A track from blues-rock singer C. C. Coletti’s CD Bring It On Home: Sings the American Roots of Zeppelin:

   One of the most phenomenally successful versions of the mad killer roaming about in a gothic mansion on a stormy night is the Mary Roberts Rinehart / Avery Hopwood play The Bat. I don’t recall any version of that turning up at a Saturday afternoon matinee in my nonage, but I know of at least two film versions that precede my first matinee at the Bijou, a 1926 silent version, and a 1930 sound version, retitled The Bat Whispers.

   At an early stage in my mystery reading addiction, I was a great fan of Rinehart (especially of the delightful spunky spinster series featuring Miss Letitia Carberry), but I did not then encounter an errant bat.

   However, on a recent evening I turned out with a number of other “Friends of the Library” for a Mary Roberts Rinehart evening in the University of Pittsburgh’s Hillman Library, of which an announced feature was to be a showing of an unidentified film version of The Bat.

   A call to the program coordinator would probably have cleared up the mystery, but I preferred to be kept in suspense, hoping against hope that it would be one of the early versions. My wife and I arrived in time to tour the collection of manuscripts, books, correspondence and other items on display from the library’s extensive Rinehart Archives, and I was delighted to find on display (but attracting no interest from the other friends) a number of original Howard Chandler Christy oils illustrating some of Rinehart’s early stories.

   They all featured dashing gentlemen in evening dress in close proximity to handsome ladies with elaborate hairdos and evening dresses that swept to the floor, all rendered in atmospheric browns and yellows, with only an occasional luminous, bloody red to suggest the criminal stories they had accompanied. This whetted my appetite for an unsettling film and it was with great anticipation that we sat in comfortable armchairs in a conference room improvised as a screening room and waited for the title and credits to flash on the screen.

   You have probably anticipated the disappointment that awaited me. The friends of the library and staff are not film buffs, and what they` had rented for our evening’s pleasure was a 1959 version made for ABC-Television, written and directed by Crane Wilbur, and starring Agnes Moorhead and Vincent Price, as spunky spinster and suspicious doctor with a penchant for experimenting on bats.

   The dialogue was awful, the budget was obviously minuscule and the movie was shot on a soundstage with a raging forest fire and exterior view of the country mansion so patently false that there was-some laughter from the audience. The saving grace was that, although the setting was rural contemporary, the film was shot in black-and-white.

   The interior of the “old” house had secret passages and dimly lit corridors that favored the action, and Moorhead was an enormously appealing spinster who, at intervals, gave some hint of the performance she might have delivered with the right materials.

   The script required that she be both a paragon of independence and a helpless female often trailed by a bevy of younger but not necessarily more attractive women while a series of suspicious male characters were alternately presented as defenders and threats.

   The last 30 seconds were beautifully handled and this was the conclusion that should have capped a brilliant rendition of the classic narrative. I have not lost my taste for such fare but it will not, I fear, be soon or well satisfied.

NOTE:   Part One of this two-part essay can be found here. Even if you read it earlier, you might wish to take another look, as several comments may have been added since your previous visit.

CHARLES ALVERSON – Not Sleeping, Just Dead. Houghton Mifflin, hardcover, hardcover, 1977. Playboy Press, paperback, 1980.

   Joe Goodey is a private eye. Being a cynic comes with the job, but along with a sour view of the`world and a nasty way of saying his mind comes an unquenchable sense of justice that not even the soul-scouring impact of group therapy can touch.

   What he’s hired to do, and what he does, is to learn who caused the death of wealthy man’s granddaughter at a Big Sur drug rehabilitation commune. He also finds once again the success does not always bring satisfaction, much less gratitude.

   While there are some novelistic weaknesses in his approach, Goodey’s last statement on the matter is an impassioned defense of the moral point of view that explains society’s continued need for incorruptible investigators who are unafraid of the truth and willing to point fingers of guilt where they should. It’s not been done better since the days of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, and praise greater than that cannot be given.

[UPDATE] 01-12-16.   I’ve not read either this, or Alverson’s Goodey’s Last Stand (1975), the first entry in an all-too-short two book PI series, in nearly 40 years. I liked both very much at the time, but I wonder how they would stand up today. I also have no idea why there were only the two books. Based on my opinion back then, there should have been more.

SUBMARINE RAIDER. Columbia Pictures, 1942. John Howard, Marguerite Chapman, Bruce Bennett, Warren Ashe, Eileen O’Hearn, Philip Ahn, Larry Parks, Forrest Tucker. Director: Lew Landers.

   If you can look past the “those treacherous Japanese fifth columnists” angle and production values that leave much to be desired, you may soon find that Submarine Raider is a decent enough flag waver that punches above its low budget weight.

   Directed by Lew Landers (along with an un-credited Budd Boetticher), this patriotic programmer is a highly fictionalized dramatization of events leading up to the December 7, 1941, Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. This isn’t Howard Hawks’ Air Force (1943), a film that benefited highly from James Wong Howe’s cinematography. Not even close. But it’s not nearly as much a total clunker as I expected it would turn out to be.

   John Howard, who went on to a highly prolific career in television, portrays Commander Chris Warren, a submariner in charge of a vessel that rescues damsel in distress, a surprisingly calm and collected Sue Curry (Marguerite Chapman), from a lifeboat floating along in the Pacific. All was going well enough for Sue and her friends aboard a civilian ship until the Japanese Navy decided to blow them out of the water on their way to Pearl Harbor.

   This, of course, is historical nonsense. But it gets the story moving and makes international politics into a personal story. And speaking of personal stories, Commander Warren’s brother, Bill (Warren Ashe), is a government agent in Honolulu investigating Japanese spies. When he gets killed on December 7, it’s gloves off for our intrepid submarine commander protagonist.

   Watching Submarine Raider ends up being less an exercise in film appreciation than it is a glance backward in time to an era in which American anxieties about the War in the Pacific remained at an all time high. Look for the scene in which Warren toasts the Japanese Navy: “Bottom’s Up!” It’s all terribly dated, but then again, not every movie was made to speak to timeless, universal themes.

From this Boston-based rock singer’s 1994 CD, Cockamamie:

THE LONE WOLF RETURNS. Columbia Pictures, 1935. Melvyn Douglas, Gail Patrick, Tala Birel, Henry Mollinson, Thurston Hall, Douglas Dumbrille, Raymond Walburn Screenplay Joseph Krumgold, Lionel Houser, Bruce Manning. Characters created by Louis Joseph Vance. Directed by Roy William Neill.

ARSENE LUPIN RETURNS. MGM, 1938. Melvyn Douglas, Virginia Bruce, Warren William, John Halliday, Nat Pendleton, Monty Woolley, E. E. Clive, George Zucco, Vladimir Skoloff, Ian Wolfe, Tully Marshall. Screenplay by Howard Emmett Rogers, James Kevin McGuinness, George Harmon Coxe based on their story. Character created by Maurice Leblanc. Directed by George Fitzmaurice. (*)

   You can be forgiven if these two films leave you more than a bit confused when it comes to gentleman cracksmen since both films feature perpetual second lead, Melvyn Douglas as the questionably reformed title hero making yet another foray into crime and detection. In The Lone Wolf Returns he is reformed jewel thief Michael Lanyard, a Parisian-born American jewel thief who famously changed his ways for the love of a woman. The back story for his adventures dated to the silent era where actors like Jack Holt played him, and indeed this 1936 outing is a remake of the 1926 film.

   The plot is simple here; Lanyard, retired in America, is lured out of retirement by a fabulous emerald owned by Gail Patrick while under the watchful and distrustful eye of Inspector Crane (Thurston Hall, who would remain a regular in that role in the Warren Williams Lone Wolf series that followed). Lanyard, easily the most easily unreformed and re-reformed crook in fiction, toys with taking the jewel, falls for the girl, and then falls afoul of a gang determined to use his skills to get the jewel for themselves. He isn’t called the Lone Wolf for nothing though, and he manages to foil the gang, rescue himself and the girl, and stay semi reformed, at least until the next film in the series.

   The Lone Wolf was the creation of Louis Joseph Vance, a popular American novelist whose work appeared in the early pulps and slicks of his day. He had a number of bestsellers, often as not works of romance, adventure, and crime, and continued the adventures of Michael Lanyard until his death adding a son and daughter of the Lone Wolf along the way.

   The Lone Wolf not only added a phrase to popular fiction with his name, he also managed to keep going through silent film, radio, talkies, and a syndicated television series, starring former film Saint, Louis Hayward, in which Lanyard had reformed enough to work as an insurance investigator — not that anyone was ever completely convinced of his reform, including Lanyard who had an eye for a shapely karat as well as an ankle.

   This well done outing features fine direction by Roy William Neill and a simple straightforward script that benefits from Douglas’s droll underplaying of the reformed crook. Even he never really seems sure until the last minute whether he is going to steal the jewel or not, and that helps.

   Despite the title The Lone Wolf Returns was the first of a new series and not a sequel, whereas Arsene Lupin Returns is a sequel to the 1934 film Arsene Lupin, which starred John Barrymore in the title role versus Inspector Ganimard in the person of Lionel Barrymore (one of only a handful of films they worked together in) and Karen Morley a shapely police agent.

   Whether a series was contemplated (another Lupin film Enter Arsene Lupin was made in 1944 with Charles Korvin), the notable cast of the first film was kept in mind and this time the brilliant Lupin is up against canny ex-FBI agent turned private detective, Steve Emerson (Warren William, shortly to be Michael Lanyard the Lone Wolf and himself a screen Perry Mason to confuse things more) in a Parisian adventure, though you would never know it by the accents.

   Emerson may be no match for Lupin, but he is far from the lunk-headed tecs usually pitted against the hero, enough so you could easily pull for him. His chief drawbacks are his assistant Nat Pendleton, and the authorities like Prefect of Police George Zucco and Monty Woolley who insist Arsene Lupin is dead and gone, lo these many years.

   Again there is a fabulous emerald, this time the property of Baron de Grissac (John Halliday) and adorning the bosom of the baron’s beautiful daughter Loraine (Virginia Bruce). Lupin is around as retired gentleman Rene Farrand, who Emerson suspects is far more than a bored gentleman farmer and indeed the notorious Arsene Lupin, and when an attempt is made on the jewel it begins to look as if Lupin is up to his old games.

   Created by French journalist Maurice Leblanc, Arsene Lupin had an even grander career than the Lone Wolf, with his adventures appearing in just about every form of media from newspaper serials to animated cartoons to this day. While he is not as well known as he once was in this country (he was President Theodore Roosevelt’s favorite detective), in the rest of the world he as been featured in countless reprints, pastiche (continued by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narjeac of Diabolique and Vertigo fame), film, television series, comic books, manga, animation (including the adventures of his grandson Lupin III in Japanese manga and anime as well as live action film), a 2004 film, and even a television series from the Philippines loosely based on his adventures.

   There is even a stylish animated series available on DVD and YouTube done in recent years known as Night Mask or Arsene Lupin. Most episodes of the stylish live action French television series from the 1970‘s can be watched on YouTube in French or sets purchased on line.

   Like most gentleman adventurers Lupin eventually becomes as much a crime solver as criminal, but unlike Michael Lanyard he never really makes much effort to reform. He enjoys being Arsene Lupin and thumbing his nose at police and crooks, rescuing ladies in distress, and distressing anyone who deserves it. He is the most unrepentant criminal in all fiction who still manages to be a good guy and not an antihero.

   Sad to say, for all its good qualities, Arsene Lupin Returns largely wastes Halliday, Zucco, and Woolley (in all fairness, it was an early role and they didn’t quite know what to do with Woolley yet). There isn’t a lot of suspense, Lupin will get the girl, save the jewel, and Emerson will take his defeat like a gentleman wishing Lupin, his rival for the girl, merrily on his way. The greatest pleasure is watching Douglas matched against William, a bit fairer battle than usual in this sort of film, though not as fair as a better script might have had it.

   Truth is, American film and media didn’t quite know how to handle Lupin. He isn’t deprived or depraved, he has no long sad story to tell, he chose to become a criminal because it was a good way to make money and have fun, and while he isn’t above avenging the wronged or pursuing evil he’s not really a Robin Hood. He goes to considerable length over his career to acquire the treasures of the Kings of France, and not for the public good. He is also very French, and his combination of ego, arrogance, and Gallic brio can be a bit hard on American audiences brought up on phlegmatic American and British heroes.

   Arsene Lupin Returns avoids that side of his personality, but because it does he is never quite Lupin, just as no one and nothing in the film is quite French.

   Still, you really should see both of these if possible. They are well done pictures with attractive casts and better than average performances, scripts, and direction. Douglas has considerable charm as does William, and both films are good examples of a kind of film Hollywood used to make effortlessly. If The Lone Wolf Returns is the slightly better picture, it is also the slightly less interesting one of the two. They really should be seen in tandem to appreciate them, though.

(*) I thought it worth noting both films had an actual mystery writer working on the screenplay. Bruce Manning co-wrote mysteries with his wife Gwen Bristow, and of course George Harmon Coxe who worked on Arsene Lupin Returns, was one of the Black Mask Boys creator of Flash Casey and Kent Murdock.

MICHAEL CONNELLY – The Black Echo. Hieronymous Bosch #1. Little Brown, hardcover, 1992. St.Martin’s, paperback, July 1993. Reprinted many times since.

   This is Connelly’s first novel, and if it has any value as a predictor I think we have some good books to look forward to. According to the publicity, he is at work on the second novel featuring Harry Bosch. Bosch is an ex-“star” LAPD homicide detective, more or less in exile and disgrace after shooting an unarmed man. He is a Vietnam vet, an ex-tunnel rat, and has been an outsider and a loner all his life.

   As the book opens he is called to a homicide involving a murdered man in a long pipe around the reservoir, a tunnel, if you will. The victim turns out to be another ’Nam tunnel rat, with whom had Harry served. Harry still alternates between nightmares and insomnia from his war experiences, and this doesn’t bode well for his future peace of mind.

   As the case develops, the murdered man appears to have been involved in a major robbery in which the city’s sewer system was used to tunnel into a bank vault As Harry pursues this, he discovers that the FBI had suspected the dead man, and indeed know about Harry as well. Rather than acceding to his request for cooperation, they try to use pressure within the LAPP to force him off the case.

   When this fails, he is assigned to work with one of the FBI agents, Eleanor Wish, full time. Do I reveal too much by saying that there is a mutual attraction? The plot becomes very complex, with links back to Vietnam and possible corruption within the law enforcement agencies. The ending may or may not surprise you.

   This is not really a cop novel, though it is about cops and has many procedural aspects. Indeed, it is almost anti-cop in that aside from Bosch and Wish, nearly all of the law enforcement agents are not attractively portrayed at all. It is as much as anything else a book about some of the things that war does to people; and, of course, it is a book about Harry Bosch.

   Connelly writes very effectively, with a lean narrative style that moves the story along but still leaves room for adequate characterization. As in most books, characters other than the main few are merely sketched in, but Bosch himself is well-drawn. I didn’t like the culmination of the plot. I just didn’t believe that things would have realistically happened that way, with those people; not quite deus ex machina, but something similar.

   I thoroughly enjoyed the book until the end, and even then was not sorry I had read it. I think Connelly has a bright future, and look forward to seeing more of Harry Bosch. Recommended.

   In French classical tragedy, a major “don’t” is the intrusion of the supernatural. One of classical tragedy’s less elevated offspring, the puzzle detective story, has kept to that tradition and it has always seemed to me that readers of detective fiction, in general, abhor a mixture of the “real” and the ghostly.

   However, I must confess that I am perhaps inordinately fond of a dash of the supernatural in a film or tale of detection and/or mystery. I don’t require that the spooks be dispelled by a rational explanation and I’m happy even if the threat is fake spookery as long as it keeps me in a state of shivery suspense for an hour or so.

   One of my favorite varieties of this kind of fiction/film is that of the menacing house in the country where a faceless (i.e., masked) horror keeps popping out of secret passageways and stretching out a fearsome claw from a panel over the heroine’s bed. I think I can trace my affinity to two sources: the thirties serials The Green Archer and The Iron Claw and a delightfully wacky 1939 version of the archetypical example of the genre, The Cat and the Canary, starring Bob Hope and Paulette Goddard (Paramount, 1939).

   Forty some years later, I remember with unabated delight the scary confrontation of hero and villain in a cobweb-bedecked passage. I haven’t seen it since then and perhaps it is just as well. I might be disappointed and, at my age, such disappointments can provide graceless coups de grace to pleasurable childhood memories.

   I did see, on television, the 1981 version directed by Hadley Metzger. The cast was decent (Wendy Hiller, Edward Fox, Wilfrid Hyde-White and Honor Blackman, among others) but the spooky old house was clean as a whistle, and no spider ever survived long enough on that pristine set to spin an atmospheric web or two in a dark corner (of which there were also depressingly few to be glimpsed). Atmosphere is crucial in this kind of film and the scrubbed-up, glossy technicolor versions just won’t do.

   (I might add that I have never seen the highly regarded silent version directed by Paul Lent and am glad to know that this particular pleasure lies in wait for me.)

       TO BE CONTINUED…

This is the title track from bluegrass singer Claire Lynch’s 1995 CD from Rounder Records:

ENEMY OF WOMEN. Monogram, 1944. Re-released as The Mad Lover. Wolfgang Zilzner (as Paul Andor), Claudia Drake, Donald Woods, H. B. Warner, Ralph Morgan, Gloria Stuart, Robert Barra, Byron Foulger. Written and directed by Alfred Zeisler.

   A real oddity.

   An independent production picked up and distributed by Monogram, this was written and directed by Alfred Zeisler, who was born in Chicago but rose to prominence in the German film industry of the 1920s and 30s, with memorable hits like Gold (1934) and Viktor und Viktoria (1933) on his resume. Like many other talents, he was forced out of Germany with the rise of the Nazis and ended up back in America, where he worked mostly on “B” products like this story of the rise and (anticipated) fall of Paul Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda and brief successor.

   Given that background, one would expect a strident film here, but Enemy is surprisingly restrained, even gentle at times. It doesn’t try to make Goebbels sympathetic or even likable, and yet ….

   Goebbels is played by Wolfgang Zilzner, an actor usually cast as a sinister Nazi underling in films like Invisible Agent and All Through the Night; the guy standing behind Peter Lorre, with a sullen look and no lines. But here he’s the star, and the film opens on him, with a smooth night-time tracking shot in the rubble of a recently-bombed Berlin neighborhood (tellingly evoked by photographer John Alton, one of the architects of film noir.) Goebbels’ car arrives on the scene and he enters one of the smoldering ruins, preparing a radio broadcast to the effect that the damage was “negligible” but there’s something strange about his manner, and as he slumps into what’s left of a chair, we flash back ….

   What follows is a rather staid account of the fortunes of Joseph Goebbels, starting off with him as a tutor spurned by his young student (Claudia Drake, the woman no one remembers in Detour) and hooking up with the rising Nazi Party more to recover his self-esteem than from any political conviction.

   There are some understated (and economical) vignettes as Goebbels takes power and publishers and broadcasters find themselves out of work or under arrest, usually done in a single scene on one set—an approach that heightens the sense of ruthless Nazi efficiency and saves money at the same time—and a surprisingly lavish bit at a swanky party used by Goebbels to push more propaganda.

   There’s also an unexpected and quite suspenseful sequence where he finds himself scheduled for a visit from the SS and has to get next to Hitler before he can be spirited away by his rivals. It’s one of those moments like the car-sinking scene in Psycho where the viewer finds himself suddenly identifying with a killer.

   In fact, as Enemy of Women goes on, it becomes less about the Nazis and more about Goebbels’ ruthless pursuit of the woman he loves (the Claudia Drake character) a pursuit punctuated by murder, kidnapping and detention, but with none of the gloating villains or noble martyrs so common in movies those days.

   The conclusion is skillfully and intentionally tipped off ahead of time as we suddenly recognize the room where Claudia Drake awaits her unwanted lover and this becomes, of all things, a story of losing the thing one loves by trying to possess it. The flashback ends as the master propagandist of the Third Reich delivers his prepared lies, and his close-up reveals the face of a man who realizes he is the herald of a fallen angel.

   No, there are no brave patriots here, no stirring speeches or beastly villains, but despite the trashy title, Enemy of Women hits its target by humanizing it.