Inspector Montalbano #12

The Track of Sand – Andrea Camilleri

This 2008 mystery stars a Sicilian police inspector. The recurring themes of this series – Salvo’s rocky romance with Livia, globalization as criminal enterprise – felt stale, so I wondered if the series, like The Big Bang Theory, was just going through the motions.

I was pleasantly surprised that international crooks play no part in The Track of Sand. The series hero Salvo Montalbano wakes up one morning to find in his yard the battered carcass of a horse that was beaten to death. Salvo feels admirable grief for the horse and rage at the evil-doing perps. His half-official investigation delves in Mafia schemes and the lifestyles of the filthy rich. A new character, the lovely Rachele Esterman, adds to Salvo’s diversions.

The sense of place still feels authentic and familiar, with Salvo walking on his jetty and sitting on his rock. He still eats local cuisine at Enzo’s trattoria. The translation is extremely smooth and readable, with helpful cultural notes at the end. Camilleri handles skillfully the spectrum of life, from the funny to the horrible, often following each other only in minutes.

I advise readers new to Camillieri to read – in order, please. Camilleri has a clear, decisive, essential style. He envelops you with his particular vocabulary; captures you with the stubborn, ironic and sensitive character of Montalbano.

·        Click on the title to read the review

·        The Shape of Water (1994)          ·        The Terra-Cotta Dog (1996)         ·        The Snack Thief  (1996) ·        Voice of the Violin (1997)             ·        Excursion to Tindari (2000)            ·        The Smell of the Night (2001)     ·        Rounding the Mark (2003)           ·        The Patience of the Spider (2004)               ·        The Paper Moon (2005) ·        The Wings of the Sphinx (2006) ·        August Heat  (2009)          ·        The Track of Sand (2010)

·        The Potter's Field (2011)                 ·        The Age of Doubt (2012)              ·        The Dance of the Seagull (2013) ·        Treasure Hunt (2013)     ·        Montalbano's First Case and Other Stories (2013) ·        Angelica's Smile (2014) ·        Game of Mirrors (2015) ·        A Beam of Light (2015)  ·        A Voice in the Night  (2016)           ·        A Nest of Vipers (2017) ·        The Pyramid of Mud (2018)           ·        Death at Sea (2018)

 

 

 

The Ides of Perry Mason 78

Note: Three times a month, we turn to the works of Erle Stanley Gardner, either the novels or the classic TV series that sent us hardcore readers to the novels. The first three seasons on CBS (1957-58-59) have a noir look and a delightfully lurid handling of stories of folly and murder. The motives are classic: overweening ambition; wishful thinking; irresistible desires and aversions; cowardice and cupidity; and wanting to speed blackmailers into the scalding hells they deserve. Because the Sixties zeitgeist prized “relevance,” the stories became less sensational and more topical, from corporate espionage to folk singing to the JD problem to open-wheel race cars to Playboy clubs to the space program to Vic Tanny-type health clubs. Ironic that the emphasis on “ripped from the headlines,” along with the corny soundtrack of Sixties teevee crime drama, makes the Sixties episodes feel more dated than the timeless Fifties fables of ambition, anxiety, and anger crowding out good sense, moderation and caution.

The Singular Episode in Color

The original Perry Mason TV series (1957 - 1966) was shot in black and white. In the first three seasons, the designers and crew worked their magic with grayscale and composition to achieve the noir vision. The high-contrast visuals and low-key lighting, for example, make Evelyn’s troubles more nightmarish in The Case of the Restless Redhead and make sleazier the civic corruption in the stylish The Case of the Fraudulent Foto.

Only one episode of the 271 was filmed in color. CBS execs had decreed that all shows would be in color for the 1966-67 season. President Wiliam S. Paley wanted to see what full-spectrum Perry Mason looked like so in Season 9, the experiment entitled The Case of the Twice-Told Twist was broadcast* on February 27, 1966**.

Designers took the color bit and ran, which was what designers did in the early days of color TV. They used red and orange for walls, linen, and cars. As for clothes, though Barbara Hale*** pops against the pecky cypress paneling in the office and looks stunning in red silk, not well served by colorful attire are  Victor Buono, Beverly Powers, and Lisa Pera (with the blue blue really blue eyes that some Russian women have). I gape, gawking at the yellow mohair sweater. One scene has Paul chasing a suspect down on L.A.’s Olvera Street (shot for Mexico), with its merchant stalls, craft shops, and restaurants. The pedestrian marketplace flashes with so much bright stuff that it looks as cluttered and fussy as an interior on Murder, She Wrote.

With an example of only one episode, it is hard to judge if Perry Mason in color packs the punch of the other 270 B&W shows.  As hinted above, the visual fatigue drains us viewers with 2025 eyes. On the positive side, Victor Buono puts in his usual skillful performance as a corrupter of youth. The confession scene is pretty cool. The deal-breaker that in the end drags the episode into Meh territory: campy and unbelievable are the juvenile delinquents playing Artful Dodgers to Buono’s Fagin. They dress like the Young Engineers Club at Beverly Hills 90210 High School.

I am of two minds about colorizing the original Perry Mason. My objection is whatever effects the original designers intended cannot be captured by the AI colorizing process as it stands today. What if training images to prime the AI were all based on color TV shows in the early days of color - bright and saturated and exhausting? AI-generated color and design tends to look garish anyway probably because of the taste of the IT bros who don’t know kitsch when they see it.  I can’t imagine what the process would do to the red highlights Hale sometimes put in her hair, but I suspect the reds would be, like Agent Scully’s, “a little too red.” How would an AI know how to use color to add emotion to the scene?  Colorizing from AI algorithms would inevitably distract from the mood, atmosphere, and drama conveyed by images and design originally conceived and captured for black and white.

But the realistic part of me grants a colorized classic Perry Mason will attract audiences. Black and white alienates many people, especially those that can’t bring themselves to believe in the distant past of 60 years ago we lived our lives in color. It would be great if colorizing Perry Mason would make the youngs put down the mobile and pay attention to the greatest courtroom series ever and its depth, creativity, convoluted plots, and high-minded morality (In The Case of the Impatient Partner, Perry says, “I always have faith, Mr. Fallon. Faith in what Judge Learned Hand called ‘the eventual supremacy of reason.’”).

By paying undivided attention, youth would learn to live with the bending of time and space. Like in The Case of the Sulky Girl, a scene supposedly taking place at 11:00 p.m. was obviously shot during the day. As for space, in The Case of the Crooked Candle, the inside of a sailboat is larger than its outside indicates, making us wonder if Perry and Della have wandered into Interstellar’s tesseract. At times out and out magic occurs as when in The Case of the Silent Partner, Lt. Tragg is driven to an apartment in a black 1957 Buick Roadmaster Riviera, but when he arrives moments later it is in a black 1957 Buick Special.

 

*CBS later cancelled the show due to low ratings ("Who wants to go up against Bonanza," asks a TV actor in the last episode TCOT Final Fade-out). Producer Gail Patrick Jackson told The New York Times that the network assumed everybody connected to the show was exhausted due to its grueling shooting schedule. Too true, Burr, obviously tired, frankly discussed burnout as early as 1963.

** I was not quite 10 years of age at the time and I don't recall public reaction to the color episode. I do remember, however, the high media interest and public semi-hysteria when Mia Farrow cut off her hair in late February 1966. Farrow said in her memoir you'd think nothing else was happening in the world. 

*** At 19, in 1941, she began fashion modelling to pay for her education at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. Besides that wonderful smile, she looked amazing in anything she wore.

Epic Historical Fiction

Creation – Gore Vidal

This historical novel is set in the 4th century BC, from the Persia of Darius and Xerxes to ancient India and China before Qin Shi Huang. The narrator is old and blind Cyrus Spitama who dictating his memoirs to his distant relative, the future laughing philosopher Democritus.

The story is Spitama’s life as an ambassador and traveler throughout the East and chronicles his meetings with Buddha, Confucius, Anaxagoras, and Herodotus. He even hires Socrates the mason, who botches getting a wall up, perhaps because of being distracted by musings about whether virtue can be taught.

As in Julian and Lincoln, Vidal pushes the reader to review many of their pious certainties soaked up in school and not really examined since. For instance, Vidal is acerbic about the glory that was Greece. “Democritus thinks Athens is wonderful,” our narrator observes. “The fact is, son, you haven't seen the rest of the world. I hope one day you can travel and go beyond your Greekness.” Cyrus entertains doubts: “wisdom was not born in Attica, Democritus, but maybe that's where it will die.”

As in the Narratives of Empire, Vidal loves these large frescoes, where he can allow himself to recast a familiar or dimly recalled story as he sees it, such as the Greek wars from the viewpoint of the Persians. But the real preoccupation of the novel is that of the narrator, the grandson of Zoroaster, as to how the universe arose and who or what created it, with the answers of the various wise men and philosophers of the time. Confucius, a practical scholar, shrugged at inquiries into first causes, figuring that it was a waste to time discussing unanswerable questions and that our life, right here, right now, wasn’t affected whether the origin of Creation was divine or natural forces.

A good novel for those times when the reader that wants an evocation of the remote past, with endless court and harem intrigues, regicide, parricide, fratricide, witches and sorcerers, bloodthirsty leaders and impalements of 15,000 soldiers on the losing side of a battle. Feel for a little time the world when it was either new relative to urbanization or philosophy or really old due to the intrigues of politicians, ministers, and merchants that thought they are going to build systems that would last forever only to have them survive founders by mere decades.

A Novel of Detroit

Note: The greatest TV courtroom drama series in the history of creation (Perry Mason) had deals with car-makers to provide vehicles for the show. Ford was hot to promote the Edsel whose sales were hurting from bad press, doubts about its workmanship, and baffled public derision due to its oddly beautiful or beautifully odd appearance. In The Case of the Buried Clock (1958) a beautiful top-of-the-line Edsel Citation appears all too briefly. And The Case of the Bedeviled Doctor (1959) features a 1959 Edsel convertible, white interior, with its top down. In The Case of the Spurious Sister is seen a white 1959 Edsel Corsair four-door hard top. The Case of the Watery Witness (1959) has two Edsels: a convertible and perhaps the same Edsel Corsair as in the previous episode Spurious Sister.

Edsel: A Novel of Detroit – Loren D. Estleman

Our narrator-protagonist is Connie Minor. His glory days as a crime reporter for the Prohibition-era Detroit Banner are but a dim memory by the time his story opens in 1954. Connie is working where old writers go to curl up and die: an advertising agency.

But Connie is adept at creating advertising copy and campaigns. Because of his marketing prowess, he is hired by Ford executive Israel Zed to plan strategy on the campaign to sell the still secret E-car, later known as the Edsel. To get a feeling for the auto business in terms of manufacturing, Connie interviews the guys on the line in the plant at River Rouge*

Nothing happens in the plants that UAW leader Walter Reuther doesn’t know about. Resenting Connie’s “spying” activities, Reuther pressures Connie to use his underworld connections to find out the who and why behind the attempted murder of Reuther and his brother in 1948.

To get an in with mobsters, Connie approaches pro wrestler Anthony Battle, who hangs out with people dear to the hearts of people from SE Michigan who were Born in the Fifties: Leaping Larry Shane, Bobo Brazil, Haystack Calhoun and The Shiek. Anthony, however, says he will approach the mobsters with Connie’s request for an interview only if Connie intervenes with Stuart Leadbeater, an ambitious politician who is threating to paint Anthony as a pinko, which is the kiss of death in the commie-nervous USA of 1954.

Connie cuts a deal with Stuart Leadbeater to save Anthony by promising the goods on Albert Brock, tough head of Steelhaulers' Union who may have ordered the shotgun blast through the Reuthers’ kitchen window. Connie also talks to twin mobsters, the Ballista brothers, to little avail in his cause, but some very fine set pieces for the reader. Estleman’s evocation of hospitals, especially cancer wards, will stir readers who remember visiting patients in old Harper Hospital, demolished in 1977.

And remember gold shag carpeting, license plate keychains, jelly glasses, and the “table lamp with a revolving shade that simulated a forest fire when it was switched on” that grandmother used to have. Readers that know what a Kelvinator is will indeed get a kick or two. Besides nostalgia that isn’t sick-making, bonus points for mentioning places like Port Huron and Melvindale. Estleman’s tone is caustic but never dark and cynical. Interesting is his claim that the failure of the Edsel was both cause and symptom of cultural malaise that would be exacerbated by Vietnam and Watergate.

*Rouge Steel was a five-minute walk from the house I grew up in. Nothing says home to me like the smell of industrial pollution.

The Nones of Perry Mason 77

Note: I’ve read so many goddamn Perry Masons. ESG uses a recipe with different ingredients, but a constant element is Mason's sympathy. He is never so hard-boiled that he doesn't feel sympathy for a client in trouble deep through malice, poor judgement or sheer bad luck. Mason is often attracted by the prospect of examining an unusual wrinkle in a case.

The Case of the Dubious Bridegroom - Erle Stanley Gardner

Michael Garvin spins money in mining businesses like Rumpelstiltskin spins straw into gold. Outside of the boardroom, however, the one-trick pony stumbles into one personal mess after another. He gets married to red-headed Lorraine even though he has not confirmed that his first wife has really divorced him. 

Garvin belatedly comes to the decision to consult Perry Mason to check if his quicky Mexican divorce will hold up in the Home of the Brave. Then, wanting a romantic get-away despite a looming stockholders meeting, he traipses off on a second honeymoon without letting anybody know where he’s going. Finally, in the crisis following the shooting death of his first wife, Garvin lies to Mason about his movements on the night of the killing.

Trust Gardner to treat us to a relatable defendant. Lots of readers fantasize about retaining a supportive lawyer who will fight for us no matter how lame our excuses sound or how many silly decisions we’ve made. Even, in our surprise and shock, when we’ve picked up the murder weapon at the scene of the crime.

Not so relatable is Virginia Colfax, the kind of smart devious active woman we quiet guys are scared of at work. While working late in his office, Mason spies a comely woman on the fire escape. When Mason queries her as to what she’s up to, the hottie says she works upstairs for Garvin’s extraction companies. Mason notes she’s carrying something that glints, which she tosses away, saying it was a flashlight.

He wants to confirm her identity by checking out her car registration, but out on the street she lays a mitten on him (translating 1949ese: slaps him), making onlookers think she’s a pretty baa-lamb fending off a wolf. In celeb-addled LA, this spectacle is noted and thus appears in the gossip column in the paper the next morning. His secretary Della Street rags Perry, but stoical Mason shrugs it off as one of those things that just happen.

But things get complicated mighty quick when Perry finds himself enmeshed in a case that involves two convoluted situations. One is bigamy involving a Mexican divorce that may or may not be legal. The other is a proxy fight looming at a stockholders meeting.

As usual, Gardner paints an unflattering portrait of the guardians of our criminal justice system. The cops arrest their person of interest by using trickery. At the trial two bumbling prosecutors are more intent on puffing themselves up by making Perry look bad than on building a strong case. They are helped out by Perry’s client, who lies to Perry. Like I tell my ESL students, tell the whole truth to your doctor, your lawyer, and your English teacher.

A good, not great, Mason mystery.

No Woman Ever had Such a Lover

Note: The Gail Patrick film festival continues. Some of her previous movies have been reviewed: If I Had a Million, Murders in the Zoo, and The Phantom Broadcast. In this movie she plays an American rich girl. She sets her cap on Death. She plays the part as frank, direct, and open, not a haughty rich at all, as she was destined to be typed after she played mean sister Cornelia in My Man Godfrey a couple of years later. To readers wondering why a forgotten actress is appearing in what could be taken for a Perry Mason blog, she was the executive producer of the greatest courtroom drama of teevee's first century - you guessed it in one - Perry Mason.

Death Takes a Holiday
1934 / 1:19
Tagline: “No one can die - while he makes love!”
[internet archive]

A rich English family and their American friends are enjoying a festival while the intended of the family’s son prays in church. Her piety and seeking of the illimitable contrast with the frivolity, heedlessness, and worldliness of the family she will marry into. Speeding back to their villa they escape being killed only because Death decides to take a three-day vakay at their Italian villa.

Death feels curious as to why mortals have such terror and revulsion regarding his reality. Death desires to know the reasons few people can think straight about death, taking their individual extinction personally indeed. Shunned, Death feels lonely. At first, only the host knows Death’s true identity. Death impersonates charming Count Sirki.

Frederic March plays the title role. His Death is stern and preemptory but also stiff and pompous as if unused to having a body of flesh and blood and wearing clothes. March does not overdo Death being taken with sensual pleasures like wine; after a sip, he says wonderingly but not too, “Already I have learned a fact of importance.” His lines are delivered deadpan, heavy with meanings given his identity. Meeting an experienced diplomat, he says, “Given your age, it’s a surprise we have not met before.”

Much of the humor is nonverbal. Death looks ever so slightly bemused as if just struck by the fact when he says, “I have something in common with doctors” and “They were such heavy drinkers that they weren’t afraid even of me.” He looks earnest and reassuring when he says of war, “Your sacred privilege of blowing each other to bits is quite safe.”

Gail Patrick glares at her rival for the Count’s attentions. She plays an engaging American rich girl, disarmingly direct. Death naively insults her, saying the wrong thing in the wrong way. Seeing he’s blown it somehow, he observes, “The Baron will be disappointed,” because the Baron taught him the main game in life was love.

One gets the feeling the budget for this movie was not all that generous. Although shot on only a couple of sets, the production avoids feeling stagey. Considering the script is based on a play, it is a little talky but not oppressively so. There’s much movement and the story goes straight and true.

I suppose with regard to theme, movie-goers could see this movie as an example of Pre-Code risk-taking. Examining issues concerning death in a buoyant fashion is not exactly an enterprise people-pleasing Hollywood is famous for. Messages are delivered, I think, indirectly, to avoid singeing movie-goers who think a frank treatment of death is tantamount to taking their granny’s death lightly. While the lessons here don’t depart from what wise people have been saying about Death for centuries, they are not on the level of greeting cards either. Only connect. Love one another. Relish the time you have, here and now.

The Kalends of Perry Mason 76

Note: Vintage mysteries can often be read as snapshots of life as it really felt to the people living it. Astute readers will find things not mentioned even in popular histories. The background to the story reviewed this month is an example of Gardner unwittingly writing the first draft of the history of the home front during WWII. The backdrop of the war adds credibility and depth to this forgotten mystery.

The Case of the Smoking Chimney  - Erle Stanley Gardner

In the early 1940s, the creator of Perry Mason wrote a pair of mysteries starring Gramps Wiggins. The first was The Case of the Turning Tide (1941) and this novel was the sequel. Gramps must have been psychic, able to anticipate the trend of the American retiree to live on the move in a trailer. Gramps is apt to show up in the driveway of his grand-daughter Milred’s house in a swanky neighborhood of a Californian small city. Milred is married to Frank Duryea, who’s the DA for Santa Delbarra County, which may be a pun on Santa Barbara.

Gardner opens the mystery by introducing the rum characters. Ralph Pressman, with sharp elbows in the oil business, is buying up leases in Santa Delbarra County. Due to the human tendency to assume the future will not be so terribly different from the present, the local farmers have figured that nobody was ever going to use the leases to extract oil. So when Pressman sinks a test well, they remember what happened to their ancestors and accordingly get nervous about being tricked and exploited and robbed of their land and livelihoods. Not above working with main-chancers as bad as Pressman, Hugh Sonders, the leader of the farmers, works with George Karper, another hardhearted opportunist in development and extraction.

Harvey Stanford is Pressman’s auditor. Young and so dumb he thinks he’s smart, he plays the casino game with a mean house edge: roulette. Inevitably he finds himself in debt to the tune of $17,000, about $300K in today’s money. His girlfriend is a “gifted amateur with commercial tendencies” Eva Raymond, who likes excitement too much for her own good (how she puts up with sitting at Harv’s side at the slow-paced roulette table is a poser; she sounds more like a gal for the craps table).

Pressman has a wife Sophie that is twenty years younger than him and feeling unloved because Pressman is cold, austere, undemonstrative, and dedicated to the pursuit of wealth and property. Pressman’s loyal secretary Jane Graven tries to hide a private eye’s report about Sophie’s cheating with young rich guy Pelly Baxter but Sophie is too ruthless for Jane and gets her mitts on the reports and the negatives of her and her Pelly doing stuff to make poor Jane blush.

Basically, the verisimilitude comes out of many believable characters having believable personal and professional agendas. Also feeling true to this scheming world is the business background of outside interests in the extraction business catching small-town folks unawares. Gardner was from a mining family and lawyered in small-town California so he was familiar with thorny legal and social issues connected with mining and oil drilling ventures.

As a character, Gramp Wiggins is as American as hot dogs in his frank manner, independent ways, humor, warmth, and friendliness. In his seventies, he’s a ball of energy, always into new enthusiasms. He’s friendly, talkative, sociable and milks information out of people in spite of their initial suspicion of his interest in the inevitable murder. Gramps treads warily, never exploiting his in-law relationship with Frank the DA.

But Frank has to be patient when Gramps horns in on the murder investigation by possibly fabricating evidence to protect somebody he likes and point Frank and the cops in the direction he thinks they should look. After all, at the next election half of the public will trash him for disloyalty if he puts a relative in jail. And the other half will trash him if he shows nepotism by not putting a relative in jail. Gardner had a good feeling for the political and social pressures small-town DA’s had to face. It’s also a change from the Mason novels to view the murder investigation from the DA/cop point of view.

In the Mason and Cool & Lam novels of the 1940s, Gardner, to my mind, was at the top of his game. But I thought without the familiar characters this would be mediocre. But this was way better than middling. The story, setting, and characterization are utterly plausible.  The humor moves the story along and Gramps provide comic relief in funny dialogues. The third-person omniscient narrator causes us to hear conversations among persons of interest, handling each other with antsy mistrust and fearing that they are being set up to be the fall guy.

Gardner was careful not to date his novels with topical references, but uncharacteristically, he dates this 1942 story by referring to wartime austerities. In the shadow of tire rationing, Gramps offers his grandson-in-law a ride to “save rubber.” To spit in the eye of rationing, foodie Gardner gives suggestions for eating magnificently. No sugar? Hotcakes with maple syrup. No flour or eggs? Strawberry shortcake. No meat? Make hash more palatable with lots of garlic.

European Reading Challenge #3

Sharks and Little Fish: A Novel of German Submarine Warfare - Wolfgang Ott

Based on the author's WWII experience as a young sailor and submariner, Haie und kleine Fische
(S&LF) stands with classic novels of the U-boat genre such as Das Boot by Lothar-Guenther Buchheim and Run Silent, Run Deep by Edward L. Beach.  S&LF gives raw, ferocious accounts of men in dangers posed by the mistakes of crewmates, the incompetence and mania of officers, the relentlessness of weather, water, and salt, and the physical foulness of submarine life.

Wolfgang Ott was almost seventeen when he got called up into the Navy at the beginning of WWII.  As Willi Heinrich fictionalized his experience as a grunt on the Eastern front in the best-selling Cross of Iron, Ott also wrote an autobiographical novel and published it in 1957.

The first half of S&LF finds us with the main character Teichmann, also barely seventeen, on his tour of duty on a mine sweeper. Ott displays control of scene-setting and action, deadpanning his way through brutal, perilous situations but never resorting to a callous or hard-boiled tone.  It’s a rare book whose tone, incident, characters mesh so finely that I, a lover of sleep, stayed up past my bedtime. But I read the first 150 pages or so, enthralled, until my eyes smarted. Such a thing never happens.

With only sometime lapses into overwrought prose, Ott stays matter-of-fact. He implies that the young are too dumb and green to be panicky and that the older, more practiced soldiers and sailors become experienced enough to be scared brickless. Only seventeen as Ott reminds us, Teichmann is too young to recognize as possibilities getting killed and being dead forever. For instance, stuck in a rubber raft and menaced by a half-dozen sharks, Teichmann feels only mild concern till it only gradually dawns on him that he’s really in tight spot. Indeed, the word “sharks” in the title refers not only to the war, which chews almost everybody up, but also to the marine carnivorous fishes with forked tails that will happily munch down a teenage sailor as a quick snack. Mortal danger in this novel takes forms both figurative and literal: on one hand, the caprices of fate and on the other, English bombers and corvettes and destroyers.
 
Against such bad odds – eight of ten U-boats did not return to port – bravery helps only so much. For Heinrich in Cross of Iron, an officer observes why men continue to fight even when the situation looks hopeless, “To fight for a conviction does not require heroism. Heroism begins where the meaninglessness of the sacrifice remains the last, only message the dead can leave behind.”

Ott is more skeptical about heroism. The professional warriors know how and when to fight and they never think of why. They are ironic about their business. When one officer asks another how he spent one of his days on leave, the other replies with a straight face, “Reading Ernst Jünger.” Jünger wrote the solemnly hard-boiled WWI memoir Storm of Steel, which the Nazis kept in print, unlike their banning and burning of All Quiet on the Western Front by anti-war Erich Maria Remarque.

Ringing true is his account of brutal officer training, which came out of the inferiority complex of the German navy of the time. Without being too satirical, Ott exposes the unnecessary and pointless discipline of the naval establishment, who seems to assume mere military formalities will induce esprit de corps and an authentic martial tradition.  Such exalted emotions can’t be imposed, it’s like kidding yourself that something is true because the authorities merely assert that it’s true.

In contrast to Heinrich in Cross of Iron, Ott does not neglect the social and political side of the war. For instance, the midshipmen return to Germany for a couple of Christmases as Germans become poorer and more guarded. Talking about the war and national psychology, the cowed civilians babble ready-made phrases on the order of “If you want to make an omelet, you’ve got to break eggs.” As for the leaders, two sailors dismiss with scorn the “fairy tales” told by the “club-footed Jesuit” of a propaganda minister.

At the time the fictionalized memoir was a best-seller, the heavy-hitting Times Literary Supplement said, "It is as uncompromising, vivid, and unfalsified an account of war-time naval life as has appeared." The book is not a multi-layered classic on the order of James Jones’ The Thin Red Line but it’s better than memoirs of the “I Fought in Okinawa” variety.  Because of the occasional over-writing and melodrama, I’d place it next to Jones’ classic potboiler From Here to Eternity.

Of interest to those into the topic of minesweeper/sub warfare or ambitious fictionalized war memoirs.

The Skeleton in the Cupboard

Note: Maugham has been popular with hardcore pleasure readers (like me!) for going on a century now. In the parables The Razor's Edge, The Painted Veil, and The Moon and Sixpence, he gives implicit advice on how to live a flourishing life.  Where else will busy readers be exposed to Epicureanism? Life is short, so live and let live, and seek out delight as often as you can.

Cakes and Ale: Or, The Skeleton in the Cupboard - W. Somerset Maugham

Set in England, this novel’s time periods are the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, as seen from a writer looking back from around 1930.

The death of elderly writer Edward Driffield, by 1930 esteemed as the Last of the Victorians and recognized as an inimitable man of letters, gives the high-minded widow the opportunity to commission a biography that will relate the life and times with proper reverence. Having selected a best-selling writer to assist her, the two pump for background information a third writer - the narrator Willie Ashenden - one of the few still among the quick, of proper taste and station, to have known Driffield in youth.

The interview prompts Willie to hark to his youth and to his first meetings with Driffield in the 1880s, when Ted was still just an unknown with a passion for writing and his masterpieces were far from anybody’s wildest fancies.  Willie also reflects on Driffield’s first wife Rosie. Though the widow and the hack want Rosie conveniently forgotten, it is the mysterious Rosie who plays a major role in Willie’s story and in the story of the famous writer himself.

A free spirit, Rosie liberates Willie from small town conceit, pig-ignorance, and quirkiness. Her bolting also gives another woman the chance to work her PR magic to make Driffield the famous man of letters. Maugham hints we can’t always be sure about what is good or bad in every situation nor can we predict whether things will turn out good or bad in the long run.

The first-person narrative persona (the mask is maybe the most prominent modernist thing about Maugham) reveals the rest of the story of the skeleton. At first, we readers are made to think that there is not much to this tale but a Forster-like tweaking of respectability (Howards End) and advocacy for individual freedom (Where Angels Fear to Tread).

We soon find ourselves dealing with twists, however. The prose is spare, which contrasts with muddles and tangles the characters land themselves in.  The world-weary Maugham persona provides urbane asides about literary fashions, style, taste, and so-called Beauty (as subject to fashion as clothing). On the happy citizens of the Land of the Free:

The Americans, who are the most efficient people on the earth, have carried [ready made phrases*] to such a height of perfection and have invented so wide a range of pithy and hackneyed phrases that they can carry on an amusing and animated conversation without giving a moment's reflection to what they are saying and so leave their minds free to consider the more important matters of big business and fornication.

Maugham started his career in the late Victorian era and is one of the few major figures whose writing career spanned so much change. A doctor, Maugham brought to his narrative persona a matter-of-factness about the body and its vagaries; unsentimental about birth, death, and marriage; and for 1930 frank about women’s sexuality. Of the modest persons, gentlemen of small means, clergymen, retired officers in the countryside in the 1890s, candid Maugham says:

…People who were condemned to spend their lives within a mile of one another quarreled bitterly, and seeing each other every day in the town cut one another for twenty years. They were vain, pig-headed, and odd. It was a life that perhaps formed queer characters; people were not so like one another as now and they acquired a small celebrity by their idiosyncrasies, but they were not easy to get on with.

The skeleton in the cupboard of the sub-title is Rosie. Her free and easy ways express a tolerant attitude about life in this uptight and messed-up world. At the end of chapter XVII pleasure-seeker Rosie reasons Willie out of his irrational jealousy over her sexing it up with other men. She argues by obsessing about her other affairs, Willie himself undermines the sexual satisfaction and emotional contentment he can get in the here and now. She argues her affairs don’t offer him any harms or threats so he is much better off not worrying about concerns that are none of his business.

Rosie advises that Willie had better take the long view. Soon enough, everybody we know will be gone and the things we thought so important will be dust. Nothing is so important that we need to make ourselves miserable and self-pitying and frustrated by fretting and stewing and ruminating about it. Nothing.

Take other people as they are, life as it really is. The tolerant acceptance of reality, both good and bad, will inspire and set Willie free. He had better focus on managing his own responses to his feelings, other people, events, and then nothing can hold him back. 

Maugham is often beaten up for his alleged icy detachment, his harsh cynical take on ordinary people who do their best only to screw up time after time. But I think he implicitly advocates the ideas above – being present, minding your own business, view from above (a.k.a. taking the long view), disputing irrational beliefs, using free will to embrace necessity - as reasonable ways to deal with the inevitable troubles life throws in our path. And Maugham’s enduring popularity with hardcore readers like us - outsiders, dreamers, rebels, seekers, malcontents, beats, scamps, and slackers – is due to his focus on the ethical question, “How should we live.”

* We're still good at them <sigh>: the bottom line; it is what it is; at the end of the day; iconic; silver bullet; obsessed; side-hustle; and wait for it.

The Crooner Lay Dead...

Note: Gail Patrick's film debut was in 1932, a scene in If I had a Million. After a couple of uncredited parts in 1933, she got a speaking role Murders in the Zoo. In the movie reviewed here, she plays a cheerful optimistic woman that must choose between marriage and a singing career. Radio was filled with live programming in the days before widespread recording so it is in fact conceivable that singers, no matter in what genre, could make a living in big cities. Gail Patrick Jackson found retirement tedious in the 1950s, so she became the executive producer of the greatest courtroom drama ever Perry Mason.

The Phantom Broadcast
1933 / 1:12
Tagline: "The Crooner Lay Dead...Yet His Voice Haunted 20,000,000 People!”
[internet archive]

Grant Murdock has become a radio star with song and charm that entrance women of all ages. He’s earning so much money that gangsters want to take over his management and skim his earnings. After all, they are facing a loss of revenue due to the Repeal of Prohibition in December and mobsters have bills to pay too. To accomplish this end, the mugs must knock off Norman Wilder, Grant’s business manager, accompanist, and singing coach.

Ironically, the hoods don’t know that killing Wilder would tank Grant’s career. Wilder, in fact, is the singing voice behind Grant, since this kind of faking was easier to pull off in the bygone days before Milli Vanilli stole our innocence. Not explained was how sensitive sensible ethical Wilder got himself neck deep in such a sham. Maybe he got sucked in because he loved singing so much and he knew music brought comfort to Americans hard-pressed by the Depression. A noble artist! An idealistic soul!

Grant, not an artist but a star, is a total ingrate and brute, mocking Wilder’s spinal deformity which makes it impossible for him to become a heart throb. Inserted in this talky drama for the sake of a modicum of action, an attempt is made on Wilder’s life involving a car chase and tommy guns. The attempt fails but gallant Wilder finds himself implicated in another killing.

As a fickle puritan, I must opine on the Pre-Code aspects of this picture. While Wilder is a paragon of the lofty and high-minded, morally iffy is the gangsters having Elsa sleep with Grant in order to insert a wedge between Grant and Wilder. Much to the mobsters’ disgust at mixing business and pleasure, Elsa falls in love with Grant, who treats her like trash because, in the tradition of "ladies' men," he holds women in contempt. Plus, Grant has hit on the grubby idea to defile wholesome Gail Patrick.

Also lowering the moral tone is everybody mocking the afflicted Wilder for his kyphosis. On the upside, Wilder takes these insults philosophically, since it is easy to assume that he has been hearing put-downs about his body his entire life. He would have had to develop a thick skin to stay sane.

Bold is the sexuality of the characters played by Vivienne Osbourne and Pauline Garon. They both move like women who know they are free, though Osbourne’s Elsa is using her charms with an eye to future big bucks, furs, diamonds, etc. Most shockingly, the culprit gets away with murder. Getting a movie-goer to pull for a culprit to get away with it is about as Pre-Code you can get, I imagine. I’m down with the guilty party walking away every once in a while, just for the contrast to the glop and pap Hollywood was later to so cautiously churn out.

Hey, I said I was fickle.

Attractions include not only sophisticated Art Deco decorations in Grant’s apartment. The acting and writing make up a garland of antique charms. The acting has carry-over from the silent era, with lengthy shots of overwrought faces expressing profound emotions. Actors talk real slow, as if the audience were not used to voices coming from the big screen yet. The ending is as corny as Kansas in August. There are many weak lines that call to mind short stories in romance magazines. “A heartening phrase.”  “To reach people you must have sympathy.” As a budding star torn between career and marriage, Gail Patrick does what actors have to do, i.e. make feeble lines persuasive: “I've reached a crossroads.” “Music is a zealous master,” Wilder sagely warns her.

Also of interest to movie-goers into the history of pop culture, the word “crooner” is twice used indignantly in “He’s not a crooner.” By the early 1930s, the term “crooner” and “crooning” had taken on a pejorative nuance. Cardinal William O'Connell of Boston and the New York Singing Teachers Association (NYSTA)* both denounced crooning in the papers. Perhaps fearing that women would be emotionally manipulated by libertines who sang in that style, Cardinal O'Connell called crooning “base,” “degenerate,” “defiling” and “un-American,” with the NYSTA adding “corrupt.” Other culture mavens stigmatized crooners as gender and sexual deviants. The loyal assistant of Wilder, Sandy, sourly observes of Grant “When all the dames are gaga about a guy, there's usually something wrong with him." 

* Still in existence, NYSTA is the oldest continuing singing teachers organization in the world.

Today is Vernal Equinox Day

春分の日 Shunbun no Hi. This national holiday was established in 1948 as a day for enjoying nature and cultivating love for all living things. Prior to 1948, the vernal equinox was an imperial ancestor worship festival called Shunki kōrei-sai (春季皇霊祭) - in other words, it had lots of ultranationalistic overtones that the post-war Japanese felt uneasy about. Let's celebrate spring by reading a non-fiction book about Japan.

Dogs and Demons: Tales from the Dark Side of Modern Japan – Alex Kerr

The author’s Japanese is so proficient that he writes and publishes in it, a rare ability in a foreigner. His second book Dogs and Demons was released in 2001 and has been recommended as a must-read ever since. The title is from an old Chinese story. The emperor asked his court painter what's easy and what's difficult to paint. The artist answered that demons are easy but dogs are difficult. The artist meant that the quiet low-key things in the environment are hard to get right but flamboyant eye-catching things are easy. It was Kerr’s ambition to explain dogs - what's in front of everybody's nose but hard to see.

Kerr’s basic thesis is that Japan has been mired in economic woes since 1990 because politicians, bureaucrats and business leaders have been unwilling and unable to change their old ways and meet today's challenges.

For more than two decades, Japan's national debt has floated above 100% of its GDP. In fact, as of the second quarter of 2022, Japan's debt-to-GDP ratio was 226%. Debt is out of control because of government spending on public works projects that feed the largest employer in the country and raise demons, i.e., flashy projects that are easy to point to. For instance, the construction industry piles unsightly tetrapods one upon another along about half of the Japanese coastline. Studies done on US coasts have shown that instead of protecting beaches, the 50-ton concrete thingies in reality promote erosion.

To spend down budgets lest they be cut the next fiscal year, the Japanese equivalent of the Department of the Interior pays millions and millions to the construction industry to mold the tetrapods and plop them on the beaches. Kerr paints an unsettling picture of a bureaucracy turned spending machine for which nobody can find the off switch. As often happens among federal bureaucrats in the US, Japanese officials retire from government at the mandatory age of 55, and then they find jobs in the very industries they used to regulate.

Kerr builds a strong case because the book is solidly researched. Figures and examples support his assertion that bureaucrats in Japan collude with industry to construct boondoggles and white elephants (demons) instead of making the small particular changes (dogs) necessary to solve problems.

Using his ability to read Japanese, Kerr provides an insider’s view of the environmental degradation of Japan, the disappearance of the Japanese movie industry and the failure of internationalization. The one qualm I have with this treatment is that although he argues that plenty of Japanese are becoming concerned about the ecology, he doesn't say much about the complacent voters who are happy to receive government pork for schools, community centers, paved roads, train lines and communication towers.

The chapter on the Japanese attitude toward information is fascinating mainly because I have first-hand experience with the Japanese tendency to equivocate, prevaricate, cover, and generally mishandle information. One tiny story. When I taught in Okinawa I noted a couple of times on campus an English professor toting around a camera. I asked him on two different occasions what he was taking pictures of and both times he clowned to avoid telling me. I found out from a third party a simple explanation. For a committee the English prof was taking shots of illegally parked cars to collect evidence that the campus lacked adequate parking space. I heard the explanation only after I angrily stopped being curious, figuring “F**k it I'm not gonna give a s**t if he's got such a f*****g problem giving me the a f*****g answer to a non-sensitive f*****g question,” so incensed was I over nothing (my last two years of six in Japan I often needed more self-control than I could muster for a high-context culture). Kerr says the slow pace of Internet adoption and the waste of time that is the Japanese Internet is the result of this aversion to openness.

Anyway, Japanophile Kerr ends on a cautious but pessimistic note. This is a powerful book and well worth reading for those interested in what happened to Japan in the 1990s. Kerr not only quotes modern scholars and journalists but quotes great opinion leaders in the past to get the long view. This book is still worth reading.

Pop Evolutionary Psychology

The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology & Everyday Life – Robert Wright

Through the lens of human evolutionary psychology, this book examines one, the life of Charles Darwin in terms of his theory and two, nature as it is expressed in human behavior. The theory, I think, posits us as animals with morals, with our impulses and instincts formed millions of years ago when we were human primates, long before we were influenced by the culture of our hunter-gatherer forebears.

Much good in this mean old world is a result of natural selection even when our intentions to be cautiously skeptical, favorably accepting, gratefully generous are not ideally carried out, even for the sake of passing on our genes to the next generations. Wright asserts:

The one thing one can't do, I submit, is argue that evolutionary psychology is irrelevant to the whole discussion. The idea that natural selection, acutely sensitive to the most subtle elements of design in the lowliest animals, should build huge, exquisitely pliable brains and not make them highly sensitive to environmental cues regarding sex, status, and various other things known to figure centrally in our reproductive prospects - that idea is literally incredible. If we want to know when and how a person's character begins to assume distinct shape, if we want to know how resistant to change the character will subsequently be, we have to look to Darwin. We don't yet know the answers, but we know where they'll come from, and that knowledge helps us phrase the questions more sharply.

We know it must be the genes because the same stuff pops up in many cultures around the world. Most infanticides are committed by stepfathers.  Men find women with large eyes and small noses more beautiful. To be human is to gossip. No culture admires its members who are cheap but universally people are stingy when they know they can get away with it. We most of us would take a bullet for the same sibling that we’d gladly strangle during a fight over an inheritance.

These and many other crucial questions about human behavior are explained with evolutionary biology. Evolutionary biology used to be called sociobiology, but back in the day sociobiology attracted so much gleeful politically incorrect attention from fascists, clansmen, and fundamentalists that decent people ran away the word, if not the field.

And Wright is quite a good writer, able to explain hard concepts in prose a reader of average intelligence (like me) can comprehend. Wright is a science journalist, not a biologist. But his is a good read for people that are interested in our evolutionary path and the latent drives that motivate our feelings and responses, as well as the environmental conditions that have shaped human nature over millions of years.

The Ides of Perry Mason 75

Note: In the old Roman calendar, the Kalends, Nones, and Ides were three special days that marked the beginning, middle, and end of a month's counting period. In hat tip to those tough old Romans, on the first, fifth or seventh, and the fifteen of every month, we will run an article about Erle Stanley Gardner's various contributions to the mystery genre. So many are in the can, and it's not like I'm kidding myself I'm exempt from the universal experience of humankind. Below are the memorable episodes from the initial season of the Perry Mason TV series that ran from 1957 to 1966, in 271 episodes.

The Best of Season 1 (1957-58)

The Case of the Restless Redhead. The very first episode features two-gun switcheroos that don’t add to the plot or the reveal but show Mason’s inventiveness in manipulating circumstances, cops, and persons of interest sometimes blew up in his face. Stunning Whitney Blake as the titular redhead puts in a convincing performance as the every-woman waitress who’s not getting any breaks. Her gripping tale is an example of “innocence exonerated,” a theme Gardner knew his audience loved. Whitney's tears of gratitude when Mason gets her off really are wonderful to behold. Vaughan Taylor appears as the motel-keeper who wants out of his go-nowhere existence and boring marriage to harsh pioneer woman Jane Buchanan. It was his first of eight appearances on the show, four as a deceptive guy and then defendant, murderer, and twice the victim who had it comin’. I like this one because it’s emblematic of the noir look of the first couple seasons.

The Case of the Vagabond Vixen. After he picks up a young female hitchhiker and gets her a job, a movie producer lands in trouble deep. Carol Leigh plays the kitten with a whip to perfection. Cast as the vixen’s mother, Barbara Pepper (Arnold the Pig’s mother in Green Acres) plays her usual salt of the earth type. When Perry conceals her in a hotel room he says, “Your stay here is on me so get anything you want,” to which she replies, “That's good. I need a beer.” Catherine McLeod was another fine actress the casting department hired, this time playing a sympathetic person so dedicated to the cinematic arts that she commits terrible crimes for them. After his devastating cross-examination of the wayward girl, Perry offers noir advice “You ought to tell them if they're ever tempted to pick up a lady on the highway, don't. If she's no lady, it could be murder.”

The Case of the Lonely Heiress shines because of the force of nature  Anna Navarro. She so convincingly plays her character as a victim of her own muddled thinking that we are reminded of the risks of interpreting what other people say and do through the narrow template of anger and anxiety. When her character on the stand asks Perry in a hurt bewildered voice, “Do you think I’m a bad girl,” we think, “Well, while I usually say that we’re all just people who sometimes do bad things, with your greediness, yelling, dish-throwing, larceny, blackmail, lying, cruelty, exploitation of the vulnerable, battery, assault with a deadly weapon and attempted murder, yeh, I’d have to say you’re a very bad girl.”

Homage to the Golden Age

Murder in a Mummy Case - K.K. Beck

Harken back to the kinder gentler traditions of the Golden Age whodunit. This 1986 effort is charming and delightful, though the author would go on about clothes: “dressed in a smart two-piece golf ensemble, aquamarine wool knit with a band of orange at the neck and in the gores of the skirt.”

Gores? Luckily I married a weaver and sewer, she knows about these things.

Set in the late 1920s, Stanford co-ed Iris Cooper has received permission from her parents to spend Easter Break with gentleman friend Clarence Brockhurst and his wealthy family. The high society setting will bring to mind Charlie Chan novels by Earl Derr Biggers. The characters are wealthy enough to afford eccentric hobbies and maintain wacky hangers-on. Mrs. Brockhurst employs a spiritualist medium and her entourage of assistant Mr. Jones and a lady’s maid who turns out to be The Victim. She has also taken in a poor relation Aunt Laura and a dispossessed White Russian Count Boris. Son Clarence has the resources to indulge his hobby of Egyptology and even keeps a mummy in the house, which the psychic blames for evil emanations.

Mystery fans and fans of B-movies by Poverty Row studios will recognize the stock characters.  Iris is smart and sweet, and plucky in the pinch. Brassy and bold she is not but those are covered by Clarence‘s sister Bunny, a free-spirited flapper. Iris’ other possible BF is a walking checklist of traits of a young newshound: brash, quick witted, wisecracking, and prone to jump to conclusions. Clarence is the huffy pompous mooncalf who woos his lady love with the promise to teach her how to read hieroglyphs.

Beck deals in comic allusions too. The butler, who is assumed to have Done It, is a Chinese named Charles Chan. Even the characters look askance at that. At the beginning, she has Iris say, “Had I but known that my request would lead me into another adventure, my anticipation would have been even greater,” which is a send-up of the standard melodramatic “Had I but known” foreshadowing of mysteries and gothics in the first half of the 20th century. At the end, a character marvels at his luck, “Imagine, I almost invested a fortune in some worthless little town in Southern California, Palm Springs it was called.

Beck must have read her share of cozy puzzlers of bygone days not only to spoof them but also to feel affectionate about the whole genre. Nostalgia buffs will like the dumbwaiter, speakeasy, and chaperones and other such artifacts, institutions and customs that went they way of the dodo before our grandparents checked out of this vale of tears.

Readers on the look-out for a light and entertaining mystery will not go wrong with this one.

Classic Travel Narrative

The Sea and the Jungle – H.M. Tomlinson

In 1910, Tomlinson sailed on the English tramp steamer Capella from Swansea to Porto Velho, Brazil, near the cataracts of the Madeira River.

He was the purser with light duties on the two-thousand ton steamship, which carried supplies for the construction at Porto Velho of the eastern terminus of the new Madeira-Mamore Railway. The steamer went upriver and Tomlinson also took some jaunts into the Brazilian rain forest some distance from the ship.

This classic travel narrative was only one of the author’s 30 book-length works. Tomlinson was one of the most respected writers of the first half of the 20th century, but he is little read nowadays.

My praise cannot possibly do justice to Tomlinson’s prose, such as this, on the rewards of travel:

They are no matter. They are untranslatable from their time and place; and like the man who unwittingly lies down to sleep on the tumulus where little people dance on midsummer night, and dreams that in the place where man has never been his pockets were filled with fairy gold, waking to find pebbles there instead, so the traveller cannot prove the dreams he had, showing us only pebbles when he tries.

And this:

When you sight your first mountains, a delicate and phantom gleam athwart the stars, are you reminded of the substance of the hills? I have been watching it for so long, this abiding and soundless forest, that now I think it is like the sky, intangible, an apparition; what the eye sees of the infinite, just as the eye sees a blue colour overhead at midday, and the glow of the Milky Way at night. For the mind sees this forest better than the eye. The mind is not deceived by what merely shows.

Whole paragraphs and pages feature this kind of writing. By the end, a certain "Nobody who's not done it can imagine what I've seen" tone creeps in, but so what, with prose like this?

Tomlinson went to Brazil on the freighter to get away from the humdrum craziness of working in the city so the reader had better try to avoid reading in the jangled mood that comes after a day at work.

The Nones of Perry Mason 74

Note: Buffs of classic Hollywood know that Raymond Burr played the murdering husband identified by apartment-bound James Stewart in Hitchcock’s Rear Window. But only hardcore readers who have somehow found their way to this blog know that before he landed the Perry Mason role in 1956 that was to be his ticket to immortality, Raymond Burr was the Portly Prince of Noir.

I Love Trouble
1948 / black and white / 1:35
Tagline: “Five Lovelies Leave a Trail of Perfume … and Murder!”
[internet archive]

Our buddy Burr has two lines in one scene – with shadow covering half his grim visage. His bulk compels our attention as he sizes up with his spellbinding eyes hero Franchot Tone. Burr seems to be measuring Tone for a beating. Tone has been hired by a well-connected LA realtor-politician to identify the blackmailer of his wife. After Tone pursues leads in Portland, the wife’s natal city, he returns to LA to dead bodies, edgy police and thugs that roughly request the information he gathered.

Franchot Tone saves his dignity by delivering noir one-liners with style and grace. He may be feeling that old “coming down in the world” feeling due to having to appear in a B movie, but he’s a true professional. What’s curious about his ambiguous character is that the viewer can’t guess how he is going to approach an interview, especially with women.

Burr’s disheveled partner in crime is John Ireland. He made a career of looking tough and at least half-way down the road to PsychoVille. Though the formidable one, it is Burr’s role to ensure that Ireland doesn't get carried away and kill anybody in the heat of the moment.

For comic relief, we get two wonderful actors. Glenda Farrell cracks wise as the tough city girl, game, canny, reliable as the PI’s ever faithful secretary. Tone asks her, “Ever have the feeling you're being watched or followed, and she replies sourly, “Not nearly enough.” Sid Tomack plays a wise-cracking bistro owner who comes to an unhappy end because he knows too much and wants to monetize his excess of knowledge. Appearing three times on the classic Perry Mason, Tomack was especially great in a satirical scene in The Case of the Envious Editor.

The main draw, however, is the bevy who possess a similar beauty. This feeds into the noir themes of doubleness, identity, and misdirection. Janis Carter and Lynn Merrick both shanghai a movie-goer’s attention wherever they enter a scene.  Janet Blair, a breathtaking pin-up, is the nice girl we’d take home to ma and warn pa to heed his better angels. Adele Jergens is the Jezebel we’d keep secret from the homefolks.

All this but we movie-goers are treated to location shots of Late Forties L.A., with brutal concrete buildings on Hollywood Boulevard. Venice Beach used to have clam chowder shacks where proprietors would say, “You can have clam chowder and clam chowder,” to which you would reply laconically, “I’ll have clam chowder” like a real noir hero. Oil derricks in Santa Monica, so cool. I like mid-century industrial infrastructure probably I grew up in a house a five-minute walk to the Rouge Plant. 

Though complicated, this diverting movie is redeemed by its Chandleresque writing. Caretaker of the mansion, where the kidnapped PI was kidnapped, drugged, beaten, and interrogated, when asked what the place is called, “733, that’s all. Places like this don’t have a name.” PI: “That’s what you think.”

She was a Good Girl in a Bad Joint!

Sensation Hunters
1933 / 73 minutes
Tagline: “THERE WERE PITFALLS AT EVERY STEP ---AND SHE DIDN'T MISS A SINGLE STEP!”
[internet archive]

The “Pre-Code” Era was roughly 1931 to 1934, when American movies were at their most spicy, a time when illicit sex and violence were common themes. The Poverty Row studio Monogram flirted with the exploitation genre. And this odd antique was the result.

It’s not nearly as disposable as silly things like Reefer Madness. It has genuine actors and actresses. The writers worked in character development and a moral with a little heft to placate puritans like me. In his debut, the director Charles Vidor added artistic touches. Vidor was not a hack and went on to have a respectable career. Hey, he was Hungarian so he must have been cool (my grandmother was Hungarian).

The opening sequence, set on a cruise ship from San Francisco to Panama City, features one woman in hot-pants and another in a bathing suit. A middle-aged man with a fake English milord accent and, worse, a travesty of a country shooting outfit tosses a coin on the floor so he can have a cover story if he is busted looking through keyholes. To fulfill the educational purpose of this production, we get a camera shot through a keyhole to see women changing, in case we weren’t quite sure what he was doing.

Due to the pandering content and the poor quality of the print (like sound drop-outs due to lost frames), I, my mother’s uptight son, was tempted to give up about 15 minutes into it. But the characterization got me more interested in the story and less bothered by the blemishes.

Upper-middle-class woman (Marion Burns) for reasons that are not made clear, signs up as singer in a troupe of dancers and b-girls. The troupe works in a notorious cabaret called The Bull Ring in wild, wide-open Panama City. Her working-class roommate, perennial best friend Arline Judge, is puzzled why such an elegant woman as Marion, brought up in affluent circumstances would take up such a job.

The Mama is played by a silent screen heroine Juanita Hansen, a Mack Sennet protege. Not above smacking the girls around to enforce her expectations, she is crude and bossy and all too effective in this role. The male actors, as usual, are nothing to write home about, but Walter Brennan has a small part in which he stutters in that injured voice he was saddled with after he was gassed during World War I. It was an era in which communicative disorders were played for laughs.

The action moves along briskly, but the real attraction is the setting of the down-at-heels cabaret, the third-rate hotel rooms, and people one does not meet in the normal course of life. Warner Bros had the rep for gritty settings but clearly the Poverty Row studios could render reality in all its romping glory to make us think, “My place is home with mother, but that sure does look fun.”

I’m a Thirties buff so I like anything that gives me a sense of what the time looked and smelled like. I’m also a moralist so I was placated that this movie, while not what I would call prim, was not as saucy as I was fearing. Unless I was reading into (I'm a meaning-seeking animal), I got the message to be careful what kind of people, places, and conditions you settle for since we set bars lower and lower insensibly until one fine day we wake up and realize we’re hanging out with the likes of people Mother wouldn’t have had in the house, I’m sure.