Kasey Chambers is an Australian country singer-songwriter with a list of nominations and awards several pages long. “I’m Alive” is the final track on her most recent CD Bittersweet (2014).

SAN QUENTIN. Warner Brothers, 1937. Pat O’Brien , Humphrey Bogart, Ann Sheridan, Barton MacLane, Joseph Sawyer, Veda Ann Borg. Director: Lloyd Bacon.

   For fans of Warner Brothers’ crime films and Depression-era realism, San Quentin is a well-paced crime melodrama with enough solid characterization to keep viewers fully engaged with the story for the duration. Indeed, watching the film, a short programmer filmed on location at the California prison, is like hanging out with old friends. Not only is Humphrey Bogart front and center, you’ve also got many of the studio’s finest by your side: Pat O’Brien, Ann Sheridan, Barton MacLane, and Joe Sawyer.

   Bogart portrays Red Kennedy, a low-level crook at odds with the world. It seems the only good thing he’s got going on in his life is his devoted sister, May (Sheridan), a singer in a San Francisco nightclub. Soon after the film begins, Kennedy is nabbed by the law and ends up in San Quentin. Little does Kennedy know that his sister and the prison’s new chief guard, Captain Stephen Jameson (O’Brien) are beginning a romantic relationship. When he does find out – from the mouth of thuggish fellow inmate, Sailor Boy Hansen (Sawyer) – he’s enraged and is more prepared to do something about it.

   Although San Quentin is by no means a classic or comparable to Bogart’s better known movies, it nevertheless succeeds as a film due to its script and fine coterie of actors. As was the case in many Warner movies from the era, San Quentin is a crime film with a conscience. Kennedy isn’t really such a bad guy so much as a victim of time and circumstance. Even so, the lesson is plain enough for all to see. As much as we might sympathize with Red Kennedy, ultimately his decisions to pursue a life of crime will usher in his tragic downfall in a world that’s ultimately indifferent to his fate.

I awoke this morning to discover that all of the comments on this blog are missing. I don’t know why or how, but I’m hoping they can be retrieved. As I’m sure you’ll agree, the discussion that takes place in the comments is often as useful as the posts themselves, sometimes more so. More later when I know more.

UPDATE: The comments are back, thanks to my son-in-law Mark, who reminded me that the same thing happened almost exactly three years ago. So all he had to do was to remember what he did then, and do it again, and it worked! I wonder if it has anything to do with the autumnal equinox?

If by chance you tried to leave a comment while the system for handling them was down and it never showed up, please try again.

This Tom Waits song was on Shawn Colvin’s CD Cover Girl back in 1994, which is when I purchased it. It is hard to believe that that was over 20 years ago.

GEORGE HARMON COXE – The Camera Clue. Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover, 1937. Dell #27, mapback edition, no date [1943?]. Dell #453, mapback edition, 2nd printing, no date [1950].

   Another useful feature of these old Dell mapbacks, besides the obvious one, of course, is the listing of the cast of characters, right before the title page. The map didn’t help much with the mystery this time, but it is interesting to note that of the twenty characters listed, at least nine of them are on the scene outside the murdered man’s office when Kent Murdock stops to take a candid shot of a sandwich advertising man on stilts.

   Most of them don’t want their picture taken, either. Murdock’s office soon begins to resemble Grand Central Station, with worried people continually running in and out, desperately trying to keep him from publishing theirs in the newspaper. Murdock’s assistant, Gowan, even gets his skull crushed in, by someone even more desperate than the others.

   This was George Harmon Coxe’s third novel — Kent Murdock is still definitely married, and whatever became of Joyce Murdock anyway? Formerly a writer for Black Mask and the other detective pulps of the twenties and thirties, Coxe was never known as a great wordsmith, and his massive total of camera-oriented plots soon became rather repetitious.

   He was a pretty good master of misdirection, however, and here’s a fine example of how he played the game of “fool the reader” so well. The big climax misfires just slightly, but even so I have to admit, I was caught off-balance by its outcome, exactly as I was supposed to be. In one sense I wasn’t even close, and I am chagrined to say I should have been.

   And no, the sandwich man didn’t do it.

Rating:   C plus.

CONFLICT. Warner Brothers, made in 1943, but not released till ’45. Humphrey Bogart, Alexis Smith, Sydney Greenstreet, Rose Hobart. Screenplay by Arthur T. Horman and Dwight Taylor, from the story “The Pentacle” by Robert Siodmak and Alfred Neumann. Directed by Curtis Bernhardt.

   An off-beat misfire that has its moments, Conflict will disappoint some Bogart fans, because it reverses the stereotype: Bogie is the bad guy here and Sydney Greenstreet the amateur detective who trips him up. And when I say that, I’m not selling any state secrets: The capsule reviews of this film all say up front that Bogie kills wife Rose Hobart and makes a play for sister-in-law Alexis Smith. The slip-up that incriminates him is perfectly obvious to mystery fans the second he makes it, and director Curtis Bernhardt even throws in a reaction shot of Sydney Greenstreet — well — reacting to the clue.

   The real plot of Conflict hovers around Bogart’s growing suspicion that the wife he thoroughly killed is not actually dead –- or worse, that she may be dead, but making her presence felt anyway; her personal effects show up in odd places, notes in her handwriting land on his desk… The sense of Bogart’s growing dread in a world gone awry would become a staple of film noir, but since we know they’re on to him, and we’ve figured out this is Greenstreet’s strategy for making him tip his hand, it counts for very little here.

   On the other hand, I have to say that Conflict was done with the usual Warners’ care and polish. There are some striking visuals here, with the studio fog machine pumping full-blast, and some intelligent dialogue that coveys the weakness in our protagonist but retrains our sympathy.

   And there is one aspect of Conflict (whatthehell does that title mean, anyway?) that deserves discussion and it’s the kind of thing that is better discovered than described, so I’m giving the following WARNING! If you think you might see this movie sometime in the near future or remember these comments unduly, skip the next paragraph!

   At the ending, tormented by fear, Bogart betrays himself and finds it’s all been a (sigh) trick. We were expecting this all along, but it’s handled in a surprisingly insightful fashion. As Bogart prepares to face his worst fears and make the mistake that will cost him dearly, the camera angles upward to his face, lit from below, like a man at the edge of a precipice summoning up the courage to jump.

   And when he’s caught, what comes across most compellingly is his sense of relief. His capture is not so much comeuppance as catharsis, and there’s an unexpected look of relief on his face as they slap the cuffs on him and lead him upwards toward the light; the whole ending, in fact, is played with a surprising sense of redemption that seems to put the rest of the film in a whole new context — one of the unexpected and perhaps inadvertent pleasures that sometimes come out of Hollywood.

The son of alternative country artist Steve Earle, Justin Townes Earle sings his own mix of folk, blues and country. From his second CD, Midnight at the Movies, released in 2009:

POUL ANDERSON – Mayday Orbit. Ace Double F-104, paperback original, 1961. Published back-to-back with No Man’s World, by Kenneth Bulmer. First appeared in Fantastic Science Fiction Stories, December 1959, as “A Message in Secret.” Reprinted in several Poul Anderson collections.

   This is one of Poul Anderson’s long-running series of stories about Captain Sir Dominick Flandry, a field agent of the Naval Intelligence Corps of the Terrestrial Empire, or at least that’s his rank this time around. I’ve read quite a few of his adventures over the years, but without regard to chronology or trying to read a whole lot of them at once.

   Which can be done and very easily. Both Ace and Baen Books have published large collections of the Flandry stories as well as other of Anderson’s other series, including those about the Psychotechnic League. I’ve tried to keep up, but there are too many stories, including full-length novels, for one person to read them all and have time to read something else as well.

   Mayday Orbit turns out to be a puzzle story and well as a good old-fashioned space opera yarn. Flandry is working undercover on an isolated planet that’s in a buffer zone in space between the rival realms of Terra and Merseia. Each empire is always on the lookout for suitable outposts to place their ships and troops.

   His cover doesn’t last long, however, and he’s soon on the run with a female slave whom he helps escape the ruling power of the planet. Most of the book is spent following the couple’s path to safety, which at one point requires Flandry to set a huge plain of dry grassland on fire.

   Where the puzzle comes in, though, as far as Flandry is concerned, is how does he get word off-planet to the Terran forces to let them know what nefarious activities are going on? The cover pretty much gives it away, in a way, but Anderson does his best to prolong the solution for as long as possible.

   It’s an average story at best, only 126 pages long, but Anderson does keep things moving at a brisk pace. As a writer, he was much better at writing descriptive passages than he was at portraying characters with any kind of depth. At least in this one he doesn’t need to spend too much time having his characters explain to each other what each other should already know.

BLAKE AND MORTIMER: THE ANIMATED SERIES. Ellipse (France), 1997. 26 episodes, consisting of 13 two-part stories. Based on “Blake et Mortimer” created by E.P. Jacobs, with four original stories. Originally appeared in Tintin magazine in serial form.

    “Blake and Mortimer” is among the oldest and best loved comics in Europe, second only to Herge’s “Tintin” in longevity and popularity among adventure strips. Created by E. P. Jacobs, and drawn in the same simplified realistic style as the more famous “Tintin” (in Europe it is pronounced Tonton, and yes, Rin Tin Tin, discovered in WWI France, was originally Rin Ton Ton too) strip, it recounts the adventures of handsome blonde mustachioed Captain Francis Blake of British Intelligence and bearded red haired Scottish Professor Philip Mortimer (“By the arms of clan McGreggor!”), a pair of friends who find themselves battling scientific menaces somewhere between Professor Quatermass and James Bond while globe trotting from modern Egypt to the Middle Ages.

    Unlike Tintin, who debuted in the Thirties iu France, Blake and Mortimer appeared post-war in the bestselling Belgian magazine Tintin, named for Herge’s famous boy reporter. There they rivaled the magazine’s namesake in popular adventures, taking them around the world battling everything from mad scientists to aliens and from time travel to UFO’s.

    It was natural after the success of the animated adventures of Tintin, shown here on HBO, that Dargoud, Tintin’s publisher, would try to replicate the flagship titles success and so an animated series adapting the Blake and Mortimer albums was done with the same style and faithfulness as the Tintin series. If they aren’t quite up to the same quality it is only because Tintin is a work of genius that has managed to entertain children across the world for decades, and good as Jacobs work is, it is not quite in that class — few works of popular fiction are in terms of success or sales.

    Like “Tintin,” these were adapted in English, though as far as I know never shown in the American market, and until they showed up on YouTube unavailable to Region 1 DVD players. (I think one or two were available on VHS if you could find them.) Like “Tintin” they consist of half hour episodes, each album complete in two episodes. Though the books are known and loved around the world, they are still, a bit like “Tintin” itself despite the Spielberg film, not that well known in this country.

    Titles like “The Mystery of the Great Pyramid,” “The Secret of Easter Island,” “The Yellow Mark,” “The Infernal Machine,” and “The Atlantis Enigma” give a fair idea of the material, which tends to be better written and developed in terms of character and plot than the average animated fare thanks to Jacob’s well done albums. The adventures, like “Tintin” before them, are faithful to the look and period of the original, and just about as perfect a translation from printed page to screen as you could ask for.

    Of course it all depends on your tolerance for animated adventure fare, but these are a classy production handsomely adapted and faithful to the entertaining originals in all ways. There are a handful of European animated series around well worth a look, including “Corto Maltese,” based on Hugo Pratt’s work about a Conradian early 20th century adventurer, “Belphegor: the Phantom of the Louvre” (which was originally a novel and source for several movies and television series in France), Henri Verne’s “Bob Moraine” (originally the hero of a series of juvenile novels Moraine has appeared in comics and both live action and two animated series and films), Leo Malet’s private eye “Nestor Burma” (live action films and television series, graphic albums and animation based on the design of Jacques Tardi though whether the series ever aired, I’m not certain), the laconic satiric cowboy “Lucky Luke” (who also appeared in two live action films with Terence Hill, and more recently Oscar winning Jean Dujardin), and “Valerian and Laureline,” an intelligent space opera series based on yet another long running popular comic creation. Not all of them are available in English or subtitled, but “Blake and Mortimer” is well worth the effort.     (*)

    Anyone who enjoyed the HBO “Tintin” episodes should at least check this series out. The same imagination and love of the material that marked those adaptations has been shown here.

(*)    Episodes of all those series mentioned save “Nestor Burma” can be found on YouTube, some in French, but a few in English dubbed versions.

Rhiannon Giddens is the lead singer of the Grammy-winning old-time country and blues band, the Carolina Chocolate Drops. Here is the title track of her first solo CD: