European Reading Challenge #5

Entangled in Terror: The Azef Affair and the Russian Revolution - Anna Geifman

Evno Azef was born in a Russian shtetl to poor Jewish parents in 1869. He was intelligent but anxiety and anger twisted his personality, which made him unpopular at school and work. In a fix, he impulsively stole 800 rubles and escaped to Germany where he studied engineering.

In order to keep the wolf from the door – poverty was his great anxiety – he supplanted his income by turning into a spy for the Tsar’s secret police. He told the dreaded Okhrana of the plans for terrorist attacks by the Socialist Revolutionary Combat Organization. Azef was regarded as the mastermind of two spectacular political assassinations, though in reality he tried in the SR itself to thwart attacks while telling the Okhrana about the plans.  After a 15-year career as a double-agent, he was unmasked in 1908, causing a huge scandal that shook up Europe.

Professor of modern Russian and Jewish history at Harvard, Prof. Geifman tells this interesting story, one right out of Brian Moore or John LeCarre. Also a psychohistorian, Geifman argues that Azef’s anxiety had its roots in abuse at his father’s hands, fear of poverty and pogroms, and his physical ugliness. In order to avoid facing his overwhelming anxiety and feelings of worthlessness, she argues, he sought the concrete risks of being an informer.

This is a fascinating book for students of secret agents and their handlers, terrorism and its stupidly dream-struck and mercifully disorganized practitioners, and Russia’s endless struggle with modern ideas and reform. Geifman’s scholarship seems impeccable and she makes convincing arguments based on what she has read in Russian archives. She writes in a style scholarly yet her own, especially when deploying adjectives professors don't usually use like "philistine," "shady," and "ill-omened."

Happy Birthday Dashiell Hammett

Red Harvest - Dashiell Hammett

The first-person narrator of this violent crime novel from 1929 is an anonymous operative of the San Francisco branch of the Continental Detective Agency. It seems to me our Nameless Narrator is not a protagonist with a code or sense of purpose or impulse to protect harmless villagers or retired plutocrats.

Nameless takes up a risky challenge to clean up Personville, a corrupt town in Montana, because do something or do nothing, death, that remedy of all ills and payer of all debts, will come out of nowhere. So we may as well play a no-limit game:

“…Poisonville is ripe for the harvest. It’s a job I like, and I’m going to it.”

“While you last,” the gambler said.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “I was reading in the paper this morning about a fellow choking to death eating a chocolate eclair in bed.”

“That may be good,” said Dinah Brand, her big body sprawled in an armchair, “but it wasn’t in this morning’s paper.”

This calls to mind in The Maltese Falcon Sam Spade’s story of the man who escapes death when a beam falls to the ground just yards behind him.* Realizing the abyss is always yawning, the man leaves his family and starts a new life.

No one has tasked the Nameless Narrator with the civic reform that he is willing to carry out. Robber baron and tinpot potentate Elihu Willson had only hinted that he wanted his town back. But Nameless seizes the opportunity to unleash a bloodbath by setting the hard cases of Personville against each other. Nameless is an ace Machiavellian, mixing lies and truth for civic order if not truth and justice. We can see where Akira Kurosawa got the inspiration for Yojimbo and Sergio Leone for A Fistful of Dollars (the Coen Brothers got the phrase “blood simple” from this novel).

Writing for serialization in a pulp magazine, Hammett packs this short novel full of episodes and flat characters, often introduced by a physical description with grotesque details (this was a pulp convention, making heavies appear repulsive). No other characters are as round as the shabby femme fatale Dinah Brand. Her brazen greed is a caricature of any crafty and calculating American climber in thrall to hankering for wealth. Ultimately, the main character is Poisonville – Butte? Helena? - the mining town on which Hammett vents his anger with violence and corruption American-style, as if disgusted by our sinister decadence in accepting strong-arm gangsterism and trails of blood in murders and massacres as normal.

Often called the first hard-boiled novel, Red Harvest tells a dark grisly story and does so in an exceptional way, with a raw, concise and unvarnished style, but at the same time always ironic, fresh and high-spirited. All the noir elements are in place: rival gangs, corrupt policemen, femme fatales, fixed boxing matches, score settling in ambushes and shoot-outs, and Prohibition-era speakeasies and rum-running.

In this cauldron of booze, deception, and blood our Nameless Narrator sidestrokes with ease, playing the anonymous detective with an anti-heroic beer belly and low-down enough for his colleagues to think he could be a murderer. But he’s blessed with a quick mind, glib tongue and ready gun so he always ready to solve the thorniest issues. The archetypal American hero: help yourself and help others if your help avails because talent, wit, fame, wealth, security, property, health we have only on loan, all are subject to Fortune waving a wand and poof-it’s-gone.

 

* From 1994 to 1997 I lived in Riga, Latvia. During thaws, chunks of ice would slide off the roofs of the five- and six-story Art Nouveau buildings. A couple of times I walked on sidewalks spattered by the blood of unlucky pedestrians who were hit by chunks of ice. Once time about a block from my apartment on Chaka-iela, I heard a thump behind me. I looked back and saw a chunk of ice the size of a medium-sized pumpkin. I didn’t have any hard-boiled epiphanies but I swallowed pretty hard. And clearly I’ve not forgotten my close shave. More recently I was walking in my neighborhood after jogging, cooling down. A car pulled up and a teenage girl jumped out. She let me have it with a super soaker water blaster. It felt good but it could just as easily have been an AK-15, yes?

Tales of the Flesh in the Age of Decorum

Victorians Undone: Tales of the Flesh in the Age of Decorum - Kathryn Hughes

This book collects case studies about specific body parts of five Victorians: Lady Flora Hastings, Charles Darwin, George Eliot, Fanny Cornforth and Fanny Adams. This book, the famous biographer explains, is “an experiment to see what new stories emerge when you use biography .... to put mouths, bellies and beards back into the nineteenth century” by introducing “a certain lumpiness to canonical life narratives that have previously been rendered as smooth, symmetrical, and as strangely unconvincing as a death mask. For it is in lop-sidedness and open-endedness, in bulges, dips, hollows, oozes and itches, that we come closest to a sense of what it feels like to live in the solitude of a single body, both then and now.”

Lady Flora Hastings probably had liver cancer and its tumor made her belly swell. The Queen was still very young so her prefrontal lobe may not had have yet developed a nuanced moral sense: disliking Lady Flora for spying on the behalf of Vic’s difficult mother, Vic spread the rumor at court that Lady Flora was in a family way. A horrified Lady Flora underwent a humiliating medical examination by two doctors, one cruel and one kind. The bad doctor, oddly enough, was the one that misdiagnosed Prince Albert’s case of typhoid 20 years later. So even Queens can’t escape the sting of nature’s irony. 

Charles Darwin grew his archetypal beard rather late in life, because he wanted to compete with the facial hair of his nephew. He became so unrecognizable that when he attended scientific conferences, eminent men snubbed him, not knowing they were high-hatting the most famous scientist in the world. Interesting if a little long is Hughes’ examination of Victorian perceptions of masculinity and the cultural history of the beard and reasons it became fashionable again in the 1850s.

The two pieces about George Eliot and Fanny Cornforth are more about biography and biographers than eminent Victorians. Hughes explores the sensitivities of Evans’ family about the claim in early biographies that the right hand of the author of Middlemarch was bigger than her left. The family was nervous that people would be judgy if it were generally known that their famous relative had once been a diary worker. At the turn of the 19^th and 20^th milkmaids were dogged by the stereotype that they were all cheeky, disagreeable girls who were too free with their charms.

Hughes also details how Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s literary executors excised model Fanny Cornforth from the painter’s life and work. It seems that when Rossetti painted her sensuous mouth, people were shocked and scandalized that the painting brought to mind the sex act that was so forbidden in the Victorian era that even the most shameful pornography of the time didn’t depict it. The story of Fanny Cornforth is a warning to readers of biographies to be clear as to who is carrying water for the subject. The section about Rossetti’s downward spiral after his testicles were removed made me re-evaluate my previous dim view of the founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

The last section covers the gruesome murder of eight-year-old Fanny Adams one late summer afternoon in 1867. Like writer of high-class true crime William Roughhead, Hughes examines rural violence and mores through the lens of forensic pathology. Nowadays the expression “Sweet Fanny Adams” means “nothing” or “very little” in British English and is used by people who would never say “bugger all” for “worthless” or “disappointing.”  That’s the appeal of the book, too, the Britishisms like “skivvy” for “a menial” and “mimsy/missish” for “prim.”

Highly recommended, a good vacation read.

Murder Stalks in the Midst of Loveliness!

Note: The Gail Patrick film festival continues, having viewed If I Had a Million, The Phantom Broadcast, TheMurders in the Zoo, Death Takes a Holiday, and The Crime of Helen Stanley. In this picture, she plays private detective Sadie Evans. She has committed a B&E to steal back compromising material purloined from the hero by a blackmailing GF. “Marry me or I turn in your mother in for murder” seems a solid basis for connubial felicity. In contrast to this low Pre-Code method to land a husband, Gail is the only positive role model in the movie. As a resourceful PI, she is a trailblazer, self-employed in a male-dominated profession. She does the right brave thing, intervening when she sees a murder about to be done. And she pays for her intervention with her life. Why, the reader wonders, all this attention to a forgotten actress on what could be taken for a Perry Mason blog? Because in the Fifties and Sixties Gail Patrick Jackson was the executive producer of the greatest courtroom drama ever: Perry Mason.

Murder at the Vanities
1934 / 1:38
Tagline: “Murder Stalks in the Midst of Loveliness!”
[internet archive]

This Pre-Code musical features big productions of songs and dance routines peppered with a backstage drama and absurd murder mystery. Check common sense and good taste at the popcorn stand. Forget there’s a Depression on - enjoy the over-the-top experience!

The attractions work on many levels. The streamlined design of the 1930s can be seen in the display fonts and Art Deco furnishings. All the actors belong: without exception they have that ineffable allure that makes movie-goers pay attention to them. Be warned, however, that almost all the characters are obnoxious and tiring.

One wonders what the personification of sophistication is doing in this loopy production, but Duke Ellington and his band put swing into a rhapsody by Liszt. During this number, blacks and whites dance together which must have made the white supremacists and segregationists spout their mint juleps (a thumb in their eye was as good a thing then as it is now).

Other surreal dance numbers must be seen to be believed. Gape at the bizarre love song on the tropical island as the “dancers” wave fans of flowers to imitate ripples in a lagoon. The songs have clever lyrics though they have a tendency to have lots of words. Glowing with cheer, Eric (Carl Brisson) looks forward to the Repeal of Prohibition in Cocktails for Two: Oh what delight to / Be given the right to / Be carefree and gay once again. / No longer slinking, / Respectable drinking / Like civilized ladies and men.

The Pre-Code aspects are bold. First, hard-edged Gertrude Michael (Rita) sings “Sweet Marijuana,” a ditty that extols the calming effects of smoking wacky tobaccy. Second, two corpses are treated in a manner grotesquely offhand, as poor Gail Patrick is being lugged down the stairs like a trunk and we can see Rita’s dead face as she lies prone on a table. Third, there are battalions of scantily clad women.  Very young. Usually platinum blondes with waves and curls. Flawless fair skin from pounds of powder. Short with the tiny builds of yoga teachers. Dancing not much since a “vanities’ showcases appearance over genuine skills in the performing arts, the pretty women are objectified for decorative effect, commodities like the cigarettes and perfume in the number Where Do They Come From and Where Do They Go.

The last Pre-Code marker is that the moral atmosphere is lowdown and dirty. At the station house, the cops sit on their duffs and play cards. A homicide detective is easily distracted by all the half-naked chorines. He walks around with a hideous rictus of lust, hostility, and aggression on his face. In a typical harsh remark, the theater manager asks the detective, “Why don't you take your lamps off those dames and do a little police work?”

Backstage at the Vanities, Rita is not only a blackmailer and killer but also beats her maid. Two other women are murderers too, but it’s okay since the people they snuffed were bad people. One of those killers will get the best defense money can buy and scores of character witnesses. And the other killer will simply walk, her being so sympathetic and the victim was asking for it and it happened so long ago and an old lady in prison doesn’t make society any safer. The manager of the show tries to cover up the murders because he doesn’t want the cops to stop the show and drive patrons to demand their money back. The banter between the theater manager and the detective is sneering and derisive to the point of wearying. “We got comics who are paid to be funny.”  “Don't get too close to her. She'll mistake you for King Kong”

Mind, I’m not saying the low moral tone should be deplored, per our enlightened attitudes (which will probably make our descendants squirm). I mean, I assumed this would be silly from the get-go, so I was not disappointed, though the last 15 minutes had me thinking about brushing my teeth.

SHE MIGHT AS WELL HAVE USED A SHOTGUN!

Double Harness
1933 / 1:09
Tagline: “SHE MIGHT AS WELL HAVE USED A SHOTGUN!”
[internet archive]

Sister Joan is dependable while Sister Valerie is frivolous.  Lazy John is a profligate who plays polo instead of keeping the family shipping business above water. Practical Joan sets her cap on John. She realizes that he's a project but she holds the theory that a woman should make her mark on the world by supporting and assisting her man make his mark.

Her noble aim is based on her axiom that marriage is a woman's business and love is superfluous if she can do a man good personally and professionally. Despite her skepticism about romantic love, Joan realizes she is falling in love with John.  In an amazing scene that reveals his cruelty and her love, good girl Joan spends the night with John, a departure from everybody’s expectation of what she would ever do, including her own. John’s total uninterest in getting married, she thinks, justifies her tricking him into marriage. She connives to have her father bust them in a compromising situation and thus compel John to do the honorable thing. On their honeymoon they discuss a divorce after six months.

Joan, in love with John, is wracked by guilt over her dishonesty. She feels she has to work to win John’s love. The household cooking gets better. Joan provides business opportunities through her father’s network. John discovers job satisfaction is a real thing, not an oxymoron. Joan listens closely when John talks about dealing with stodgy coots at work.

Spoiled and willful Valerie doesn’t stop spending on extravagances. This inability to deal with the Depression lands her in trouble deep, even to the point of prostituting herself to pay debts. This sad desperate situation leads to the climax, the most awkward dinner party in the history of San Francisco. The black humor of it was diluted by a slapstick scene that was out of place, the only grossly false note in the movie.

Talented but forgotten actress Ann Harding plays Joan with an attractive mix of strength and vulnerability. She looks stricken so persuasively that the movie-goer wants to put their arms around her. I gather that The Look of Desolation was Harding’s trademark, like Margaret O’Brien’s ability to cry on command, but knowing that The Look of Desolation is a honed skill doesn’t make it less impressive or dilute a movie-goer's desire to comfort her. Plus, Ann Harding has a femininity that seems to glow, with pale skin, dark eyes, and blonde hair a man could lose himself in. Forever. Her look of turbulent emotions bravely restrained balances her sometimes quaintly affected manner (a holdover from the silent era?).

William Powell as John is smooth and has a cutting edge that movie-goers expect to see in swingers. His character grows in the course of the movie. His scenes in the second half as an honest-to-god adult male instead of a smooth-talking philanderer are persuasive indeed. Lucile Browne as Valerie is totally convincing as the flighty impulsive younger sister. Lilian Bond as Monica, John’s ex-lover, is as disagreeable as she is alluring. Reginald Owen as Freeman, John’s butler, is equal parts discretion and familiarity.

Is this a melodrama? No, all the performances are restrained and believable. A comedy? No, there are no sustained comedic scenes or situations. For me, the main interest was Harding's blend of old-fashioned nurturance and sensitivity with more modern determination and resilience.

The Ides of Perry Mason 81

Note: Fans of the classic Perry Mason TV series say Vaughn Taylor did the trifecta, playing victim, accused, and culprit. Post-Mason, Taylor did a lot of TV up to the middle Seventies. But in his mid-sixties, he was suffering from a bad back, and he had to retire in 1976. He passed away at the age of 72 in 1983.

Tribute to Vaughn Taylor           

Medium height with a slim build, balding, and middle-aged, Vaughan Taylor looked like a bookkeeper so he often played white-collar professionals. But he was versatile enough to play petty grifters, too.

In TCOT Corresponding Corpse, he plays a bent insurance investigator who is blackmailing an artist. The painter has faked his own death and his wife, not knowing, has collected his insurance and started a business. Taylor gets a laugh when on the stand, asked by Mason why he didn’t blackmail the wife, another obvious target, he replies blankly, “I didn’t think of it.”

In TCOT Witless Witness, Taylor does a great job as a political operative who would get involved in any kind of flimflam with government contracts if there was a chance to cut himself a little piece of cake. In a drunken rant before he is done away with, Taylor sounds like a wrecker that wants to burn down everybody's life because his own sorry existence hasn't been happy. It’s a brilliant episode, about integrity assailed by malice and corruption, with an edge as real as death and taxes.

In TCOT Blonde Bonanza, he portrays an heir hunter. That’s a kind of detective who tracks down family members of people who died without a will. Finding a “distant” relative and getting 50% of the inheritance as a fee could be lucrative. Depending on one’s point of view, this enterprise could be described as “racket” or “profession.” Pal Vaughn plays it like a racket.

Taylor played genial and relatable too.  In TCOT Travelling Treasure he plays an absent-minded chemist being used and conned by a gangster. His only solace is being able to play gin rummy with our Lisa Gaye. In TCOT Stuttering Bishop, for his earnest pains in trying to obtain justice for a young woman, he is beaten up and later killed. 

In TCOT Fickle Fortune, he‘s totally persuasive as a mild-mannered civil servant who ends up in the dock because of his own poor judgement and a low-down in-law. His manner at the defense table is that of a deer in the headlights – the little guy facing impending doom, accused by a criminal justice system that is positive it is doing the right thing by rushing an innocent clerk into the gas chamber.

Doubtless, Taylor’s most memorable outing on the show was his mixture of everyman and culprit in TCOT Restless Redhead, the very first show of the series. His facial expression speaks volumes when he’s recalled to the stand to be grilled by a relentless Mason. Taylor looks like a guy who realizes that the walls are closing in on him and he’s going to be a long time wishing he were dead. Strangely, he seems to brag when he claims he did the crime all by himself and that his wife called him stupid, but he got the $10,000, didn't he? Then it dawns on him that he really was stupid, that no amount of money, no action on his part now is going to remedy the consequences of his own stupidity. If he had just wanted to get out of his monotonous life and loveless marriage, he could have deserted his wife, leaving her the business and starting a new life. Easy if not nice. Easier than being called to account for robbery and murder.

Notes on the Art of Surgery

Mortal Lessons: Notes on the Art of Surgery - Richard Selzer

Dr. Selzer (1928 - 2016) was a general surgeon and faculty member of the Yale School of Medicine. In the early Seventies, he revived a genre that has become so familiar to us 50 years down the pike: the doctor memoir in which the doc examines his thoughts and actions dealing with patients and their disorders, often with examinations of the state of contemporary medicine. See Awakenings and Intern: A Doctor’s Initiation.

Selzer was a post-modern writer in the sense that he fictionalized his OR experiences, to protect patient confidentiality and to make the “literary most” (his words) of what happens to him and his sick, dying, disabled, frail patients. Just one example: A young diabetic woman who, though blind, draws for the surgeon a smiley face and a "Smile, Doctor" on the kneecap of her gangrenous leg that he will amputate.

This 1974 collection of nineteen essays is mostly about opening human bodies with invasive procedures and inflicting massive insult for benevolent purposes. He was, like his entire cohort of children in the Thirties, exposed to lots of Longfellow. This exposure stoked his love of words – from sounds to metaphors – and the act of writing. In his childhood, teens and early twenties, he read the Harvard Classics. From medical school to about age 40, he read nothing outside of professional articles.

When he felt impelled to write creatively at about 40 years of age, he found he had access to all he had read in childhood and youth. This blossomed into an imposing and old-school style in the manner of Lamb, Chesterton, Pater, and Hazlitt. Therefore, these essays had better be read like short stories: one at a time, over time, lest we risk suffocation by redolent prose. Everybody has had the odd experience of a vivid memory being recalled by an unexpected odor, but everybody would say ‘pee-yew,’ I think, when Selzer calls the nose “the organ of nostalgia.”

In addition to more than few affected metaphors and similes, his cool and dispassionate realism may turn off sensitive readers. For instance, how medical schools store donated bodies will make squeamish readers opt for cremation. Another turn-off may be the self-regard (surgeons are stereotypically abrasive, arrogant, and difficult to work with) though he has flashes of self-deprecating humor.

The Nones of Perry Mason 80

Note: ESG was savvy at marketing. He avoided topical references so as not to date his novels and hurt sales. World War II, however, made such a huge impact on American society that he could hardly ignore its effect on the home front. The references to wartime austerities make this story more interesting.

The Case of the Drowsy Mosquito – Erle Stanley Gardner

His doc told Banning Clarke to take it easy on account of his cornflake heart. But Banning Clarke’s old prospecting pard Salty Bowers urges him to stop babying himself, that old prospectors go downhill in a jiffy if they don’t live under sun and stars and tramp all day looking for precious metals. So Banning Clarke takes to sleeping in his mansion's rock garden, which has been planted with cactus and saltbush.

His nervous-nellie cardiologist has insisted that nurse Velma Starler live there 24-7, ever ready with medication and cautions to take it easy. Also living in the big house are his in-laws the Bradissons (mother and son), the son’s mining broker Hayward Small, and his cook-housekeeper Nell Sims and her con-man husband.

Banning Clarke has retained ace lawyer Perry Mason to represent him in a fraud case. The plot thickens when the Bradissons and then Perry and his assistant Della Street are poisoned with arsenic. After the inevitable murder, an interesting legal question comes up: who is culpable for the killing if the victim is shot after ingesting a big bad dose of arsenic?

This is doubtless one of the best Masons I’ve read, and I’ve read a stack of them. To appeal to the kid in us, Gardner includes material about the legendary lost gold mines of California.  The legal twists are so snaky that even Mason gets ahead of himself. Gardner trusted readers' intelligence enough to follow the complex legal reasoning of the opposing attorneys.

Gardner puts in more comic relief that usual, with PI Paul Drake posing as a drunken prospector and Nell Sims as a known Mrs. Malaprop who mangles proverbs such as “A stich in time saves a pound of cure.” While Gardner’s nature writing about the austere beauty of the desert is not exactly W.H. Hudson, it’s enjoyable to read his advocacy of the simple outdoors life and nature’s lessons of self-reliance and resilience. 

Finally, as the novel was written in 1942, during WWII, the topical references give us post-moderns a sense of how the rationing of sugar and fresh produce, for example, influenced the daily behavior of ordinary people. 

Charles Honeybath #4

Appleby & Honeybath – Michael Innes

This 1983 mystery features Michael Innes’ series heroes in the same novel. The setting is a country house with weekend guests. The squire is a ruffian who hates his well-stocked library. He amazed and appalled that buzzing around with requests are literature scholars, art historians and auctioneers that want to explore its treasures to extend knowledge, build reputations, and stuff their wallets. This gives Innes a chance to tweak the landed gentry for their philistinism, scholars for their pride, and hustlers for their greed. All in hilarious ink-horn terms like “velleities” and “pernoctate.” An Oxford literature don remarks, ''An unresolved fatality is an unsatisfactory thing to leave behind one after a quiet weekend in the country.'' Indubitably. This is a light mystery to read between more serious works or more grisly tales of murder.

The Kalends of Perry Mason 79

Note: Because of the cognitive distortion called anchoring (relying too heavily on a single reference point, or anchor), I have a history of struggle with Raymond Burr. As a teenager during the Nixon era, I sought out Erle Stanley Gardner's whodunits after I saw Burr in the TV series Perry Mason. Reading, I was shocked that Mason was tall and Lincolnesque, not tall and Kelvinator-like. Since last November I've been escaping to Burr's Pre-Mason film noir oeuvre (see Please Murder Me and I Love Trouble). In 1961, a TV Guide writer said, "Before becoming Perry Mason, Burr's customary role in feature length films was that of the heavy, and seldom before had that synonym for villain been applied so precisely.” Talk about cognitive dissonance - seeing Our Man of Order & Ethics acting menacing, mean, maniacal and up to no good has shaken me soul deep. But, thankfully, not in this picture.

Sleep My Love
1948 / 1:37
Tagline: “...the most terrifying words a man ever whispered to a woman!”
[internet archive]

Pal Raymond Burr has two scenes and a handful of lines as homicide detective Sgt. Strake. 

A busy copper, he sports a genial manner but his expressive eyes look unimpressed by the rich-person problems of the connected people seeking police assistance. Though dubious about what he is told, the good sergeant listens kindly to devoted husband Don Ameche’s request to locate his missing wife Claudette Colbert. 

In the fullness of time, Claudette wakes up from her spell, however, in Boston and returns by plane to New York City with family friend Bob Cummings, the personification of harmless but helpful American masculinity. 

I hate spoilers so you’ll hear no details from me about this suspenseful movie but for two things. First, Bob and Claudette attend a Chinese-American wedding. It’s unexpected and fascinating to see successful Chinese-Americans just enjoying themselves in a sequence free of stereotyping or oohing and aahing at exoticism. Eagerly anticipating "being alone," newlyweds Keye Luke and Marya Marco make a cute couple as they neck in the back seat of Bob Cummings' car, thus trashing the stereotype of the Desexualized Asian American Male.

Second, in her initial scene Hazel Brooks as the stereotypical noir bad girl is a showstopper. Red-hair, green eyes, the “You can kill me but you can't hurt me” look on her face, she must be seen to be believed in a sheer peignoir. Really, before viewing, geezers are cautioned to ask their cardiologists if Hazel Brooks sitting in a photographer's high chair is safe for them to view.

The light and shadow, glass and veils, are striking to behold thanks to director Douglas Sirk and cinematographer Joseph Valentine. They like mirrors and fabrics, too.

As for the connections with the classic TV series Perry Mason, Lillian Bronson pops up once as a loyal housekeeper (she has an intense turn on the stand, really good, in TCOT Sulky Girl) and three times as a no-nonsense judge. One imagines that executive producer Gail Patrick Jackson was the power behind diversity in the judiciary on the show (a black judge in 1963's TCOT Skeleton's Closet got the white supremacists frothing, this movie-goer hopes). Keye Luke guest stars in TCOT Weary Watchdog as a monumentally evil perp.