RUN ALL NIGHT. Warner Brothers, 2015. Liam Neeson, Ed Harris, Joel Kinnaman, Boyd Holbrook, Bruce McGill, Genesis Rodriguez, Vincent D’Onofrio, Common. Director: Jaume Collet-Serra.

   Because it’s a fairly recent movie and there’s quite a few reviews available online to read (this one from Sight & Sound magazine is particularly on point), I probably am not going to be saying all that much that’s new here about Run All Night.

   Still, it’s worth noting that, for those not familiar with the film, it’s is actually a quite engaging neo-noir feature, one that grips you tight and doesn’t particularly want to let you go until the very end.

   Combining the directorial talents of Jaume Collet-Serra and both the world-weariness and sheer physicality of Liam Neeson, this gritty crime film set primarily in Brooklyn and Queens, New York, feels more like a 1970s Charles Bronson/Steve McQueen/Roy Scheider movie than it does a sleek Hollywood action film. There’s murder, revenge, car chases, corrupt cops, ruthless gangsters, bright neon lights, and cold winter rain. There are back alleys, back rooms, and back streets.

   Neeson portrays Jimmy Conlon, a down on his luck, washed up enforcer for Irish crime boss Shawn Maguire (a nearly perfectly cast Ed Harris). Jimmy’s glory days as a hit man have come and gone. All he’s got now are bad memories and the bottle. He’s estranged from his son, Mike, and lives alone in an apartment several yards from an elevated subway platform. It’s a depressing life, especially in contrast to Shawn’s upper middle class lifestyle.

   All that changes when Maguire’s son Danny sets out to kill Mike for witnessing several murders that he has committed after a drug deal gone bad. That’s when our antihero Jimmy, who was throwing up from too much booze earlier in the film, turns into a Charles Bronson-type figure and decides that he’ll take on the entire city, the police included, if that’s what it takes to protect Mike and to redeem himself in his son’s eyes.

   It takes some suspension of disbelief to imagine this action all taking place on one rainy December night. Neeson’s character often looks tired, as if he’s beyond exhausted by both his present condition and by the crimes he himself has committed in the past.

   But that’s the point, and if anyone is well suited to this role it is Neeson who is able to convey an incredible amount of meaning in short, terse sentences and in body language alone. Neeson excels in portraying men carrying heavy moral burdens and that’s certainly the case in Run All Night. Look for rapper Common who portrays a Terminator-like hit man. It’s something else.

   One final observation: after watching this one on DVD not knowing whether I’d care for it or not, I can now safely report that I regret not going to see it on the big screen during its theatrical release last year. Next time a Liam Neeson actioner hits the theaters, I’m there.

JOHN DICKSON CARR – The Crooked Hinge. The Mystery Library #2, University Extension: Univ. of California at San Diego, hardcover, 1976. Introduction, with notes and checklist, by Robert E. Briney. Illustrations by Dick Connor. Originally published by Harper, US, hardcover, 1938 (shown); H. Hamilton, UK, hardcover, 1938. Reprinted many times.

   The second in The Mystery Library’s series of reprints is another quality job, and the book itself is a good one. Twenty-five years before the story begins John Farnleigh was packed off to America on the Titanic. He survived and stayed in America, as he was the black sheep of the family, returning only when he inherited the family estate and title.

   Now, a year later, a man shows up claiming to be the real Sir John Farnleigh. On the night the confrontation takes place to determine the impostor, the first Farnleigh is murdered. Dr. Gideon Fell, somewhat less outrageous here than usual, must determine who killed him (or was it suicide?), and why.

   There is also a possible tie-in with another murder that happened a year earlier, and a number of Carr’s usual strange elements. These include an automaton based on Maelzel’s famous Chess Player, a local coven (?), and a truly bizarre solution. An engrossing book.

BILL S. BALLINGER – Heist Me Higher. Signet P3799, paperback original, March 1969.

   Over his long writing career (24 books listed in Al Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV, and more than a few dozen TV and movie credits on IMDb), Bill Ballinger came up with only two series characters: a Chicago PI by the name of Barr Breed (two appearances) and Joaquin Hawks, who was a Native American agent for the CIA whose adventures took place in Southeast Asia.

   The detective of record in Heist Me Higher is another PI, this time a fellow named Bryce Patch, who owns his own security firm. The detective aspect of the story is only so-so, but there’s no reason why Patch couldn’t have made subsequent appearances. Ballinger is especially good at describing people and places, and the conversations and dialogue that take place are as good as any other PI writer of the day. Combined with an adequate amount of action, some of it in the bedroom (very discreetly), keeps the reader flipping through the book in nothing flat. At least it did me.

   Patch has two cases on his hands in this one. The first is that of an armored car heist — no surprise there — in which a guard and a good friend of his gets killed. The second is brought to him by a good-looking lady who wants her ex-husband found to have some papers signed. I will not tell you whether or not the two cases are in any other way connected.

   What I will tell you is that Bryce Patch is a sex magnet of some great magnitude. As the way the story works out, he shares his bedroom with three lovely ladies on successive nights, one at a time, and at story’s end he he faced with happy prospect of four of them in his penthouse apartment at one time, two of them return visits from the previous three. This is what you may very well refer to as a male fantasy.

   I wish the detective work had been presented better, however. The clues are there, sort of, and the way Patch described it at the end, he had to have been working on instinct alone; either that or a slick combination of hunches and guesswork, which is probably the same thing. Nonetheless, the book is short (125 pages), and as a low ambition crime caper, it is fun to read.

BOXCAR BERTHA. American International Pictures, 1972. Barbara Hershey, David Carradine, Barry Primus, Bernie Casey, John Carradine. Director: Martin Scorsese.

   Produced by Roger Corman, the Depression-era crime film Boxcar Bertha has its share of sex, violence, and leftist social commentary. With director Martin Scorsese at the helm, however, this would-be exploitation film ends up being as much an art house film as it is a grindhouse movie.

   That perhaps, along with a stellar cast including Barbara Hershey as the title character and John Carradine as her partner in crime in taking on the greedy and mendacious railroad elites, is what makes this low budget, but high quality production, a memorable visual depiction of the shadowy borderlines between crime and political protest.

   At once a depiction of the tensions between haves and “have-nots” in Depression-era Arkansas and a character-based film about a young woman trying to navigate a life in that milieu, Boxcar Bertha isn’t the easiest movie to categorize. It’s a crime film about outlaws on the run as well as a romantic drama; a hang out movie as well as a buddy film.

   It’s a very personal film and a vehicle for a stridently pro-labor, pro-feminist, and anti-racist political message. There’s even quite a bit of religious, particularly Catholic overtones throughout, themes that would be explored time and again in Scorsese’s films. However one categorizes this movie, it’s definitely the case that Corman and Scorsese successfully captured lightning in a bottle with this unflinching portrait the dark side of the American Dream.

  CARYL BRAHMS & S. J. SIMON – No Bed for Bacon. Michael Joseph, UK, hardcover, 1941. Thomas Y. Crowell, US, hardcover, 1950. Various reprint editions exist.

   This book is about a lot of things.

   — Sir Francis Bacon’s Finagling to get one of Queen Elizabeth’s touring beds; the attempts of rival impresarios Henslowe and Burbage to burn down each other’s theatres; Sir Walter Raleigh’s efforts to out-dress the earl of Essex and the culinary debut of the potato — but the most intriguing sub-plot centers around rising playwright William Shakespeare and a young gentlewoman named Viola who aspires to be an actress and gets on stage by impersonating a boy playing girls’ parts — the makers of Shakespeare in Love disavow all knowledge.

   Be that as it may, No Bed stands very ably on its own merits as a shrewdly observed, deftly-plotted and often riotously funny comedy. Brahms and Simon are adept at broad slapstick, sly repartee, and the occasional jibe at History, as when Shakespeare and Bacon argue over how a scene should be played and Will asks rhetorically, “Master Bacon, did you write this play or did I?” There’s also a nice running gag about Shakespeare trying to write past the first page of his forthcoming hit, Love’s Labour Wunne.

   There was one rather lengthy bit here that puzzled me for a moment, though: late in the book there’s a long scene where the Queen and her favorites sit around reminiscing about Drake whipping the Spanish Armada out of the Channel. It’s not a bad passage, per se, but it goes on for some pages and doesn’t move the story along a bit. I wondered at first why the authors were spending so much ink on this, then I remembered this was written in England in 1941 — a time when memories of Britain beating back a vastly superior invading force must have appealed to readers and author alike.

   It slows things down perhaps, but it doesn’t dampen the irreverent charm and sly humor of the thing, and I can recommend No Bed to lovers of History, lovers of Shakespeare, and anyone who just loves a good laugh.

RICHARD HAWKE – Speak of the Devil. Random House, hardcover, January 2006. Ballantine, paperback, February 2007.

   This one starts out in grand fashion, with a mass shooting at a Manhattan Thanksgiving Day parade by someone (perhaps) with a personal vendetta with the mayor. PI Fritz Malone, whose first recorded case this is, is a witness and chases after the killer. He shoots him in the shoulder … and then things start to get weird.

   Malone is nabbed by the police, put into a patrol car, a bag is placed over his head, and he is rushed off to places unknown. And the shooter, who was only wounded, somehow ends up dead, shot to death at police headquarters.

   Eventually things get straightened out re Fritz vs the cops, and (this is also not strictly kosher, I don’t imagine) Malone is asked by the mayor to work on the case: the unknown someone who hired the now dead killer now is blackmailing the city for millions of dollars, and to prove his point, he is methodically cutting the fingers off a kidnapped city official.

   So this is not exactly standard PI fare, yet in another way, Fritz Malone is very little different from other wisecracking PI’s with girl friends who try to be patient and understanding while their guys are off doing their PI thing. This part of the story I enjoyed a whole lot more than the bigger picture.

   Which reminds me of another thing. When I got to page 164 or so, which is about where the Gold Medal paperbacks of the 1950s used to end, I looked at where I was in the book, and I was surprised to see that I was barely over halfway through. And the second half, unfortunately, was not nearly as interesting as the first half. There is simply too much story in this book. (I have not yet told you about the novice nun who committed suicide in one of New York City’s many parks a while back. How she is connected, you will have to read the book.)

   One thing toward the end of the book annoyed me immensely. [This may warrant a SPOILER ALERT.] Malone has an important — no, crucial — piece of evidence which he gives to Margo, his girl friend, and asks her to take it to Brooklyn to give to her father, an invalid ex-cop, with the killer still on the loose. Have you seen this gambit on TV before?

   Pages 317-318, in which Malone explains everything after all the excitement has died down, are really a mess. These two pages are filled solid with Ramos did this so Carroll did that, Cox said this and Cox said that, then McNally did this in return, then Byron did this and Sister Natividad was — and who’s Margaret King?

   This book was given a big fanfare when it first came out, a big budget promotion, an huge advertising campaign, floor displays in bookstores, the whole works. I hope the author, in reality mystery writer Tim Cockey, got a big advance. There was one other book for Fritz Malone, Cold Day in Hell (Random House, 2007), but I don’t think the ad campaign worked. In spite of the hullabaloo and critical acclaim from several quarters, neither book seems to have gone anywhere.

THREE GIRLS ABOUT TOWN. Columbia Pictures, 1941. Joan Blondell, Binnie Barnes, Janet Blair, John Howard, Eric Blore, Una O’Connor, Hugh O’Connell. Bruce Bennett, Lloyd Bridges. Guest Star: Robert Benchley. Screenplay by Richard Carroll. Directed by Leigh Jason.

   Joan Blondell and Binnie Barnes are sisters who work as Convention Hostesses at the Merchants Hotel where Binnie has a thing for chief clerk, the much harassed Robert Benchley. It’s the busy season and things are more hectic than normal because a convention of magicians is being followed by a staid convention of morticians and because Joan’s boyfriend, reporter John Howard, wrote an article implying the ladies are more than just helpful to convention attendees. This has caught the attention of the head of the undertakers convention and a ladies group who meets weekly at the hotel.

   Add to all that a major union and the bosses are having nationally important talks at the hotel in hopes of avoiding a strike that could leave the country vulnerable, and as yet the mediator from Washington has yet to show.

   Howard just wants Blondell to quit so they can marry, but she and Binnie can’t think of themselves because younger sister Janet Blair is away at an expensive finishing school they are paying for. Which is why Blondell decks Howard for the first of several swings in this lightweight but fast and smartly written screwball comedy well played all around.

   Of course Blondell could do comedy blindfolded and still hit her marks, as could Barnes and of course Benchley and Blore, but Howard does surprisingly well as the fast-talking, fast-thinking reporter whose life is about to get complicated.

   Then there is a very drunk Eric Blore pestering everyone by asking where Charlie is.

   It’s at this point that maid Una O’Connor and her helpers find a body in the bedroom next to the girls’ room.

   Don’t get ahead of me. You are expected to get the connection.

   Joan and Binnie quickly convince Benchley, Binnie’s boyfriend, that the hotel can’t afford a body to be found like that, especially with those staid undertakers and pressure from the Ladies Club who have read Howard’s article and want answers, so they decide to move the body. Which is all well and good until Howard discovers the corpse and recognizes it is the mediator everyone is looking for. It’s the scoop of a lifetime for him and a certain raise at the paper if he can be the one to turn in the story. But Blondell is determined the body won’t be found in the hotel.

   Now, to make things decidedly worse, little sister Janet Blair shows up, and finishing school has about finished her. She sets her sights on sister Joan’s boyfriend John Howard from the get go, showing all about what she learned of the fine art of lip oscillation at that exclusive school for hormonal young women.

   There is also a cop, Hugh O’Connell, whose wife is having a baby that is taking its time getting here, the only thing he can think about until he discovers Howard is hiding a body.

   There is nothing startling or new here. If you have seen a screwball comedy you will recognize the form from the first scene, but here it works with almost perfect timing, an attractive cast of mostly B or minor A stars and supporting actors and some clever bits including Howard caught in a poker game where the corpse can’t lose a hand no matter how hard Howard tries — he throws away three aces and draws three queens to match the one he has — and a bit straight from The 39 Steps where he poses as the mediator and fast talks the settlement of the strike while the police look on.

   Meanwhile Eric Blore still can’t find Charlie.

   Not much more I can say, save that this is not a comedy mystery, though it plays much like one for most of its run. No spoilers to explain why it isn’t, save that the why would have you throwing things at the screen in frustration if you saw it in an actual mystery. Here it just seems to fit the whole screwball format of the film.

   Blondell looks as good as you ever saw her in a film, and Blair makes a satisfactory tempest of a sexpot little sister. Binnie Barnes couldn’t help but be good in this kind of film, and Eric Blore and Robert Benchley … well, do I really have to say it?

   It’s John Howard, who usually played rather stalwart unimaginative leads or decidedly stiff second or third leads (Lost Horizon, The Philadelphia Story), who is a surprise here, though if you watched him in the Bulldog Drummond films or The Invisible Woman, you might not be quite as surprised.

   He shows considerable charm and comic timing in this one, and the ending when he referees while Janet Blair receives a much deserved public spanking from sisters Joan and Binnie, and soon to be brother-in-law Robert Benchley actually rises to that kind of giddy high usually only achieved in major screwball comedies with people like Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn in Bringing up Baby or James Stewart and Claudette Colbert in It’s a Wonderful World.

   I’m not comparing this to those classics, only pointing out it achieves one genuine lighter than air moment of sheer exuberance mindful of those found in those films. That’s quite an accomplishment for a film with these credentials.

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From this Grammy-nominated jazz singer’s 2015 CD For One to Love.

DIANE K. SHAH – The Makin Cover. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1977. Playboy Press, paperback, 1979.

   A pleasing addition to a growing list of female sleuths is magazine reporter Lindsie Hollis, who in her first crack at detective work finds herself hot on the trail of a missing pro quarterback. The effort is convincing, and the wit is genuine, but as the male-female relationship becomes ever more complicated, the mystery behind what may or may not be an actual kidnapping attempt seems to fall apart through holes of its own intricate nature. The result is flawed, but the story is far above average.

Rating:   B

[UPDATE] 01-14-16.   The details escape me, but I do remember liking this one. I was hoping there would be a second adventure of Lindsie Hollis, but as far as I can tell, it never happened. Shah did write two books about Paris Chandler, who was a “legman” for a gossip columnist in Hollywood, circa 1947. I’ve always meant to read these, but alas, I have not.

  A fourth book by Shah that’s included in Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV is High-Heel Blue, about Brenden Harlow, a female LAPD cop who’s recruited to work undercover trying to track down a serial killer. For better or worse, that brief story line suggests there’s little chance I’ll read that one.

   This is one for the books. This is Steve. Two days after my son Jonathan wrote up a review of this movie, I received an email from Dan Stumpf containing his comments on the same film. So here you are. Two reviews of Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure, totally independently of each other, two for the price of one. I’ll let Dan go first.

TARZAN’S GREATEST ADVENTURE. Paramount, 1959. Gordon Scott, Anthony Quayle, Sara Shane, Niall MacGinnis, Sean Connery, Al Mulock and Scilla Gabel. Written by Berne Giler and John Guillermin. Directed by John Guillermin.

   Well maybe it is.

   I recall vividly and pleasantly seeing this as a kid when it first came out, and realizing even then that it had almost everything anyone could want in a Tarzan picture: quicksand, alligators (or were they crocodiles?) spiders, fights, vine-swinging and the Tarzan yell, as stirring in its own way as the Lone Ranger theme music. The only serious omission was a guy in a gorilla suit, but producer Sy Weintraub was going for a more Adult approach (if you can call any Tarzan movie “adult”) and, perhaps wisely, decided to dispense with the gorilla-fighting.

   The result is a tougher fantasy, less pre-adolescent and more … well, more adolescent if you will. Greatest even includes obvious lust from the bad guys for their boss’s sexy mistress and a discreet fade-out when Tarzan and the heroine embrace in the jungle. The action is considerably grittier here, with some memorably grisly death scenes, but the main distinction of Greatest is the time it takes with the bad guys.

   Said nasties are played by a cast worth taking the time for. Anthony Quayle and Niall MacGinnis were both in Olivier’s Hamlet ten years earlier; Al Mulock is less well known perhaps, but I remember him fondly as the bad guy who gets the first close-up in The Good the Bad & the Ugly; and Sean Connery….

   â€¦ well that makes for another interesting footnote: At one point in this movie Connery is cheerfully hunting down Tarzan in the jungle, and our hero is almost undone when a tarantula starts crawling up his leg. A few years later, Connery was promoted to Tarantula-Turf in Dr. No. Such are the vagaries of movie heroism.

    Director John Guillermin (who did my favorite PI flick of the 1960s, PJ) handles all this with speed and economy, pausing just long enough for the moments of character development without slackening the pace, and gracing the action scenes with fast tracking shots and evocative angles. Best of all, he seems to have a real feel for the Tarzan ethos: a man of few words and much courage; a man basically civilized but given to savage cries of challenge and triumph. In short, the Lord of the Jungle, perfectly evoked in a colorful package.

   If any action movie is deserving of critical reappraisal and a reintroduction to movie fans, it’s Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure, a truly gripping feature from start to finish. Directed by John Guillermin, this grim and violent Tarzan film isn’t kids’ stuff. Filmed in glorious Eastman Color and on location in Africa, Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure has far more in common with the gritty, taut Westerns of auteurs Budd Boetticher and Anthony Mann, than it does with the earlier black and white, filmed on set, Tarzan programmers.

   Now I’ll be the first one to admit that muscleman Gordon Scott wasn’t the finest of actors and that his portrayal of a noticeably more loquacious Ape Man is certainly adequate and gets the job done, but is hardly ranked among the greatest acting moments in cinema.

   But it works, for Scott’s Tarzan is effective as a brooding, strong silent type. With a bit more vocabulary and a hat and a gun belt, could have easily blended in quite nicely in a dusty Old West frontier town. He’s the type of man you could imagine getting caught up in a range war. There’s a lot less “man of the jungle” in this celluloid rendition of Tarzan than in those clunky, if not charming and innocent, RKO movies starring Lex Barker as the eponymous title character.

   The plot is elegant in its simplicity. Our protagonist, sans Jane (who isn’t featured in the movie at all, let alone mentioned), takes to his canoe and sets out after a gang of criminals responsible for murder and the theft of explosives. The outlaw gang is living on a houseboat and heading upriver to an abandoned mine in the hopes of finding diamonds and striking it rich.

   Helming this outfit of misfits and lowlifes is a dangerous sociopath named Slade (an exceptionally well cast Anthony Quayle). Among his henchmen are Dino, a former convict (Al Mulock); O’Bannion, a jovial trigger-happy scoundrel (a pre-James Bond Sean Connery); and Kruger, a serpentine Dutch diamond expert of dubious loyalty (Niall MacGinnis). Along for the ride – literally – is Toni, a sunbathing beauty (Italian actress Scilla Gabel).

   Like all criminals, and particularly like those stuck together in cramped quarters, this group is prone to not only mischief, but also toward turning on one another. Some of the movies most memorable scenes involve the fall out of one or more of the criminal group betraying another member in ways both big and small.

   As time goes on, Tarzan’s pursuit of the gang becomes less about these particular criminals and more about his need to enforce his own personal code of honor. He realizes that the outlaws need to be eradicated from his jungle home, for if they were to stay, they’d taint it with their presence.

   In many ways, the movie is less an adventure yarn and more about Tarzan’s psychological quest to rid his home of these unwelcome intruders. Romance and levity play little part in Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure, a visually bright but emotionally dark film that seems to affirm Burke’s notion, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Suffice it to say, Tarzan chooses to not do nothing. And then some.