Evelyn Venable 1/5

Intro: Evelyn Venable was born on October 18, 1913 so this week let’s take a look at her movies. The movie reviewed below gained her much attention at the time and dreamy Grazia is the role she is remembered for today among the hardest of hardcore buffs of classic Hollywood. She was perfectly cast and made the most of her chance. That this movie ever got made in the first place is hard to figure out, since it is pitched an extremely narrow market: folks of above average intelligence (i.e. half the movie-going public) that are interested in spiritual matters (whoa, that takes in only about 30% out of the half we had*).

Death Takes a Holiday
1934 / 1:20
Tagline: “No one died! Because Death was busy making love!”
[internet archive]

From the play by Alberto Casella (1891 - 1957), Fredric March plays the Grim Reaper and Evelyn Venable plays the Spiritual Girl.

March crashes a carefree house-party hosted by expatriate English people in Italy for their American friends. The Grim Reaper conceals his identity by dressing in the height of fashion and adopting the suave manner of a European aristocrat. He obligates his host to keep his identity a secret because he wants to plumb the mystery as to why, given the sorrows and trials of life, people fear and abhor death even more than being alone.

The Reaper tries gambling, ping pong, the ponies, boating, dancing and socializing. He finds no answer in these time-filling activities as why people cling to life. Then an elderly baron suggests love and romance. Luckily the Spiritual Girl, on the lookout for the ineffable, has not yet discovered sitting on the meditation cushion or the usual snares for the unwary called mysticism or occultism or politics.

They fall in love.  

Thus, the Grim Reaper finds the answer to his question as to why people cleave to life though they piss away their precious time with mindless scrolling. For once, Hollywood does not give in to its usual nervous anticipations as to what the folks in Pottsville or Zenith will think of the ending.

The line, “Has it ever occurred to you that death may be simpler than life and infinitely more kind” provides grist for conversation during, say, a third date for a well-read but cute couple in that 15% of the audience that will like this picture. Fredric March makes the human charm believable, but he makes the remoteness, the detachment of the character from human concerns plausible too. March’s Death has an agenda that is not the agenda of us among the quick, his when and how are not our when and how.

March plays his part so as to give us movie-goers the impression that for all the sinister reputation, Death is not a complete bad hat. We are not taken in by the awkward magnetism and tidy attire so much that we want to meet the Grim Reaper before we absolutely have to. But we may become more willing to grant that Death is a part of the necessity of life, the cosmic order of things, so it had better be accepted with grace and bravery, not ferocity or fear. In other words, “Rage, rage against the dying of the light” is just exactly what we shouldn’t do.

Evelyn Venable is perfectly cast because she has the ethereal air of a searcher who feels far away from other people, even from those they love, because they are hunting for an indescribable something. Inward and young, she feels the miraculous is nearby, a knowledge and serenity that she can understand only on her own. Movie-goers who are also seekers will enjoy her in this part because her performance may remind them of themselves. Many years ago. As Jobeth Williams cajoled her husband in Poltergeist, “Now just stand, okay? Now, just be calm. Okay. Now reach back into our past when you used to have an open mind. Remember that? Okay. Just try to use that for the next couple of minutes. Okay?”

And we’ll regret that loutish producers didn’t know what to do with actresses who had that otherworldly aura, spiritual oomph like Ann Harding and Evelyn Venable nor did they assign writers to come up with stories about our search for meaning, a topic hot among The Folks only in dire times (see The Razor’s Edge, 1944, i.e. during WWII).

* According to a study published in iScience, the number of Americans who read for pleasure every day has nosedived from 28 percent in 2004 to just 16 percent in 2023.

Extro: In her collection of reviews of movies from the early Sixties, The Private Eye, the Cowboy, and the Very Naked Girl: Movie from Cleo to Clyde, Judith Crist writes, "… we assuaged our guilt with the conviction that nothing in the outside world could provide the intellectual and emotional equivalent of Fredric March, his holiday over, enfolding Rochelle Hudson in his Death's cape …." Memory problems are understandable since Crist had seen the movie reviewed here 30 years before, when she was only 12 years old.  Plus, Hudson and Venable are easily confused, both young, brunette, and both known for their fresh-faced looks and a gentle presence that become unfashionable in lead actresses and stars as the Thirties went by.

The Ides of Perry Mason 96

Note: Before the Perry Mason TV series, in almost all his movies Raymond Burr played an outlaw. With his heavyset stature, deep commanding voice and expressive eyes, he was the brightest light in forgotten film noir outings such as Walk a Crooked Mile (1948), FBI Girl (1951), They Were So Young (1954), and A Cry in the Night (1956). This movie too - worth it but forgotten. 

The Whip Hand
1951 / 1:29
Tagline: “Foreign Scientist Spies in Vast Germ-Murder Plot!”
[internet archive]

The film opens with a blunt ideological hammer stroke: Kremlin apparatchiks, speaking in grating, caricatured Russian, plot the downfall of America. It’s a Cold War nightmare, rendered with the kind of paranoia that turns Winnoga, Wisconsin - a town whose very name evokes a simpler pastoral Land of the Free - into a focus of realpolitik dread. The choice of setting is no accident; it’s a deliberate inversion of the heartland mythos, a place where the soil is poisoned not by foreign agents but by the complicity of its own citizens.

Enter Elliott Reid, a journalist on a fishing vacation, whose arrival in Winnoga fulfills Tolstoy’s dictum that all stories are either about a journey or a stranger’s arrival. Reid is the latter, and his presence is met with the kind of guarded hostility that suggests not just small-town insularity but something more sinister. The lake, once teeming with trout, is now dead - an ecological mystery that doubles as a metaphor for the moral rot beneath the town’s surface.

Reid’s investigation leads him to Mr. Peterson, a landowner whose opportunism - buying up property after the fish die-off marks him as a man not in simpatico with the rhythms of big nature and cozy community. The townspeople’s evasions, their forced laughter, and their long, appraising stares evoke a kind of Midwestern noir, where the menace is not in shadowy alleyways but in the bright daylight of Main Street.

Raymond Burr plays a hotelier whose joviality is so forced it curdles into menace. His laugh is a performance within a performance, a signal to the audience that the town’s surface charm is a mask for something darker. His henchmen - Peter Brocco’s rodent-like presence and Michael Steele’s Aryan brutality - are less characters than archetypes, personifications of a violence that is both personal and political.

The cinematography captures the piney woods and sandy soil with a documentary-like authenticity, but the close-ups - tight, accusatory - render familiar American faces as foreign, uncanny. It’s a visual strategy that suggests to the movie-goer that the threat is not external but, like contaminants in soil, filth in drinking water, already existing in the nation itself.

The film’s thematic core - biomedical experimentation on unwilling subjects - echoes the darkest chapters of 20th-century science, such as the Tuskegee syphilis study, CIA mind-control programs like MKUltra, and human radiation experiments conducted by government agencies. It’s a narrative that brushes against the ethical abyss, evoking the unease of Oliver Sacks’s Awakenings and the moral inquiries of Deborah Blum’s Ghost Hunters. The horror here is not supernatural but systemic, a reminder that the machinery of progress often runs on the bodies of the powerless.

Critics may dismiss the film as melodramatic, but its sincerity - its willingness to confront the moral compromises of Cold War America - renders it a document of its time. It’s a film that doesn’t just entertain; it indicts, implicates, and ultimately unsettles.

As for the connection with the Perry Mason TV series, Carla Belenda went back to her birth name Sally Bliss by the time she was cast in TCOT Playboy Pugilist. Lurene Tuttle, Burr’s distant and cold mother, was the defendant no fewer than six times in TCOT Substitute Face, TCOT Artful Dodger, TCOT Loquacious Liar, TCOT Shoplifter's Shoe (with Margaret O’Brien and Len Nimoy), TCOT Grinning Gorilla and TCOT Avenging Angel.

Pre-Mason Raymond Burr
Please Murder Me (1956) [internet archive] [my review]
I Love Trouble (1948) [internet archive] [my review]
Sleep My Love (1948) [internet archive] [my review]
Ruthless (1948) [internet archive] [my review]
Pitfall (1948) [internet archive] [my review]
Walk a Crooked Mile (1948) [internet archive] [my review]
Raw Deal (1948) [internet archive] [my review]
Station West (1948) [my review]
Red Light (1949) [internet archive] [my review]
Abandoned (1949) [internet archive] [my review]
Borderline (1950) [internet archive] [my review]
Unmasked (1950) [internet archive] [my review]
The Whip Hand (1951) [internet archive] [my review]

Everybody is Under Suspicion

Note: Gail Patrick moved beyond ingenue parts when she played Cornelia the mean (albeit breathtaking) sister in My Man Godrey. After 60 or so parts, often as the bad girl, retirement from acting drove her batty. With her husband, Gail Patrick Jackson she formed the company that produced from 1957 to 1966 the greatest courtroom TV series in the history of Creation. She was the soul of the series, said Raymond Burr. One wonders if it was due to Jackson that the writers so often returned to serious themes such as the long row women have to hoe in a world ridden by the lust, anger and greed of men; friction between the social classes; sharp practices in the business world; the dark side of the entertainment industry; and the harsh treatment of vulnerable groups.

Wives under Suspicion
1938 / 1:09 minutes
Tagline: “…THAT JEALOUSY feeds strongest on the heart of a wise man!”
[internet archive]

In this gritty courtroom drama set in a large, unnamed city, a district attorney becomes consumed by his role as a prosecutor, taking disturbing pride in sending convicted murderers to the electric chair. His desktop features a macabre abacus made of skull-shaped beads, tallying the lives he's ended - a detail that unsettles both his secretary and his wife, who fear he’s lost touch with his humanity.

Despite promising his wife a long-overdue vacation, the DA is drawn back into work when a distraught college professor is brought in for questioning. In the pre-Miranda era, the professor is interrogated without legal counsel, and the DA coerces a confession to the murder of the man’s unfaithful wife. The DA’s cold mockery of the professor’s emotional breakdown reveals a chilling lack of empathy, especially given his disdain for an educated man succumbing to mindless violence.

During the trial, the DA’s wife pointedly remarks that he’s treating the proceedings like a “Roman Holiday”—a spectacle enjoyed at the expense of someone else’s suffering. This comment sparks a slow realization in the DA: he and the professor are not so different. The film ultimately suggests that justice must be tempered with empathy.

The opening sequence features a haunting look at the electric chair’s machinery - mid-century technology rendered terrifying through close-ups of switches and turbines. Surprisingly, the film’s visual style is restrained, especially considering it was directed by James Whale, known for the iconic sets of Frankenstein.

Warren William delivers a compelling performance as the DA, balancing dedication with arrogance and cruelty. His shift toward compassion feels slightly stiff, though it’s unclear whether that’s a flaw in the acting or the character’s emotional repression. Gail Patrick stands out with her poised presence and a particularly powerful scene reacting to the professor’s recorded confession. Ralph Morgan plays the stereotypical absent-minded academic, while Lillian “Billy” Yarbo provides comic relief as a maid - a role steeped in racial tropes but given a rare moment of agency.

Though critics at the time have dismissed the film as melodramatic and moralistic, it offers a sincere attempt to entertain and provoke thought. Its message - that justice should be guided by fairness and mercy - is one worth hearing, especially in a system where conviction often overshadows compassion.

Other Gail Patrick Movies: Click on the title to go to the review

·         If I Had a Million
·         The Phantom Broadcast
·         The Murders in the Zoo
·         Death Takes a Holiday
·         The Crime of Helen Stanley
·         Murder at the Vanities
·         The Preview Murder Mystery
·         My Man Godrey
·         Murder by Pictures
·         Artists and Models
·         King of Alcatraz
·         Wives Under Suspicion

The Nones of Perry Mason 95

Note: Who to cast as Donald Lam? Cagney - too pugnacious, not smart enough. William Powell - too old. Alan Ladd - too young. Dick Powell -  perfect in his 30s, yes, but older, no. As Bertha Cool? Marie Dressler had a commanding presence, but too matronly. Thelma Ritter - too small. Lucille Ball - only after 1960, hard to picture her smacking somebody, but possibly.... Geraldine Wall in her 40s - about perfect.

Give 'em the Ax - A. A. Fair aka Erle Stanley Gardner

In this 1944 mystery Donald Lam returns Stateside from duty in the Pacific. The hardcore reader trusts the Navy got a lot of milage out of Lam’s sharp legal mind – which got him disbarred when he talked too much to a gangster about how to get away with murder. Suffering from malaria sequelae, he's been discharged from Navy Intelligence with symptoms such as decreased appetite and unpredictable onsets of sudden fatigue. The sharp legal mind is subject to brain fog like memory problems, difficulty focusing, and slower less efficient processing.

He finds in a precarious state the detective agency that before Pearl Harbor he ran with partner Bertha Cool. Cool and Lam had attracted complex cases with serious money, headlines, and the enmity of the cops involved. But after Lam’s deployment, business fell back to the penny-ante insurance and cheating spouse stuff, though the professional animosity from Sgt Sellars of the authorities continued. Paradoxically, Sgt Sellars has a thing for Bertha because she is what he looks for in a woman: tough and practical.

And that’s Bertha’s problem when she’s client-facing. Bad-tempered Bertha is smarmy when she attempts charm. Her obvious faking of care and concern turns potential clients off. The office manager Elsie Brand, target of Bertha’s acting out, tells Lam that the only reason she stayed on was to try to hold the business together. Another reason is that Elsie is in love with Lam. Manipulative monster Lam pretends not to know her feelings for him though it would a tough lift to find somebody as loyal, smart, and kind as Elsie, an ideal Gardnerian woman like Della Street.

Lam is a client-pleaser because he’s such a good listener. So on his first day of popping into the office, a new case comes their way. It’s hardly a lulu. Admitting to being a home-wrecker, a woman wants a private detective agency to get something on her boss’ new wife. The woman says she and the boss were very “close,” but when she returned from a long vacation, the boss, pining and bereft, married a woman he had met when the two had a car accident together. Angry and hurt, the woman wants the goods on the new wife. Ho-hum, nothing to get excited about here.

Eager to get back in the saddle, Lam luckily finds the wife in the Rimley Rendezvous. This is a nightclub that has tapped the afternoon market of bored married women who are looking for afternoon delight. The operator of the club, a hard case named HJH, recognizes Lam and throws him out since a PI on the cheating side of town is “as welcome as smallpox on an ocean liner.”

Pressed to time, Donald calls Bertha. He describes the owner and tells Bertha to tail him when he leaves the club. The tail job ends in an auto accident, which will be followed by an ax murder. Lam finds himself involved with a cigarette girl with legs up to here, who's way close to the murder.

Highly recommended.

The Kalends of Perry Mason 94

Note: Sure, everybody wants an honest, loyal and efficient lawyer that will fight like the devil when the going gets rough. But even more, everybody wants a supporter, an advocate who knows their weaknesses and understands their messed-up choices but pleads their case eloquently and shrewdly anyway.

The Case of the Negligent Nymph – Erle Stanley Gardner

This 1959 mystery starts with the usual working girl – pretty, naturally; full of moxie, certainly – needing super-lawyer Perry Mason when she finds herself in a jam. Perry is in a canoe scoping out a millionaire’s island on behalf of a client in a real estate case. The naked nymph, pursued by a savage dobie, swims up to the canoe so Perry saves her and takes her to her own battered yacht.

The next day Perry finds out that the game and canny beauty he rescued is wanted by the cops on suspicion of stealing $50K worth of gems from the millionaire’s island mansion. She is apprehended and bound over for trial for grand theft. In an exciting courtroom scene, Perry sets off legal fireworks during a cross-examination and gets her bail whittled down to a manageable $2,500.

Things start looking up for the accused, but, self-reliant to a fault, she makes errors in judgment, the worst of which are not following Perry’s legal advice and then lying to him. Perry ends up defending her on the inevitable murder charge.

He finds his back up against the proverbial wall yet again since he faces as many legal woes as his client does if he doesn’t find out the truth. Perry kicks himself for letting impulse rule him and helping the fibbing brat in the first place, but he defends her with all he’s got. Perry acknowledges his own fallibility and is thus compassionate about the short-comings of others.

Usual. Of course. Inevitable.

Why return again and again to the Perry Mason stories that invariably feature damsels in distress, the powerful exploiting the vulnerable, and the cunning and resourceful hero who combines wise tactics and swift action to exonerate the innocent? Because these irresistible elements, the essentials of heroic myth and folktales, exert a magical appeal over our senses of fairness and courage, shared senses that come easily to us because we are human beings hard-wired with the same nature.

European Reading Challenge #9

The Generation of 1914 - Robert Wohl

This intellectual history was released in 1979, four years after the seminal book The Great War and Modern Memory (Paul Fussell) influenced historians to examine the idea that what people think happened was just as interesting as what really happened. Wohl explores the intellectual and cultural landscape of Europe before, during and after World War I. To study what young educated men regarded as “generations,” Wohl delves into the thoughts and writing of the intelligentsia who came of age during the tumultuous period running up the WWI, focusing on the middle-class elite of five European countries: France Germany, England, Spain, and Italy.

Readers like me who are not so up on European history in the 19^th century will appreciate Wohl's comprehensive approach. He examines briefly the events and how each country’s unique experiences shaped its intellectual climate. For instance, in the example most familiar to us hardcore readers because of Fussell’s book, in England, the concept of the "lost generation" emerged due to the significant losses suffered by the British upper class during the war who happened to be literary guys like Robert Graves, Edmund Blunden, and Wilfred Owen. In contrast, Germany's war generation became a driving force on the political right, emphasizing the supposedly “moral” strength gained through the hardships of the trenches. I had no idea that the war had damaged Ernst Jünger so severely as to drive him to such wrong conclusions about human nature, democracy, and the Weimar Republic.

The book is structured around separate chapters for each country, allowing Wohl to highlight the distinct generational concepts that developed in each culture. Wohl's use of primary sources, including novels, journalism, autobiographies, and political speeches, adds depth to his analysis. He skillfully connects these personal and collective experiences to broader historical trends, such as the rise of Communism and Fascism, and the decline of liberal and humanitarian values.

One of the book's strengths is Wohl’s decision to disregard the definition of a generation, in favor of analyzing what the figures such as Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset thought was a generation. Wohl is careful to point out that the thinkers themselves were well aware of the logical problems with defining what a generation is. Translating theoretical constructs like "generation" into specific variables or factors that can be studied in quantifiable research is a challenging intellectual task, for example, needing the statistical tools of sociology. Wohl captures the sense of disillusionment and sheer confusion that characterized the generation of 1914, making the book both an intellectual history and a poignant human story.

Overall, this is an engrossing study that offers valuable insights into the minds of young, more or less educated or well-read men who lived through one of the most transformative periods in modern history. Serious students of European history will get much from this book, even if they think that terms like ‘generation z,’ ‘boomers,’ and ‘millennials’ are the worst kinds of pseudoscientific horseshit.

Happy Birthday Marcia Muller

Wolf in the Shadows - Marcia Muller

A reader with some pretentions to taste would expect, after a dozen installments in a series, to hear the gears grinding in the thirteenth in a series. But not at all in this case because Sharon McCone, the baddest female PI in San Francisco, learns, grows, and changes from book to book.

This 1993 mystery deals with the issues of immigration and dolphin-protecting environmentalists. With her bosses going all corporate on her and pressuring her to accept sitting at desk and moving papers around, she proves herself to be the Coolest Toughest Girlfriend Ever and works on finding her missing boyfriend Hy Ripinsky who has gone missing.

As usual, the characterizations, even of the secondary characters, are very finely drawn, as are the settings. Nothing mars the elaborate plot but a couple of melodramatic scenes. Worth reading.