DONALD HAMILTON – The Threateners. Matt Helm #26. Fawcett Gold Medal, paperback origina1, 1992.

   It’s become fashionable to curl the lip at series like Matt Helm, and speak of “formula,” and “predictable.” Well, okay; so what? Sausage and eggs haven’t changed a hell of a lot over the last 25 years either, but it’s still my favorite breakfast, and a Helm book is still pretty tasty, too.

   An old flame of Helm’s pops up out of nowhere and is killed, along with Helm’s dog and the in-hiding author of a drug exposé book. Helm shepherds the widow to South America to retrieve material for another book, dodging both members of a rival government agency (Hamilton has used this device a lot; maybe a little too much) and the drug lord di tutti drug lords.

   Ihere’s a few more killings, a couple of seductions, and a torture scene or two — Helm must be solid scar tissue by now. Sound familiar? Well, it is. If you’re looking for something new and different, look elsewhere. Me, I still like ’em just fine.

Bibliographical Note:   There proved to be only one more Matt Helm adventure, that being The Damagers (Gold Medal, 1993).

From this Nashville based songwriter’s only LP, Cross Country Cowboy (1974). It may be a stretch to call this a Halloween song, but there you go. It’s that time of the year.

THE CLAY PIGEON. RKO Radio Pictures, 1949. Bill Williams, Barbara Hale, Richard Quine, Richard Loo, Frank Fenton. Director: Richard Fleischer.

   Sandwiched between Bodyguard (1948) that I reviewed here and Armored Car Robbery (1950) that I reviewed here is another film noir programmer directed by Richard Fleischer, The Clay Pigeon, from 1949. Much like the other two films, it takes place in postwar boomtown Los Angeles.

   Bill Williams portrays Jim Fletcher, a World War II Navy veteran who wakes up from a coma. The back of his head still hurts and he’s not sure what happened to him. He had been in a Japanese POW camp in the Philippines. Surely that has something to do with his condition. Not too long after waking up, he overhears his doctor and a nurse discuss the fact that he’s been accused of treason and is awaiting a court martial. Fletcher absconds from the hospital and heads to San Diego. Surely, his friend, fellow prisoner of war Mark Gregory will be able to help. It doesn’t take long for Fletcher to learn that Gregory is dead and that he’s been accused of his friend’s murder!

   Suffice it to say, there are plot twists and unanswered questions. Did Fletcher really commit the murder? What is his amnesia preventing him from remembering? Eventually, Fletcher ends up teaming up with Gregory’s widow (Barbara Hale) to solve the myriad mysteries.

   Overall The Clay Pigeon does a good job in keeping you on your toes. But here’s the thing about certain movie plots stemming from a leading character’s amnesia. Neither you, nor the protagonist in question, really know exactly what’s going on. The screenwriter thus has to walk a tightrope so as to keep the viewer engaged, all the while not revealing too much pertinent information too quickly. On the other hand, the screenwriter must find a way to make sure that the “big reveal,” so to speak, flows naturally from what has come before and doesn’t come too late in the movie.

   Indeed, after murder and mayhem, it’s tempting to wrap things up with a tidy bow and an “ah-ha” moment and end the movie immediately after. Unfortunately, that is exactly what The Clay Pigeon ends up doing. The ending feels so tacked on, so forced that it actually ends up making the film far less memorable than it could have been.

   Don’t get me wrong. I enjoyed watching this movie and admire Fleischer’s work in the film noir genre. It’s just that, compared to Bodyguard and Armored Car Robbery, The Clay Pigeon ends up feeling like an overly ambitious project that strives for a payoff that it’s not capable of delivering.

   
SLEEPING CAR TO TRIESTE. General Films, UK, 1948; Eagle-Lion, US, 1949. Jean Kent, Albert Leiven, Derek de Marney, Paul Dupuis, David Tomlinson, Alan Wheatley, Rona Anderson, Finlay Currie, Bonar Colleano, Zena Marshall, Grégorie Aslan, Hugh Burden. Screenplay by Allan MacKinnon from a story by Clifford Grey. Directed by John Paddy Carstairs.

   An excellent spy story set on a train (and the famed Orient Express at that), a setting I can never resist, with a top notch cast, and an involving and cannily observed Ship of Fools style script and cast.

   The film opens as suave adventurer Captain Zurta (Albert Leiven), in white tie and tails, robs an embassy safe in Paris during an embassy ball, cold-bloodedly kills a waiter who interrupts him, passes the diary he steals on to his associate Karl (Alan Wheatley) waiting outside, and rejoins his beautiful companion Valya (Jean Kent) to leave before they are discovered. Things start to go wrong though, when the next morning the two go to collect the diary and find Karl has double crossed them and fled to sell it on his own, catching the Simplon Orient Express (*) for Venice and Trieste (then a ‘free’ city between East and West whose very name suggested intrigue) and beyond to Zagreb and Istanbul.

   The urgency of catching up with Karl, traveling as Charles Poole expatriate Englishman, is demonstrated by Zurta’s own admission: “Beyond Trieste I’m a wanted man. Beyond Trieste I am dead.”

   Zurta and Valya just catch the train and it’s Grand Hotel of passengers, one of which is their quarry.

   Aboard the train is married divorce lawyer George Grant (Derek de Marney) and the innocent young women he is taking for an illicit holiday Joan Maxted (Rona Anderson); comic Englishman, and former client of Grant’s, Tom Bishop (David Tomlinson); skirt chasing American soldier Sgt. West (Bonar Colleano) and sharing his compartment a bird enthusiast who won’t shut up; a pair of beautiful French girls returning from a shopping holiday in Paris and leaving boxes of hats with all the men on the train to avoid the customs fees; train chef Poirier (Grégorie Aslan) saddled with an English son of one of the line’s board members who wants to learn to cook but thinks boiled cod and chips is a delicacy; and just Poole’s luck, the last minute companion in his compartment, Inspector Joif (Paul Dupuis) of the Paris police, hero of the resistance, and something of a French Sherlock Holmes.

   That sets off the game of musical compartments as Poole tries to get a compartment by himself, briefly succeeds, hiding the diary in the new one, then finds himself ejected as famous and penurious and vain international author McBain (Finlay Currie) and his abused secretary Mills (Hugh Burden) occupy the compartment.

   But they are only on the train until Trieste where Poole can get it back if he can find a place to stay away from Joif and the two hunting him, which is how he stumbles of the illicit lovers at lunch as they try to avoid the obnoxious Mr. Bishop who is a notorious gossip and determined to organize a poker game with Grant, who has other things on his mind.

   And when Zurta kills Poole and frames Grant only to find the diary is missing, all the differing threads begin to come together.

   Screenwriter Allan MacKinnon was not only a first class writer of film thrillers, but a top notch thriller writer in his own right (Cormorant Isle) often compared to Victor Canning and Geoffrey Household (no mean company for comparison). John Paddy Carstairs was a first class British director, and the cast, while devoid of big names save perhaps Kent, is a who’s who of top British and International character actors.

   Unusually the film hasn’t really got a hero per se. Grant, as played by de Marney, is a bit of a heel all too obviously leading the girl on, and her simpering willingness to be fooled detracts from too much sympathy for her character. Bishop, played with perfect obnoxious self centered British satisfaction and obliviousness by Tomlinson (Mary Poppins Mr. Banks), will save the day, but blindly and by butting in where he isn’t wanted.

   McBain finds and tries to save the diary for himself because it will harm a country that has shunned him and his secretary Mills finds it and tries to blackmail him with it, a worm who all too easily returns to worm status. Zurta is a cold blooded killer willing to sacrifice anyone along the way with no moral or political axe but his own need for adventure and money. Valya, is a little sympathetic, but only a little so and rather ruthless herself in pursuit of her ideals. As for Jolif, he is willing to hang whoever’s neck the noose fits, rather like some real Paris policemen I knew.

   That is probably why this one is such a delight. There is no United Nations message of international cooperation like Berlin Express and no dashing hero and spunky heroine like The Lady Vanishes. The train is filled with flawed people, not evil, even Zurta and Valya aren’t evil, just human beings caught up in their own comical and tragic dramas thrown together in an artificial environment and rather savagely, but with British reserve and taste, dissected as pressure is applied. The American is a girl chasing vulgarian (“We are tired of being liberated,” a French Zena Marshall tells him pointedly); the Scotsman is cheap, cruel, vain, and petty; the Brits are all insular and judgmental; and the Europeans all seem bored and a bit rude.

   But it is all so expertly played and written that despite that you recognize the characters as humans deserving of sympathy for all their flaws depending on their varying degrees of innocence.

   Sleeping car or not, no one, certainly not the audience, gets much sleep on this trip to Trieste.

   
* Just a note, but I traveled on the Orient Express in the seventies, and it never looked more like just another train than here. I suppose something to do with post-war austerity in England. The gilt and red velvet (the film is in black and white, but still …) are gone; there is no sense of the gilded cigar smoking cherubs on the dining car ceiling; and the windows in the compartments only open eighteen inches, not wide like British trains of that period as shown here.

   Granted the train was not its glorious self in 1948, and not fully restored until the nineties (it wasn’t really the famed Orient Express when I rode it, not exactly, still twenty years or so from the full restoration to the glory of the great years pre-WWI and between the wars), but it was still much more cosmopolitan and less British commuter train than it appears here, a small flaw in an otherwise delightful film.

Music by Les Baxter:

THE CLAW MONSTERS. Republic Pictures, 1966. Phyllis Coates, Myron Healey, Arthur Space, John Day, Mike Ragan, Morris Buchanan. Director: Franklin Adreon.

   After D-Day on Mars, reviewed here, I spent some time with The Claw Monsters, which on the other hand is pretty awful. It’s the trimmed down feature version of the serial Panther Girl of the Kongo, which was made in 1955 when everyone had pretty much lost interest, and it shows.

   Phyllis Coates — future Lois Lane — is the Panther girl (mostly, that is; a lot of footage of her swinging through the trees was lifted from the Nyoka serial) and not being much for Stunt Work she leaves most of the fighting to Myron Healey and the requisite two bad guys working for the Mad Scientist.

   The Claw Monsters are just little crayfish photographed on cheap miniature sets, and there isn’t even much back-projection to integrate them with the actors; someone just looks off camera, screams, and we cut to a shot of the crayfish ambling around in some completely irrelevant direction inside what looks to be a dime-store Turtle Tank.

   Also, the fights are pretty routine, and the protagonists on both sides are incredibly poor marksmen; time and again they shoot at each other from about ten feet away and miss until one of them runs out of bullets, knocks the gun out of his opponent’s hand and etc., etc. There’s also a lot of really embarrassing dialogue — from the good guys — about how ignorant and superstitious the Natives are.

VICTOR MacCLURE – Death on the Set. J. B. Lippincott, hardcover, 1935. First published in the UK by Harrap, hardcover, 1934. Film: Twickenham, UK, 1935, released in the US as Murder on the Set.

   Following the final takes of More Than Coronets at the Titan Productions studio in England, Cayley Morden, the producer — or what I would consider the director — is found shot to death in his office. Not only was Morden a well-hated man, despite his immense talent, but he apparently was leading a double life. A number of the actors on the set had obvious or not so obvious motives for doing away with Morden, and their alibis aren’t very persuasive.

   Investigating the crime is MacClure’s series character, Chief-Inspector Detective — well, that’s what the author says his title is — Archibald Burford, who has intelligence, money and a talented scalp. A good investigation that’s up there, I would say, with the cases of plain of Inspector French.

Bibliographic Note:   Murder on the Set was the fifth of seven appearances in England for Inspector Archie Burford between 1930 and 1937. Three of them, including this one, were later published in the US.

BRETT HALLIDAY – Murder in Haste. Torquil/Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1961. Dell 5970, paperback, 1962. Reprinted several times.

   If my count is correct, this is the third of twenty-three Mike Shayne novels that were ghost-written by author Robert Terrall under the Brett Halliday byline, and to me, it’s far from the best in the series. It’s easy to speculate in retrospect, but I never had the sense that the author had more than a surface feeling for the characters, that it may have been too early.

   The well-known antagonism between Shayne and Miami Beach’s Chief of Detectives Peter Painter is emphasized over and over, for example, and that Shayne’s fondness for drinking cognac, is demonstrated more times than I’d care to count.

   Nor is the story any great shakes, though it does redeem itself in a semi-satisfactory way by the time Shayne wraps it up at the end. The telling is far too complicated, for one thing, with at least two different threads of the plot going at the same time, and one of those not very interesting:

   (1) The wife of a murdered bank employee is contacted by the wife of the man convicted of the killing, asking her to retract her testimony against her husband. The former is willing, but would like Shayne to investigate further. (2) A convention of union delegates is in town — one of those organization with all kinds of crooked behavior going on at the top. (3) Peter Painter, who seems to have been holding his cards close to his vest, has disappeared. Unfortunately no one seems to know what game he was even playing.

   OK, so maybe that’s three. Number two didn’t interest me at all, and I never cared all that much about Peter Painter. Neither does Mike Shayne, but he figures he has to save the guy if he can.

   There’s a lot of mostly meaningless action going on in th early going, mostly to give the impression that something is going on, when it isn’t. There are also way too many characters involved, and one unfortunate continuity goof that slowed me down to a crawl for a while. The ending, when it comes, is a decent one, as I previously mentioned, but as you can probably tell, my recommendation for this one is no better than so-so.

STAN CUTLER – The Face on the Cutting Room Floor. Goodman & Bradley #2. E. P. Dutton, hardcover, 1992. Signet, paperback, 1993.

   The unlikely detecting pair of middle-aged Hollywood PI Rayford Goodman and gay ghostwriter Mark Bradley made their debut in Best Performance by a Patsy to considerable good press.

   In the second outing, Goodman is “requested” by the local Mafia boss to guard a good friend who is recovering from plastic surgery at an exclusive hotel, while Bradley is ghosting an autobiography of an Oscar-wining director. They turn out to be the same person, and our lovable pair are reunited amid murder and gangland mayhem.

   To be honest, I didn’t see what all the fuss was about. The characters are amiable enough, and Cutler is a decent writer, but I remained relatively unimpressed with it all. I found the overall plot not very engrossing (though there was a realistic subplot with Goodman and his lady), and I didn’t like the alternating first-person narratives, which were distracting to me. I’m glad I read this from the library rather than buying it.

Bibliographic Note:   There followed two additional entries in the series: Shot on Location (Dutton, 1993) and Rough Cut (Dutton, 1994).