination — who, from overhearing her talk in her sleep, accuses her of having an affair with another man. He strikes her, she leaves, he goes upstairs and immediately dies in a laboratory explosion.

   Is she free? Not exactly. She begins to have nightmares, nightmares so real she is convinced they really are. Robert Taylor, who was her husband’s lawyer, is sympathetic, but he’ s hard to convince that she is doing nothing but dreaming. In the meantime, visions of Irene’s dead husband, even more badly disfigured than before, continue to haunt her.

   Is it real or is it all a dream? With Robert Bloch’s credentials as a combination fantasy/horror/mystery writer, it’s impossible to say in advance. Unfortunately, it was also almost impossible for me to stay awake. I’m awake now, but I really don’t think this movie will keep me awake later.

   I think that dreams are too personal to bring them very effectively to the screen. It’s been done, but with bigger budgets than this. Phony-looking make-up jobs and spinning cameras just don’t cut it, at least not any more.

MARK FROST – The Six Messiahs. Conan Doyle #2. Morrow, hardcover. 1995. Avon, paperback, 1996.

   Frost’s The List of 7 last year was an unexpected pleasure for me. It was a good, old-fashioned thriller rather than a crime novel, a story whose plot wouldn’t have been out of place in the pulps of the early decades of this century. It featured the pre-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (who seems to be bidding to become as popular a lead as his creation) as does this, its sequel. I wonder — are there any figures of our time who will be seen as fascinating enough 60 or 70 years from now to be made heroes in thrillers? I don’t think so.

   A decade had passed since the events of the previous book, and the now-famous Doyle is making a tour of the US, accompanied by his younger brother, Innes. During the trip across the Atlantic by steamer a man is murdered, and evidence surfaces regarding the attempted theft of a rare and valuable religious book. Later, in New York, it becomes clear that there is a conspiracy by some very evil and competent people to steal a number of the world’s most revered religious works, to some end as yet unknown.

   The above plot summary is wholly inadequate, but it was going to be unless I wanted to give half a page to it. This is another book like its predecessor, a fantastic thriller that’s very well written and very enjoyable if you can take it on its own terms. I can’t with modern thrillers, but I can and did with this. Go figure.

Editorial Update: This was the second and last of only two books in Frost’s series of Conan Doyle adventure thrillers. According to a source I found online: “Mark Frost is an American novelist, screenwriter, director and film producer, best known as a writer for the television series Hill Street Blues and as the co-creator of the television series Twin Peaks.”

ERIC AMBLER – Journey Into Fear. Hodder & Stoughton, UK, hardcover, 1940. Alfred A. Knopf, US, hardcover, 1940. Reprinted many times, in both hardcover and paperback.

● JOURNEY INTO FEAR. RKO Radio Pictures, 1943. Joseph Cotten, Dolores Del Rio, Ruth Warrick, Agnes Moorehead, Jack Durant, Everett Sloane, Orson Welles. Screenplay by Orson Welles & Joseph Cotten, based on the novel by Eric Ambler. Directed by Norman Foster & Orson Welles (the latter uncredited).

● JOURNEY INTO FEAR. New World, 1975. Sam Waterston, Zero Mostel, Yvette Mimieux, Scott Marlowe, Ian McShane, Joseph Wiseman, Shelley Winters, Stanley Holloway, Donald Pleasence, Vincent Price. Screenplay: Trevor Wallace. Director: Daniel Mann.

   A local video store was going out of business lately, and naturally I stopped by to see what priceless treasures I could pick up on the cheap. Among the things I emerged with was the remake of Journey Into Fear, adapted by producer Trevor Wallace from Eric Ambler’s 1940 novel (previously filmed by Orson Welles in 1942) and directed by Daniel Mann. Watching this, I began to suspect that Wallace’s script drew rather more from the 1942 film than from Ambler’s novel, so I pulled out the older film and the book to check my suspicions.

   The 1942 film is an engagingly gimmicky piece, complete with the Mercury players (Agnes Moorhead, Everett Sloan et al.), but the effect is somewhat vitiated by Welles’ giving himself all the smart lines and by his decision to depict the quiet Graham (Joseph Cotton) as a boob.

   The overall theme is deliberately un-heroic, which is probably just as well, given his strong visual style; a Welles movie with an out-and-out Hero would come off as altogether too Wagnerian. There is, in fact, more than a touch of Wagner in Welles’ two most nearly heroic characters, Rochester in Jane Eyre and MacBeth. But there I go digressin’ again

   To be fair, there are a couple lines from the novel in the newer film and not in the 1942 version. But to be frank, huge chunks of Welles’ film seem to have been simply re-shot without credit and plunked down in this movie. When Orson Welles and Joseph Cotton adapted Ambler’s novel for the film (Cotton gets sole screen credit for the writing) they gave lines from one character to another, re-arranged scenes and added little bits of business, and all these changes appear just about shot-for-shot in the re-make.

   In fact, the earlier film features a hired killer who never speaks, because the guy who played him was no actor and would only do the part if they cut out all his lines. And sure enough, in the re-make the hired killer – played by the very capable actor Ian McShane — has no dialogue.

   What difference exists between the two films is largely in the ordinary look of the ’74 film — the careful camerawork and set design of the original replaced by harsh color and tinny sound — and in the casting: Welles filled his film with capable bit players whose names mean little to most moviegoers, but players who leave a distinctive impression – the best-known are maybe Everett Sloane and Hans Conreid.

   The re-make, on the other hand, is filled with second-rank “stars” mostly miscast or wasted: Sam Waterston is fine in the lead, and Vincent Price and Donald Pleasance have a couple good scenes (though Price makes a decidedly unconvincing Arab) but Zero Mostel, Shelley Winters, Scott Marlowe, Yvette Mimieux and even Stanley Holloway all just kind of take up space.

   On the plus side, though, I’ve got to say Joseph Wiseman (fondly remembered as the first of the Bond villains and star of his own comic-book cover) is fine in the old Orson Welles part as Colonel Haki, there’s a solid, actionful ending, and a shoot-and-chase done entirely with sound effects. I still can’t figure out whether it was meant to be clever or merely cheap, but it’s enough to elevate this startlingly unoriginal film into the class of a pleasant time-filler.

   Moving on just briefly to Eric Ambler’s novel (the excuse for this piece, after all) well, it was one of those things I read in 7th grade, and I was glad to come back to it. Even after seeing two movies and getting very familiar with the plot, I found the writing absorbing and the story suspenseful.

   Ambler’s tale takes a bit of familiarity with the political map of war-torn Europe in the 40s; readers who didn’t live through it or bone up on their History might wonder at a story where British and German agents travel freely in Turkey while the British are supposedly arming the Turks against Hitler, but complications like this were pretty much gratis when Ambler wrote it, and by the time he gets to the crux of the tale — Howard Graham, an un-assuming British engineer trapped on a tramp steamer with a bizarre assortment of passengers, one of whom wants to kill him — he has notched the suspense up very agreeably indeed, and proceeds to a conclusion that is both cynical and exciting: no small feat, that.

   Ambler also does a sharp job here creating an atmosphere of claustrophobic tension, and he adds a layer of genuine thoughtfulness: our hero starts out his journey as a man with secrets to hide, and he seems at first rather unique and isolated, surrounded by a ship full of very ordinary and rather dull background characters.

   As the book and the journey go on, though, we discover the rest of the cast have their own secrets: droll, noble, sinister or just venal, the passengers who began the journey as stereotypes become real by the story’s end, and the central character seems much less unique — and more believable.

   This works both as a plot device (I won’t say how) and as something more. Perhaps Ambler, writing in a world at war, was trying to say something about the worth of the Individual. Or maybe he was just setting us up for a delicious bit of anticlimax at the very end of the book, when the last secret is revealed.

   Whatever, it makes for the kind of reading one remembers.

ARTHUR C. CLARKE – The Deep Range. Harcourt Brace, hardcover, 1957. Signet S1583, paperback, 1958. Expanded from a short story of the same title first published in Star Science Fiction Stories No. 3 (Ballantine, paperback, 1955). The novel first collected in From the Ocean, from the Stars (Harcourt Brace, hardcover, 1961).

   Essentially the life story of Walter Franklin and his career in the Bureau of Whales early next century. There are three distinct parts, each nearly independent of the others. In the first, Franklin is placed under the guidance of [Game] Warden Don Burley to learn a new career after astrophobia has forced him from space. Then, after becoming a warden himself, Franklin joins with Don in the capture of a giant squid, but an attempt to capture an unknown sea serpent ends in Don’s death.

   As Franklin rises to the directorship of the Bureau, he is forced to decide whether continued slaughter of the whales or conservation shall become policy. The philosophy of Buddhism is responsible for his choice.

   Smooth, intelligent and informative writing dominates, overshadowing a lack of real depth. An important exception occurs in the final third of the story. In the words of the Maha Thoro: “When that time comes, the treatment man receives from his superiors may well depend upon the way he has behaved toward the other creatures of his own world.”

   Another important facet of Clarke’s writing is his remarkable constraint in not telling the whole story when indeed it is not necessary.

Rating: 4 stars.

THE BARBARIAN. MGM, 1933. Ramon Navarro, Myrna Loy, Reginald Denny, C. Aubrey Smith, Edward Arnold, Hedda Hopper.  Screenwriters: Anita Loos & Elmer Harris. Directed by
Sam Wood.

   Myrna Loy is the only reason that anyone would watch this movie today. (And whatever became of Ramon Navarro?) It’s a strange mixture of comedy and strong melodrama, and maybe all the more fascinating (and “keepable”) because of it. (Or maybe not, since I’ve already reused the tape and recorded over it after watching it only once.)

   Here’s the story line. Besides being a guide, Navarro is a romantic gigolo who spends his time watching the Cairo train station for the arrival of rich foreign tourist women – rich, lonesome, and easy prey for men such as this. When Myrna Loy’s train comes in, however, he immediately drops everything (and everyone) else, and from that time on, she is the object of his never-ending attention and affection.

   This causes some problems, mostly amusing, at the beginning. She is already engaged to be married. (Reginald Denny is a stuffed shirt, true, but she loves him.) She also has the unfortunate ability to see through Navarro’s “charms.” She is flattered, but she spurns his advances – and this is a bad mistake. Suddenly the movie isn’t quite so funny any more. In fact, in a wedding scene that comes soon after, the atmosphere is extremely tense indeed.

   From here, this slightly risque, crazy-quilt tale muddles its way through to a conclusion that could only be described as “totally expected,” but through it all, Myrna Loy somehow still manages to hold her own. This maybe the only movie in which she is seen taking (and leaving) a bubble bath, and now that I am thinking about it, maybe I shouldn’t have erased it after all.

   
RICHARD HULL – Keep it Quiet. Dover , US, trade paperback, 1983. Originally published by Faber & Faber, UK, 1935. Putnam, US, hardcover, 1935. Reprinted again later by Agora Books, UK, trade paperback, 2018.
   

   Richard Hull abandoned his accounting career after reading Francis Iles’ Malice Aforethought, the first “inverted” psychological mystery. Hull’s first mystery was The Murder of My Aunt, which followed the inverted model. Keep It Quiet was his second mystery. It proved to be very popular and successful.

   Set in a London men’s club, the ambience is that of quiet good breeding, tasteful meals, and drinks served in the library. The Whitehall Club’s atmosphere is predictable and ordinary – until one of its members dies shortly after eating dessert one day. The club’s chef fears he was at fault, since it was his prescription for perchloride of mercury that was mistaken for vanilla. The club’s secretary wants only to “keep it quiet.” And with the victim’s doctor also a member of the Whitehall Club, the death is labeled as one due to natural causes.

   Then a second club member dies after a few sips of sherry. Should the secretary and doctor keep this one quiet too? But what about the blackmail letters, and threats, that are received by the secretary and doctor?

   Hull has created a traditional British mystery that blends subtle humor with unnerving psychological twists that will please most any mystery fancier.
   

   Dover is doing us a good deed by reprinting some of the good old mysteries. The great ones remain in print; the good ones and even the mediocre ones are of interest historically, and Dover is giving us the chance to get our hands on them easily and inexpensively.

   Hull’s first mystery, The Murder of My Aunt, is one of the great ones. Keep it Quiet was his second, and not nearly so good. Yet it’s of interest. It begins on a farcical note, and I suspect that Hull had his tongue firmly in his cheek throughout the book. The cook at a London club has a carbuncle for which the doctor has prescribed perchloride of mercury. The cook’s wife thoughtfully puts part of the prescription in an old vanilla extract bottle so he can take it to work.

   So when old Morrison, who insisted on vanilla flavor in his souffle, dies unexpectedly, it’s no wonder that the club secretary, Ford, wants to keep it quiet. More surprisingly, Ford’s doctor, Anstruther, who’s also a club member, goes along. The result: blackmail.

   But blackmail of a marvelous kind! The blackmailer actually succeeds in getting muddleheaded Ford to make some long-needed improvements in the club facilities! Anstruther, on the other hand, is instructed to bone up on poisons, for the blackmailer intends that some people should suffer. Who is the blackmailer? How did Morrison really die? Who is stealing the library books? Did Pargiter die a natural death?

   Remember the tongue in the cheek and read this book for fun.

CASH ON DEMAND. 1961. Peter Cushing, André Morell, Richard Vernon, Norman Bird, Kevin Stoney. Director: Quentin Lawrence.

   With Frankenstein and Dracula as their figureheads, it is easy to forget just how versatile Hammer Film Studios actually were, with comedies, war films and even a couple of Robin Hood movies amongst their filmography. One of their early specialities was the crime thriller, which they focused on particularly in the 1950s, with a trilogy of Dick Barton films, the last Saint and a Sexton Blake film (which I really, really must find somehow) and it is crime they returned to here.

   This low-budget black-and-white effort from director Quentin Lawrence stars a bespectacled Peter Cushing as the prim and pernickety bank manager Harry Fordyce, who is visited at work by an urbane, avuncular and apparently experienced insurance investigator named Colonel Gore-Hepburn (André Morell). It seems to be a routine check on the bank’s security, but things turn sour when the Colonel reveals himself to be a bank robber holding Fordyce’s family hostage at home. Fordyce is forced to become the Colonel’s accomplice and help remove £90,000 from the bank’s vault.

   Played out in real-time, on just three sets, the film snares the viewer’s interest and won’t let it go. The irony of a man as authoritative and stiffly regimental as Fordyce being plunged into a situation in which – for once – he has no control neatly demonstrates just how much power he has so instantly lost. In Gore-Hepburn, he is confronted with a ruthlessness just as rigid and impersonal as his own and it is almost as if this Colonel is an even darker version of himself. It is, effectively, the Ghost of Christmas Future who speaks to Fordyce suavely from across his desk and, like Scrooge, he becomes a changed man because of it.

   The film’s yuletide setting emphasises this moral – a time of goodwill, spiritual rebirth and the importance of family and friends – but, for me, it could have been clearer just why Fordyce goes on to be so grateful to his staff. They help in a minor way but I think they could have done more if the charity of others is what the filmmakers were pointing towards.

   However, even if this ending is a little inarticulate, the scenes before it more than compensate. The robbery scenes, in particular, are thrilling and there is reliable support from Richard Vernon and an underused, but always welcome, Norman Bird.

   Cushing and Morell had, of course, played Holmes and Watson in Hammer’s 1959 hit The Hound of the Baskervilles and much enjoyment comes from watching these two fine actors spar again in what is essentially a two-hander. Morell must have been at particular ease as he had played his character in the television version broadcast several months earlier (under the somewhat anaemic title The Gold Inside).

   It seems strange today, but many TV series of the time – such as several stories from The Francis Durbridge Serial – would see a film studio recast and reshoot a television production on a slightly bigger budget. Sometimes, this meant seeing the (condensed) material in colour or, at least, on a much bigger screen than the small one in the corner at home. Cushing himself would participate in such a feature when he took on the role of The Doctor (or, more properly, ‘Dr Who’) in the two Dalek films.

   Biographer David Miller wrote in Peter Cushing: A Life in Film that the actor seemed more theatrical and mannered here than usual. I would prefer to think of the performance as intense, which is no surprise as Cushing always gave his all to a role, without any indication of irony. Perhaps he considered it a novelty to play a less than heroic character. Elsewhere, in The British ‘B’ Film, writers Steve Chibnall and Brian McFarlane list Cash on Demand as one of the best examples of its kind, calling it, “both tensely compelling and humanely rewarding.”

   Happily, it’s on YouTube, so Cash on Demand won’t be demanding any cash from us, though it would certainly be worth it.

Rating: ***

THE SHIP THAT DIED OF SHAME. General Film Distributors, UK, 1955. Continental Distributing, US, 1956, as PT Raiders. Richard Attenborough, George Baker, Bill Owen, Roland Culver, Bernard Lee, Virginia McKenna. Screenplay by John Whiting, Michael Relph & Basil Dearden, based on a story by Nicholas Monsarrat. Directed by Basil Dearden.

   This is an offbeat British noir with a touch of the supernatural, though underplayed and understated, that is unmistakable. George Hoskins (Richard Attenborough) and Bill Randall (George Baker Wexford, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service himself and as George Lazenby’s voice when he is posing as a member of the Royal College of Arms) and Birdie Dick (Bill Owen Compo of The Last of the Summer Wine) serve together on a Royal Navy Motor Gun Boat (a P.T. Boat in American jargon) raiding the French coast and attacking German installations at night and rescuing downed pilots in the Channel.

   When Bill’s wife (Virginia McKenna) is killed in the cottage where they live in a bombing raid his rather jolly swashbuckling war comes to and end. With the war at an end Bill finds himself at sixes and sevens until he runs into George who has a plan to buy their former boat and indulge in a bit of harmless smuggling.

   Smuggling and the British efforts to avoid excise taxes is a common theme in British history and literature from du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn, Graham Greene’s The Man Within, and J. Meade Falkner’s Moonfleet to more comic takes like Geoffrey Household’s “Brandy for the Parson,” and Compton Mackenzie’s Whiskey Galore, and the theme only grew more common with the wartime shortages and black-market during and after the war where shortages lasted well into the prosperous Fifties.

   George and Bill, with Birdie insisting on coming along, begin rather harmlessly and revive some of the spirit of their wartime adventures. Fooling Customs Inspector Sam Brewster (Bernard Lee, M from the James Bond films) and foiling pirates led by smooth baddie Major Fordyce (Roland Culver) are a throwback to the best days of the war when they struck quickly and silently along the French coast.

   Bill can almost forget the pain of what he lost, almost pretend that he has really escaped from the emptiness of his life.

   But George is greedy and seeks out Major Fordyce who can guarantee them higher pay and bigger risks. Attenborough was always equally adept at playing meek innocents and rather shady characters.

   Those risks come in the form of smuggling a man out of England, a dangerous mission attempted in a heavy fog and with a new element, sudden trouble with their ship, something that first becomes apparent to Birdie when he notes the ship doesn’t like what they are doing.

   And little wonder, because the man that Fordyce has them smuggling is a wanted child murderer.

   They barely get away and their passenger ends up overboard, but their luck has run out. Bill is ready to chuck it all and turn himself in when Fordyce and George, hoping to get away, murder Sam Brewster who is onto them and kidnap he and Birdie to get them safely to Portugal.

   But no one has counted on the weather or the whims of their once gallant ship.

   That faint, and it is very faint, hint that the ship is somehow aware of what it is being used for and ashamed is the main oddity in the story which otherwise would be a tough but standard British noir crime outing of the period with a better than average cast.

   Based on a story later expanded by Nicholas Monsarrat (The Cruel Sea, The Nylon Pirates, White Rajah) who was a bestselling novelist who wrote primarily of the sea and whose feel for that life was notable, the supernatural aspect is never overplayed. It works at the fringes and builds only at the big climax.

   The Ship That Died of Shame isn’t seen all that often, but it is worth catching. Currently it, and quite a few excellent films from the Thirties through the Sixties are available on Classic Reels a low price streaming service that adds one or two new films a day.

   In any case this is worth seeing.
   

   The clip below is taken from the British film Brassed Off (1996), starring Pete Postlethwaite, Tara Fitzgerald and Ewan McGregor.

   From Wikipedia: “The film is about the troubles faced by a colliery brass band, following the closure of their pit. The soundtrack for the film was provided by the Grimethorpe Colliery Band, and the plot is based on Grimethorpe’s own struggles against pit closures.”

   Through the magic of movie making, the flugelhorn solo was by Paul Hughes, not by Tara Fitzgerald’s character, Gloria Mullins.
   

JAMES LEE BURKE – Burning Angel. Dave Robicheaux #8. Hyperion, hardcover, 1995. Hachette Books, paperback, 1996.

   Well, Burke’s one of the big-timers in terms of sales. He’s also ne of the best pure prose stylists around regardless of genre, and he’s created some great characters in Dave Robicheaux his family, and Cletus So what’s not to like? Well, occasionally in the past he’s had a few plot problems …

   There was a small-time grifter named Sonny Boy in New Orleans who ran afoul of the big-timers and went away. Then years later he came back, and passed a black notebook to Dave. After that, people started dying in bloody ways. Mysterious folks wanted to kill Sonny Boy, and they wanted his little black book, and Dave didn’t understand any of it, That didn’t keep more people from dying, though.

   The thing about Burke is that he can write. That’s not a given with bestselling authors, but if you’ve never read him before you know a very few pages into your first one that you’ve picked a winner for people and prose. He is just a very, very good stylist.

   He’s also someone who seems to care less and less about plot and a coherent story, and who is more and more inclined toward angst, deep thoughts, and the quasi-supernatural, and who is beginning almost to parody himself. This is all about sin, redemption and all sorts of other stuff; truth to tell, I’m not sure what all Burke was trying to tell me. I am sure it didn’t make much sense, and that I finished it with a feeling of dissatisfaction. But he sure can write.