A. FIELDING – The Cautley Conundrum. Collins Crime Club, UK, hardcover, January 1934. Published in the US as The Cautley Mystery: Kinsey, hardcover, 1934.

   A later appearance of Chief Inspector Pointer, and in comparison to the breakneck pace of the previous book [The Net Around Joan Ingilby], just reviewed, this one, some readers may feel, is downright soporific. Well, not I, even though most of the 250 plus pages take place within walking distance of Bunch Cottage, where Jack Cautley, one of the four Cautley cousins makes his home, even though it is Major Howard Cautley to whom it actually belongs.

   And among the four, it is the Major who has the money, and it is he who on page 40 is found dead, lying across a stile after having gone shooting, his gun lying beside his body. It is at first assumed to have been a dreadful accident, but at the same time, a valuable necklace, a family heirloom, is discovered to have gone missing. The local police in the guise of Superintendent Wanklyn, at the Woodhaven police station, do not believe strongly in coincidence (nor does the faithful reader) and eventually Pointer is called in from Scotland Yard.

   Accordingly, in mind-expanding fashion, there follows a story full of questions, evasive answers, long-shot inquiries, other deaths, puzzling tales, and a plethora of clever observations. The characters are extremely well-defined as well – there is no mistaking one for another, even though there many, many of them, and all of them have their own desires and motivations. It’s not a book for most modern readers, though. It’s too stationary. It moves, and yet on the surface, it doesn’t. There’s no flair there, you might say.

   Or you might not. I enjoyed it, but largely as an intellectual endeavor only. I truthfully have to admit that I enjoyed the earlier adventure more, as rough and unruly as it was. If I’d read this one first, I confess, I probably wouldn’t have read the one I did read first.

 MICHAEL O’HALLORAN. Republic Pictures, 1937. Wynne Gibson, Warren Hull, Jackie Moran, Charlene Wyatt, Sidney Blackmer, Hope Manning, G. P. Huntley Jr. Based on a novel by Gene Stratton Porter. Director: Karl Brown. Shown at Cinefest 26, Syracuse NY, March 2006.

   One of the great film reference books is Jack Mathis’s Valley of the Cliffhangers, a fascinating detailed history of the Republic serials, and during his research for additional volumes on the studio,he was allowed to have prints made from studio negatives of some rare titles. Three of these ware shown during the weekend.

   Unfortunately, this film, in which Wynne Gibson, an irresponsible party girl, attempts to present herself as a fit parent in a custody struggle with Sidney Blackmer, her dull respectable husband, continues the Cinefest tradition of scheduling a dog to initiate the screenings.

   The plot is mainly an excuse to showcase what my fellow attendee Jim Goodrich referred to as the “unquestionable” talents of a popular young child actor, Jackie Moran, whose invalid sister becomes the do-good project that Gibson takes on to improve her image.

   About twenty minutes of the film don’t survive (except for the soundtrack) and that was something of a blessing. It didn’t, however, deprive us of an especially saccharine (and inept) imitation of Shirley Temple by a child actress who does a walk-on.

SHADOW OF THE LAW. Paramount Pictures, 1930. William Powell, Marion Shilling, Natalie Moorhead, Regis Toomey, Paul Hurst, George Irving, Frederick Burt. Screenwriter John Farrow, based on the novel The Quarry by John A. Moroso (Little, Brown, 1913). Director: Louis Gasnier.

   Back in 1922 a man named Robert Elliott Burns was sentenced to hard labor on a Georgia chain gang for his part in an armed robbery that netted him and two other men less than six dollars. Probably only Steve and Walter are old enough to remember, but Burns escaped from the chain gang and made a new life for himself under another name, eventually becoming a prominent businessman in Chicago and something of a celebrity when his wife (who had been blackmailing him) betrayed him to the law after getting a cash settlement from him in exchange for a divorce.

   Burns could have fought extradition but agreed to return to Georgia when corrections officials there promised him quick release after some nominal service. Instead, they reneged on their promise and he was returned to the chain gang for “extra attention” from the guards, with no release in sight. Eventually Burns escaped again and wrote I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang (Vanguard, 1932), which finally secured his freedom.

   Burns is best remembered for the movie made from his book, but his personal story seems to have been much on the mind of John Farrow, screenwriter of the film Shadow of the Law, which appeared a full two years before I Am a Fugitive hit the bookstands and movie screens.

   The story in Shadow of the Law is slightly changed, but the essential elements are there: William Powell stars as a decent if amorous gentleman who gets in a scrape over a lady (perennial vamp Natalie Moorhead) and ends up accidentally killing a man—whereupon Ms. Moorhead, fearing scandal or worse, promptly decamps, leaving Powell with no witness to clear him of a murder charge that sends him to prison.

   A few years later, Powell is a hardened-enough convict to pal up with a thief (well played by Paul Hurst) and exploit the warden’s trust in him to break out of jail. When we next see him, he has become a highly-placed executive, respected by the workers in his factory and engaged to the owner’s daughter — but determined to find Moorhead and clear his name.

   He does eventually find her, or rather Hurst does, but she proves smarter than Hurst thought and more avaricious than Powell suspected, leading to some plot twists both melodramatic and highly entertaining.

   In fact, the writing and direction (by Louis Gasnier) in Shadow keeps the story right on its edge, offering some juicy plot twists and a couple of suspenseful moments, one of which – as I realized what Powell was going to do to himself and watched him calmly set about it — I swear made my skin crawl. Director Gasnier is not well known as an auteur (unless you count Reefer Madness) but his work here shows a stylishness and pace perfectly suited to the subject.

A. FIELDING – The Net Around Joan Ingilby. Collins Crime Club, UK, hardcover, 1928. Alfred A. Knopf, US, hardcover, 1928.

   According to a huge amount of research done by John Herrington, [FOOTNOTE] A. Fielding was in reality Dorothy Feilding, who between 1924 and 1938 was the author of 24 detective novels, an absolute terrific pace, with one last book appearing in 1944.

   Her primary character is Chief Inspector Pointer, who did not appear in all of them, and who, on the basis of the two books read so far, does not always appear in the ones he does until a certain distance into the story. He’s from Scotland Yard, and the local police do not always see fit to call in them in right away. (I am hedging here, trying not to tell you more than you should know, and as soon as I tell you that, I know that that’s telling you too much in and of itself.)

   But all digressions aside, let me tell you about this one, which is a doozie and a half, as my mother (or was it my grandmother) used to say. In Chapter One, there’s no detective story or mystery thriller in sight. On board ship, where such chance meetings often take place, just before landing, journalist Martin Blair meets the fairy princess of his dreams, briefly but most magically, yet with no likelihood of ever seeing her again.

   Chapter Two. After fashioning a successful career for himself, Blair comes across a strange but apparently accidental death, that of a woman who took refuge in a shed near a outdoor charcoal burning facility and was later found asphyxiated by the fumes. Investigating further on his own, Blair comes to the conclusion that foul play was involved, and he writes the story up for his newspaper, complete with an all-but-accusation of the guilty party, Miss Joan Ingilby, the missing governess of the dead woman’s child.

   Well, I suppose you know what comes next. Joan Ingilby and his fairy princess are one and the same, and while Blair desperately tries to take back his accusation, his recital of the facts is all too convincing, and Joan must go into hiding while Blair tries to make amends and catch the real killer.

   There may be a “first” involved here. Can you think of any other story in which an accused murderer comes back into the story disguised as her older sister in order to help in the investigation?

   Here’s a description of Joan’s first encounter with Chief Inspector Pointer, taken from page 137:

   Pointer will need all the strength that is suggested in this passage. The trail leads to France, and to Marseilles in particular, to a den of iniquity there never seen in the likes of Innes, Christie or Carr. Kidnappings, last minute escapes, recaptures, underground passages and more – unlike anything I have read in more normal fiction in many a day. (Maybe I’ve been reading the wrong stuff. This was great.)

   Not so great, though, were the many lapses in story-telling continuity. In the early going, characters appear only as they are needed, even though they had to have been on the scene all along. One truly remarkable feat of physical genius occurs around page 42. Joan is in Blair’s apartment, coming to plead her case to him after the story he wrote. When a policeman comes to the door, Joan ducks into Blair’s bedroom, unready to give herself up. Fearful of the maid’s impending arrival, Blair tries to distract Police-Inspector Armstrong, to no avail. Two pages later, there is a knock on his outer door. It is Joan, disguised as her sister, ready to confront the law, heavy on her trail. But how? It is never explained.

   There are parts of this tale, however, which concern matters mysterical and are equally amazing, and once explained, may very well take your breath away. It did mine, and for more reasons than one – one being pure audacity, and another – well, you’ll have to read this one for yourself.

   Do I have room for another quote? I think so. From pages 84 and 85, where Pointer is telling Blair something about his philosophy of solving criminal cases:

FOOTNOTE:   Most of this research was done after this review was written, and this current first paragraph replaces several earlier ones dealing with what was known about A. Fielding in 2004. Check out this earlier post on this blog, and this review on Curt Evans’ blog, in the course of which he discusses the life of the author in much detail.

LOVE CRIME. French; original title: Crime d’amour, 2010. Ludvine Siegneur, Kristin Scott Thomas, Patrick Mille, Guillame Marquet. Directed by Alain Corneau, also co-screenwriter with Natalie Carter.

   Love Crime may seem like a leisurely suspense film at the beginning, and granted it takes its time to establish the two main characters, but once it kicks into gear it is a fascinating character study with enough twists and turns to keep any fan of suspense films happy.

   Kristin Scott Thomas has a showy role as Christine, a ruthless bisexual female executive who becomes mentor to the rather mousy Isabelle (Ludvine Siegneur). The sexual tension between them is obvious, and Siegneur, while shy, is not all that reluctant to be seduced. It becomes obvious this won’t end well early on.

   Siegneur seems to slowly blossom under Thomas’s guidance, until things go south when Thomas sends Siegneur to Cairo on an important business trip. Siegneur seduces Thomas’s lover (Phillipe Mille), and pulls off a triumphant business coup that is certain to insure her quick movement up the corporate ladder.

   Then Thomas takes all the credit for Siegneur’s coup.

   A relentless no holds barred competition begins between the two women, played out in the boardroom and the bedroom. Blackmail, humiliation, and extortion all play a role in the game between them until Siegneur finds herself publicly humiliated by Thomas and firmly under her thumb again.

   Aided unwittingly by her Iago, her assistant Daniel (Marquet in a perfectly under played performance), Siegneur begins a ruthless plan of revenge, but it seems more mad than anything else. Humiliated, she spins out of control into uppers and downers and what becomes increasingly obviously a plan to murder Thomas and doing her best to frame herself.

   When she does murder Thomas, she even draws the first three letters of her name in Thomas’s blood. She is arrested and the police all too easily follow her self-incriminating trail. Still heavily drugged, Siegneur confesses. The film seems to be over, having driven itself into a wall.

   I can’t say much more about the plot without giving too much away, but all is carefully unraveled as Siegneur’s true/false trail by turns leads the police in unsuspected directions. One by one as each pawn falls and each part of Siegneur’s plan is revealed, this worm-turns tale slowly reveals just how much the viewer as well as everyone else has been played by Siegneur from the beginning. She gives new definition to the term passive-aggressive.

   Love Crime is handsomely shot in beautiful color and on sleek modern sets, and moves at such a deliberate pace you may not recognize this is the model of classic film noir, with two femme fatale’s in a cat and mouse game that mid-film turns into a Simenon psychological suspense story with enough twists for Agatha Christie.

   It won’t be until the very last scene and the very last moment you realize how well you have been played, and how important that deliberation was to the final outcome of this clever film. Despite the two female leads don’t mistake this for a “woman’s” picture on Joan Crawford lines. This film is as hard and unsentimental a film as you will ever see.

   The cast is uniformly good, but it is Siegneur and Thomas who carry the film and without either character ever becoming a really sympathetic character. Both have obvious personality problems and possibly borderline personality disorders. At one point in the film you will be convinced Siegneur is mentally unbalanced, a sociopath with an unhealthy obsession with Thomas. It’s not until the end you even begin to suspect the truth.

   If you stay with this film you will find at the end you enjoyed it much more than you thought, and may even want to watch it again, to see if you can catch the places you were played, mislead, and bamboozled by the intelligent script. This film has the courage to ask you to stick with it, and rewards that effort with a final moment that will leave you frostbitten.

   Love Crime was remade by Brian de Palma as Passion in 2012 with Rachel McAdams and Noomi Rapace. Despite that cast and a co-script by the screenwriter Natalie Carter, skip it and see the original, Corneau’s last film and a worthy one.

SHERWOOD KING – If I Die Before I Wake. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1938. Mystery Novel of the Month #16, digest-sized paperback, [1940]. Ace Double D9, paperback, 1953 (published back-to-back with Decoy, by Michael Morgan). Curtis 7154, paperback, 1965.

THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI. Columbia Pictures, 1947. Rita Hayworth, Orson Welles, Everett Sloane, Glenn Anders. Based on the novel If I Die Before I Wake, by Sherwood KIng. Director: Orson Welles.

   Sherwood King’s If I Die Before I Wake offers an intriguing premise: Laurence Planter is something of a footloose jack-of-some-trades marking time, as the story starts, as a chauffeur to criminal attorney Mark Bannister and his trophy wife Elsa. He also spends a lot of time running Bannister’s partner Grisby back and forth from the Bannister house to the office.

   It’s on one of those runs that Grisby offers Laurence five thousand dollars to commit murder — the murder of Grisby himself.

   It’s a neat book, with an even neater twist to it: Grisby wants to fake his death by having witnesses see Laurence walk to the end of a dark pier with him, hear a shot and see Laurence come back alone. But no corpse will be found — Laurence can’t (he thinks) be charged with murder, but Grisby will (he thinks) be legally dead.

   And the scheme seems to work quite nicely until Laurence goes through with it and signs a confession,only to have Grisby’s body turn up after all — very very murdered.

   As I say, it’s a clever hook for a story, and Cornell Woolrich could have made a nightmarish classic of it, but Sherwood King just lets it lie there with the sharp end sticking up. There’s not much action in the story and very little movement at all, as if King were too lazy to describe new locations for us. Instead,he opens the tale with awkward dialogue, then gets bogged down in a lengthy trial scene capped off with a resolution that’s all talk. And so another good idea misfires.

   But wait….

   The story goes that in 1946 Orson Welles was trying to raise money from Harry Cohn, the head of Columbia Pictures, and during a desperate conversation in a drugstore phone booth his eye fell upon a paperback book he’d never read and he suddenly convinced Cohn it would make a great movie, which he could direct and star in with his then-wife, Columbia’s leading lady Rita Hayworth.

   Well, it’s a nice story and it may even be true, despite reports that Columbia already owned If I Die Before I Wake and was planning to have contract director William Castle make it as a B movie. (It would have made a good entry in the Whistler series.)

   Whatever the case, Welles took the basic plot and most of the details and turned The Lady from Shanghai (its new title) into his most enjoyable film, a tricky, fast-moving, witty, careening ride form Central Park, through Acapulco (some of this was filmed on board Errol Flynn’s yacht) to San Francisco’s Chinatown, culminating in a visual tour-de-force: the shoot-out in a hall of mirrors where, as one critic noted, the characters have to come face-to-face with themselves before meeting their end.

   Welles plays the hero like a young Falstaff, lustful, charming, and all too aware of his own fecklessness. He’s abetted by Rita Hayworth as the duplicitous wife — though he doesn’t give his then-wife much to do. I’ve seen her more effective in the hands of lesser directors — but the films is helped along splendidly by Everett Sloane and Glenn Anders as lawyers Bannister and Grisby.

   Except for a part in Tarzan’s Peril, I never heard of Glenn Anders before and after this film, and he reportedly had an awful time making it, but his performance as Grisby is one of high points of the American Cinema: sweaty, smiling, whiny and worming, he seems so devoid of humanity — of perhaps so excessively human — that you can’t figure out why no one ever killed him before the picture started.

   His performance complements Welles’ visual excesses perfectly, and I’ve always thought it an overlooked gem in a treasure-trove of a film.

DAVID HILTBRAND – Killer Solo. Avon, paperback original. First printing, January 2004.

   I was going to start this review by stating that this is the best rock music detective novel I have ever read. It then occurred to me that this may be the only rock music detective novel I have ever read. I know there are others. Unless there are some that aren’t coming to mind right now, though, I just haven’t read them.

   Forgive me if you’re not a rock music fan. I’m going to quote the entire first page. You can skip this and go on the rest of review, if you want to. In fact, you can even go on to the next review, if you want to. I can’t stop you.

   Wow. David Hiltbrand nails it, as far as I’m concerned. And it’s no wonder. The brief bio on the inside back cover points out that among other things, he’s been a rock journalist for a number of well known magazines and newspapers. (He’s currently a consulting editor for TV Guide.)

   Working out of Winsted CT as an insurance investigator is Jim McNamara, á la old time radio’s Johnny Dollar, who in his many years on the air may have checked out a mysterious death on a rock band’s tour, but if he did, I haven’t listened to it yet.

   Dead is Shirley’s good buddy, Jake Karn, and one of the crew. He fell off a catwalk after a show late at night, and Jim is asked to see if foul play could have been involved.

   Back to Shirley, who is male, and who is described on page 7 as “the one who looks like Johnny Depp with dysentery.” It takes some time, but Jim, at one time also heavily involved in the world of rock music, eventually gets on his good side, following along with the tour from city to city, a brutally honest behind-the-scenes inside look. Quoting again, this time from page 136:

   Musicians, groupies, roadies, managers, PR people and more, they’re all represented, and they’re all among the suspects. Jim works alone, but since he needs someone to bounce ideas off, he has his AA sponsor to talk to by telephone, not to mention the girl friend he picks up along the way.

   So how’s the mystery, someone asks. More than tolerable, is my reply, with enough suspects and opportunity and motive to accommodate two books, and by the way, if there’s a second one coming in the series, it would be OK by me.

   The ending of this one is rather over the top, I hasten to caution you, including the killer (yes, it was murder) giving a long ten-page explanation of everything that went on prior to then, when the realistic course of action is to simply do away with one nosy insurance investigator.

   My first sentence still holds, though.

        The Jim McNamara series —

1. Killer Solo (2003)
2. Deader Than Disco (2005)
3. Dying to Be Famous (2006)

JACK REACHER. Paramount Pictures, 2013. Tom Cruise, Rosamund Pike, Richard Jenkins, Werner Herzog, Robert Duvall, David Oyelowo. Based on the novel One Shot by Lee Child. Directed by Christopher McQuarrie (also screenplay).

   Who was that masked man?

   Actually he’s Jack Reacher, hero of a series of books by British television writer Lee Child, a cross between Travis McGee, Mike Hammer, and. yes, the Lone Ranger. Here he’s played by super star Tom Cruise. Reacher really isn’t a hero, he’s a sociopath gone off the grid out of paranoia and what fits every definition of schizo effective disorder ever penned, whose tarnished armor should be replaced by a strait jacket.

   Unlike both McGee and Hammer Reacher has no self recognition, no dark nights of the soul when he questions himself or his motives. He’s a sociopath incapable of examining his own motives, actions, or morality. Showtime’s Dexter is better balanced and he’s a serial killer.

   Confession time before I go any farther. I find the Reacher books appallingly written, inauthentic, badly researched, and universally stupid. I don’t like them much either. Child is the type writer who thinks he sounds like an American if he uses “guy” twenty to thirty times on the same page.

   He makes huge gaping mistakes like putting a military base in Dallas (save for the Naval Air Station, Dallas never had a base — ever — not at all — not even in WW II), and going on for an entire book about how ineffective a .38 caliber gun is and then praising the 9mm automatic. The .38 and the 9mm are damn near the same thing (9 mm is .35 inches — you would think a Brit would know the metric system), he also seems ignorant of the fact that the .38 revolver is one of the most efficient hand guns ever made.

   If he thinks getting shot by a .38 is nothing he should recall what a .22 did to President Reagan. In another book the Secret Service hires him to stalk the Vice President like a real assassin — this despite the fact he is homeless loner living off the grid. No trouble buying that plot. These things add up over time.

   I’m not a gun nut, and better writers than Child have made such mistakes (Ian Fleming for one), but they don’t rant for three hundred pages about it, and they didn’t have the Internet at their fingertips.

   This is symptomatic of the problems I have with Child and the movie made from his book. There is nothing original, nothing new, nothing period. This isn’t up to the level of the generic paperback series of my youth or the later Men’s Action series.

   I promise you Mack Bolan knew what gun he was using whether he knew syntax or not. This isn’t as good as run of the mill series television from that era either. The plot pretty much is run of the mill television.

   In addition Reacher is a huge pain in the ass, always right, always the smartest, toughest, most ‘perfectest’ hero in the game. He’s so perfect he gives me dyspepsia. Casting Tom Cruise in the role didn’t help things much, humility is not one of his stronger acting skills.

   Confession Part deux, I’m no Cruise fan. I particularly don’t like him when he tries to play a flawless hero, but he can be great when he either laughs at himself (Knight and Day) or allows his hero to be human.

   He’s much better in films like the Mission Impossible series (his character in these films differs from Reacher in that he is usually fighting great odds with his life or that of his loved ones at stake), Minority Report, Risky Business, Rain Man, or Born on the Fourth of July playing fallible humans often battling huge odds, heroes struggling to reclaim their lives, or men struggling with difficult moral problems with a flawed character.

At least in Top Gun his character had something to be arrogant about in a profession that calls for more than a little over confidence, and it was only a little exaggerated about what personalities make great fighter pilots.

   As Jack Reacher he doesn’t make the ‘guy’ heroic or iconic, he plays him as a horses rear, a rude creepy loner who has watched too many James Dean movies without noticing the humanity under Dean’s cool. You’ll be excused if you root for the villain.

   At the point where the great Robert Duvall comes in as a colorful aging gun dealer playing Tonto to Reacher’s Lone Ranger in a terribly written role, the patter between the two actors will make you remember the Bowery Boys fondly. God awful is the only description I can give of it. I hope at least Duvall got a bundle for it. Something good should come from this movie.

   Joe Kraemer’s score did win an award and the trailer was great, but the movie, not so much. It had a great opening weekend in theaters, but in the end didn’t bring in that much more than it cost ($20 million is not considered a profit in Hollywood these days, not the way they calculate it), so audiences do have taste and word of mouth lives.

   The plot is incredibly cliched, obvious, and plain silly. The screenplay and book were apparently written by Marconi, because every twist and turn is telegraphed with the subtly of a hammer on an anvil.

   Former army sniper James Barr (Joseph Siroka) stands accused of a killing spree and calls on Reacher, a former MP who once proved Barr murdered four people in Afghanistan but couldn’t nail him because the army needed a hero. Reacher would be perfectly happy to see Barr dead, but he agrees to work with Barr’s lawyer Helen Rodin (Rosamund Pike) who just happens to be the prosecutor’s daughter and has daddy issues.

   She and Reacher semi flirt, but it is so lead footed there is never any question of them getting together. Pike is attractive, and shows a bit of cleavage, but it’s not enough to keep you sitting through this. She does what she can with nothing much to work with. A better movie would have dropped Reacher and focused on her more interesting character, but then you have to explain the title.

   David Oyelowo isn’t bad as the assassin Reacher battles, but he has nothing to work with. Maybe in a later movie we’ll see what he can do. Werner Herzog does creepy great, but it’s too little too late.

   Reacher is of course devastating with women, and a devastating wit. as this little exchange will show.

            Girl (Alea Fast): Mind if I share your table, I’m Sandy.

            Reacher: “So was I last week at the beach.

   What Shavian wit. James Bond will have to retire his Bond mots. How can you top wit like that? I don’t know how Cruise delivered the line without laughing — or crying. That is pitifully bad, but then most of this film is.

   John Gardner, the American one, wrote in an essay about what he called Dis-Pollyanna, an unearned cynical pose assumed by people with no life experience to base that cynicism on. That’s Child. It’s second hand life picked up from books, television, and movies not experience. It’s imitative of people who earned that voice like his models John D. MacDonald and Mickey Spillane, but theirs was real coming from their lives. Child’s is coming from episodes of Magnum P.I. (but not as well written or directed, much less acted). Peter Cheyney’s Lemmie Caution was more authentic, and Lemmie was at least funny. Reacher is just depressing.

   I won’t give away the plot save to say it is incredibly hackneyed, a plot device so old Street and Smith would have hesitated to put Nick Carter through it in the Nickel Library. Worse still, it is ineptly done. The second hand action scenes have been done better on television and the car chases were better choreographed on Rockford Files and Mannix.

   There is one line that defines the film perfectly: “It’s grassy knoll ridiculous.”

   As played by Tom Cruise in this disaster of a film Jack Reacher lacks the substance of corrugated cardboard.

   Reacher even puts down his gun when he has the bad guy dead to rights to fight him hand to hand when Helen Roden is still hostage to a man who has orchestrated countless murders.

   Didn’t these people learn anything from Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark? Who is he, Roy Rogers? No, I apologize to Roy, he never pulled a boner like that while there was a gun at Dale’s head.

   This cost me $1.20 to rent from a Redbox kiosk. I was cheated. Don’t you be, this was even worse than the last Die Hard movie, and that was one of the worst blockbusters of the year.

   Flat, cliched, obvious, poorly written, with no real action, drama, or characters to root for, this is a painfully bad movie with a plot they would have rejected for an episode of The Dukes of Hazard.

   And it is exactly the movie Jack Reacher and Lee Child deserved, but not their fans who deserve much more than this cynically made half-hearted effort at starting another franchise for Cruise. Nothing much happens in the film and what does happen is pretty inept.

   I can’t even recommend this as a good bad movie, it’s not enough fun to even laugh at.

FELIX FRANCIS – Dick Francis’s Refusal. Putnam, hardcover, September 2013. Berkley, softcover, July 2014.

   First Sentence: “No,” I said.

   Sid Halley is married, a father, and six years retired from doing investigative work. Sir Richard Stewart approaches him asking that Sid look into race results that seem wrong. Although Sid is curious, he refuses but agrees to look over the information. However, the next day Sir Richard is found dead in his car of an apparent suicide and Sid receives a phone call, followed by escalating threats, demanding he sign a report of no wrong-doing … or else.

   Having read every book written by Dick Francis, I knew I was starting with a bias. However, even distancing myself from that and trying to view this as a book from a completely different author, it did not help.

   There were several major problems with this book. First, the characters. The two best characters were Charles and Chico. Sid’s wife was very poorly written. Even as a mother, worried about her child, she was overly strident and annoying. She did not convey as the type of woman Sid would have married.

   Sid may have been retired for six years, but he came across as soft and insecure. Francis’s protagonists were known for their determination and doggedness. They didn’t give up, they never whined and they certainly would never have considered asking a policeman to break the law, or committing murder or blackmail.

   The dialogue lacked a natural flow. I don’t know whether this was due to this being an “American” version — why do they do that? — rather than U.K, but it was choppy and somewhat painful.

   On the plus side, there was fascinating information on the technological advancements in limb replacement, both with mechanical, and now, actual limb transplants. The plot did have some very good twists. Even when you think Francis has made an error, it’s lovely to discover he hasn’t.

   Refusal isn’t a dreadful book, but it’s just not a very good one either. The biggest mistake was probably to resurrect Sid Halley, a character so well known and well loved by Dick Francis fans. I suspect that had one not read previous books, one would enjoy this far better than did I.

Rating:   Poor.

THE PARSON AND THE OUTLAW. Columbia Pictures, 1957. Anthony Dexter, Sonny Tufts, Marie Windsor, Buddy Rogers, Bob Steel(e). Director: Oliver Drake.

   Yet another fictional distortion of the legend of Billy the Kid, but one in which I have to admit a really neat twist takes place. It seems that what really happened was this: Pat Garrett and Billy got together on a plot that would leave Billy “dead” and buried, free to begin a new life, one without the need to constantly prove himself to every new gunfighter in town.

   This all takes place in the first ten minutes, so I’m not telling you all that I could, but unfortunately, it is the most interesting ten minutes of the movie — as maybe you could tell from just a single glance at the cast.

   Marie Windsor excepted, of course.

   As Billy the Kid, Anthony Dexter has no acting ability, no looks, and is minus 30 on the standard Sonny Tufts charisma scale. (Which means that Sonny Tufts has 30 times the charm and charisma of Anthony Dexter, as displayed in this movie.)

   On the other hand, no movie with Marie Windsor in it is ever a complete waste of time, but a few of them come close, and even fewer of them come closer than this.

   And what other movie can you think of would have the parson, a man of the cloth, begging Billy to put his guns back on, for the sake of the town. (It works out even worse than you might think.)