TWO ON A GUILLOTINE. Warner Brothers, 1965. Connie Stevens, Dean Jones, Cesar Romero, Parley Baer, Virginia Gregg, Connie Gilchrist, John Hoyt, Russell Thorson. Producer-director: William Conrad.

   Two on a Guillotine, a decidedly uneven Gothic horror movie, features two esteemed character actors who will be quite familiar to anyone who watched more than their fair share of theatrical films and television from the 1960s; namely, Cesar Romero (perhaps best remembered now for portraying The Joker on Batman) and Dean Jones (star of The Love Bug in the movies and Ensign O’Toole on TV). The third star in Two on a Guillotine is singer-actress Connie Stevens, the lead female protagonist, a role that was meant to be a more serious, adult one than the parts she played in largely teenage exploitation fare in the late 1950s (Dragstrip Riot).

   In Two on a Guillotine, a film that well-known character actor William Conrad both produced and directed, Connie Stevens has a dual role. She portrays two different, but related, characters – a mother at the very beginning of the film and then later, her daughter. When we are first introduced to Stevens in her role as Melinda Duquesne, wife of the magician, Duquesne (Cesar Romero). She’s also a star in his show, playing the role of a damsel in distress with the seemingly magical ability to escape from the horrible fate that Duquesne sets out for her as part of his theatrical act. As the movie begins, we see her tied up with her arms around her head, with a man pushing a sword into her. But it is all an illusion, a trick. For she was never really in danger and the whole thing, as the camera soon demonstrates, was merely part of a stage act.

   Things seem all right between Duquesne and his wife, although there apparently are some difficulties in balancing their professional lives with caring for their young daughter. It’s not that their daughter is physically ill; it’s just that in his life, she seems to be something of any afterthought to the magician. He seems far more concerned with his newest and latest magic trick: a guillotine – with a razor sharp blade, no less. It’s an instrument of death and terror straight out of revolutionary France.

   The film quickly shifts in time to some two decades later, with the next scene at Duquesne’s funeral in sunny California. A young woman rushes up to the area where the coffin is located and the mourners are gathered. She looks just like Melinda Duquesne as we saw her earlier, but that’s impossible, for she hasn’t aged a day. The viewer attentive to the tropes of Gothic horror movies such as the one utilized in The Tomb of Ligeia (1964) will quickly recognize what’s transpiring here. Namely, that this beautiful young woman isn’t Melinda at all, but she is Duquesne’s daughter, Cassie portrayed now by Stevens in her second role.

   Among those noticing Cassie at the funeral is intrepid reporter Val Henderson (Dean Jones), who soon learns that Duquesne’s last will and testament specified that his daughter Cassie inherit a fortune on the condition that she agrees to stay in his Hollywood mansion for seven nights. This leads us to the basis for the crux of the film: why would Duquesne want his estranged daughter to stay in his house? Is it possible that he’s really not really dead after all and has a magician’s trick up his sleeve?

   Those familiar with haunted house movies surely know the basic outline of what comes next. At first, Cassie decides that she will stay in the house – after all, she feels as if she deserves her estranged father’s fortune – and initially appears to give little regard to what might happen next. Soon, with Val and an adorable white house rabbit at her side, Cassie begins to encounter weird goings-on in the house. So much so that Val, who has fallen in love with her in the meantime, becomes determined that no harm come to her.

   Unfortunately, as the story continues to unfold, the tone of the movie becomes increasingly uneven. Shifting from moments of light, innocent romance between Cassie and Val to moments of tension and fright, Two on a Guillotine ends up suffering from an identity crisis. Is it a horror movie with light, comic overtones or a quirky, offbeat feature more indebted to René Claire’s I Married a Witch (1942)? Or was it intended to be a darker, more psychologically brooding horror films such as the similarly themed The Mad Magician (1954), starring Vincent Price in the title role?

   One possibility that may help explain the film’s tonal unevenness of this film is that the movie’s screenwriters, John Kneubuhl and Henry Slesar, are known to have worked primarily in television, a medium where one needed to be particularly cautious how far one could push the envelope. Indeed, there is definitely a flat, television feel to Two on a Guillotine. Cinematographer Sam Leavitt had a prolific career in Hollywood, but he didn’t lend this story the type of exceptional photography that would have elevated it from competent to something more memorable.

   One notable exception is found in the film’s singular dream montage sequence. Distraught and confused, Cassie has a bizarre, hallucinatory dream in which she images various scenarios that might explain, at least in part, what is transpiring all around her. It’s an experimental sequence in an otherwise lackluster film, at least in terms of photography.

   In terms of the film’s direction, credit goes to veteran character actor William Conrad who imparts the movie with a workmanlike quality. Although he was better known for his achievements in radio and as a television actor (Cannon, Jake and the Fat Man) who often portrayed a heavy or, in the case of exceptional, albeit nearly forgotten, film noir Tension (1949), in which he portrayed a Mexican-American police detective, William Conrad also worked as a behind the camera as a director as well.

   His primary work in that regard was in television rather than in cinema, directing episodes of genre-based series, both well known and obscure, including Highway Patrol, Bold Venture, The Rifleman, Bat Masterson, Route 66, and Naked City. Still, Conrad directed three other feature films: a western entitled The Man from Galveston (1963) starring Jeffrey Hunter, Preston Foster, and James Coburn, and the thrillers The Blood Runs Cold (1965) and Brainstorm (1965).

   In contrast to Conrad’s rather prosaic direction, the movie’s score works well quite with the subject matter at hand. Max Steiner, the legendary Hollywood composer whose work include such classic works of American cinema as King Kong (1933), Gone With the Wind (1939), Casablanca (1942), and The Searchers (1956) is credited with a score which is neither too intrusive nor overwrought. The film’s initial scene (discussed above) in which Duquesne “stabs” Cassie’s mother is accompanied by music that fits the mood perfectly. Foreboding and chaotic, Steiner’s musical accompaniment to this scene opens the movie with an intensity that fits the on screen happenings to a hilt.

   Unfortunately, there’s then little excitement and intensity in the movie until the ending when the big reveal happens, and Cassie learns that that her father is still alive. She also finds out that her mother died in a gruesome guillotine accident when she and her father were attempting to prepare for his next big act decades ago. And to make matters worse for her, Duquesne has come to believe that Cassie is really her mother, Melinda. Apparently he has brought her to the mansion so that he can “perfect” his guillotine trick.

   This is where the film’s tone most strikingly shifts from playful to intense. Duquesne’s reappearing act, as it were, reveals a dark, sinister underbelly at the heart of this film. He truly is mad and maniacal. The lighthearted, albeit contrived, romance between Cassie and Val disappears under the weight of the revelation that Cassie’s mother’s body is buried out somewhere in the yard and that her father is a homicidal maniac.

   Even though Romero was a highly competent character actor, his portrayal of Duquesne is not nearly as memorable as Vincent Price’s portrayal of Gallico in John Brahms’s aforementioned The Mad Magician. Also of note: Romeo himself does a disappearing act of sorts during most of the film, and has probably less than a total of ten minutes of screen time. Indeed, for most of the film, we just are witness to Cassie and Val investigating the strange goings-on in Duquesne’s seemingly abandoned mansion.

   In conclusion, Two on a Guillotine had the potential, at least on paper, to be a stronger, more sinister feature. The decision to play up the romance between Cassie and Val, not to mention the casting of Dean Jones who had a career of playing particularly non-threatening characters, made it nearly impossible for the film to end up being the fright fest that the movie posters portrayed it to be.

   Instead, the movie remains an historical curiosity at best, a black and white horror film produced a time when most were being released in color and a vehicle for Connie Stevens to pursue a more serious and mature acting career, one that never successfully got off the ground in the way that she had intended. While it has its moments, this decidedly quirky movie, by attempting to package lighthearted romance with psychological horror, ends up being an uneven mélange of genres and a rather average horror film, albeit one not without some charm.

FISTFUL OF DIAMONDS. Balcázar Producciones Cinematográficas, Spain-Italy, 1967. Original title (Spanish): El hombre del puño de oro, Also released as L’umo dal pugno d’oro (Italian). Germán Cobos, Erika Blanc, Frank Russell, Tomás Torres, Screenplay: Mario Colluci as Ray Colloway. Director: Jaime Jesús Balcázar.

   In 1967 the Eurospy craze was already running a bit thin, and this film with Eurospy star Germán Cobos (often playing Danny O’Connor aka Agent Z-55 in his spy outings) was designed to open up a new venue, the hard boiled American private eye. It did not, but for what it is, this is well worth your time.

   Cobos is New York private eye Joe Galligan, a hard-drinking, hard-hitting, and hard-punching example of the breed with a soft heart for his pre-teen black neighborhood girl/secretary and kids in general. We meet him as he is about to be hired by beautiful Linda Moore (Erika Blanc) whose sister was killed the by gangster Norman Krasner (Frank Russell), who double-crossed her and his other partners and ambushed them at a buy in where the price was a suitcase full of diamonds. Erika wants revenge and the ice.

   Galligan (not Callahan as one review on IMDb has it, and Clark in the English language version for no real reason) accompanies Linda to the house where the exchange was supposed to be made and is waylaid by two of Krasner’s thugs. They take the girl and leave him unconscious.

   Determined to get the girl back, Galligan finds the cops won’t talk about the well-connected Krasner, and neither will the usual informers, but he discovers Krasner is in Istanbul and heads that way.

   In Istanbul Galligan ties up with Joy Boy (Tomás Toros) his old friend, a Texas-born Hispanic who owns a club, and together they set out to recover the girl and the diamonds, and shut down Krasner.

   Despite some eighteen-wheeler worthy plot holes and a title song that may keep you from watching the film (the score is great otherwise), this is good private eye stuff, with Cobos a likable and not too superhuman sleuth, Blanc beautiful and smart, and Russell a fine villain wielding a South African sjambok to make his point.

   The Turkish scenery is handsomely filmed, there are some first-rate fight scenes including a comic one in Joy Boy’s club, and a deadly serious one in a boatyard at night. The ending is a humdinger with a spectacular setting even if it is a bit contrived, and a surprisingly, but satisfyingly brutal, somber final note.

   Find it with subtitles if you can; the dubbing on the English language version is terrible. Thanks to YouTube, the complete Italian version is below, at least for now:

KAREN JOY FOWLER “Private Grave 9.” First published in McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, edited by Michael Chabon (Vintage Books, 2003). Collected in What I Didn’t See and Other Stories (Small Beer Press, 2010). Reprinted (and lead story) in The Mammoth Book of the Mummy, edited by Paula Guran (Prime Books, 2017).

   This story takes place in Mesopotamia around the same time that Howard Carter was looting King Tut’s burial site over in Egypt. The unnamed narrator is there at the dig as its official photographer when two things happen: First the discovery of a body of a royal princess in a tomb also containing the remains of seven other women, quite possibly her servants.

   Secondly, and perhaps even as importantly: the arrival of a mystery writer (à la Agatha Christie) hoping to soak up some atmosphere for her next book, and looking for signs of conflict between the various members of the expedition. She finds none, not at first, but as time goes on, she does create some.

   Or do the murderous thoughts that come into his mind come from the princess, Tu-api, rather than the presence of Miss Whitfield? One of the narrator’s photos of the princess mysteriously shows a ghostly image of her face, or is it only his imagination?

   This story is extremely well written, with many fine scenes and phrases to keep the reader turning the pages. To me, however, this is a story in which something is always on the verge of happening, but that something never really does. Nor by story’s end has anything much changed, except to the narrator, who cannot seem to relate what he has found out about himself to anyone except himself.

   But as to whether his discovery translates well to the reader, well, all I can suggest is that is something that will depend on the reader. As for me, I was disappointed, but I also have to tell you there are depths here that make this a story well worth reading.

DEAD AGAIN. Paramount Pictures, 1991. Kenneth Branagh, Andy Garcia, Derek Jacobi, Emma Thompson (and Robin Williams). Director: Kenneth Branagh.

   A California home for orphans and indigent children asks a breezy young PI named Mike Church to investigate a strange intruder-visitor there, an equally young woman who is unable to speak, with no memory of who she is, but who has the most violent nightmares after she barricades herself inside her room at night.

   With the aid of a friendly hypnotist, together they discover that one of her past lives has apparently converged upon her present one, with an old murder case that made headlines in 1949 at the core of the matter. There are a couple of other twists to come, neither one of which were expected (by me) at all.

   This is an utterly marvelous motion picture, a true Gothic neo-noir, but one that I’m sure I would have missed altogether if it weren’t for the private eye trapping. Karma-freak or not, don’t make the same mistake. And while this is Branagh’s movie all the way through, it’s also the first time I have seen Emma Thompson in action. What a revelation as an actor she is. It won’t be the last time I’ll see her in a movie, I can assure you of that.

PostScript:   Absolutely incidentally, and for no extra fee, this motion picture also contains the greatest advertisement for non-smoking that you can ever imagine.

A song on the LP Days of Future Passed, released in 1967. To me this is one of the most perfect albums of all time, an out-and-out classic.

BASIL HEATTER – Virgin Cay. Gold Medal k1310, paperback original; 1st printing, June 1963.

   The primary protagonist in Virgin Cay, just as it was in A Night Out (reviewed here ), also by Basil Heatter, is once again a dedicated boatsman plying his trade in the Gulf of Mexico off the Florida shore, and if anything, even more so.

   But “plying his trade” is not entirely accurate. When asked what he does for a living (page 12), Gus Robinson’s reply is:

   Asking the question is a fine-looking woman whose home on Virgin Cay is where Gus washes ashore after his boat goes down about ten miles out to sea. They hit it off so well that before he leaves the next morning, the delectable Clare Loomis has a business proposition for him, one that if accepted will net Gus a cool $20,000.

   The proposition? Murder. Ordinarily Gus wouldn’t think twice before refusing, but without a boat, he’d be lost trying to survive on land. The next question: who would he have to kill? And there, as it turns out, is where the rub comes in.

   The first twist in the story is an obvious one, or it was to me and I suspect it will be to you as well. After that, though, the beauty of this story is that you, the reader, have no idea of what happens from there.

   But what does happen will have you reading the last 40 pages about as fast as you can turn them. Is the ending a happy one? I won’t tell you. Why spoil your fun?

   Heatter is a more polished writer than he was in A Night Out, written some seven years earlier, but this time around, while the sense of doomed futility is there, it is not nearly as strong. This is a suspense novel more than it is a crime thriller, and even then, the emphasis is on being a novel.

   In that regard, there are some not-so-subtle hints of John D. MacDonald in this later book, most evident when Gus reflects with dismay upon what the Florida landscape is starting to become. He’s a boat person, through and through, which I suspect was as true about the author as it is about Gus Robinson.

From this French-American singer-songwriter’s fourth studio album, Half the Perfect World, released in 2006:

THE NIGHT VISITOR. Universal Marion Corporation, 1971. Max von Sydow, Trevor Howard, Liv Ullmann, Per Oscarsson, Rupert Davies, Andrew Keir. Director: László Benedek.

   Before there was such a thing as the slasher film genre, there was The Night Visitor. Directed by László Benedek (The Wild One), this English-language Swedish film is a brooding psychological thriller, albeit one punctuated by moments of extreme, brutal violence. Set in a small, somewhat isolated Swedish town beset with winter snow, the story follows the devious scheme hatched by Salem (Max Van Sydow in an standout performance), an inmate at an asylum for the criminally insane, to wreak havoc and to exact revenge on those who framed him for a crime he did not commit.

   Salem isn’t a particularly bright man, but he’s devised an ingenious, if highly implausible, method to escape from his cell at the asylum. He does so in such a methodical and successful manner that he is able to leave his cell, abscond into the Swedish landscape, and to avenge himself upon those who he — rightfully — believes have wronged him two years ago when he was framed for the murder of a farmhand. When he returns to his cell, however, he has an iron-clad alibi.

   Among Salem’s targets are his sister Ester (Liv Ullmann), and her husband, Anton (Per Oscarsson). He also targets three other people: Anton’s sister, his former lover, and the lawyer who was bribed into changing Anton’s plea into not guilty by reason of insanity.

   Once bodies start showing up in his small town, the local police inspector (Trevor Howard) begins to investigate whether it is just possible that Salem is the one committing the crimes after all. But he’s not entirely convinced that Anton is innocent either. Howard is nearly flawless in his portrayal of an elderly, somewhat cynical, policeman who isn’t so easily impressed by or intimidated by any one who comes between him and his quest for the truth.

   Overall, The Night Visitor isn’t a superb movie, but it’s a good one. The tension is palpable throughout and the stark, wintry Scandinavian landscape lends the film an atmosphere that is hard to beat. Although one may end up finding Salem’s nearly magical escape methods to be somewhat laughable, the movie’s bleak, brooding nature makes up for whatever implausible plot devices are utilized to tell the story of a man who literally went crazy when he was unjustly imprisoned in an asylum.

DOLORES HITCHENS – Sleep with Slander. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1960. Permabook M-4243, paperback, 1962; Berkley, paperback, 1969.

   Many people seem to feel that the best hard-boiled male private-eye novel written by a woman is Leigh Brackett’s No Good from a Corpse (reviewed here ). But that may because many people haven’t read Sleep with Slander. For the undersigned reviewer’s money, this is the best hard-boiled private-eye novel written by a woman — and one of the best written by anybody.

   Its protagonist, Long Beach-based Jim Sader, is a multidimensional character, much more realistic than the stereotypical tough detective; Sader uses his intelligence to accomplish his purposes. The plot, reminiscent in its complexity of both Chandler and Ross Macdonald, is better crafted, more compelling, and ultimately more satisfying than the Brackett.

   Sader is hired by a rich old man, Hale Gibbings, whose daughter gave birth to an illegitimate child five years earlier. The child, Ricky, was given away for adoption, not through a recognized agency but to a private couple, and Gibbings has heard nothing about the boy until recently, when an anonymous letter writer tells him the child is being mentally and physically abused.

   Sader undertakes the search for Ricky, following a trail that leads him to a conniving friend of Tina Champlain, the adoptive (and now presumed dead) mother; to a violent builder of boats and his drunken father; to murder, extortion, double-dealing, madness; and finally to the truth. The surprises Hitchens springs along the way are not at all easy to anticipate. A first-rate novel recommended not just to fans s of the hard-boiled school but for anyone who appreciates a quality mystery.

   Hitchens wrote one other novel featuring Sader: Sleep with Strangers (1957). This is also good reading, but marred by sentimentality and a shaky ending that reveals the wrong choice of murderer.

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   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.

LEIGH BRACKETT – No Good from a Corpse. Coward McCann, hardcover, 1944. Dennis McMillan, hardcover, 1998 [includes eight detective pulp stories plus title novel]. Reprint paperbacks: Handi-Book #32, 1944; Collier, 1964.

   Leigh Brackett is perhaps best known for her science fiction and for her script work on the classic private-eye film The Big Sleep (1946); but she also wrote excellent crime fiction (and one very good historical western). Her mysteries tend to be tough-minded and realistic. No Good from a Corpse, in fact, can accurately be termed “hard-boiled” — and indeed has been called, by some critics and aficionados, the best traditional private-eye novel written by a woman.

   Los Angeles detective Edmond Clive embarks on an angry, vengeful hunt when an old girlfriend, nightclub singer Laurel Dane, is murdered. His quest leads him from Beverly Hills mansions to cheap night spots along the Sunset Strip; from rich playboys (and playgirls) to denizens of the underworld; from threatening telephone calls to a knock on the head to attempts on his fife; and from blackmail to several more murders before he finally uncovers the not altogether surprising identity of Laurel’s murderer and the truth behind a web of lies and half truths.

   Critic Anthony Boucher stated in an introduction to a reissue of this novel in 1964 that Bracken was the one woman who “most successfully captured the authentic Chandleresque male tone.” True enough; the tone is very Chandleresque, to the point of pastiche. It is as if Miss Brackett deliberately set out to out-Chandler Chandler.

   About the novel itself, Boucher wrote, “Its ingredients are not startlingly new: it even includes the obligatory night clubs, in which detective-story characters spend so much more time than any other class of people. But the familiar ingredients take on fresh life, partly because Miss Brackett looks at and writes about Los Angeles itself and not its conventionalized fiction image.”

   Also true, pro and con. There is nothing really new in the novel; Brackett covers old ground- and covers it well, even expertly, but the fact remains that Chandler did it first and did it better. Clive is the only memorable character,and he pales alongside Philip Marlowe. With all due respect to Boucher and the book’s other boosters, No Good from a Corpse is not the best traditional male private-eye novel written by a woman. That distinction belongs to Dolores Hitchens’s Sleep with Slander (reviewed here ).

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   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.