One of the Oddest Books Alive

Wisconsin Death Trip -Michael Lesy

First published in the early 1970s, I found this strange book on a remainder table in the middle 1970s. A half-dozen moves later, I'm surprised I never lost it like I lost a cool Rolling Stones book by David Dalton.

It is a combination of old photographs and news stories of Wisconsin country life in the late 19th century, during an economic slump. The photos were taken by Charley Van Schaick, a photographer in Black River Falls. There were 30,000 plates in the Van Schaick collection of which 200 were chosen for publication in this book. The news accounts were taken from a newspaper called the Badger State Banner. Along with stories about arson, psychosis, drunkenness, and other high times of the good old days, this is typical

Joseph Shotgoe, aged 45 years, who lived in the town of Rose, Waushara County, tried to kill his wife with a kettle of hot water. A 14-year-old daughter sprang between them and saved her mother but was badly burned herself. The father then got a rope and . . . attempted to hang himself, but being discovered by neighbors was rescued before life was extinct. His wife soon [afterward] went to the barn and discovered that her husband had taken the lines out of the harness, put them over a beam, and hung himself

Looking at the photographs of country people at the end of the 19th century, I recalled in an essay by Edmund White or David Sedaris which said the French see us Americans as simple and nice. We’re uncomplicated, unencumbered by any sense of the tragic.

Yeah, right. Check out these news stories and photographs of a happy-go-lucky people.

Happy Birthday Ed Lacy

Classic Mystery with POC. In the late Fifties and early Sixties, Toussaint Marcus Moore is an African-American detective in two novels written by Ed Lacy.

Moment of Untruth - Ed Lacy

In the first, Room to Swing, Moore finds himself investigating in a southern Ohio town and tracking down a killer. Facing a hostile white community, he has to deal with Jim Crow customs and being suspected in the assault of a police officer. This novel won the Edgar award for Best Mystery Novel in 1958.

The other was Moment of Untruth (1965). Touie’s wife Frances announces with glee that she is pregnant, to which he secretly reacts, “Damn, just what the world needed – one more kid … another colored kid.” Realizing that his mail carrier’s income will not make the nut when Frances goes on maternity leave, he calls his former employer at a PI agency for a short-term job.  The old partner sends him to glamorous, sweaty Mexico City where a wealthy widow wants him to catch the murderer of her husband.

Although the culprit is obvious, the plot has unexpected twists that make this an agreeable read. In Acapulco, then as now a fun park for the affluent, Touie feels disgusted at going through other people’s dirty laundry. He feels sympathetic toward his main suspect, who’s also a minority. Touie contemplates the uncomfortable notion that he is only “an Uncle Tom doing the white folks a favor.” Another highlight that distinguishes this novel are memorable side characters, especially Janis, the drunken blonde from Texas and Frank, a retired American black who hilariously comes into a fortune, which does him little good.

Academic critics regard Touie Moore as a transitional figure – the decent man who does his best and doesn’t let prejudice or his own anger and frustration steal his joy– between the supermen Coffin Ed and Gravedigger in Chester Himes’ incredible novels in the Fifties and Ernest Tidyman’s character Shaft in the Seventies. Readers who like the tough, tense, and realistic detective fiction in the Hammett and Ross Macdonald tradition should get a kick out the Moore novels.

William Hopper Week 4/4

Note: This is the final of four tributes to William Hopper. During one of his many showings of The Deadly Mantis Svengoolie referred to William Hopper as “that guy from Perry Mason,” which probably put the noses of his elderly audience out of joint. I’m sure there are still many true-blue fans that remember Hopper fondly as private investigator Paul “Hello, Beautiful” Drake, breezy, friendly, approachable, dogged, and so blunt that Mason said, "I'm glad you're not on the jury." After the Perry Mason show ended in 1966, Hopper did TV once in a while. A heavy smoker like many men in his generation, he suffered a stroke on Valentine’s Day 1970 and held on until March 6. Like the other Bill, Talman, Hopper was taken when he was only in his fifties.

20 Million Miles to Earth aka The Beast from Space
1957 / 1:28
Tagline: “Monster from Outer Space Runs Wild!”
[internet archive]

20 Million Miles to Earth is an unjustly forgotten monster movie directed by Nathan Juran, notable for its memorable stop-motion animation by Ray Harryhausen. The plot revolves around a US spaceship returning from Venus that crashes off the coast of Sicily. A local boy loots the flotsam and sells his find – an egg – to a vacationing zoologist. Inevitably, bad luck takes a hand when a small creature with the torso of a human being and tail of a T-rex escapes and grows into a monstrous beastie. And now it is acting as incensed as any other critter taken from its natural stomping grounds.

Whenever Harryhausen's stop-motion animation is in the spotlight, I have to take a moment and say a prayer of thanks for the technicians who worked through the tedious process to craft this special effect. The performances of the human cast also contribute to the attraction. William Hopper tops the bill as Col. Calder. 

His mission to Venus was to confirm if human life could adapt to the atmosphere. He brought back the egg of a local creature for study, to see how its physiology survives the harsh environment on Venus. The research endpoint was to imitate that alien physiology for human use and thus colonize Venus.

Hopper's portrayal is marked by a sense of urgency and scientific curiosity. His character's fights with the Venusian creature highlight the tension between the human goal to generate knowledge and the creature’s anger, frustration, and fear. Hopper's performance is memorable for its intensity. He effectively conveys the desperation and determination of a scientist faced with an extremely strong beast that emits loud blood-curdling cries. Hopper’s scenes with a love interest are pivotal in establishing the film's balance of suspense as to whether the cute couple will fall in love before or after they catch the monster that stinks so ferociously that animals flee from it.

The film's simplicity in plot and character development allows the special effects to shine, but the setting should not be overlooked. In a film dominated by visual spectacle, the settings of Sicily and then Rome are different, unexpected, and credible. The fight in the Calabrian barn is well done. The critter tearing up picturesque Roman streets is especially terrifying as is the monster’s fight with an elephant from the zoo. Viewing fleeing Romans instead of fleeing Tokyoites or Osakans in a monster movie makes a welcome change. But the climax in the Colosseum really rocks, so to speak.

20 Million Miles to Earth is a testament to the era's innovative filmmaking, with William Hopper's performance standing out as a key element that enriches the film's scientific intrigue and action scenes. 

As for the connection with the classic TV series Perry Mason Thomas Browne Henry (General Mackintosh) played a hard-nosed but honest lawyer in TCOT Sleepwalker’s Niece, one of the best villains ever in TCOT Dubious Bridegroom, and a finely done cornered perp in TCOT Treacherous Toupee. This movie was the last one in which William Hopper got top billing. For nine years after 1957, he was busy as hell in the greatest courtroom series in the history of creation.

William Hopper Week 3/4

Note: This is the third of four tributes to William Hopper who played Paul Drake, Perry Mason’s private detective on the classic series. After he was discharged from the Navy in 1943, William Hopper, his brown hair turned white due to service in a combat zone, was also a heavy smoker. He sold cars for nine years. It seems strange that although he performed hazardous duty in underwater demolition and maritime sabotage, he was prone to stage fright and had little confidence to return to acting. From the early Fifties, he landed parts in B-movies and did some TV. In 1955, he played the father of Natalie Wood’s character in Rebel without a Cause. 

The Deadly Mantis
1957 / 1:19
Tagline: “Engulfing the World in Terror!”
[internet archive]

The Pentagon is growing concerned about disasters, disappearances and crashes involving Air Force personnel at a remote base in the Arctic. A five-foot appendage like a hook is found at a ruined facility but biologistic experts can't identify it.

Naturalist Ned Jackson (William Hopper) is called in by Maj. Gen. Mark Ford (Donald Randolph, mustached) to consult on the appendage. Ned is assisted by a comely journalist Marge Blaine (Alix Talton). Jackson theorizes that it might be from an insect like the praying mantis after Marge, with the tenacity of Lois Lane, presses him for a hypothesis.

The theory is supported soon after a deadly mantis terrorizes an Eskimo village, giving the director a chance to insert stock footage of villagers desperately paddling their kayaks away as their packs of sled dogs run somewhere. The element of surprise that a good monster reveal requires is thus taken off the table in short order.

Ned and Marge are sent to the Arctic to investigate first-hand. We movie-goers get some comic relief in the form of the sex-starved men at the remote base ogling Marge.

Hey, “some,” as in “a little.”

We also get perfunctory romance between Marge and the base commander Col. Joe Parkman (Craig Stevens). To me, the genuine comic relief is Marge throwing over Ned Jackson for Col. Joe after five minutes of interaction. Cast into a despondent funk, Ned kind of disappears and plays no role in the final disposition of the oversized bug. It just strikes me that the silver lining to our Bill Hopper being cast as Bookworm Intellectual in this Festival of Dull is that at least they didn’t make him wear horn-rimmed glasses or have him say they had to save the creature to study it for science.

This is a singularly uninspired science fiction movie. Seeing the mantis flying between places where it wreaks mild havoc is neither interesting as a special effect nor scary. We never see the mantis eating people so the mantis is not the stuff of nightmares. We hear the roars of the mantis but instead of being chilled to the bone, we idly wonder if in fact insects have lungs with which to roar. The movie even fails to make us movie-goers feel pity for the beastie who didn’t ask to be woken up by seismic activity and was doing only what comes naturally.

I watched this movie on a Sunday afternoon when it was too hot and smokey from wild fires to do anything safely outside. A healthy person might want to watch this undemanding movie when they have just finished an especially difficult mental task. It may also be the ticket for somebody coming out of an anesthetic after an outpatient medical procedure. So even mediocre movies have their place and uses.

As for the connection with classic TV series Perry Mason, dropping the officer and gentleman parts, Donald Randolph played the smoothie perp in TCOT Cautious Coquette and the victim that had it coming in TCOT Spanish Cross. Paul Smith, who played an ogling corporal in this, had a tiny part in TCOT Jealous Journalist and a bigger part in TCOT Meddling Medium, an episode that exploited the hot topic in 1961 of ESP. Too many of the post-1960 scripts, torn from the headlines, were silly and slapdash, which Burr and Talman groused about, with little effect.

William Hopper Week 2/4

Note: This is the second of four tributes to William Hopper who played Paul Drake, Perry Mason’s private detective, on the greatest courtroom drama in the history of creation. When World War II began, Hopper left roles in B-movies and enlisted in the Navy. He became a frogman that specialized in underwater demolition and maritime sabotage. He took part in the Ulithi landing, missions on Peleliu and Angaur, and pre-invasion prep in the Lingayen Gulf and the Battle of Leyte. He won a Bronze Star. His wartime experiences turned his brown hair white. 

Over the Goal
1937 / 1:03
Tagline: “Exciting Thrills of the Pigskin Parade!”
[internet archive]

Most of the product of classic Hollywood was disposable stinkers. Therefore, in efforts to watch the Pre-Perry Mason work of Barbara Hale, William Talman, and William Hopper, we movie-goers will sometimes run across B-movies that force us to kiss off standards for a good movie and see where looking at the picture as a cultural artifact goes.

What does their humor tell us about Americans in the Thirties? Humor often arises from shared cultural experiences, such as college football.

In this sports comedy, a rich alum of Carlton College has willed his entire estate to the private institution if its football team can somehow manage to win three games in a row, something they have never done in the history of the pigskin program. The finances of the college are in such bad shape that even a one-time amount will do financial good in the short-term.

So it’s a disaster when its star half-back William Hopper meets a moral dilemma in the form of love versus football. His GF’s father, a doctor, has told her she should extract from Hopper the promise to give up football for the sake of his cornflake knee. Hopper makes his face do an insipid smile as he promises not to ever play again, lest he suffer never-ending orthopedic pain and complications.

We can see humor being used to reinforce cultural norms. When his roommate worms out of the half-back his promise not play football so he won’t be a “cripple for life,” the water boy says in mock-wonder, “Giving up football for a girl. Who would believe it?” No societal pressure back in the good old days to prioritize relationships, especially for men. Much societal pressure to play hurt, for the sake of the team and college.

The humor in this movie also turns on stereotypes of college kids. Nowadays college students don't provide the building blocks for vivid stereotypes, merely seen as anxious and depressed, lazily cheating with ChatGPT, living on junk food, and partying all night.

But back then the stereotypes were more various. Coeds are better students than college boys: Lucille Martin in this movie goes the Gobi Desert on a study abroad program.

College boys are more given to pranks, practical jokes, fighting, rumbles and fantasizing about coeds. College boys are always up for antics like kidnapping the mascot of the opposing team, in this case a bear named Imogene (warning: the chain around her neck will make post-modern movie-goers sad).

College students go out of their right minds when they hear swing music, because it brings out their energetic and rebellious spirit. College kids, in fact, are willing to start protests and demonstrations over any issue, at the drop of a hat. In this movie, they have a rally to persuade a half-back to play in the big game.

Not that the stereotypes are limited to college kids. Black people are portrayed as highly strung and easily alarmed. Country people are ill-dressed and cranky, though bumpkins will do as they are told if the orders are simple enough for them to comprehend. Lawyers will resort to high jinks in order to gain a fee. Cops, judges, and politicians cave in to powerful interests and ask how high when big shots say jump. Sports play-by-play guys will talk in overblown language (why affected talker Howard Cosell in the 1970s was ever thought something new has always escaped me).

The dopey water boy with the infectious smile and surfeit of personality is played by Johnnie “Scat” Davis. He played trumpet in the popular Fred Waring Band and can be heard on How'm I Doin’ on vocals. With undeniable screen presence, he gets two musical numbers in which to prove he has studied Cab Calloway and Louis Armstrong as closely as Mick Jagger studied Tina Turner’s moves. Also of interest are Hattie McDaniel and Eddie Anderson in early movie roles.

William Hopper is rather bland. If this movie was his chance to grab the brass ring and become a star, he didn’t rise to the occasion. Legend has it his heart was not in acting, at least not in the Thirties, and maybe not in sports movies awash with clichés that were tired by 1930.

William Hopper Week 1/4

Note: This week, presented are four tributes to William Hopper, who played Paul Drake, Perry Mason’s private detective. He became an actor because his mother Hedda (actress, then a powerful gossip columnist) pushed him into the profession. “When I worked at Warner Bros.,” stage-shy Hopper said, “I was so scared I stuttered all the time.” It’s sometimes impossible to spot Hopper in his early roles unless he is standing up and thus using his height and good looks to advantage. Also, his youthful brown hair, before WWII made it white, makes him hard to recognize.  He appears in ‘blink and you’ll miss him’ roles in TCM stand-bys such as Stagecoach (1939), Knute Rockne, All American (1940), The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942). 

Public Wedding
1937 / 1:00
Tagline: “Married by Mistake Only to Enjoy It”
[internet archive]

In this zany rapid-fire comedy, Jane Wyman, her con-man father, and three minions run a threadbare carnival act. They face intractable money problems that may even force them to into an activity that involves work. This prospect is so horrible to the quintet that they hit upon the idea of raising money with a public wedding. That is, they are putting on a sham wedding as an event at which advertisers can buy time and space to market their goods and services. And the down-home Americans of the time get an hour or two of entertainment for the price of admission.

Two problems arise. Two of the minions make off with all the proceeds. And Wyman ends up married to a young unknown artist (William Hopper) for real. In a satire of the news-hungry press of the time, the remaining minion (Dick Purcell) recruits his fan dancer GF to stage a suicide attempt as a publicity stunt in order to pump the juicy story of an artist as a bum that left an innocent girl at the altar to pursue his art.

The publicity enables Wyman to set up Hopper up as a portrait painter for the rich and famous in the social register.  Wyman argues to Hopper that a successful artist needs to build up notoriety before he can sell paintings. Hopper argues, "Good, sound, honest work will be appreciated in the end" to which Miss Practicality answers, "Well, who the heck wants to wait till the end?" Hopper’s dream is to set up a scholarship fund that sends art students to Europe for study abroad. But the con-man father exploits this idealistic plan for his own larcenous purposes.

A lot of incident is packed into a comedy that is only an hour long. The tone is rather slap-happy. In her first part at the top of the bill, Wyman seems very young and feisty but has the charisma a movie star needs. Hopper, sadly, not so much. He has all the power of attraction of The Young Suitor in a Charlie Chan movie. Seeing his hair in its original brown is odd given we are used to seeing Paul Drake’s white hair.

Usually a heavy or a heavy-handed character, Berton Churchill as the father is funny in the American blowhard tradition of the Frank Morgan’s Wizard of Oz and W.C. Fields’ Larson E. Whipsnade in You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man. Looking to weigh about 80 pounds, tiny Marie Wilson as the fan dancer provides additional comedy. Fastidious Dick Purcell* makes a moue of disgust and barks “Why don't you cover your mouth with your hand when you yawn” to which she replies huffily, “And get bit?”

Even when the script is lame, the nutty story makes its own kind of giddy sense. So the movie checks the box of creating its own world. Credibility is impaired by Hopper asserting his right to wear the pants in the family when they both know Wyman is the brains and gasoline of their alliance. The man who runs the restaurant is stereotypically Greek, but this does not seem so old-fashioned to me who lives in a place where people still use the expression “Greek restaurant.”

*Never thought you would ever see in the same sentence "fastidious" and "Dick Purcell," did you? This blog is full of surprises.

The Ides of Perry Mason 90

Note. The is the second Perry Mason novel, published in 1933. The courtroom scene really is a rocker – it’s easy to see why the mystery reading public went crazy over Mason novels. H.R.F. Keating, critic and no mean crime novelist himself, included this mystery in his list-book, Crime & Mystery: The 100 Best Books.

The Case of the Sulky Girl – Erle Stanley Gardner

Sulky Frances Celene brings to Perry Mason's attention a problem that would make any young rich lively woman pout. Performing the helpless girl routine for which Mason doesn’t fall, Fran explains that after her father passed away, the terms of his will had it that Fran could marry anytime she wanted, as long as she contented herself with a lump-sum payment of $5,000 (about $120,000 in our 2025 dollars). But if she held off marrying until after she was 25 she would receive a million-dollar fortune (about $23 million smackeroonies).

Though Our Favorite Lawyer had cautioned her that he is not much interested in cases that involve wills, he perks up considerably at the mention of a million dollars. Perry Mason in the Dirty Thirties was tougher and shiftier than he was to be during the Eisenhower years. Hey, hard times and all, sometimes a guy has to get dubious – shonky, like the Australians say – to get the job done.

The will also stipulated that her large fortune is be managed by her uncle Edward Norton. In the event that Norton gives up the duty or is unable to carry out the duty, the entire fortune passes to Fran. Later the cops will put a bow on that motive.

Fran requests that Mason visit her Uncle Edward in order to convince him to find the wisdom and kindness in his flinty heart to grant his consent to her marrying a young man named Rob Gleason. Perry goes to Norton's mansion, only to find out that Norton is a scrupulously honest trustee that has actually grown the inheritance in the slough of the Depression.

However, Norton is so full of integrity, as inflexible as an adding machine, that it is no-can-do on Fran marrying Rob at the age of 23. The paragon of virtue remembers Fran being a wild teenager in the Roaring Twenties. Unc is determined to prevent Fran from losing a pile of simoleons to a fortune-hunter, or given it’s Southern California, a gambler or a blackmailer or a con-artist or a fortuneteller or a cult leader.

Sadly, virtue turns out to be less than its own reward. Not that I’m pardoning the killer or blaming the victim, mind, but a factor in the motive was Uncle Edward being an uncompromising model of rectitude. Perhaps if Unc had been less ready to call the cops when he thought a crime was going down, the killer would not have bashed in his skull with a walking stick. Wrapping up Fran’s motive with the cute bow, the nameless cops and Deputy DA Claude Drumm put Fran and Rob on trial for murder in the first degree.

Sure, we get the stock characters of the pulps: the shyster lawyer, the cynical newspaper man, the knuckle-walking cops, and the unethical DA that “loses” notes of an inconvenient interview. Also dating this are running boards, cuspidors, and cameras with flash lamps (I wonder how acrid magnesium flash powder smelled). Men wear hats and pince-nez on black ribbon.

But for my money the period touches are just incidental. They don’t make the setting quaint or distract from the narrative magic. Gardner assumed his readers would use their imagination to fill in descriptions of people, places, interiors, and weather. He correctly thought that readers wanted a fast-paced story in which a resourceful hero assisted an underdog to come out on top, their innocence exonerated, while The Authorities would hang* innocent people due to crooked thinking, misinterpretation of evidence and arrogant certainty they are doing the right thing.

 

*The last execution by hanging in The Golden State took place in Q on May 1, 1942, nine years after the release of this mystery.