HALLOWEEN SPECIAL, PART TWO:
HORROR RADIO
by Michael Shonk
Welcome to part two of a three part series on horror and suspense for Halloween. Part One can be found here.
Horror is at its most terrifying when it exists in our own imagination. This is why the genre works so well in radio. Few radio series did not attempt a scary story or an episode with a horror theme. From BABY SNOOKS to PHILIP MARLOWE, the comedic or the typical whodunit, all took advantage of the success of horror in radio.
A good example is this episode from my favorite radio series ADVENTURES OF SAM SPADE (reviewed here ).
“The Fairly Bright Caper.†(CBS, October 31, 1948) Written by Bob Tallman and Gil Doud. Directed and Produced by William Spier. Cast: Howard Duff as Sam Spade and Lorene Tuttle as Effie.
Sam is hired for a Halloween high society engagement party that is spoiled by murder. What does the Witch really know?
It is radio’s version of Sam Spade, so jokes are as common as clues and the character of the witch gave it a perfect Halloween feel.
The most common form of the horror radio series was the anthology. Many of these series are still fondly remembered today, shows such as INNER SANCTUM, LIGHTS OUTS and SUSPENSE. So of course I will ignore them and turn to some forgotten ones.
MYSTERIOUS TRAVELER aired on Mutual Network between 1943 and 1952. Each week you the listener would board a train only to have the Mysterious Traveler approach you and tell you a story.
The series was created, written, produced and directed by the team of Bob Arthur and David Kogan. Arthur and Kogan won the Edgar award for this series as the best radio drama in 1953.
Mysterious Traveler was also adapted for comic books and a Mysterious Traveler magazine that featured short stories for the radio show as well as stories from such writers as John Dickson Carr, Craig Rice, Dorothy L. Sayers, Brett Halliday, Ray Bradbury, and Lawrence Blochman. The magazine lasted five issues and was edited by Bob Arthur.
“Locomotive Ghost.†(Mutual Network, July 6,1947) Written, directed, and produced by Bob Arthur and David Kogan. Voice of Mysterious Traveler: Maurice Tarplin.
To steal a large payroll carried by train two robbers destroy the train. They get away with the money but can they escape the Judgment Special?
While fictional characters hosted many of the radio anthologies, other anthologies used an announcer or the writer/producer or a famous star to introduce the story. The host star often acted in the episodes.
MYSTERY IN THE AIR featured the talents of Peter Lorre as each week the series would adapt some of literature’s best horror stories such as Edgar Allen Poe’s THE BLACK CAT, Alexander Pushkin’s QUEEN OF SPADES and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s CRIME AND PUNISHMENT. The sadly neglected series was on NBC as a summer replacement (July – September 1947) for ABBOTT AND COSTELLO SHOW.
“The Horla.†(NBC, August 21, 1947) Based on short story by Guy de Maupassant. Cast: Peter Lorre, Peggy Webber and Lorene Tuttle. Announcer: Henry (Harry) Morgan.
Lorre plays a man who slowly becomes convinced an invisible monster is stalking him.
HALL OF FANTASY (KALL, Salt Lake City, 1946-47; WGN 1949; Mutual 1952)
Richard Thorne was the creative force behind HALL OF FANTASY. The series began in 1946 on Salt Lake Utah station KALL and produced by Thorne and Carl Greyson. The series ended in 1947. In 1949 Thorne (with Greyson in some accounts) revived the series for WGN and by 1952 HALL OF FANTASY was airing nation-wide on Mutual Network.
“The Judge’s House.†(April 6, 1947) Based on story by Bram Stoker, adapted by Bob Olson. Directed by Richard Thorne. Produced by Thorne and Carl Greyson.
A young student comes to a small town to find a quiet place to study. Despite the locals warnings he rents a house where an evil judge had lived fifty years ago.
While it is common belief that original dramas for radio died when TV took over, that is not totally true. Shows such as SUSPENSE and YOURS TRULY JOHNNY DOLLAR hung on until 1962.
CBS tried to bring back radio with CBS RADIO MYSTERY THEATER (1974-82). While many talented artists from radio’s glory days contributed to the series, the writing was never able to recapture the magic of old type radio. Perhaps the focus was misplaced in trying to recreate the magic of the past instead of bring radio up to the present.
Radio drama continues today at the BBC. Canada has shown success with radio series such as JOHNNY CHASE: SECRET AGENT (1978-81), THE MYSTERY PROJECT (1992-2004), and the anthology series NIGHTFALL (1980-1983).
Created by Bill Howell the series NIGHTFALL remains best known for its scary episodes such as “Porch Light†(not on Youtube), but tried nearly every genre in fiction, even adapting a folk song by Stan Rogers for an episode.
NIGHTFALL (CBC, 1980-1983)
“Fatal Eggs.†(April 17, 1981) Written by Arthur Samuels. Based on a novel by Mikhail Bulgakov. Produced by Bill Howell. Cast: Douglas Campbell, Neil Dainard and David Calderisi.
Russian scientists develop a red ray that can grow animals in size. But things go bad when the communist bureaucrats take over the project.
NEXT: PART THREE – TELEVISION.
SOURCES:
ON THE AIR: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio by John Dunning (Oxford University Press, 1998)
THE HILLS RUN RED. C.B. Films S.A., Italy, 1966. United Artists, US, 1967. Original title: Un fiume di dollari. Thomas Hunter, Henry Silva, Dan Duryea, Nando Gazzolo, Nicoletta Machiavelli, Gianna Serra. Screenplay by Dean Craig (Piero Regnoli). Directed by Lee W. Beaver (Carlo Lizziani)
Imagine a Spaghetti Western without the jangling percussive score or the arty cinematography and directorial flourishes and with a more or less standard Western plot from an average lesser A Western of the fifties, and you pretty much have this. The Hills Run Red is a decent minor Spaghetti Western from producer Dino De Laurentiis shot handsomely in color and on more or less classical revenge Western lines, despite some over the top bits you expect of the sub genre.
I would warn you of spoilers from here on, but honestly if you can’t figure this one out you have never seen a Western.
Jerry Brewster (Thomas Hunter) and Cam Siegel (Nando Gazzolo) are ex Confederate soldiers, you can tell by their over the top Southern dubbed accents, who have stolen $600,000 from the U.S. Army and are on the run from pursuing soldiers when just north of the border the Army catches up with them. Brewster loses a game of high card draw and agrees to lead the Army away while Siegel will take the money and promises to take care of Brewster’s son and wife if the latter is captured.
If you don’t see where this is going, you haven’t been paying attention all these years.
Sure enough, Brewster is caught and sent to prison where he spends five years in hard labor and inhuman conditions well illustrated during the titles. When he is finally let go he heads home to find his home deserted (and no wonder he needed the money it is pretty palatial for the post Civil War West) and is promptly ambushed by two killers sent by his old pal Siegel who has been waiting five years. He is saved by the timely help of Winnie Getz (Dan Duryea), an out of work drifter who happens to be sleeping in the remains of Brewster’s barn, and learns from a dying killer that his wife died four years earlier never knowing Jerry Brewster was in prison as Jim Houston or had stolen the money and his son was taken in by Siegel, now known as Milton, who let poor Mary starve to death rather than share the money.
This is accompanied by a half decent song about a golden haired woman.
Either quite a few scenes of connecting material are cut from the film or the screenplay was written during a weekend binge, because no one ever asks questions like what is an aging man doing sleeping in the deserted Brewster barn in the middle of the day in the first place, or why the gun he provides the unarmed Brewster during the battle with the killers only has two bullets.
For that matter why didn’t Duryea’s character just kill the two killers himself? There is an answer, but you have to fill it in for yourself because the screenplay leaves you to guess all the stuff most writers would take the time to fill in. I have to wonder if the screenwriter was a son-in-law or nephew or some other relation of Di Laurentiis, if not I hope he wasn’t allowed to write anything after this.
Brewster swears revenge, and Getz, seeing a chance to get money out of it (exactly how is never explained, but turns out not to matter because … but then I don’t want to give away the big non-surprise), convinces him to play dead while Getz claims to have killed him and gets a job on Milton’s ranch in Austin. There is a fairly nasty scene where they get proof Brewster is dead by carving a tattoo off of his forearm and cauterizing it, but as Spaghetti Westerns go, it is pretty tame. I’ve seen much rougher stuff in American Westerns from a decade earlier. Hell, Gary Cooper lancing the boil on Karl Malden’s ass in Hanging Tree is more disturbing, and its played for laughs.
From there, it is off to Austin where Milton has his ranch, and is pressuring the other ranchers trying to take all the land in standard Western bad guy fashion, aided by his chief henchman Garcia Mendez (Henry Silva) a sadistic hyena of an assassin and ranch foreman in black who covets Mary Anne (Nicoletta Machiavelli) Milton/Siegel’s sister. Apparently it has never occurred to Mary Anne to ask her brother why they had to change their last name, but she frankly never seems very bright anyway. Even by the standard of Spaghetti Westerns, Mary Anne is dumb as a rock.
I won’t even bother with the fact this film is supposed to be taking place in at most the 1870‘s yet everyone is carrying hand guns not in common use for another decade. Those are pet peeves of mine and not really fair to the genre under discussion here.
Brewster, now calling himself Jim Houston, the name he used in prison, shows up and promptly kills two of Mendez men aligning himself with the ranchers and a saloon owner. We are told the sheriff is dead, which still doesn’t explain where the Texas Rangers and Army are, since Austin is the capital of Texas — sorry, keep forgetting it is a Spaghetti Western and they don’t have books in Italy to use for research.
In short order Brewster finds his son Tim (Loris Loddi), living in poverty working for a brutal smith on the Milton ranch, and after proving himself by beating up about eight of Mendez men is befriended by Mendez the cheerful laughing psychopath — you have to wonder Duryea didn’t keep suspecting he was cast in the wrong role, as Silva seems to be playing a Dan Duryea part but as a Mexican bandit.
Of course Milton’s sister has eyes for Brewster (who keeps lingering on the Mary part of her name so we get the connection in case we are as dumb as she is) almost as soon as she sees him setting up a rivalry with Mendez that the screenplay lays on but then promptly forgets to follow up on as it hurries to the finale. Silva tries hard but can’t quite master the Duryea leer — or even the Jack Palance leer. I kept wondering if some of the laughing was directed at himself stuck with this screenplay.
There are a number of big twists in the film that are only twists because the director and screenwriter weren’t familiar enough with the genre to properly set them up. At times it feels as if Di Laurentiis himself must have been shouting at them that they had a movie to make and not to bother with the plot. Quite a few things are never explained and never connected.
Skipping some of the details of the plot, eventually a big gunfight takes place and the two men wipe out Mendez men in one of those over the top Spaghetti Western blood bath gunfights rather dully staged, save Duryea is enjoying not getting killed for once. He, or his stunt man, even gets to jump off a roof onto a bad guy on a horse. You know Duryea must have wanted to be the jumper and not the jumpee in that scene at least once in his career. Brewster then chases Mendez back to the ranch where Henry Silva gets a ridiculous death scene, involving enough lead to sink the Titanic.
We have to hope he was getting paid a ridiculously high salary for this.
Meanwhile a whore (Gianna Serra, who gets the single worst musical number I have ever seen in a Western early on in the film) who helped Mendez trap Brewster by waylaying Tim, has shot Mary Anne when Mendez tried to kidnap his bosses sister and ride away, Mendez has killed the whore/dance hall girl (once you hear her song you know where her talents lie and it an additional motive for Mendez to kill her), and Brewster comforts the wounded Mary Anne before, dressed as Mendez (and I wouldn’t have put those clothes on after putting six or eight holes in Henry Silva), he finally confronts and kills the cowardly Milton (we know he is a coward because earlier he nearly faints at the sight of his own blood) in a decently shot interior gunfight in the dark.
At this point we discover Mary Anne is alive and it looks like she will end up with Brewster and his son Tim (what’s a dead brother among friends), the ranch is turned over to the Army to make up for the lost $600,000, the Army is told Brewster is dead and the now Jim Houston gets a reward and a badge as sheriff of Austin. (But wait, you say, the Army never knew who Brewster was and thought Jim Houston did the crime and the time so why … better still try not to think about it, it’s one of those uncrossed t’s or undotted i’s which abound in this films screenplay.) It’s a happy ending, shut up and enjoy it.
Then there is a twist involving Winnie Getz that is never even hinted at in the film, Getz is Colonel Getz, an undercover Army officer trying to recover the stolen money all this time, explaining quite a few things which the screenplay finds so obvious it leaves for us to guess on our own. Most importantly this allows for possibly the only time in his long career of Westerns for Dan Duryea to not only be proven to be a total good guy, but get to literally ride off into the sunset as a bona fide hero. I admit I wanted to tear up a little at the prospect. It’s one of the few films where he even gets out alive, much less a hero.
Got me right here — I’m tapping my chest, and it isn’t heartburn, though with this film it is hard to tell.
Hunter overacts terribly at times — screaming his dialogue at other actors is his specialty, and it is a wonder Silva didn’t gain weight, he chews so much scenery, come to think of it he looks a little stuffed here, probably all that pasta, those cheekbones are positively rosy. Duryea seems happy to be getting paid for very little and not getting killed for once.
The film is not in a class with any of the Eastwood or Lee Van Cleef films, certainly not most of the Django, Sartana, Nobody or other series, but it is not a bad Western, more like a classic Hollywood type than the ultra violent, cartoonish, and at times psycho sexual Spaghetti Western we know and love. It’s just above a passing grade as such things go, a bit like a shaggy puppy that wins you over by wagging its tail harder than it has to despite knocking over a few lamps in the process.
Jack Elam claimed Henry Fonda called him when they were filming Once Upon a Time in the West and told him to come to Italy, they were paying them for doing nothing. You have to imagine someone told Duryea the same thing.
But for me The Hills Run Red is worth seeing just to see Dan Duryea get to ride away into the sunset. It was a long time coming, and he honestly seems to be enjoying it, I know I did. Way to go, Dan, you made an entire Western without once shooting anyone in the back.
According to Wikipedia, the acronym B.A.D Cats stood for “Burglary Auto Detail, Commercial Auto Thefts.” Now that’s nice to know, since after watching this pilot episode, I couldn’t have told you. I might have missed it, but other hand, I was deliberately looking and listening, and I really don’t think it ever came up.
But I admit I may have snoozed off. This is a TV show that makes you wonder why some shows ever manage get on the air. It is Not Very Good. It lasted six episodes before being deep-sixed, with four more ready to go and never aired.
It is a wonder, though, that with very young Michelle Pfeiffer in it as the handy girl around the office, answering phones and looking pretty and the like, that no one has come out with an official set of DVDs for the series. Perhaps she has a good lawyer.
This first episode has to do with a gang of crooks trying to smuggle a fortune of gold out of the country, and do to so they come up with a plan that involves faking the cops out by stealing a fleet of high-priced automobiles and shipping them overseas, while they are really…
The fact that Jimmie Walker is in this as an inveterate car thief tells you right away that the story is played as much for laughs as anything else, along with one of the two stars’ infatuation with a water bed, with a worried downstairs lady neighbor who thinks the floor will give way. I don’t think it gives anything away to say that it does, to the hilarity of all.
What should you expect to see otherwise? Lots of long car chases, that you bet your bottom dollar on. The last one I will concede is a doozy, but I should also warn you that it takes a long time to get there.
“Galahad.” An episode of Front Page Detective, Dumont, 1951-53. Actual date of this episode unknown, perhaps the pilot for the series. Edmund Lowe, with (possibly) Emory Parnell, Frank Jenks, Helen Brown, John Phillips.
The only member of the cast that I recognized, other than Edmund Lowe, was Frank Jenks. The credits were clipped on the DVD I watched this from, so I’m relying on IMDb until proven otherwise.
I have no idea what persuaded Lowe to come out of a long hiatus from movie-making to star in this bare-bones budget of a TV series. Between 1945 and this series, he was in one movie in 1948 and nothing more. It is possible that the show I watched was trimmed here and there. Quite often the transitions between scenes seemed to skip over parts of the story.
Which may have been a good one. It is hard to tell from what I saw of it. Lowe plays a newspaper reporter named David Chase in this series, and in this episode he gets mixed up with an heiress who wishes to marry the brother of her deceased husband, against the wishes of the rest of his family, and a former photographer for Chase’s paper who has blackmail on his mind.
The rest is a muddle, and a mystery to me, though not the one they intended, I’m sure.
Note: Mike Nevins had more to say about the series itself in his column for this blog back in September 2012.
LAWRENCE GOLDMAN – Black Fire. Ace Double D-170, paperback original, 1956. Published back-to-back with Flight by Night, by Day Keene.
I purchased this last weekend in the Old Book Store in Morristown, NJ, a Mecca of sorts for lovers of old books and magazines up and down the East Coast. The shop is clean and well-organized, and the books are priced so that books move out almost as fast as they come in. Used bookstores such as this one are an endangered species. If there’s one near you, by all means, give them all the support you can. That is to say, buy books from them even if you already own more books than you can possibly read in one lifetime.
I bought this one because of the book on the flipside, the one by Day Keene, which I didn’t remember if I owned or not. It didn’t look familiar, and the price was right, so I did. Later that evening when I was looking for something to read, I decided to sample this book by Lawrence Goldman for a chapter or so, as long as I owned it, then go on to the Keene half, which I was looking forward to.
But I surprised myself, and 30 minutes later I was 60 pages into the book. It was also time to turn the lights out, and I had to wait a couple of days before I could finish it, which I’ve just done.
Black Fire starts out as an an ordinary domestic thriller, by which I do not mean a cosy, but one in which the teller of the story, Bill Kincaid, happily married, falls in lust with his boss’s wife. Not only that, but his boss is his best friend, who asks Bill to track down the guy whom he knows is messing around with his wife.
The company both men work for (with one of them the owner) is a shipping concern, and as the wheels of fate (and the story) would have it, the four of them, Kincaid and his wife, and the Skipper and his wife Joyce, find themselves marooned at sea off the coast of Mexico in a boat with no gasoline. Not only that, the Skipper has no memory of his attack on the man whom he thought was lovimg his wife.
Pulled into shore, they find themselves to be the guests, if not the prisoners, of El Jefe, who controls the small town of Aparicio, a small settlement located at the base of an every-so-often active volcano called Fuego Negro — thus creating a novel of suspense far from anywhere you might have thought the first few chapters were heading.
It’s no great shakes of a story, with no other surprises in store — you probably can easily guess some of what happens from here, with just this little part I’ve told you about — but with the sense that I may be the only person to ever have reviewed this book before, I can honesty say that I’m happy to have read it.
But now on to the Day Keene half of the book. Stay tuned.
TALBOT MUNDY – The Mystery of Khufu’s Tomb. First published as “Khufu’s Real Tomb” in Adventure magazine, October 10, 1922. First book edition: Hutchinson & Co., UK, hardcover, 1933. First US edition: D. Appleton-Century Co., hardcover, 1935. Several other reprint editions exist. (Follow the link to an online edition of the pulp magazine version.)
Talbot Mundy’s career was as strange as anything he wrote, and that is no small statement. A con man and adventurer in India he came to the United States, nearly died, saw the light, and reformed by becoming a writer, almost immediately penning a number of classics such as Rung Ho!, The Eye of Zeitoon, and Hira Singh. He shot to the top of the list of Haggard and Kipling successors and stayed there until his death, his work a staple in the pulps, particularly the grand old pulp icon, Adventure.
His King of the Khyber Rifles was twice filmed, a bestseller, and even adapted by Classics Illustrated, and his novel Jimgrim, or King of the World is considered by many, myself included, the greatest achievement of the adventure pulps.
Jimgrim featured one of Mundy’s series heroes (Tros of Samothrace, the Greek trader and opponent of Caesar and Cleopatra, is his other great creation), the American Captain James Schyler Grim, in the service of His Majesty’s Secret Service in the Middle and Near East. With his ally and friend Jeff Ramsden, his Sikh friend Naryan Singh, his Indian Secret Agent companion Chulander Ghose, and a small army of Mundy’s other heroes (Athleston King and Cottswold Ommony among them) he battles to keep the Middle East, Palestine in particular, from exploding.
All of that fairly standard British Raj rah rah rah save for one fact: Talbot Mundy was no admirer of the Empire and stood for self-rule in India and the Middle East. It was a unique view of the world for an adventure story writer in that era. There is little racism or jingoism in Mundy.
Later in life Mundy became obsessed with the philosophy of Theosophy, a semi-mystical religious movement out of Madame Blatavasky and the Golden Dawn. That would have ruined a lesser writer. In Mundy’s case it inspired his finest novels and most loved tales, Om: The Secret of Ahrbor Valley, The Nine Unknown, The Devil’s Guard, Full Moon, and Jimgrim.
The change in his work showed first in the Jimgrim tales in Adventure, where Grim and company left the British Army and Secret Service behind and took up with American millionaire Meldrum Strange who financed their adventures from there on. And what adventures they were, a search for what happened to all the coins minted in the ancient world (they were hidden beneath the Ganges by the Nine Unknown), a war of good and evil on the roof of the world where the Black Lodge is challenged by the White, and the final novel of the series, Jimgrim, in which the world must be saved from a fanatical madman, leading to a finale that still stuns the unsuspecting reader today and never fails to bring a tear to my eye.
In the transition period from the heyday of the series to the later deeper novels Mundy’s best is the Jimgrim adventure The Mystery of Khufu’s Tomb.
It begins when engineer Jeff Ramsden is nearly run off a road on the Geiger Trail near Virginia City by Joan Angela Leich, the kind of headstrong heiress who was common in fiction of the time. Joan and Jeff are old friends though, and she has nearly gotten him killed before.
She’s tall — maybe a mite too tall for some folks’ notions– and mid-Victorian mammas would never have approved of her, because she’s no more coy, or shy, or artful than the blue sky overhead. She has violet eyes, riotous hair of a shade between brown and gold, a straight, shapely little nose, a mouth that is all laughter, and a way of carrying herself that puts you in mind of all out-doors. I’ve seen her in evening dress with diamonds on; and much more frequently in riding-breeches and a soft felt hat; but there’s always the same effect of natural-born honesty, and laughter, and love of trees and things and people. She’s not a woman who wants to ape men, but a woman who can mix with men without being soiled or spoiled. For the rest, she’s not married yet, so there’s a chance for all of us except me. She turned me down long ago.
That’s Joan all over, and a welcome breath of femininity she is in Mundy’s masculine world. She is also guaranteed trouble, and here is no exception. This time she has gotten involved with one Mrs. Isobel Aintree, a fatale femme with a cobra’s bite that Ramsden and Grim have battled before. Joan needs help concerning a purchase made while in Egypt during a revolution (the more things change …) where she “…went and bought a lot of land that everybody said was no good because it was too far from the Nile.”
Now a man called Moustapha Pasha (“…there are men of all creeds and colours, who can mouth morality like machines printing paper money, but who you know at the first glance have only one rule, and that an automatic, self-adjusting, expanding and collapsing one, that adapts itself to every circumstance and always in the user’s favour. This man was clearly one of those.”) wants the land and won’t take no for an answer, but Joan is too stubborn to ever yield.
Just what is on that land that Mrs. Aintree wants it and Moustapha Pasha is willing to bribe Ramsden to betray Joan to the tune of one million dollars (1920‘s dollars at that)? Mrs. Aintree wants it so bad she marries Moustapha Pasha. The answer must be in Egypt, and anywhere east of the Pillars of Hercules there is no better man to have on your side than Jimgrim, so Joan hires Meldrum Strange’s team to help her.
As usual Grim knows more than might be expected:
The men who are interested are keeping it awfully quiet among themselves, but Narayan Singh and I have overheard some talk, and the figure they name would make the Federal Reserve Board blink — fifty million pounds, or say two billion dollars!”
“Let’s hope it’s true!” said I.
“Let’s hope it isn’t true!” Grim answered. “Any such sum of money as that would turn Egypt into Hades! If it’s there it means civil war, whoever gets it!â€
Two billion dollars and the fate of Egypt, just the sort of thing Grim lives for.
And they are off with the help of a Chinese astronomer, Chu Chi Ying, and it is no real mystery what lies beneath Joan’s land.
“…when they got to the so-called King’s Chamber it was empty. There never had been anything in it. Khufu was supposed to be buried in it, but he wasn’t. He was the richest Pharaoh Egypt ever had. He must have been, or he couldn’t have built the Pyramid. Where was he really buried, and what did he do with his money?”
So if Khufu, Cheops, money is not in the Great Pyramid of Giseh, where is it? Want to hazard a guess?
Our band of heroes must deal with enemies on all sides and excavate the treasure that Khufu flooded under Joan’s land without drawing too much attention. Mundy never made things easy for his heroes. You may even wish he had, because the danger, sweat, set backs, short-lived victories, and sheer impossibility of the task will leave the reader almost as stretched as the heroes.
And it can only get worse, as Grim battles the forces of Moustapha Pasha and Mrs. Aintree above ground while Jeff and Joan are trapped underground avoiding death traps laid by the determined Khufu, and up against blind mutated giant albino crocodiles.
Long before Indiana Jones, Clive Cussler, and James Rollins Mundy’s heroes were knee deep in the kind of adventures readers today savor. Today’s heroes rely on relentless action though, and while there is no shortage of action and movement, Mundy’s heroes use their brains first, then their brawn.
That is one reason Mundy remains not only readable, but fresh and entertaining to read when so many others have been passed by. It isn’t hard to see the influence he had on Robert E. Howard, Philip Jose Farmer, and Fritz Leiber as well as a generation of adventure writers. His name still triggers images of exotic locales and high adventure in the wild places as much as Rider Haggard before him.
I’ll give Mundy, via Ramsden, the last perfect words:
In Singapore, in a little side street that runs down toward the quays, there lives a Chinaman named Chu Chi Ying, who teaches no more “fat-fool first mates” how to pass examinations for their master’s ticket, but smiles nearly all day long and amuses himself by making marvellous astronomical calculations. He seems to have an income quite sufficient for his needs, and a portrait of Joan Angela hangs on the wall just inside the doorway of his house. Go and look, if you don’t believe me. On your way, consider the stuffed, blind, white crocodile in the Gezivich Museum, Cairo.
I don’t see that adventure today is in any better hands.
“DIPLOMAT” – Murder in the State Department. Jonathan Cape & Harrison Smith, hardcover, 1930.
“Diplomat” dedicates this, his first mystery, to the “pacifists and bootleggers of the United States, without whom the author would have been at a loss for a motive for a murder in the State Department.” This gives you some idea of the tone of the book, and those who are neither pacifists nor bootleggers may read safely on with the pleasant anticipation that someone else’s ox will be gored.
A guard at the State Department finds Harrison “Handsome” Howard in his office, a steel filing spike transfixing a top-secret unsigned treaty, Howard’s hand, and Howard’s heart, in that order. Also in the office is a revolver with a silencer, unused.
(Who is it that makes silencers for revolvers? Does anyone outside the characters in mysteries purchase them? Why is there never dissatisfaction with their performance?)
Only one other person is working in the building — Howard’s rival for position and prestige. He, however, has an unimpeachable alibi. Dennis Tyler, Chief of the Bureau of Current Political Intelligence (Now there’s an oxymoron! Oops. Sorry.) has a low opinion of police investigators, so he takes charge.
Tyler talks like a mixture of Bertie Wooster and Reggie Fortune; his intellect, at least to this reader, is closer to Bertie’s than Reggie’s. Still, he does come up with the solution, which is for the most part plausible. Those who can accept an exchange like the following with good heart and maybe even appreciation should enjoy the novel:
“The chemical man turned over to the parson a cylinder of a secret new gas, the effect of which is to make people go to sleep….”
“Ether?” Nichols suggested.
“Either that or something like it,” Tyler admitted.
Amiable nonsense, for which I admit a weakness.
— From The MYSTERY FANcier, Vol. 12, No. 2, Spring 1990.
Bibliographic Notes: “Diplomat” was, according to Hubin, the pseudonym of John Franklin Carter, 1897-1967. According to Wikipedia, Carter was an American journalist, columnist, biographer and novelist. Dennis Tyler appeared in all of the novels Carter wrote under that name, as follows:
Murder in the State Department (n.) Cape & Smith 1930.
Murder in the Embassy (n.) Cape & Smith 1930.
Scandal in the Chancery (n.) Cape & Smith 1931.
The Corpse on the White House Lawn (n.) Covici Friede 1932.
Death in the Senate (n.) Covici Friede 1933.
Slow Death at Geneva (n.) Coward 1934.
The Brain Trust Murder (n.) Coward 1935.
Al Hubin reviewed this same title earlier on this blog; you may check it out here. In the course of the review and the update that followed, much more information about the author was supplied. (You may also enjoy Al’s opinion of the book, and compare it with Bill had to say.)
KING OF DIAMONDS. Syndicated, 1961-1962; Ziv/United Artists. Cast: Broderick Crawford as John King and Ray Hamilton as Casey.
John King was the chief investigator for the Continental Diamond Industries. With Casey, his young handsome assistant, King led the fight against the evil IDB, the Illicit Diamond Buyers (well, at least the criminals were honest about it). Or as King explained, “… from the minute the diamonds come out of the clay until they go on somebody’s finger we protect them. The we is me.â€
King of Diamonds was a typical Ziv first run TV Film syndication series with the creative talent working against the limitations of low budgets and too short a production schedule. The series fortunately didn’t take itself too seriously which gives it a charm and makes it still fun to watch.
The pace of the half hour episodes were fast enough for us to enjoy the story without noticing or caring about the plot holes. The writing featured dialog that was equally quick:
“He’s not big enough for this one.â€
“He grew.â€
The episodes began with the narrator (probably Highway Patrol narrator Art Gilmore) setting up the story such as in “The Wizard of Iceâ€:
“… A world of diamonds. The world of Johnny King. Margie Howard wanted a share of that world, a two million dollar share, enough to play three men like a guitar. Men who heard the words but not the music. To Johnny King the melody was loud and clear.â€
Broderick Crawford was the perfect Johnny King, tough guy detective, a man obsessed with the recovery of stolen diamonds. Murder, justice, those were the police’s problems all Johnny King wanted was the diamonds back. Crawford biggest acting challenge was trying to be convincing as a ladies man with beautiful women from his past still helpless against his charms.
It is hard to take the show seriously when King wore a trench coat and fedora in nearly every scene including at least once when he was sitting behind his office desk. Check out that outfit in this trailer for the series:
Ray Hamilton was forgettable in the stock character role of King’s young assistant. The guest cast was above average especially (in the episodes I have seen) Lola Albright, John Anderson and Gerald Mohr.
Directors such as Irving Lerner were able to overcome a lack of time and money and occasionally shoot some quality scenes such as a car chase in a high-rise parking lot involving three people in “The Wizard of Ice.â€
EPISODE INDEX. (I have watched three episodes each with incomplete credits. Titles from IMdb.com.)
“The Wizard of Ice.†Written and produced by John Robinson. Directed by Irving Lerner. GUEST CAST: Lola Albright, Telly Savalas, John Anderson, John Marley, and Richard Kiel. *** A hijacking of two million in diamonds gets complicated by a woman.
“Commando Tactics.†Written by Steve Fisher. Directed by John Rich. GUEST CAST: Gerald Mohr *** King’s fun loving WWII commando buddy has decided to try the adventurous fun life of a diamond thief.
“Backlash.†Written by Edward J. Lasko. Directed by Skip Homeier. GUEST CAST: James Coburn and Nancy Kulp. *** War hero and respected citizen in a small town in Maine has his past come back to haunt him as a former army buddy arrives wanting to sell the diamonds they had stolen from the Nazis during the War.
King of Diamonds was an entertaining show despite its flaws or in part because of them, but it was the story behind the scenes I found more interesting.
It is well known Broderick Crawford had a problem with alcohol (too many DWIs cost him his driver’s license and they had to adapt filming Highway Patrol). There is an interesting story about why Crawford agreed to do King of Diamonds in Rick Jason’s (The Case of the Dangerous Robin) autobiography Scrapbooks of My Mind. (Thanks to Wikipedia for citing its sources.)
“After four years of the pressure of two shows [of Highway Patrol] a week, Brod got fed up, said he couldn’t take it anymore, so he quit and went to Spain to make movies. The studio held up payment of his ten percent gross. A year or so later he came back to the States.
“He’d dried out, hadn’t had a drink in almost nine months, and he wanted his money from Highway Patrol. Ziv cut a deal with him: if he’d do a pilot for a new series called King of Diamonds and sign on for the series, they’d release about two million dollars they were holding and he would only have to do one show a week if the pilot sold. He signed.â€
Despite being in over 185 markets including the top five markets in the country, King of Diamonds lasted just one season. TV was changing at the time. In the words of Broadcasting (9/18/61), “Production of programs for first-run syndication has virtually collapsed.â€
Production costs were rising. The trade magazine reported the cost of an average first-run syndicated TV Film series had risen to $40,000 to $50,000 per episodes. With a star such as Broderick Crawford (who was also credited as associate producer) King of Diamonds’ costs were most likely even higher.
Meanwhile the market had been taken over by off-network reruns that were cheaper, had proven popular with the viewers, and could be aired on a daily basis.
In the fall of 1961, King of Diamonds competed against twenty-one newly available off-network reruns series including Peter Gunn, Wanted: Dead or Alive, Hong Kong, Bat Masterson, Wyatt Earp, The Lone Ranger and Yancy Derringer.
Another problem facing first-run TV Film syndication was the increase in the networks’ involvement in the programs they aired. Even the weakest network, ABC had increased the amount of programs they scheduled and their series quality. Also, the hour-long format was beginning to take up more and more time of the prime-time schedule.
TV’s most successful first-run TV Film syndication company, Ziv Television would soon disappear as United Artists Television would completely take over the company (dropping the name Ziv from Ziv/United Artists television) in 1962 when Frederick Ziv sold the last part of the company he still owned and left Hollywood to teach at the University of Cincinnati.
It is hard to mourn the passing of Ziv Television with its bottom of the barrel production values, but it was responsible for a few shows such as King of Diamonds that might not have been the best television ever made, still have enough charm to entertain.
From all accounts, Ernest Hemingway wrote To Have and Have Not (Scribner’s, 1937) in fits and starts, cobbling it together from two earlier short stories while mucking about in the Spanish Civil War. And frankly, it reads a bit sloppy and disjointed, with shifting time frames, clashing narrative modes, and here and there the terse, fascinating prose that made Hemingway a name. Reading it through, with its sudden jumps in time, location, narration and focus, one wonders if the legendary author was pointing the way for writers like Ken Kesey and Carlos Fuentes or just being lazy.
The first part deals with Harry Morgan, a charter boat skipper operating around Key West and Cuba who gets stiffed by a Mr. Johnson and helped out by Eddie, an alcoholic buddy (an important character in future incarnations of the book, but this is his only appearance here) when he’s forced to take on an illegal load of Chinese immigrants — a job that ends in gunplay and murder. This is pretty good stuff, violent and fast-moving, with Hemingway writing in the style of W.R. Burnett, with maybe a touch of James Hadley Chase.
Then we make a jump and it’s some time later, months or a year maybe, and Harry is now apparently smuggling full time and trying to make it home with a shot-up arm and a dying mate. This part is tough too, but Hemingway now spends time with a wealthy, officious politician who sees a chance to get some publicity by “capturing†Harry, who couldn’t put up much fight. Thus we get the first conflict between the “haves†and “have nots†— along with an infusion of social commentary into what had been just a tough crime novel.
Which sets the scene for part three: Harry is up against it now; his boat’s been confiscated and he has to get it back to do a job for some dangerous customers — so dangerous that murder and double-cross are taken for granted, and the crooked lawyer who sets up the deal (a violent bank robbery in Key West followed by escape to Cuba) is the first to go. In a tough, suspenseful scene that anticipates Key Largo, Harry shoots it out with his passengers and then …
And then Hemingway spends the last third of the book detailing the tribulations of a bunch of rich folks, with occasional contrasting scenes for Harry’s wife Marie. No kidding. What had been a tough crime novel on the order of Red Harvest is suddenly supposed to be Meaningful Social Drama. The idea, I suppose is to ennoble Harry Morgan and his people by showing us how effete and shallow their “betters†are, but it doesn’t come off.
Maybe I like David Goodis so much because when he writes a crime novel with a low-class working stiff or drunken stumblebum as the hero, that guy, be he ne’er so vile, is simply The Hero and ipso facto a man who gets our respect; he don’t gotta be Christ on the Cross too. When Hemingway turns Harry Morgan into the martyred representative of the Working Class, he loses me.
To Have and Have Not was filmed three times, and the first version (Warners, 1944) starred Humphrey Bogart, introduced Lauren Bacall, and was punctiliously faithful — to the title. Aside from that, it’s kind of jarring to see bits and pieces of Hemingway’s novel popping up here and there in what is essentially a Howard Hawks movie that seems to have little relationship to anything Papa wrote.
The story (written by Jules Furthman and William Faulkner) is moved up to 1940 and south to Martinique, which was at that time (like Casablanca) technically French but heavily influenced by the Third Reich. Naturally then, the would-be illegal immigrants become Free French resistance fighters, the officious politician becomes nasty Vichy cops, and Harry and his wife have now just met and call each other “Steve†and “Slim.â€
In this version of the story, Mr. Johnson doesn’t get away with stiffing Harry (this is Bogart, after all) but gets inconveniently killed in a shoot-out (one of those scenes from the book that somehow make their way into the film). Eddie, the drunk in the opening of the story is here played by Walter Brennan, and he sticks around for the whole movie. He’s rather good, too. So is Hoagy Carmichael as a friendly pianist and Marcel Dalio (also from Casablanca) as a protective hotel owner — a character who would later reappear in another Hawks film, Rio Bravo.
In fact, this film is much more Hawks than Hemingway, but it’s Howard Hawks at his best, which is saying quite a lot. Not much action, but what there is comes across nicely. The characters (including Lauren Bacall in her film debut) are skillfully developed, and the whole thing has that easy, improvised look that only comes from hard work and genius — and produces a classic.
But I guess someone at Warners noticed that they’d bought this whole book and never filmed it, so in 1950 Director Michael Curtiz and writer Ranald McDougal came up with The Breaking Point, a noirish exercise with John Garfield as Harry Morgan, Phyllis Thaxter as his wife (now named Lucy!) and Patricia Neal as a gold-digger/femme fatale apparently added to throw a little glamour into the mix. Eddie is gone, replaced by Juano Hernandez as a dependable wing man, and the porcine Mr. Johnson is now Mr. Hannagan, played by Ralph Dumke.
The action is moved to Southern California, but otherwise this stays a bit closer to Hemingway and even includes the bent lawyer from the book, incarnated here by Wallace Ford looking agreeably slimy. There’s a tense race track robbery (not in the book of course) and an even more tense shoot-out on the boat as Garfield tries to thwart his would-be killers.
Unfortunately, the story spends a bit too much time with Phyllis Thaxter worrying about looking dowdy, Patricia Neal worrying about staying glamorous, and Garfield just worrying over bills and the odds against him. To Have and Have Not was a working class story, but The Breaking Point can’t decide whether to be a working class film or a caper movie in the mold of The Killers and this ultimately does it in.
Nothing daunted, Seven Arts/United Artists picked up the story again in 1958 and produced The Gun Runners, directed by Don Siegel and starring Audie Murphy as an unlikely Harry Morgan — now named Sam Martin(!) Eddie is back, this time played for seedy pathos by Everett Sloane of all people, and Patricia Owens (who that same year was the fretful wife of The Fly) is Audie’s wife Lucy.
The action is moved back to Key West and Cuba, and Mr. Johnson is now called Mr. Peterson, played with slippery relish by an actor named John Harding, who had a long career but seldom broke out of bit parts. Too bad, because he’s an all-too-brief delight here, cheerfully ruining a man out of sheer self-indulgence.
There’s a Mr. Hanagan in this version too, and he’s Eddie Albert, surprisingly nasty as the eponymous dealer in firearms who uses Audie to double-cross some very nasty customers. Albert is everything a movie bad-guy should be: smiling, generous, easy to get along with, and never losing that look behind his eye that says you mean about as much to him as a bug on his windshield, and you should expect to live about as long.
This is a pretty good movie. Siegel handles the action with his usual aplomb, Daniel Mainwaring’s script strays pretty far from Hemingway but moves things along neatly, and the playing is mostly well above average, particularly Patricia Owens, who manages to get across a very earthy lust for her husband. It’s nothing that’ll make you forget Bacall and Bogart, but it’s there and you can feel it.
My only problem with the movie is Audie Murphy at the heart of it. Like many real-life heroes (Wayne Morris comes to mind) Murphy could never convey genuine toughness on the screen, and this is a part that calls for it.
Too bad he has such a pivotal part in a film that would have been a lot better without him.
DOG AND CAT. ABC / Paramount / Largo Productions, 1977; 74 minutes. Cast: Lou Antonio, Kim Basinger, Matt Clark, Charles Cioffi, Richard Lynch, Dale Robinette and Janit Baldwin. Created by Walter Hill. Teleplay by Owen Morgan, Henry Rosenbaum and Heywood Gould. Story by Owen Morgan.Executive Producer: Lawrence Gordon. Producer: Robert Singer. Director: Bob Kelljan.
This TV Movie pilot would lead to the ABC series Dog and Cat that would run for six episodes on Saturdays at 10-11 pm from March 5, 1977 through May 14, 1977.
An underage ex-porn star (Janit Baldwin) who has found Jesus wants to help “the pigs†get the man behind her former career. Detective Sergeant Jack Ramsey (Lou Antonio) and his partner Earl (Richard Forbes) meet with her and set up a trap for the bad guy.
While waiting for the bad guy to show up and meet the girl, Ramsey is at a pay phone checking in when a creepy guy (Richard Lynch) enters the diner, exchanges glances with girl, walks up to Earl and shoots him. In the confusion the shooter escapes and the girl disappears.
Ramsey’s boss, Lieutenant Kipling (Matt Clark) arrives at the scene as Earl is being rushed to the hospital, unconscious but still alive. He finds a sad Ramsey sitting on the curb. He reacts as if Ramsey was a hotheaded cop about to go rogue and sends him home to cool down.
At first, I wondered if Antonio was playing the part wrong, focusing on inner emotions rather visually displaying his anger, but then the script has him going home to walk his dog. Ramsey stops at a phone booth to call the hospital to check on his beloved partner. When he learns his partner has died he is emotionally distressed without any visual sides of anger. He takes his dog home and lies down on his couch. Dirty Harry, he ain’t.
The next day the Lieutenant warns Ramsey against going out on his own hunting the killer. Kipling is convinced (for reasons not apparent to us) he should force Ramsey to take two weeks off, but instead gives him a new partner familiar with the skin trade and sends him out to hunt for the killer.
Ramsey is angry to discover his new partner is a young beautiful woman (Kim Basinger). He claims “Dog and Cat” partnerships (male cop/female cop) never work. After some lame sexist dialog, Ramsey gets into her car, a cute VW Bug with a Porsche engine.
While Antonio’s acting seems not to fit the character, Basinger does no better as Officer J. Z. Kane. Basinger looks overwhelmed in this film, her Southern accent keeps going in and out. She isn’t even convincing with the sexy part of her character. This is Kim Basinger here, sexy should be a given.
Of course, the two are like cats and dogs, complete opposite from body parts to taste in music. They constantly argue except when danger threatens then they work as a team, each having the others back.
While looking for the girl, they question the man who had helped the girl get into a Mission and find Jesus. After our favorite Dog and Cat leave, the man is worried Officer Kane will remember him hanging around a porno theatre (she had spent time undercover as the cashier). So he sends his lackey out to “take care of her.â€
Meanwhile, the cop killer named Shirley is also looking for the girl and kills again to cover his trail. Richard Lynch does what he can with his role as plot device, but the writers don’t bother to develop the character.
This script focuses less on making sense and more on its quota of car chases, gunfights, gratuitous women in bikinis, and predictable arguments between the two cops until it’s off to chase the bad guy.
After Ramsey and Kane catch the bad guy behind it all, they then focused on catching the cop killer. And of course, our two cops take the killer on alone without backups because this kind of TV show can never have too many pointless chases and gunfights.
For a TV movie pilot, nothing worked. The story was unbelievable and unnecessarily complex. The writing and acting did not play well together, with the characters behavior inconsistent with the script. There was no chemistry between Antonio and Basinger.
The movie ends with the two discussing their future, as if we cared. He suggests dinner but end the partnership. She agrees, but warns him she will never get involved with a man with a badge. He cancels dinner and both agree to stay partners as cops with no romantic involvement. Reportedly, Ramsey and Kane kept their relationship platonic during the series.
The 1976-77 season ended with ABC the top rated network. Four ABC series finished in the top five and seven in the top ten. ABC’s Dog and Cat finished 50th out of 102 series.
Networks were trying the idea of a third season that started in March. New series would be tested. Some such as Three’s Company, Man from Atlantis, and Eight Is Enough were a success, while most such as Kingston: Confidential (with Raymond Burr), Future Cop (human cop/android cop) and Dog and Cat failed and quickly vanished to be forgot
