THE HARD MAN. Columbia Pictures, 1957. Guy Madison, Valerie French, Lorne Greene, Barry Atwater, Robert Burton, Rudy Bond, Trevor Bardette, Myron Healey. Director: George Sherman.

   The Hard Man begins with a gunfight. Lawman Steve Burden (Guy Madison) faces off against his friend, Ray Hendry (Myron Healey). Hendry is quick with his gun. But not quick enough. For Burden ends up killing Ray. So much for questioning him. As it turns out, there was some question as to whether Ray was truly guilty of murder or whether he had been set up. To find out, Burden travels to a small town where cattle baron Rice Martin (Lorne Greene) and his wife live out a tenuous romantic existence. Martin’s top dog in town and he’s sure to let everyone know it. But being a big shot doesn’t mean that his wife Fern (Valerie French) is beyond straying. In fact, nothing seems to set Martin into more of a rage than knowing his wife may be running around behind his back.

   Although the movie is most definitely a Western, there’s something very film noir about the whole affair. A movie nominally about a tough lawman, it really turns out to center around a femme fatale and her ability to skillfully manipulate the men in her life. Fern Martin plays all the menfolk against each other, weaving a devious little web of lies as the body count piles up. In tandem with the film noir plot, the movie also has numerous instances where some exceptionally hardboiled dialogue is employed. These scenes are thoroughly enjoyable, such as when Rice asks his wife why she sits in the dark like a cat, and she answers that it allows her to avoid seeing things she’s rather not see. Good stuff, indeed.

   Now, is The Hard Man a particularly good movie? Yes and no. It’s got some grating orchestral music for a score, and it has a decidedly studio lot feel to it. No wide vistas here. And Guy Madison, while talented, simply didn’t have the screen charisma of John Wayne, Randolph Scott, or James Stewart.

   And yet. If you go into The Hard Man expecting very little, you might find yourself pleasantly surprised. While an overall decidedly average motion picture, this Columbia Pictures release has several things going for it. Although Madison was the top-billed star, it’s really Lorne Greene and Rudy Bond who shine. Both basically steal every scene they are in. Many will primarily remember Greene as America’s favorite TV dad Ben Cartwright on Bonanza or as Adama on the original Battlestar Galactica. In The Hard Man, Greene gets to demonstrate his ability to play a villain with great skill. His physicality, combined with his distinct deep voice, makes for a thundering bravado performance.

   As for Rudy Bond, his portrayal of a hired gunslinger is utterly convincing and delightfully memorable. Bond also demonstrated similar traits in his portrayal of a murderous bank robber in Jacques Tourneur’s Nightfall (1957), released that same year. Rudy Bond double feature? Sounds good to me.
   

ALAN AMOS – Panic in Paradise. Doubleday / Crime Club, hardcover, 1951. Detective Book Club 3-in-1 edition, hardcover reprint, no date stated. No paperback edition.

   Life in Panama was little different in 1950 than it is now, but somehow this story of a hunt for hidden Spanish treasure reads as though it could be happening today, perhaps because only such timeless matters as human frailties and relationships are involved.

   The framework, that of various characters putting down in diary form the story as it passes their way, starts out awkwardly, then becomes a fascinating chain of murders, kidnappings, escaped lunatics, downed bridges, and cut phone lines. Non-stop reading fare.

Footnote: Alan Amos was a pseudonym of Kathleen Moore Knight, a mainstay author for the long-running Crime Club line of books. As Amos she wrote a total of four mystery adventures such as ths one. Under her own name, she was most famous for her series of mysteries featuring Penberthy Island selectman Elisha Macomber, of which there were sixteen. It’s a long way from Cape Cod to Central America, but I don’t think the Panamanian jungle has ever been brought to life more vividly.

LOU MANFREDO “A Study in Mint.” Short story. Gus Oliver #5. First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, November 2013. Probably never reprinted or collected.

   Lou Manfredo, befoe he turned his hand to writing, was a 25-year veteran of the Brooklyn criminal justice system. Upon his retirement he wrote three well-regarded novels about a Brooklyn cop named Joe Rizzo, who also appeared in a handful of short stories about life of a policeman whose primary goal was to do his job and do it well.

   He also wrote five stories about Gus Oliver, who at the time of this story, was the constable in the small farming of Central Islip, Long Island. “A Study in Mint” is in fact the prequel to the other four, taking place in 1939 and telling the tale of how Oliver cracked the case of the first murder to have taken place there since its founding, or well over 200 years earlier.

   The death of one its inhabitants is designed to look like suicide, or so the state trooper who is first on the scene is convinced. By why was the body found near a well-kept garden, Gus asks himself, and why had he already contracted for some home improvements to be done with he month?

   It’s a case of the local cop knowing the people in the town he’s close to, not the outside one who comes in and sees things that are of surface value only. There are no surprises in this story, only good old-fashioned police work. And there’s nothing wrong with that.
   

      The Gus Oliver series –

Central Islin, U.S.A. Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Aug 2009
The Home of the Brave. Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Jan 2012
A Path to Somewhere. Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Sep/Oct 2012
The Star of the Running Blood. Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine May 2013
A Study in Mint. Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Nov 2013

THE ENTITLED. Anchor Bay, direct to DVD, 2011. Kevin Zegers, Victor Garber, Laura Vandervoort, Devon Bostic, Dustin Milligan, Tatiana Maslany, Stephen McHattie, Ray Liotta, Anthony Ulc. Director: Aaron Woodley.

   I don’t get it. This is a kidnapping film, and the gimmick is that it’s supposed be one committed by one of the floundering 99%, taking it out on the rich 1%. I have no brief in favor of the 1%, or not in this way, at least, as three idle rich kids (two male, one female) are held for ransom, that of $1.000,000 each from their respective three fathers. These guys (Ray Liotta, William Graber, and Stephen McHattie) are probably as crooked as all get out, or so it is (more than) hinted at throughout the movie.

   The question is, or at least it was for me, which of the three sets of protagonists (the three kidnappers, the three kidnapees, thr three fathers) are the most unlikable. The leader of the kidnappers (Kevin Zegers) is, I suppose, the one we are to root for, but loving his mother who can no longer pay her own medical bills, is not enough to warrant a killing spree like this, which is exactly what happens in movies like this when things go wrong, and yes, indeed, do they ever.

I SEE YOU. Saban Films, 2019. Helen Hunt, Jon Tenney, Judah Lewis, Owen Teague, Libe Barer, Alan Williams. Writer: Devon Graye. Director: Adam Randall.

   It’s best to go into thriller movies such as this one totally cold. Although I don’t believe the one below does, even the trailers can tell you more than you might want to know about the twists and turns the story line has in mind.

   I’ll do my best to keep such things a secret, but I have feeling that many reviews won’t, so please be careful out there.

   I See You begins with several threads of the story all at once, but all somewhat disconnected, but not really. First, a young ten year old boy disappears while bicycling through a heavily wooded area close to a small town where one of the police officers (Greg Harper, played by Jon Tenney) is having a domestic problem with his wife (Helen Hunt). He has discovered that she has taken on a lover, and while she has apologized, neither he nor their teen-aged son has decided to forgive her.

   Strangely enough, the case of the missing boy has all the earmarks of a culprit now in jail. Was he wrongly convicted, or is their a copycat at work? Even more strangely, scary events are beginning to happen at the Harpers’ home. Silverware is missing, the record player begin playing by itself, and Mr. Harper is locked in a closet. Worse, a coffee mug falls from the roof on Mrs. Harper’s former lover, and he is later found dead in their basement.

   This all spooky enough for several dozen movies, but the explanation is even spookier. This is all I will tell you, but I will say that the second half of the movie is even better than the first half, assuming that thrillers like this are among your favorite movie-watching fare.
   

ELLIOT CHAZE – Black Wings Has My Angel. Gold Medal #296, paperback original, 1953. Stark House Press, trade paperback, 2012 (published with One Is a Lonely Number by Bruce Elliott) New York Review of Books, trade paperback, 2016. Reprnited earlier as One for the Money (Berkley Y658, paperback, 1962).

   The reputation of Black Wings Has My Angel as the quintessential Gold Medal paperback is deserved. It has everything that made these originals so good: a fast-moving story, sex, and fine descriptive writing.

   Escaped con Tim Sunblade (an alias chosen after his jailbreak, “because it smells of the out of doors”) is resting up after rough-necking on a drilling rig.  In a small hotel in a little fishing village on the Atchafayala, he encounters Virginia, a beautiful prostitute whose $!0-a-night fee causes him to guess rightly that she, too, is keeping a low profile; soon he finds she is a high-priced call girl on the run. Virginia seems aloof, even cold, but the two pair off.

   When Tim tries to ditch her. only to discover she has anticipated him and stolen his money, they reteam and Virginia’s passion bubbles to the surface. Camping out in the mountains in Colorado, Tim decides Virginia has what it takes to help him pull off an armored-car job. They move to Denver and set up a respectable front,. renting a house, Tim working another hard labor job, as the robbery is meticulously planned, and then carried out.

   Bu1 Chaze’s antihero 1s too complex to be described simply as amoral; his immoral deeds haunt him in a manner an amoral individual would shrug off. A murder he’s committed calls at him as he and Virginia slide into a rich, decadent life-style in New Orleans. Soon Tim is pulled obsessively into his respectable past, for a brief, violent layover in his small hometown, before the couple ride out an even deeper, darker compulsion: to look into a certain abandoned mine shaft, to stare into the darkness that is death.

   Gold Medal originals were often James M. Cain pastiches, and Chaze’s novel is one of the best – far better than the novels Cain himself was writing at the time, Chaze’s bleak social satire – the working and upper classes arc shown to be equally venal – helps keep Tim’s actions understandable and even sympathetic. The swift, compelling, natural-sounding first-person narration is marked by quietly vivid images (“She was lying on the sleeping bag in the sun, as slim and bare as a sword”).

   Black Wings Has My Angel (reprinted as One for the Money, Berkley, 1962) is an early work, and would seem to promise a major career in the genre for Chaze. But Cbaze, a newspaperman, has published novels only occasionally, and not always in the suspense field, In Chaze’s recent mystery series about newsman Kiel St. James, the promise of his Gold Medal original is not kept: Mr. Yesterday (1984) is haphazardly plotted, an unconvincing structure that collapses upon its interesting characters and well-drawn southern setting.

———
Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

REVIEWED BY DAN STUMPF:

NEVER LET GO. Rank, UK, 1960. Richard Todd, Peter Sellers, Elizabeth Sellars, Adam Faith and Carol White. Written by John Gullermin, Peter D Sarigny, and Alun Falconer. Directed by John Guilllermin.

   British Noir, dark as Detour and brutal as Big Heat, from the director of PJ and Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure, with veteran funnyman Sellers in a straight and very effective performance as the lead heavy.

   I detected understandable echoes of The Bicycle Thief here, along with surprising vibes from Death of a Salesman, in a story centered around Richard Todd, a cosmetics salesman who has lost his touch and quickly loses his car to a chop shop ring run by Adam Faith under the glowering eye of Peter Sellers.

   Let’s pause for a moment and look at Sellers here because his presence in the film positively sank it with the Public. A pity that, because it’s right up there with Francis Sullivan in Night and the City or Oscar Homolka in Sabotage, a figure of oversized villainy more compelling because he’s so real. Indeed, the more I watched, the clearer it became that the character’s arrogant brutality rose from a poignant desire to be loved.

   Pit this character against Todd’s anger at being treated like the Nobody he is, and you have a cosmic collision of irresistible force against irresistible force. The stolen car is vital to Todd’s work, but the police treat it as just another statistic. Spurred on to find it on his own, Todd finds himself hopelessly outmatched by motorcycle gangs and menacing goons — but he keeps on coming.

   Todd’s futile devotion to a lost cause — himself — puts Never Let Go solidly into Noir territory. He loses his job, gets beat up, causes a death, gets beat up, his wife leaves him, and he gets into one of the nastiest fights ever thrown onto the screen, leading to an ending that is at best equivocal. And all the while he’s struggling, Sellers’ character visibly deteriorates before our eyes until what we get is a conflict more dramatic because its antagonists are two sides of a very small coin indeed.

   I should add that the film is nowhere near as turgid as this review. John Guillerman’s style was marked by unpretentious (Some say he had a lot to be unpretentious about) craftsmanship and stylish bad taste, and it suits Never Let Go right down to its bloody fingernails.
   

WILLIAM KAYE – Wrong Target. Chickie French #1. Leisure, paperback original, 1981.

   You might call this a private eye procedural. Not in the Joe Gores/DKA Agency sense, though, for I get the distinct impression that the closest William Kaye ever came to real life investigator was about the same as you or I. In print, that is. From reading about them.

   But in deciding to write about the adventures of a PI named Chickie French, Kaye probably made the right choice, since, if anything, he is even less apt at describing how real-life police operate.

   For example, after French’s sister, the wife of mayoral candidate, Whit Davidson, is shot and killed at a political rally (note the title) , French comes in late and still manages to get in his share of interrogating the witnesses. And when he’s done, he and Davidson simply drive away. Methinks the cops clamp down harder than that, even in small towns.

   Returning, though, to my original thoughts, French does do a neat job of shuffling several cases around at the same time – some of which are completely followed through upon, some not; some are connected, some are not – and he still manages to solve his sister’s murder.

   Although I am still wondering about his secretary’s strange behavior in Chapter Four – it is never referred to again – there are some very good moments in this book, many of them occurring when French is feeling nostalgic and retrospective.

   Unfortunately, there is not much of a mystery that’s involved. Apparently Mr. Kaye has no sense of misdirection at all.

   So, to sum things up, the book is terribly uneven, and yes, even amateurish in style and technique. Nonetheless, the moments that are very good suggest that as a writer Kaye does show some promise. (On the other hand, whoever it was wrote the copy for the back cover is simply and utterly incompetent. There are no other words for it.)

Rating: C minus.

   
UPDATE; This is the only entry for William Kaye in Hubin, and thus also making this Chickie French’s only recorded case.

PHILIP MARLOWE “The Ugly Duckling.” ABC. 06 October 1959 (Season One, Episode One.) Philip Carey (Philip Marlowe), William Schallert. Guest Cast: Virginia Gregg, Rhys Williams, James Griffith, Barbara Bain, Addison Richards. Writer: Gene Wang. Director: Robert Ellis Miller.

   It is difficult to say for sure, since very few of the series’ episodes have survived (a second one can be found below), but this early attempt at adapting Raymond Chandler’s iconic character Philip Marlowe did not really have a lot going for it. The star Philip Carey has the right first name, and physically he looks the part, but he has none of the star power that was needed to push the series anywhere near the top.

   It is a young Barbara Bain, pitch perfect in her role of a golddigger “other woman,” who makes this first episode of the season worth watching. She has her hooks in nebbish James Griffith’s character, and won’t let go. Not even the $10,000 dollars Marlowe offers ger on the man’s wife’s behalf will make her change her mind.

   It comes as no great surprise the, that she is a mysterious killer’s first victim. There are enough people in the story for the deceptive fans watching to puzzle over, but the fact remains that (again based on only this first episode) that it need not have been Marlowe who was the detective. Any generic PI would do just as well.

NOTE: Michael Shonk covered this episode very briefly on this blog quite some time ago. The accompanying video disappeared from YouTube very quickly thereafter, but as you see, it has returned, at least for a little while.

   Michael later did a more complete overview of the series. You can read it here, and I strongly suggest you do.

RAYMOND CHANDLER “Wrong Pigeon.” Short story. PI Philip Marlowe. First magazine publication in Manhunt, February 1960. Previouslypublished, possibly in abridged form, in a British newspaper as “Marlowe Takes on the Syndicate.” Later reprinted as “Philip Marlowe’s Last Case” in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (January 1962) and as “The Pencil” in Argosy (September 1965). Collected as “The Pencil” in The Smell of Fear (H. Hamilton, UK, 1965). Reprinted in Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe: A Centennial Celebration, edited by Byron Preiss (Knopf, 1988) and as “Wrong Pigeon” in The Mammoth Book of Private Eye Stories, edited by Bill Pronzini and Martin H. Greenberg (Carroll & Graf, 1988), among others. TV adaptation: As “The Pencil” on Philip Marlowe, Private Eye, 16 April 1983 (season 1, episode 1), starring Powers Boothe.

   And with all of that, I’ve still probably missing something obvious. It was, as the title of the story as it appeared in EQMM, PI Philip Marlowe’s last case, Raymond Chandler having died in 1959, and it’s a good one. Marlowe takes on a job for a guy who wants to get out of the mob, but there’s been a pencil drawn through his name, and he knows the syndicate does not take defections lightly.

   It’s a fool’s task, but the promise of $5000 upon completion of a successful escape has a loud way of talking, and that’s in 1959 money. And Marlowe is no fool. He knows that there’s a reason why the job is done so easily. He’s right, of course, and you should be. too, the reader.

   It’s been a long time for me to get around to reading this one, and I’m glad I did. I don’t know what the general opinion is of this story, but I think Chandler was still in fine form when he wrote it. The story is light and breezily told, but when it comes down to it, Marlowe is as hardboiled as private eyes really ought to be, especially when it comes to dealing with the syndicate. Very enjoyable.