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.

Gay Sparkling Musical Hit!

Note: My dive into the movies of Gail Patrick continues apace.  

Artists and Models
1937 / 1:37
[internet archive]

As we would expect of a musical comedy, the plot is just an excuse to string together pop music of the day, comic songs with yodeling, dance numbers, and skits. Hollywood musicals are parodied in two extravaganzas that are worth watching, especially for movie-goers like me who genially despise musicals.

A curious antique, this picture gives a sense of what the folks thought was funny in the late Thirties. Jack Benny was a comedian whose image was a subtle mixture of diffidence and conceit. His character here is a blowhard PR man who bumbles his way to professional success and manages to attract society luminary Gail Patrick. Seeing Gail Patrick propose to reticent Jack Benny is like seeing Pallas Athena mopping the floor. Plus, with regard to 19-year-old Ida Lupino – all vigor and bloom - asking 43-year-old Benny to marry her, well, Hollywood really was a factory of fantasy.

The folks also thought knock-about comedian Ben Blue was funny. He sang, danced, and mugged in the tradition of Red Skelton. His physical business will remind the beholder of moderate to severe neurological symptoms. In an odd sequence, Blue interacts with two marionettes who stroll by giving him the saucy eye as if they were sex workers. As if we were not doubting our senses enough, another marionette sidles up, a foppishly-dressed Englishman with a posh accent. The marionette strokes Blue’s thigh and says, “Spring arrives, the sap begins to rise,” suggesting that they might experiment with relations in the form in which they arise in English boarding schools.

The finale is Public Melody #1. Despite Paramount’s cooperation with the FBI, J. Edgar’s bureau apparently did not have a problem with this sequence that satirizes the ambushing ways of the FBI (though one doubts Bonnie and Clyde would be amused). In Public Melody #1, FBI agents storm a peaceful black neighborhood like Harlem with their tommy-guns blazing. Louis Armstrong plays his trumpet a little but does more feets-do-yo-stuff stuff than we feel comfortable with in 2025. It stings to see the giant and genius Armstrong made small in view of the fact that he was one of the most talented and popular entertainers in the history of our country, white or black.

Martha Raye also sings and dances in Public Melody #1. I don’t know anything about the art or history of dance in 20^th century America. But it looks to me as if Martha Raye is doing a parody of the freewheeling and athletic gyrations of jitterbugging. Good enough but things get weird. The print posted on IA is sharp enough to discern that Raye’s skin type starts, per the Fitzpatrick Scale, at light brown, then morphs to an olive tone, and finishes at medium white. This lightening is so strange that I struggle to make a meaning. My pea-sized brain just churns to a halt.

Our brains, however, were designed to tease out meanings so let’s consider another message: like Martha Raye, we too, Mr. and Ms. Movie-Goer, can learn from those Magically Wise Minorities and loosen up and sing and dance and have fun as if life were not one goddamn thing after another. Take risks, face fears, be grateful. Life isn’t working for The Man every night and day.

However, in 1937, this positive psychology, this self-help, was decidedly not the message that some ill-willed censors saw in Public Melody #1. This number was ordered snipped from the movie by some southern distributors because they thought their communities below the Mason-Dixon would not stand for blacks and whites performing together, such mixing implying the equality of the races. At any rate, sticking a thumb in the eye of racists, segregationists, and white supremacists, even if inadvertently, was (and is) a good thing.

This review grows long so we can’t cover in detail the parody of hillbilly songs by Judy Canova and her family.  Singer Connie Boswell is appropriately kept in silhouette for her number Whispers in the Dark. But we do miss her sisters and the harmonies. Artists Peter Arno, McClelland Barclay, Arthur William Brown, and John Lagatta do their rendition of England’s most famous fashion model Sandra Storme. Rube Goldberg and Jack Benny trade barbs.

Basically, this movie works as an artifact of American Oddness if one is in an anthropological mood. It’s interesting to think about social changes that render certain kinds of humor outdated and stock characters unfunny. Self-analysis may be stimulated by scenes that make us laugh though Our Better Angels know we ought to be outraged.

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
·         

Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science

The Brain That Changes Itself - Dr. Norman Doidge

Medical students used to be taught that the brain was fixed. The brain was likened to a machine that had specific parts to perform specific functions. Ageing and trauma impaired function forever. Parts wore out and no tune-ups could really bring the brain back to optimal perception, memory, or attention.

Doidge’s thesis in this book is in fact, the brain changes all the time, not only with ageing and injury, but through everything we experience. The machine model is not the way to view the brain. It is not hard-wired forever for this or that function. Doidge explores the seminal concept of neuroplasticity, showcasing the brain's capacity to rewire itself in response to experiences, learning, and recovery from injuries and trauma.

For instance, Doidge argues that we have senses we don't know we have. We don't think much about balance until we feel dizzy. It is scary feeling to suddenly lose the confidence that we are not going to fall. The sense of tumbling down may induce panic too. Doidge describes new devices that can tell the brain to re-route signals to stay balanced. The brain does not care about the source of a signal but can process that signal and change its function to adapt to perform novel tasks.

The main appeal of this book is the lucid writing. Any thinking person who in interested in the topic will get much out of reading it. It also gives heart to readers who have left middle age in the rearview mirror. Don't renounce physical exercise, never quit reading.

The Nones of Perry Mason 89

Note: Raymond Burr built up quite a reputation playing villains in the late 1940s and early 1950s. For instance, he plays a gangster who steals a diamond in the Martin & Lewis comedy You’re Never Too Young in 1955. Nothing, not even seeing Brother Ray, will induce me to watch a movie in which zany hijinks ensue when grown-man Jerry masquerades as a 12-year-old child to recover the diamond. Just the premise makes me breathe shallow.

Walk a Crooked Mile
1948 / 1:31
Tagline: “Smash Up of a Spy Ring!”
[internet archive]

Raymond Burr plays the muscle for a gang of Communist spies during the early Cold War era. Their mission is to steal nuclear secrets from a facility in California. The FBI, however, gets hot on their trail because of a tip from Scotland Yard.

Burr plays Krebs, a Communist thief out to steal atomic secrets. Conveying a sense of menace and danger, his character adds tension and intrigue to the film.  He beats people up. He picks secrets up at a drop in an 24/7 laundry. He takes part in a climactic shoot-out. Looking as if he is tipping the scales at nearly 300 pounds, he wears a suit floppily that calls to mind a loose-fitting Japanese samue.  A trim beard makes him look a tidy saboteur. The beard also makes him conspicuous in a population where clean-shaven is the norm and expectation. I would think the last look a spy would go after is conspicuous and memorable.

The FBI agents are played persuasively as smart dedicated men who are human enough to make mistakes. They conduct muggings to relieve persons of interest of evidence and commit B&E to toss apartments. They enter hazardous situations with no back-up. They carry precious evidence out of the office instead of locking it up. They leave suspects by themselves after they’ve been interrogated. They are fooled when the Communist spies disguise themselves as clergymen. They use “Slavic” to describe a “nationality” when in fact it is an “ethnicity.” Just as prone to as anybody else, they are subject to thinking errors like overgeneralizing, filtering, and anchoring.

None of my quibbles detract from the basic messages that 1) the Communists use vicious means in pursuit of their inhuman ends and 2) the FBI is working diligently to counter this menace. I never got the feeling that the anti-Communism in this movie was the dumb hysterical anti-communism that brought into disrepute principled anti-communism. In one scene an immigrant landlady in San Francisco glares at Burr and says heroically, defiantly, “My whole family was killed by men like you because they didn’t answer questions. I’m the last one that’s not going to answer questions.”

The production is very smooth and easy to look at it. Noirish angles and scenes of shadows and light dramatize the good guys and demonize the bad guys as they develop plans to counter each other.  The voice-over and jiggly camera give a feeling of a documentary. The voice-over is omniscient so it takes us into Communist meetings which is a little strange.

As I always say, I’m easy-going and open to meeting movies where they are coming from, so I liked the tense process of breaking up the spy ring. The film itself, directed by Gordon Douglas, is considered a solid example of Cold War-era film noir, blending crime thriller elements with political intrigue.

As for the connection with the original Perry Mason TV series, Frank Ferguson plays the owner of a laundry that is a drop for the Communists. Shocking he is a spy because he looks like the personification of Midwestern Reliable. He was a Sheriff in TCOT Perjured Parrot, an expert in TCOT Angry Dead Man, and another sheriff, though more of a dimbulb martinet, in TCOT Bluffing Blast. But his best performance was as good old Walter, the faithful friend of Frances Reid of in TCOT Golden Venom.

Pre-Mason Burr: Click away

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]

Mac Fontana #1

Black Hearts and Slow Dancing - Earl Emerson

Regional setting, sense of humor, and deft writing are combined in this first-of-a-series mystery novel that features Mac Fontana. A firefighter and arson investigator, Mac has been through the mill, with a wife killed in a car crash during his own trial in the death of a woman he slapped to death. He’s moved to the Seattle area with his young son and been pressured into becoming the sheriff in addition to his duties as fire chief in the village of Staircase.

In Mac’s jurisdiction, a fireman from Seattle is found tortured to death. Mac’s investigation uncovers civic corruption in aid of urban sprawl. During his search to distinguish the good guys from the other kind, Mac is forced into an oil tank to die, tempted into You-Know by the victim’s strength-training GF, and supervises his crew at the arson fire of a church. Emerson has skilled hand for the rousing scene.

This is more a crime novel than a mystery since the perps are easy to spot. Readers that are leery of series books will have to tolerate the standard devices of local setting, emotionally damaged hero, diabolical moguls and their depraved minions. The barnyard language and humor, plus the loud stupid-on-purpose  atmosphere of a men’s locker room may be too much of a familiar thing for readers who spend quite enough time in a men’s locker room in real life, thank you very much. The three female characters can be summed up bluntly: one is a pain, the next a flake, and the last a brute.

What may or may not balance this for prospective reader: the wide-ranging action rocks, the pace is brisk, the plot twists and turns in remarkable ways. Plus, there is a Rin Tin Tin, a German Shepherd named Satan. The presence of a wonder dog wins extra points, of course. While this novel did not win any awards, Emerson has won honors for other novels, so he is writer that readers can trust will deliver an entertaining mystery.

The Kalends of Perry Mason 88

Note:  A. A. Fair is one of the many pen names of Erle Stanley Gardner, creator of defense lawyer Perry Mason. The mysteries under the Fair pen name feature the private eye partnership Bertha Cool and Donald Lam.

Double or Quits – A.A. Fair

Writing as A.A. Fair, Erle Stanley Gardner released the fourth and fifth Bertha Cool – Donald Lam mysteries in 1941. In March, Spill the Jackpot had portly Bertha Cool lose weight due to a bout with a virus.  In December, Double or Quits finds Bertha and her crack investigator Lam taking the day off to go fishing. Learning from her health scare, Bertha becomes determined to make time for self-care.

But another angler at the pier turns out to be Dr. Hilton Deverest, an M.D. with a big problem. Jewels from his safe have disappeared and so has Nollie Starr, his wife’s social secretary. He hires Cool and Lam to find the secretary, get the jewels back, and let Nollie know that the doc will let bygones be bygones. Things get complicated for Cool and Lam when their client is found dead on the floor of his garage with his car engine running.

At this point with the case heating up, Gardner tells the tale of how Lam pressures Bertha to make the agency a partnership. Bertha howls as if stabbed, but agrees after Lam applies psychological judo. The first thing new partner Lam does is boost the wages of the agency secretary Elsie Brand. Not just a pretty name (I had two aunts named Elsie), she is a Gardnerian Ideal Woman: taciturn, loyal, resourceful, quick-witted, kind, and easy on the eye.

The setting and motivations are plausible. The characterization isn’t deep but Gardner gets across that the characters are adults having real-life problems. Dr. and Mrs. Deverest have a marriage so troubled it borders on the sick. The doctor’s niece Nadine Croy is dealing with an ex that is milking her for money. Heartless con men exploit widows’ loneliness and discontent. In a fine scene, Elsie Brand’s cooking appeals to cop’s appetite which proves to be his undoing since after Bertha makes him pay for his mooching a free meal, his nasty inclination to push people around, and his all-round poor judgement. Lam has great interrogation scenes and in one he plays a doctor like a fish, getting him to toss his professional ethics overboard.

More cheering is the relationship that Lam has with Elsie. It is not of the platonic nature of the one between Perry and Della. Near the end of Double or Quits, a nurse solemnly warns Elsie not to be alone with Lam because, under the influence, he might be “abnormally stimulated.”

Gardner writes, “Elsie Brand laughed in her face.”

True, the plotting gets convoluted and the reveal requires the focus of reading a loan agreement. A key deduction feels improbable. But this is worth reading just for the enjoyment of the comical interplay between brainy Lam and hard-charging Bertha, plus of the tender back and forth between Lam and Elsie. It’s strange how the Cool & Lam novels are a little hard-boiled and a little cozy at the same time. While the characterization is not what a hardcore reader of Faulkner would call strong, the characters are the best thing going for it.

European Reading Challenge #7

Franz Kafka – Jeremy Adler

This short, copiously illustrated biography tells about the life and times of the subject in enough detail to hold the interest of but not overwhelm the non-specialist. There are many pictures of Prague and the important people in the writer’s life. Also included are Kafka’s drawings from his notebooks.

In accessible language, Adler makes the point that the Jewish Austrian-Czech writer and novelist who wrote in German tore up the blueprint for the 19^th century novel. For example, he used both ordinary and implausible characters. Josef K. is an ordinary bank employee who is arrested one day for no apparent reason and put on trial. Gregor Samsa is a fabric drummer who wakes up one morning to find he has been transformed into a winged beetle. In plain language and a lucid style, Kafka creates characters that anybody anywhere can relate to.

Making the personal and private seem universal, Kafka deals with abstract concepts like “integrity,” “reality,” and “individuality,” as concepts that thinking members of all cultures must contend with in the modern world. His description of urban alienation and anxiety speak to readers who feel isolated in the world, cut off from traditional ways of thought.

The word Kafkaesque has entered our language like Orwellian and Dickensian. It usually describes being trapped in a bureaucratic nightmare of incompetent or mean or zealous (or all three) clerks, pointless protocols, and incomprehensible paperwork. But it seems unfair that Kafka’s name should be associated with such negative meanings when he had such a positive and humane soul. 

Besides, given the Nazis branded Kafka’s art “degenerate” and burned his books, that must mean he’s worth reading.

Forty Witnesses Saw the Killing

Note: Gail Patrick moved beyond ingenue parts when she played Cornelia the mean sister in My Man Godrey. After dozens of parts as the socialite bad girl, retirement from acting drove her batty with boredom. With her husband Cornwell, Gail Patrick Jackson formed the company that produced from 1957 to 1966 the greatest courtroom TV series in creation. One wonders if it was due to Jackson – a lifelong Democrat - that the writers so often returned to themes such as class inequality and friction, the treatment of marginalized groups, and the various forms of corruption in the business world and the entertainment industry.

Murder by Pictures
1936 / 1:09
Tagline: “Forty Witnesses Saw the Killing, But Not One Could Pick the Killer!”
[internet archive]

Gangster Nate Girard (Onslow Stevens) hosts a shindig celebrating his acquittal from a murder charge. But the party is pooped when his attorney is shot to death. No gun is found, but, as the tagline hints, forty witnesses are all suspects. 

In this large pool is Meg “Nutmeg” Archer (Gail Patrick) stands out because her father was killed by Girard. She could have provided evidence that convicted Girard, so Girard wants her to take the fall for the lawyer’s killing. The flatfoots suspect that news photographer Kent Murdock (Lew Ayres) is helping Nutmeg evade the meshes of the law. A flashback explains how a photo of the actual shooting exists and like the rifle in that famous Western (Winchester ’73?), the negative keeps changing hands.

At only 69 minutes, this comic mystery can’t help but move briskly. The clever twists and non-stop turns make up for the now creaky wisecracking. So much in style then, nowadays nonsense grates if the viewer is not in the right mood for period word play.  "Aw, come on. Skin back your ivories. You're as limp as spaghetti. You're the saddest group of courtroom victors I ever trained a lens on."

Granted, though, classic American tall-tale wackiness hits the mark when a deadpan cop reports: “We got her life story from Oklahoma. When she was 12 she shot out all the candles on her birthday cake. They call her Nutmeg.”

Beware: Confusing is the first fifteen minutes. The acquitted killer gives useful information in an aside that is easy to miss due to the muddy sound. Three brash newspaper reporters – Lew Ayres, Benny Baker, and Paul Kelly – all seem to be named Murdock. Trying too hard to hit the screwball comedy note, Ayres takes to the shower with his pants on. Also, Gail Patrick’s backstory is related to what everybody at the time would have known but we post-moderns have forgotten: that in the early Twenties the Osage Nation in Oklahoma were the richest people per capita in the world, which attracted murderous whitemen on the ruthless hunt for oil money.

There is one connection to the classic Perry Mason TV series. Appearing in this movie as his usual comic relief bumpkin is a 30-year-old Benny Baker, who in his fifties was to appear in three episodes of the series. He was good as a cold gambling commission bureaucrat in TCOT Gambling Lady, but he was great as the nasty henchman in TCOT Carefree Coronary and the worst adult male role model in the world in TCOT Shifty Shoe-Box with the great Constance Ford.

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

 

Barbara Hale Week 4/4

Note: The last entry in our Barbara Hale Film Festival. She starred as Della Street, the office manager and confidential secretary of Perry Mason from 1957 to 1966. She had a solid career in full-length movies, just as flourishing as William Talman and probably moreso than Burr and Hopper. She could both 'girl next door' and 'femme fatale.'

The Houston Story
1956 / 1:19
Tagline: “Terror Over Texas!”
[internet archive]

This B-movie is a crime story produced in the waning days of the genre known as film noir. It’s an uneven movie with a shallow script. For fans of Perry Mason, however, the main attractions are two fine actresses. Barbara Hale was a regular on the show as Mason’s faithful sidekick Della Street. And Jeanne Cooper appeared five times as a guest star, usually playing a difficult complex woman.

Hale goes platinum blond in this picture. Lest I go completely ‘male gazey,’ I’ll just opine “In-frickin-credible” and let it go at that. Against her girl-next-door type in TheFirst Time and Clay Pigeon, she plays the ambitious ex-wife of Gene Barry's now dead foreman in the oil fields. Bored with a stable homelife and money problems, she deserted her happy home and took a new name, only to end up as a chanteuse and the mistress of a tool employed by the mobbed-up crime czar of Houston.

Jeanne Cooper plays Gene Barry's current girlfriend. Madge is a waitress, all wholesome loyalty, loving compassion and warm dependability. She’s even adaptable when, in the tradition of nice GF’s in film noir movies, she says they can live on the run from the gangsters out to snuff him. Her mistake is that she thinks that Gene Barry loves her and is not a crook. But in the end after she realizes his true wolfish nature, she returns to her core values of honesty and courage. The movie-goer can see her inner turmoil before she adds the proviso “unless somebody is in danger” to our cultural rule “don’t snitch” and moves the story to its inevitable conclusion.

The story gets rolling when Gene Barry pressures Hale into introducing him to the local crime lord Edward Arnold and his minion Paul Richards. Barry presents to the wise guys his plan to rustle oil directly from the fields and sell it on the grey market to unethical distributors and countries like Cuba under embargo. The wise guys agree to the plan, but Barry is a victim of his own smarts and ambition. Barry wants to rise in the syndicate, and Arnold and Richards plan to knock him off as soon as they learn what he knows about oil rustling.

Barry is clever and magnetic but he’s ignorant in various ways. He’s disloyal: he uses his childhood  friend as a patsy, the fall-guy whose signature is on all the contracts. He’s fickle: he cheats on honest Cooper with temptress Hale. He’s ruthless: he sends Cooper to his apartment though it is probably being watched by the hit men. He’s decadent: The montage shows him smiling as he orchestrates grand theft and bribery, looking nasty but charming (Barry was always charming) as he ruins businesses and livelihoods with crime. He’s dumb: he can’t imagine any rivals would really do him in, doesn’t see that he is just as vulnerable to a couple of rounds to the brain pan as the next guy. He actually says, “I’m the big boy now and nobody’s gonna get me out.”

The script comes close to a criticism of the “corporate man,” a story of rivalry among street-fighters in suits but doesn’t quite get there. The script is also blurry as a morality tale. It is not clear why Barry and Hale fall for each other so hard, nor why Barry is so callous about using a childhood friend like a tool. I suppose we movie-goers are supposed assume that Barry and Hale are both birds of a hedonistic feather, merely greedy for good times.

The pace of the movie, however, is brisk though director William Castle (yes, the William Castle) does give us breathers. One is on top of an observation tower at night (yeah, we get a plunge unto death – cool!). And another follows two hitmen through Houston International Airport, which is attractive to us movie-goers who like mid-20^th century infrastructure.

As for the connection with the classic Perry Mason TV series, Frank Jenks, who played the patsy best friend, drove a cab in this movie just as he did in TCOT Deadly Double. Jenks played a barman that had seen it all in TCOT Violent Vest. Jenks had a craggy face that made him look like an archetypal white working class American man. Paul Richards also appeared twice on the show, in TCOT Startled Stallion and TCOT Melancholy Marksman. Both characters were troubled souls.

Barbara Hale Week 3/4

Note: This is the third of four reviews to celebrate Barbara Hale Week. She starred as Della Street, the office manager and confidential law secretary of Perry Mason from 1957 to 1966.  At Columbia Pictures, she appeared in the title role in Lorna Doone (1951) and with James Stewart in TheJackpot (1951). She wasn't typecast like Burr and Talman were. She could do both comedy and drama, doing both, in fact, in this picture.

The First Time
1952 / 1:29
Tagline: “She's going to have a baby and the fun begins when she begins to feel funny!”
[internet archive]

This is the first live-action movie directed by Frank Tashlin. A movie-goer can tell Tashlin came from directing Looney Tunes because in The First Time a new baby provides voice-over commentary. Plus, the sight and sound gags are so lowbrow that they call to mind Jerry Lewis outings like Cinderfella which Tashlin was to direct later.

At first a movie-goer wonders what Robert Cummings and Barbara Hale, both veterans of serious movies, are doing in a sitcommie movie with a cozy plot. New parents, Joe and Betsy Bennett, navigate sleepless nights, brutal expenses, and the strains a new baby puts on a marriage. 

Seems safe and familiar enough.

But 20 minutes into the picture, the movie-goer senses that director Tashlin aims to express discomfort with his post-war USA. Lots of otherwise sensible people nowadays seem to kid themselves about the good old days of the Fifties, but Tashlin was there, sizing up the world the squares made with insubordinate humor.

First: money. Leaving the hospital, it is paying the bill time in a society where individuals and families still paid large medical costs out of pocket. Back then having a baby cost about $200, around $2,000 in today’s money. To pay for the delivery of the bouncing baby boy, they write the hospital a check that’s going to bounce too.

Second: work. At his new sales job, Cummings has to listen to pep talks from blowhard coaches who are motivating the washing machine salesmen with unholy bromides by Dale Carnegie and Norman Vincent Peale. Who needs values when you can fill your head with slogans? And Cummings’ fellow salesmen are all “hail, fellow, well met” types that seem as if they were stamped out of a machine.

Third: shoddy products. As for the product he devotes the best part of his day to selling, Cummings is appalled when he finds his wife Betsy has shelled out money for a diaper service. Why, when they can’t afford it and already have a washing machine? She can’t use the Whirl-A-Mart her husband sells because it tears up diapers.

Fourth: maternal mortality. Somber when Betsy and Joe discuss the terms of her will, which Joe has accidentally come across in her hospital go-bag. The scene works dramatically not only because Cummings and Hale are that good. This scene hits home when we recall that in the USA the maternal mortality rate (deaths per 100,000 live births) was significantly higher in 1950 compared to 2020. In 1950, the rate was approximately 95.1 deaths per 100,000 live births – i.e. like the Dominican Republic is now. By 2020, the USA rate had decreased to 23.8 deaths per 100,000 live births, comparable to Lebanon and Grenada and not comparable with howling socialist hellholes like Norway and Sweden.

Fifth: the bourgeois fear of embarrassment and judgement. The hospital recommends a live-in nurse take care of the child for a month. The couple can’t afford it. But they are too embarrassed to tell her they can’t swing it when she just shows up on their doorstep.

Sixth: the cult of expertise and the self-help industry. The nurse (Cora Witherspoon, who is great) tyrannizes them in their own house. When the bossy nurse moves on to another hapless family, she leaves an oppressive schedule for the cowed mother to follow. Betsy feverishly studies the magazine wisdom of experts in parenting advice, a profitable genre of self-help. Barbara Hale does a great job portraying Betsy feeling overwhelmed.

Seventh: what is with American men? The movie touches on the clear message I got when I was a little kid in the Sixties that real men weren’t supposed to be interested in babies, that nurturance is effeminate and thus contemptible in men. On the phone getting the news of the new bundle of joy, the grandmother quizzes the grandfather, who took the call, if it’s a boy or a girl. The geezer replies crustily, “I didn’t ask. It’s bound to be one or the other.” Another man says to new father Cummings “When you got that baby, a millstone was hung around your neck.” Later when a nurse asks Bob the baby’s name he blurts out “Millstone.”

Betsy ends up exhausted with the housework, child-care, and shopping. She feels grody because she zero time for self-care. She is outraged that over their supper of sandwiches and warm beer, her husband wonders aloud, icily, what she does all day and why can’t she even manage to look attractive anymore. His callous cluelessness is expressed in a shot of his ranting visage that will call to mind Jack’s maniacal face in The Shining. The unhappy couple then have a searing argument in tight whispered voices so as not to wake the infink.

Eighth: lions, tigers, aggressive women, oh my! It somehow got by the Hays office when Bob, thinking he is picking up a babysitter at a bus stop, is shocked when a broad-minded woman with a tolerant view of life says breathily, "Just between you and me, two scotches and I'll sit anywhere."

I’m not saying that this is a brilliant take-down of cultural attitudes in post-war American suburbs. The ending, in fact, seems a sop to the squares, though it didn’t help much since the movie enjoyed only moderate success at the box office. But it is worth watching for when Tashlin does depart from the usual slush involving angelic lil nippers making their entry into this vale of tears.

Barbara Hale Week 2/4

Note: Welcome to the second of four reviews to celebrate Barbara Hale week. Best known for her role as Della Street in the TV series Perry Mason, she attended the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, aiming to be an artist. She modelled to pay tuition. She began her movie career in the 1940s. Her break was appearing with Frank Sinatra in Higher and Higher in 1943. Her ability to portray different characters with depth and authenticity contributed to her reputation as a skilled actress in both dramas and comedies.

The Jackpot
1950 / 1:25
Tagline: “The Prize-Winning Comedy of the Year!”
[internet archive]

This comedy is set in Indiana, in a town of probably 40,000 people since it can support a newspaper and two department stores. Bill, his wife Amy, and their two children are leading a stable life that many folks would give their eyeteeth for. But Bill glumly predicts his pattern of life is set. He assumes that he will live an adventure-free life until he is old, remorseful that nothing has ever happened to him. Why WWII wasn’t a big enough adventure for men in the Greatest Generation is left unexplained, but the upshot is James Stewart’s Bill is an antsy male like Dick Powell’s bored insurance guy in 1948’s film noir classic Pitfall.

Bill gets a glimmer of liberation. In the so-called Golden Age of Radio, giveaway shows were a popular type of program, often featuring quiz formats where contestants could win prizes. The prospect of winning the $24,000 jackpot sends Bill, Amy, and their canasta friends into frenzied dreams of getting, having, and living it up.  Bill exploits the small-city grapevine in order to obtain possible answers to the question that has stumped contestants for weeks. Plus, blind chance takes a hand in a miracle.

Proving once again that nothing is completely bad or completely good, even in victory, Bill and family get a quick lesson in tax laws, which back in the day bordered on confiscatory. An auditor tells them that the government will count as income the prizes worth $24,000, such as the services of the gay interior decorator, quarter-ton of beef, Palomino pony, collection of designer hats, furniture, portable bar, swimming pool, thousands of cans of Campbells and long trailer. Given Bill’s income of $7500 p.a. and his $500 in the bank, the $7000 tax liability could very well be a burden.

The look at postwar USA culture is skeptical but toothless. Bill feels mildly disgusted at the nervous conformity that compels parents to ferry their children to attend the boss's daughter’s birthday party. The four other couples, Bill figures, would jump out of their underwear at the idea of changing canasta night from Wednesday to Thursday evening. 

There is a modicum of genial satire on the culture of consumption as stoked by hard-sell advertising – idiotic jingles and all - on the radio. Granted, there is some bite in the victory scene when the consumption-mad adults don’t even notice that Bill’s little boy is crying for help because he’s gotten his head stuck between the spindles of the staircase. But only funny in the standard way we’ve seen many times are the grumpy and highly-strung teenage girl (12-year-old Natalie Wood) and Bill falling down the stairs (twice, no less).

James Stewart keeps his trademark folksy schtick to a minimum, which was fine with me. In about five A-movies before 1950, Barbara Hale is confident as wife Amy. A little odd is that Hale was in her late twenties when this movie was made so her character Amy would have had her daughter in her late teens. Too true that teen marriage was not a biggie back then. Hale is called upon to put on a variety of acts in this movie, which shows her range. The act 'jealous wife,' which is cliched, is on the writers.

As for the connection to the classic series Perry Mason, portrait painter Patricia Medina was an alluring temptress in TCOT Lucky Loser. The oily obsequious colleague Lyle Talbot appeared in the TCOT Long-Legged Models.

Canasta cheat Claude Stroud appeared in TCOT Ominous Outcast, TCOT Left-Handed Liar, and TCOT Bigamous Spouse. From Texas, he was born to play the small-town heel.

Minerva Urecal, uncredited as Woman Trying on Hats (a funny scene based on the incongruity of battleaxe shooting for elegant), was in two episodes of the classic Perry Mason series TCOT Fan Dancer’s Horse and TCOT Lover’s Gamble. She could dress down and play a landlady of cheap residency hotel or dress up and play a society matron.

Barbara Hale Week 1/4

Note: Welcome to the first of four reviews to celebrate Barbara Hale Week. Best known for her role as Della Street in the TV series Perry Mason, she began her career in the 1940s. She received positive reviews for her roles in movies like The Boy with Green Hair (1948) and The Window (1949). Her ability to portray different characters with depth and authenticity contributed to her reputation as a skilled actress in both dramas and comedies.

The Clay Pigeon
1949 / 1:03
Tagline: “Where Danger Lives”
[internet archive]

In this thriller, Barbara Hale and Bill Williams have excellent chemistry. No big surprise, considering in 1949 that they were in Year 3 of their married life, which was to extend 43 more years to his death in 1992. This picture is one of the watchable half-dozen film noirs that Richard Fleischer directed for RKO

Williams’ character is James Fletcher. He wakes up from unconsciousness totally unaware why hospital staffers are giving him the stink-eye. He overhears that he is to be court-martialed by the US Navy for treason. When he was a seaman first class and imprisoned in a Japanese POW camp in the Philippines, he is alleged to have ratted on his friends for stealing food. He is blamed for the torture killing of his best friend Mark Gregory at the hands of brutal Japanese captors.

Fletcher escapes from the Navy Hospital to clear himself. He catches up with Mark Gregory's widow Martha played by Barbara Hale. In a common post-war trope, Fletcher has PTSD and amnesia related to his service. Since we don’t know if Fletcher is guilty or innocent, for a short time it is hard to sympathize with him for terrorizing Mrs. Gregory.

On the run in SoCal, however, Mrs. Gregory comes around to his side when two thugs try to kill them by running them off the road. In another noir trope "hostile universe bedeviling the innocent,” neither Fletcher nor Mrs. Gregory know the reason bad guys want to kill them. The tension is boosted due to his intermittent neurological symptoms like dizziness, aphasia, and fainting. The cloudy flashbacks are effective.

Barbara Hale is earnest and believable. Bill Williams was an athlete – a champion swimmer, in fact – so he looks in control when he’s running through LA’s Chinatown. 

The writers are to be commended on two points, one small and one big. The name of the villain – Tokiyama - could be a real Japanese family name, which is an unexpected change from names that writers just made up because they sound Japanesey. Kimuri. Fuumiro. Marya Marco plays with quiet dignity a war widow. Her husband was in the 442nd Infantry Regiment. Fletcher acknowledges that it was “quite an outfit.” Indeed, the "Go For Broke" battalion was a highly decorated U.S. Army regiment comprised primarily of Nisei (second-generation Japanese American) volunteers. While they fought in Europe, many soldiers in the 442nd had family members who were incarcerated in camps like Manzanar for the duration.

After his well-known portrayal of Kit Carson on TV, Bill Williams often played the obnoxious heavy. On the classic Perry Mason TV series, in TCOT Crippled Cougar he was that rare bird, the accused that the movie-goer could not like. He played the cold unrepentant perp in TCOT Murderous Mermaid. He was the victim that had it coming in both TCOT Bluffing Blast and TCOT 12th Wildcat.

Inspector Mallet #3

Suicide Excepted - Cyril Hare

Hare takes chances in this 1939 outing, his third novel and the first to feature his series character Inspector Mallet. Hare ensures that we patient readers dislike two of the characters from the get-go. Coincidences abound, even for a whodunit. And Inspector Mallet neither plays a major role in the story nor is he accompanied by his usual foil, the exasperated Francis Pettigrew. Mallet solo worked fine in Tenant for Death, but less so in this outing.

Leonard Dickinson’s death was the result of an overdose of a prescribed medication. Inspector Mallet had talked to the victim and had been mildly distressed by Dickinson’s gloomy pessimism, which the jury thought was sufficient to conclude was suicidal ideation and that Dickinson had later done away with himself. The problem is that insurance company will not pay up in the case of a suicide. The victim’s son, daughter and her fiancé team up to prove it was murder committed by one of the other hotel guests.

The amateur trio bungles their investigation. Their solicitor you-peoples them with “You people took it upon yourselves to prove that the late Mr. Dickinson was murdered. I dare say he was … (but) you have gone about it in a way that I can only describe as imbecile.” However, they meet a variety of curious characters in interesting settings. Hare’s prose is not flashy but it’s always clear. I get a good feeling when a writer plainly assumes that the reader has a vocabulary of more than 500 words. The dramatic twist is a fascinating twist.

This is very much a mystery from between the wars in that we have eccentric characters, little violence, and a countryish setting. So readers of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers will probably enjoy it. The solid prose, self-consciously literary, calls to mind Rex Stout.

The Ides of Perry Mason 87

Note: Below are the memorable episodes from the second season of the Perry Mason TV series that ran from 1957 to 1966, in 271 episodes. Granted, the noir theme of "innocents menaced by a hostile universe" was what PM was all about, but in the first three seasons the noir look and tropes were conspicuous.

The Best of Season 2 (1958-59)

The Case of the Lucky Loser (September 27, 1958). This episode overflows with noir elements, starting with the noir byword “Appearances are often deceiving.” A cranky dying father. His feckless son who digs up ruins instead of running the family empire. Son’s cheating wife. A fixer man who specializes in intimidation and corruption. A crooked resort owner who’s bribed to commit perjury.  Douglas Kennedy plays the sinister fixer, cast for his menacing air of willingness to throw his weight around. Plus he gets our goat because we are jealous of his sharp late Fifties Corvette, second in coolness only to an early Seventies Chevelle Malibu. As the cheating wife, Patricia Medina is drop-dead attractive with her dark Spanish eyes and sultry allure.

The Case of the Perjured Parrot (December 20, 1958). The first half-hour showcases two amazing actresses in two memorable scenes. Being interviewed in Perry’s office, Fay Baker is a mother who’s desperately afraid her daughter’s going to jail but feels angry as hell at the kid for ditching school too. Jody Lawrance plays a gentle and lonely librarian who finally finds love only to have her life shattered when she ends up charged with murder. Lawrance and Burr, in a nice change, don’t have their interview in a cell but on a park bench. Burr characteristically goes silent and gives space to Lawrance and she sustains the scene like a true professional. Two familiar faces, Edgar Buchanan and Frank Ferguson, whip up old-timey corn pone as a country coroner and sheriff respectively. Joseph Kearns – Mr. Wilson on Dennis the Menace – plays a self-styled expert nervous that his imposter syndrome will be exposed. Mel Blanc does the parrot’s voice: “Thank you for coming but you needn’t stay.” What more could we ask? This may be my favorite episode ever.

The Case of the Dangerous Dowager (May 9, 1959) has the familiar despotic dowager, her browbeaten son, and an alligator disguised as a gangster. In a comic scene crusty Ellen Corby (who later played Grandma Walton), gives Paul Drake crap at a poker table for not showing his cards when called. Paul looks put-out as Perry gives in to rare chortles. But the dramatic scene in which Perry does jail-cell therapy with compulsive gambler Sylvia shows great things happen when TV writers and actors get a little room to move. Broken and lost Sylvia tells about how she used gambling and alcohol to blot out the pain of being abandoned by her mother and tyrannized by her grandmother. Sylvia was played by London-born Patricia Cutts who studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. And the stage training shows. It’s an incredible scene.

The Case of the Lame Canary (June 27, 1959). I like another bird episode not only for the non-stop action that involves a broken marriage, attempted murder, insurance fraud, arson, grand theft, and of course the killing of the vic that needed killing.  But also it’s a cavalcade of all the usual suspects. The comely female client with poor judgement and her working-man boyfriend who’s loyal anyway. There is a tag team of evil doers: the sex bunny and dishonest insurance broker. Just classic noir. This was Berry Kroeger’s second appearance of seven on the show. His amazing voice – attention-grabbing but relaxing - got him started in radio in the late 1930s and he could act up a storm, from menacing to congenial, from forthcoming to clammed up. For once, DA Hamilton Burger gets the quotable last line, “That's the first time I ever heard of a lame canary turning out to be a stool pigeon.”

Honorable Mention: The Case of the Howling Dog is notable for its understated acting, melancholy atmosphere, and the highest body count in the whole series, I think. In The Case of the Purple Woman, elegant Bethel Leslie one of her three outings as a nice wife unhappily married to a louse who deservingly ended up on a slab in the morgue. Purple Woman also has Robert H. Harris playing his usual sleazy oaf; he was in seven episodes, as the perp in three and the defendant and victim in one each.

He Scratched her Tender Skin...

The Animal Kingdom
1932 / 1:25
Tagline: “He scratched her tender skin and found a savage!”
[internet archive]

In this Pre-Code love drama, Tom is the owner of a small press in Connecticut. He wants to publish art, not tripe. His father fears that idealistic dreamer Tom lacks punctuality, focus and persistence.

Tom had a three-year romantic relationship with Daisy, a magazine illustrator who wants to paint seriously. They had a vague idea that marriage wasn’t in the cards, that love was a bourgeois thing. But Tom met Cecelia while Daisy was away studying the great art and artists of France. After a whirlwind month that featured judgement-clouding “infatuation,” Tom married Cecelia.

Optimistic Tom wants to maintain a friendship with Daisy, because he knows they are good for each other. They like exchanging news. They give each other advice about making genuine art but making a living too. Daisy realizes with dismay that she loves Tom like crazy, bourgeois thing or not. She bails to Nova Scotia to get him out of her system.

At first Cecelia seems okay with Tom hanging with his bohemian buds. However, in the course of time, Ceceila envisions herself to be the project manager with Tom as the project. “See his ability to organize and carry through? That’s all me!” For his own good mainly but so they can live in the city, not the suburbs, and be the charming power couple in a busy social and professional life.

Playwright Philip Barry puts this complicated triangle in a social world. Cecelia allies with Tom’s father to make Tom a success, whether or not success costs Tom what he thinks is his integrity. Tom selfishly uses his ex-pug butler Regan (William Gargan, comic relief) as a good luck charm. Tom and Daisy’s hipster friends are pulling for them, but feel powerless to snap Tom out of his “bewilderment.” Cecelia keeps an ex-lover in thrall because as a lawyer he (Neil Hamilton) might be handy in advancing the scheme to sell Tom’s publishing house to a conglomerate. No triangle is an island.

Leslie Howard played Tom on the stage in this Phillip Barry play so he’s comfortable in the role. Howard has a warm gentleness that movie-goers will recall from The Petrified Forest. His lightness and tenderness disarm our judgement that Tom might be merely passive and immature. Even puritans like me will understand him doing the head over heels thing with somebody as attractive as Cecelia.

On top of easy to look at, Ann Harding as Daisy is likeable, a rare mix of talent, intelligence, and courage to want a baby even if it means being a single mother in 1932. Harding also has this aura of “Hold me when I’m hurting” that is compelling. "Easy on the eye," "likeable," "compelling," hell - who am I kidding? I'd storm Troy with Menelaus to get Ann Harding back. 

Myrna Loy as Cecelia could have played the part as an unapologetic social climber, but does not. Cecelia thinks she is doing the right thing for everybody involved, manipulating and coercing Tom to get on the path to success in the world of publishing, not an industry that coddles the thin-skinned. A puritan like me, however, has qualms about Cecelia’s esteem of ephemera such as popularity, the high life, status, and money.

The Pre-Code movie is worth watching, if the movie-goer has a yen for a rather talky movie about adult situations. I don’t think it is a “comedy of manners” because there are few one-liners and scenes are not played for laughs. The ex-prizefighter is there for comic relief, which implies to me the playwright himself thought the tone was generally serious, on the level, unironic.

The Nones of Perry Mason 86

Note: Raymond Burr was a demon for work, appearing in more than 50 feature films between 1946 and 1957. He was typecast as the villain because his stoutness gave him a commanding menacing presence. Film historian Alain Silver described Raymond Burr's psycho private investigator in Pitfall as "both reprehensible and pathetic," a characterization also cited by film historian Richard Schickel as a prototype of film noir. 

Pitfall
1948 / 1:26
Tagline: “A man can be as strong as steel … but somewhere there's a woman who'll break him!”
[internet archive]

In an incredible performance, Raymond Burr portrays a brutal private investigator that stalks Lizabeth Scott. She was connected with a case of embezzling that the insurance company, represented by Dick Powell, has to make good. Scott and married-with-young son Powell have brief dalliance that does not amount to much. However, Burr the Burly Brute wants Scott body and soul. He schemes to own her by setting up Powell in an ugly trap. Excellent plotting, pace, and climax with realistic characters.

Burr makes the most of an extended part as an ex-cop turned private investigator. He looks close to 300 pounds, making his head look small on a monolith of a body. The secretaries in Powell’s office nicknamed Burr “Gruesome” because he creeps them out. Doubtless ex-cop for cause, he hulks with repressed violence and moves as slow and leisurely as a cat as if to warn people to run away when he moves fast.

Whether he is redolent of threat or yearning for something nice to happen to him (for once), he stares with a faraway look, as if he has retreated to a place where feverish dreams are fulfilled and sociopathic plans hatched. The scene in which he visits the salon where Scott models clothes and forces her to show more bare shoulders by taking her shawl down will give the movie-goer a full-blown case of the heebie-jeebies.

Burr seems eerily oblivious of the repulsion he provokes. In his narcissism, he figures that if the object of his obsession spends a little time with him, she’ll get over his being horrible and not feel the compulsion to take a shower whenever he looks at her. In his stupidity, he never considers the hazards of driving to desperation a woman who keeps a gun in her apartment. It is too much to expect that imagination-free victimizers to ever conceive of themselves as one day becoming the victim.

The performances make this movie well-worth viewing. Powell looks and talks rather deadpan as he plays the bored suburban husband who makes it easy for noir trouble to find him. It’s his damn fault, he brews his own trouble: he doesn’t tell Scott he’s married – the fink – and, deeply wounded yet again by useless immature men, Scott drops him.

Jane Wyatt is convincing as the dependable wife. When Powell, in a rut, asks her, “You were the homecoming queen and I most likely to succeed, what happened,” she answers matter-of-factly, “We got married. I had a baby.” Quite sensibly, she tries to talk him out of his sulky FOMO and get him to appreciating what he’s got, which is only a life millions would trade their eyeteeth for 

Lizabeth Scott has delightful moments sporting about in a motor boat when she is actually smiling. This is a sea change from her usual defeated look caused by bad luck with the wrong kind of men (see The Strange Love of Martha Ivers). But due to Burr’s menace and stalking, it doesn’t take too long before she assumes her bewildered mien. She’s decidedly not a scheming femme fatale. She’s an ordinary woman who has been kicked around by life. She’s unlucky enough to get unwittingly involved with three clucks: a weak-minded boyfriend (Byron Barr), a bored insurance man (Powell), and a psychopathic detective (Burr).

I'm the kind of movie-goer that's also a moralistic prude so I get the message often sent in film noir: it doesn’t take much to go off the rails and once off, really bad stuff can come down. 

Pre-Mason 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]