NO GOOD DEED. Screen Gems, 2014. Idris Elba, Taraji P. Henson, Leslie Bibb, Kate del Castillo, Henry Simmons. Director: Sam Miller.
Idris Elba plays against type in this suburban home invasion thriller. Elba portrays Colin, an escaped convict with narcissistic personality disorder. On a dark stormy night in Atlanta, he enters both the home and life of Terry (Taraji P. Henson), a former prosecutor and current stay-at-home mom.
With charm and guile, Colin manages to persuade Terry that he is merely waiting for a tow truck after he wrecked his car. Little by little, and with the intervention of a friend of Terry’s, Colin’s story unravels. What begins as a good deed – inviting a stranger into one’s house to wait for a tow truck – turns into a nightmare.
That’s the premise. What happens next is standard home invasion thriller fare. A cat and mouse game between the monster and the captive. There are some very tense moments here, which go to show most of all how talented an actor Elba is.
There’s a moment – it’s actually quite late in No Good Deed – wherein the villain’s true motivations are finally revealed. Some might say that it comes too late. Others might rightfully consider that the reveal wasn’t presented in a manner that captures the viewer’s attention.
Still, it’s a pivotal moment in the movie and one that makes No Good Deeda slightly more clever thriller than it might initially appear to be. Which makes one wonder why the film has only a mere 13% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It’s definitely better than that.
Overall assessment: extremely watchable, but without a considerable amount of depth. If you choose to watch this one, do so for Elba’s performance and the claustrophobic atmosphere.
JACK FOXX – Freebooty. Bobbs-Merrill, hardcover, 1976.
Jack Foxx is a pseudonym used by Bill Pronzini for four Foxx novels written in the 1970s. Two are action/ adventure stories featuring Singapore bush pilot Dan Connell — The Jade Figurine (1972) and Dead Run (1975); a third, Wildfire ( 1978), is a thriller about a small California logging community menaced by both a trio of dangerous criminals and a forest fire.
Freebooty, a historical mystery, is very different in tone from the other tautly written, action-oriented Foxx novels. This is not to say that there isn’t plenty of action and suspense, but Freebooty‘s style is gentler, evoking an earlier age, and it is spiced with frequent, delightful humor.
Fergus O’Hara and his wife, Hattie, arrive in San Francisco in 1863 en route to the port city of Stockton, where they suspect the members of a bandit gang who have been terrorizing coaches of the Adams Express Company are hiding out. As O’Hara explains, his wife is not an operative of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, as he is, but frequently assists him in his inquiries, “women being able to obtain information in places men cannot.”
Before the O’Haras board the steamer Freebooty for the inland Journey, Fergus makes the acquaintance of Horace T. Goatleg, an obese man with patently suspicious motives; encounters an articulate and ribald parrot (one of the most memorable characters in a cast of outstanding ones); witnesses a near-riot on the Barbary Coast; finds a murdered man in an alley; and sustains minor injuries himself, including being half drowned by a shower of beer.
Needless to say, all of the above events tie in to further goings–on aboard the steamer. And as the O’Haras — an effective team –investigate them, their initial purposes take a series of twists and turns, leading to a final revelation that is sure to leave the reader both surprised and amused.
Pronzini has a firm grasp of historical fact, and he blends it skillfully into his narrative, capturing the tenor of the times without allowing detail to slow the pace of his story. This is an entertaining novel, well plotted and full of engaging characters.
ELLERY QUEEN – The Quick and the Dead. Ellery Queen #17. Pocket, paperback, later printing. Originally published as There Was an Old Woman(Little Brown, hardcover, 1943). First reprinted under this original title as Pocket Book #326, paperback, 1945. Reprinted several times since.
It seems senseless to have changed the title,as the original one fits so much better. Remember “There was an old woman who lived in a shoe” from Mother Goose? That verse is the basic theme; Ellery Queen picks it up early, to his later confusion.
Cornelia Potts, president of the Potts shoe business, lives with her six children and second husband, all in one house, which is the site of numerous hatreds, jealousies, and various eccentricities. Three murders, including a surrealistic duel at dawn, and one natural death later, Ellery’s deductions disrupt a weeding bring him a new secretary named “Nikki Porter.”
We have many exaggerated character studies: Thurlow, the feeble-minded nitwit; Louella, the slave and science and invention; and Horatio, who lives in a continued childhood. It is easy to suspect that the name Potts is merely a lively excuse to call the whole family potty.
What may or may not be a flaw is the failure of Inspector Queen to read the old lady’s will immediately after her death. While rationalized, it does lead to the clue which gives Ellery the answer, or rather, the proof of his accusation. Details fit together beautifully.
But are duels really legal? Even those supposedly rigged to be harmless (with Inspector Queen spying on)?
SHATTERED. Lionsgate, 2007. Pierce Brosnan, Maria Bello, Gerard Butler, Emma Karwandy. Director: Mike Barker.
Shattered, released in the United Kingdom under the more dramatic title Butterfly on a Wheel, offers the viewer a solid cast, an intriguing premise, and a great deal of suspense. Unfortunately, it doesn’t capitalize on these positive aspects. Instead, the movie takes its leisurely time to finally get to the point. And when it finally does, let’s just say the big reveal is somewhat underwhelming.
The premise and the plot are as follows. Suburban Chicago couple Neil (Gerald Butler) and Abby Randall (Maria Bello) are in what appears to be a happy, loving marriage. They have a young daughter Sophie whom they adore. While Neil works as a power broker at an advertising agency, Abby stays home to raise their child. Everything seems swell until one day a mysterious stranger with a gun (Pierce Brosnan) shows up in the back of their car and threatens their daughter’s life.
For the next hour or so, the film revolves around Brosnan’s character putting the couple through a series of tests and ordeals. To what point and why, you might ask. That’s a good question and one the filmmakers should have thought of answering earlier in the movie than they did. Let’s just say it has something to do with Neil not being the completely upstanding husband he purports to be.
I’ll confess that, despite its flaws, the movie kept me entertained. Or at least glued enough to the television that I wanted to know what was going to happen next. But would I watch Shatteredagain? Surely not. Overall assessment: intriguing premise, but an ultimate letdown. Brosnan deserved better than his thankless role.
HIGHER AND HIGHER. RKO Radio Pictures, 1943. Michele Morgan, Jack Haley, Frank Sinatra, Leon Errol, Marcy McGuire, Victor Borge, Mary Wickes, Elisabeth Risdon, Barbara Hale, Mel Torme. Director: Tim Whelan.
A former millionaire tries to pass a maid off as his daughter and the season’s number one debutante, hoping to recoup some recent business losses. Naturally humorous romantic complications arise.
Notable as one of the first movie appearances for Frank Sinatra, who does a fine job playing himself. The plot makes very little sense, and the songs, while more than acceptable, do not entirely seem to match the story.
KEITH LAUMER – The Gold Bomb. Berkley X1592. paperback original; 1st printing, 1968. #7 in The Avengers series.
Steed and Tara, on the trail of radioactive gold being smuggled into England, discover that it is actually being used to bring uranium into the country. And so the hunt is on, looking for a madman walking a large Newfoundland dog, to find him before he can bring together the components if a nuclear bomb capable of wiping London off the map.
Laumer is off and running with his Retief style here, which seems to fit the Avengers type of humor fairy well, with constant retorts and witticisms. He also seems to find a good bit of humor in having Tara confused as Steed’s daughter, or in Steed’s luck in a fiancée.
An early critical comment by Steed on the decline of the British workingman in an unionized country seems irrelevant, but their construction site turns up later as the bomber’s idea for a perfect hiding place. Rubbing their noses in it, so to say.
Rating: ***
— October 1968.
The Avengers series by Keith Laumer —
5. The Afrit Affair (1968)
6. The Drowned Queen (1968)
7. The Gold Bomb (1968)
SINGAPORE. Universal Pictures, 1947. Fred MacMurray, Ava Gardner, Roland Culver, Richard Haydn, Spring Byington, Thomas Gomez. Director: John Brahm.
Surely influenced by both The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Casablanca (1942), John Brahm’s exotic noir Singaporehas neither the grit of the former, nor the enrapturing romance of the latter. But it’s certainly not without its myriad charms. Truth be told, I find myself enjoying this lesser-known, sometimes clunky, film more than I thought I would.
Fred MacMurray portrays Matt Gordon, a pearl smuggler who returns to Singapore after the Japanese defeat in the Second World War. His goal: to recover a quarter of a million dollars worth of illicit pearls that he stashed away in his hotel room. What he doesn’t expect is to encounter his former fiancee Linda Grahame (Ava Gardner) who he presumed died in a Japanese air raid.
As it turns out, Linda is very much alive and physically well. Except for one thing. She has amnesia and has forgotten her past, including her love for Matt. Complicating matters for the heartbroken Matt is the unfortunate fact that Linda is now married to a Dutch plantation owner. Matt has to navigate that fraught situation at the same time that he has a police officer on his back and two rival seedy criminals gunning for his pearls.
There are plenty of saccharine, downright maudlin moments in Singapore which only serve to remind the viewer that this is a product of a different era. But I found there was enough suspense and intrigue to keep me interested throughout the comparatively short proceedings. MacMurray does a fine job with the flawed source material and takes the role seriously enough that you want to root for him to get both the girl and the pearls.
Overall assessment: decent sentimental escapism with some nefarious characters adding some spice to the mix.
FREDERICK FORSYTH – The Odessa File. Hutchinson, UK, hardcover, 1972. Viking, US, hardcover, 1972. Bantam, US, paperback, 1974. Reprinted many times since.
In The Odessa File, crime reporter Peter Miller finds the diary of a survivor of the Riga Concentration Camp. Miller, an extremely able journalist and a German of the postwar generation, is stunned to discover the horrors of the camp, and he sets out to track down the camp’s commandant, Eduard Roschmann (a real figure, whose story is accurately reported by Forsyth).
Roschmarm is reported to be living comfortably under a new identity somewhere in Germany.
In his search for the Butcher of Riga, Miller uncovers Odessa. a secret organization of former SS members. which is supported by the gold and jewels they took from the Jews in the concentration camps. Its aims are to aid former Nazis in returning to positions of influence in Germany and to further neo-Nazi propaganda. The anti-Nazi underground is powerful in the Germany of 1963, when this story takes place, and Miller is up against the biggest challenge of his career.
German officials who are charged with prosecuting war criminals now only want to forget; Miller gets no help from them. The Israelis want to make use of him to thwart the production of an Odessa-designed guidance system that will supposedly enable Egyptian missiles to carry bubonic plague into Israel; to them, Miller is expendable.
This tense and fascinating story reads like fact, and it is with the factual that Forsyth is at his best; he can make the assembling of a bomb in a hotel room as riveting as the best chase scene. His totally fictional characters are less sure than those based on real individuals, but Miller is a sympathetic hero.
Forsyth’s other thrillers are The Dogs of War ( 1974) and The Devil’s Alternative (1979). He has also written mainstream novel, The Shepherd (1974), and a nonfiction book, The Biafra Story(1977).
IF SCIENCE FICTION – September 1967. Editor: Frederik Pohl. Cover artist: Gray Morrow. Overall rating: ***
C. C. MacAPP “The Fortunes of Peace.” Novelette. Forced to make a deal with Kyshan pirates, “Taintless” Wend manages to doublecross them while trapped in orbit about a dead dwarf star. (3)
ROBERT SILVERBERG “Bride Ninety-One.” A tale of interworld marriage, between a Terran and a Suvornese, with insight into marriage customs or mores. (5)
PERRY A. CHAPDELAINE “To Serve the Masters.” First story; novelette. The Masters have a sensory organ which allows them to feel emotions and thus has enabled them to dominate all other life forms in their part of the galaxy. Humans are bred for generation to give them specialized intelligence. Such a specialist in genetics is given the task of improving the Masters’ race, but his solution forces them to begin the path of evolution from the beginning again. The genetics goes over my head and tends to make the story drier than it should have been. (3)
J. G. BALLARD “Venus Smiles.” Novelette. A sonic metal statue begins to grow and has to be dismembered as scrap, with disastrous results. I resent Ballard’s references to “twanging sitars” and “hack classics.” (2)
PHILIP JOSE FARMER “A Bowl Bigger Than Earth.” Novelette. Farmer’s view of Hell: regimented life in brass houses in sexless bodies. Not to be confused with his Riverworld series, (2)
JAMES BLISH “Faust Aleph-Null.” Serial, part 2 of 3. To be reviewed when all three parts have been read.
HARL VINCENT “Invader.” Novelette. An engineer gets an impulse to help a strange girl in distress, and in actuality helps a princess’s mind trapped on Earth to return to Tau Ceti. Planet Stories brought up to date, almost. (2)
Nero Wolfe on Page and (Small U.S.) Screen: The Doorbell Rang
by Matthew R. Bradley
Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe novel A Right to Die(1964) reaches back decades to revisit Paul Whipple, a Howard University anthropology student and waiter at the Kanawha Spa who provided vital information in Phillip Laszio’s murder in Too Many Cooks(1938). Now an assistant professor at Columbia, Paul named his son after black writer Paul Laurence Dunbar, whom Wolfe had impressed him by quoting. Dunbar works for the Rights of Citizens Committee (ROCC), to which Wolfe contributes, and intends to marry a white woman, Susan Brooke; convinced there must be something wrong with her to invite the attendant difficulties, Paul wants Wolfe—who feels indebted to him—to find out what.
Sent to Racine, Wisconsin, where he learns that rejected suitor Richard Ault shot himself on her porch when Susan got home from Radcliffe in 1959, Archie is recalled: Dunbar is charged after finding her bludgeoned to death in her Harlem apartment, and Wolfe offers Paul his services without fee. Finally exposed, Richard’s vengeful and incognito mother says, “She was always talking about civil rights, all she cared about was civil rights, and now she was going to marry a n*gg*r. Then she had…a right to die, so I decided to kill her.” One victim’s father, Sam Vaughn, sells Wolfe his new Heron sedan every year, and Lon’s job is, for once, specified as “confidential assistant to the publisher of the Gazette.”
One of the most memorable in its own right, The Doorbell Rang (1965) is unique among the novels in having been mined no fewer than three times for U.S. television. Filmed in 1977, writer-director Frank D. Gilroy’s would-be ABC pilot, Nero Wolfe (12/19/79), was shelved until after star Thayer David’s death in 1978; directed by George McCowan and scripted by Stephen Downing, the second episode of the NBC Nero Wolfe, “Death on the Doorstep” (1/23/81), also drew on the book. Following a pilot film, The Golden Spiders(3/5/00), it then became the source for the double-length first-season premiere of A&E’s A Nero Wolfe Mystery (4/22/01), directed by co-executive producer/star Timothy Hutton.
Despite Stout’s anticommunism in The Second Confession (1949) and “Home to Roost” (1952)—in the latter, Wolfe calls Communists “enemies of this country…[but] I deplore the current tendency to accuse people of pro-communism irresponsibly and unjustly”—he was closely watched by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, especially as the president of the Authors League (now Guild). Doorbell unsurprisingly cinched him on the “not to contact list” of those “hostile to the Bureau,” cited by the Church Committee in 1976 as “Political Abuse of Intelligence Information.” He and Wolfe read investigative journalist Fred J. Cook’s exposé The FBI Nobody Knows(1964), which Stout told Cook had “prim[ed] his pump.”
Wealthy widow Rachel Bruner also read it, and was sufficiently impressed to buy 10,000 copies and send them to influential people nationwide; she now offers Wolfe a $100,000 retainer to “compel the FBI to stop annoying [her]” by questioning, surveilling, and wire-tapping her entire circle. While calling the job “preposterous,” Wolfe vows, “I will not return that check…because I am afraid of a bully. My self-esteem won’t let me.” With her house presumably bugged, Archie gives Mrs. Bruner code phrases and a cutout for confidential communications: William Coffey, the Churchill Hotel’s “house dick…an assistant security officer” (and apparent successor to the long-unmentioned Tim Evarts).
She asserts that the FBI is not close to anything she doesn’t want dug up, while dinner—and 50-year-old cognac—for Lon buys not-for-print material about questionable cases in and around New York. Archie’s opening sortie (asking Adrian Evers if a security check on his senior VP, which sank a government electronics contract, was “a raw deal”) fails, and while leaving he bumps into G-man Morrison. When Doc Vollmer brings a message to meet an unknown man at the Westside Hotel, Archie is shocked to find Cramer, who is being pressured to help lift their licenses, but instead reveals that Morris Althaus, victim of an unsolved murder, had been collecting material for Tick-Tock magazine on the FBI.
It was not found, nor was a gun or the bullet that passed through him, and Richard Wragg (“Top G-man in New York. Special agent in charge”) rejected Cramer’s request for aid: “I’d give a year’s pay to hook [the three Feds seen leaving] and make it stick. This isn’t their town, it’s mine. Ours. The New York Police Department.” Agreeing with Archie that proving they’d killed Althaus, keeping silent in exchange for laying off Mrs. Bruner, would suit neither him nor Cramer, Wolfe proposes establishing that they didn’t. As the FBI professes no interest in the murder, Wolfe tells Archie he need not worry about tails; they are visited by Morris’s father, David, a Seventh Avenue clothier, and mother, Ivana.
Joining the parents are his fiancée, Tick-Tock researcher Marian Hinckley; their lawyer, Bernard Fromm; and senior editors Timothy Quayle—a romantic rival who cites realtor Frank Odell, jailed after Morris exposed him—and Vincent Yarmack. Absent any other lead, Wolfe elicits an invitation from fellow orchid fancier Lewis Hewitt, driven by Saul to Long Island as Archie seeks paroled Odell, formerly of Bruner Realty, who claims he was framed and saw Morris chez Bruner. Over lunch at Rusterman’s, where Wolfe is no longer the trustee, Mrs. Bruner says that her secretary, Sarah Dacos, had lived just below Morris and, on the night he was killed, saw three men leaving who looked like “the type.”
Ivana says Morris never mentioned Sarah, who joins them later at Rusterman’s (avoiding audio surveillance), stating that she’d occasionally dined with him after they met in Mrs. Bruner’s office and—inviting Archie’s skepticism—only said what her employer wanted to hear about the men. Wolfe has arranged a do-over five days hence, with Fritz cooking for Hewitt’s gourmet group, the Ten for Aristology, as fatally interrupted in “Poison à la Carte” (1960). In his apartment, Archie finds a naked photo of Morris with a fragment of familiar poetry on the back and, with samples from Mrs. Bruner, confirms the writing as Sarah’s, despite her insistence that their relationship had never “progressed to intimacy.”
Lily identifies it as “a take-off of the last four lines of the second stanza of Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn,’” and at Sarah’s, Archie finds an S & W .38, presumably the one that had been registered to Morris, relocating it elsewhere within her apartment. A delivery of “orchids” smuggles in Ashley Jarvis and Dale Kirby (impersonating Wolfe and Archie, respectively, en route to the “blowout”) and ’teers Saul, Fred, and Orrie, leaving the five waiting in the darkened brownstone for an expected FBI “bag job”—if Wragg believes a G-man killed Morris. Caught red-handed, the agents Archie dubs Handsome and Skinny give their credentials to Wolfe, who holds onto them as evidence of a felony by the FBI.
In the morning, Archie stashes them in the safe-deposit box and summons Mrs. Bruner to observe via the alcove peephole as Wragg, in exchange for leaving them there, says he’ll end all surveillance and consider surrendering the bullet—both unconceded—to clear his men of murder. Wolfe tells his satisfied client he’ll spare her the embarrassment of Sarah being arrested in her home; Archie gives Cramer the photo (obtained legally, with Ivana’s consent), suggests he comb her apartment, and watches from Morris’s as Purley arrives to find it and bring her in. Wragg gives the bullet to Cramer, in Wolfe’s presence, and after Sarah confesses, they are visited in person by the “big fish,” leaving him on the doorstep.
Gilroy, whose Edgar Award-nominated Nero Wolfe teleplay was intended to star Orson Welles, won the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award for his 1964 stageplay The Subject Was Roses, which he also filmed in 1968. Perhaps best known for essaying multiple roles on the long-running soap opera Dark Shadows, the well-cast Thayer David had played the memorable villain Count Arne Saknussemm in Journey to the Center of the Earth(1959). The main-title theme by the prolific Leonard Rosenman, who won Oscars for adapting the scores of Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975) and the Woody Guthrie biopic Bound for Glory (1976), has a whimsical flavor similar to that of John Addison for the ensuing NBC series.
Archie (Tom Mason) disturbs Wolfe and Theodore (John O’Leary) in the plant rooms as Mrs. Bruner (Anne Baxter) arrives, mentioning rumors that Wolfe is the son of Sherlock Holmes; his portrait hangs in the office, and Gilroy incorporates such exposition from the canon into his dialogue, quite close to Stout’s. Gazette editor Lon (John Randolph) leads Archie to Evers (Ivor Francis), who ejects him after Mrs. Bruner signs an agreement and he meets Sarah (Brooke Adams), using cabbie friend Al (identified as Goller by Stout) to ditch his tail. He also strikes out with Ernst Muller and Julia Fenster, but Vollmer (John Gerstad) summons him to Cramer (Biff McGuire), giving Wolfe “a nut with meat in it.”
Gilroy omits Fromm at the meeting with the parents (Sarah Cunningham, David Lewis), Marian (Katharine Charles), Yarmack (Robert Phalen), and Quayle (Sam Weisman); as Saul (Lewis Charles) drives Wolfe to Hewitt (John Hoyt), Lon—promised an interview—directs Archie to O’Dell (sic; Joe George), working in a bowling alley. The script takes liberties as Wolfe invites Mrs. Bruner to dinner at Rusterman’s, initiating an unthinkably romantic rapport, and joins Archie at Morris’s apartment to interrogate Sarah. There, he espouses the theory first voiced by Archie in the novel: learning he was to wed Marian, Sarah shot him just before the Feds arrived, fingering them anonymously when they left.
Taking the gun from her fishtank, Sarah is about to throw it into the river when a “thief” (Charles Horvath) takes her purse, giving it to Wolfe as Fritz (David Hurst) departs with the ringers, and Saul slips in with Fred (Frank Campanella) and Orrie, bagging the agents (Rod Browning, Richard Ford Grayling). Gilroy cuts right to Cramer personally finding the gun Archie has replaced, Wolfe being tipped off by the fishy smell, and conflates the two visits by Rugby (né Wragg; Allen Case) into one. He ends with an unlikely smiling photo to accompany Lon’s interview, and does no better than Stout at shedding any light on Mrs. Bruner’s acknowledged but unspecified secret, possibly involving O’Dell’s case.
Crediting only Stout’s characters, “Death on the Doorstep” finds Archie’s (Lee Horsley) college pal Barney Sullivan—in the hospital supply business, and unspecified trouble—shot by sniper Dominic (Joe Lowry); with his appetite affected, to Fritz’s dismay (George Voskovec), Wolfe (William Conrad) offers Archie aid sans fee. Widow Mandy Sullivan (Irene Miracle) swears Barn had no enemies, but Brian Stoner (Tim Thomerson) reminds Archie that their wedding “damn near killed” classmate Paul Hendricks (Stephen Parr). Like Wragg, Cramer (Allan Miller) comes to believe that rogue elements within his own organization—including Inspector Vance Allison (Arlen Dean Snyder)—are responsible.
Wolfe tells Archie that Saul (George Wyner) discovered a $250,000 double-indemnity policy with Mandy as the beneficiary, and Paul’s vending-machine industry is “known for its cash-flow attraction to the bent-nose types.” Paul insists that he desires only her happiness, but heading out to lunch, he, Archie, and Brian duck machine-gun fire…aimed at whom? Theodore (Robert Coote) directs Archie to the Westside; Cramer (with milk, per Stout) believes that Archie was the target, that Barney was hit by organized crime for reasons unknown, and that their intelligence officer is on the take, identifying Archie’s tail—shaken by Al (Frank Coppola)—as Allison’s Detective McNab (Walter Mathews).
The same rifle killed a Harlem numbers man, Brooklyn jukebox operator, and Brooklyn labor organizer using cyanide bullets, suggesting “Mob talent keeping Mob discipline.” Confirming that the brownstone is bugged, Archie visits Barney’s office, where Brian is helping Mandy learn the ropes, and he finds evidence implicating Dominic’s contact, ex-con Aaron Keller (Alan Bergmann), who may be siphoning off their liquid assets. Wolfe baits the trap for McNab, “allowing” him to overhear a discussion with Archie about faux evidence, and holds onto his badge while confronting Allison, who claims that he sought to curry favor within the department by solving the murders, and is not the leak’s source.
Wolfe suggests a plan whereby Allison can clean house by arresting Keller, then advises Cramer to tap Sullivan’s phone, on which he hears Allison’s driver, Marty Thomas (Nick Angotti), warn Keller to split. Duped by Saul and Orrie into thinking the Mob is gunning for him, Keller is caught by Archie at a seedy motel; Barney, indebted to loan sharks, had been forced to hire the “experienced company takeover specialist.” Wolfe intuits that the shooting outside Paul’s office was a charade to deflect suspicion from Brian, who denies having Barney killed, also compelled by the same loan sharks, but Keller—produced by Cramer—believes Brian set him up and admits to everything, even identifying Dominic.
Hutton starred as Archie in the A&E series, with Maury Chaykin as Wolfe, while fellow executive producer Michael Jaffe adapted “Doorbell.” Saul Rubinek, who’d played Saul (now Conrad Dunn) in the pilot, was recast as Lon, and other repertory players debuted in recurring roles: Wragg (James Tolkan), whom Jaffe retconned into “The Silent Speaker” (7/14 & 21/02); Vollmer (Ken Kramer); and Hewitt (David Hemblen). Typically faithful, it dramatizes Mrs. Bruner’s (Debra Monk) visit, dinner with Lon, Archie’s meeting Sara (sic; Francie Swift) at Mrs. Bruner’s, and his encountering Morison (sic; Wayne Best) as Evers (David Shurmann [sic]) and Miss Bailey (Michelle Nolden) have him thrown out.
Of the three, this version of the clandestine meeting at the Westside Hotel has the greatest retroactive resonance, since over the course of the show, as in the books, viewers savored many a match among Cramer (Bill Smitrovich), Archie and/or Wolfe; his fury is palpable as he relates the Althaus case and Wragg’s brush-off. Jaffe eliminates David but includes Fromm (Aron Tager) at the confab with Ivana (Nicky Guadagni), Marian (Gretchan [sic] Egolf), Quayle (Robert Bockstael)—whom Archie drags out by the ankles during his first visit—and Yarmack (Hrant Alianak). Here, Marian cites Odell (Steve Cumyn) to Wolfe, who hatches his plan while evading surveillance in Fritz’s (Colin Fox) basement quarters.
Director Hutton fulfills the comic possibilities as Saul, Fred (Fulvio Cecere), Orrie (Trent McMullen), Kirby (B.J. McQueen), and especially corpulent Wolfe-clone Jarvis (Mathew Sharp) are extricated in near-silence from their coffin-like orchid crates. The trap sprung for Handsome (Howard Hoover) and Skinny (Boyd Banks), Wolfe has his fiery skirmish with Wragg, but Mrs. Bruner’s delight turns to disbelief when she learns of Sarah’s guilt. Archie merely watches from outside the building while Purley (R.D. Reid) has her taken away, and when Wolfe recounts the scene of the G-men held at gunpoint, as Archie says, “I saw something I’d never seen before—a broad smile on the face of Inspector Cramer.”
Up next (and last): Death of a Doxy
Editions cited —
A Right to Die: Bantam (1965) The Doorbell Rang: Bantam (1971)
Devoted to mystery and detective fiction — the books, the films, the authors, and those who read, watch, collect and make annotated lists of them. All uncredited posts are by me, Steve Lewis.
