Exploding! Like a gun in your face!

Kansas City Confidential
1952 / 1:39
Tagline: “Exploding! Like a gun in your face!”
[internet archive]

He’s an ex-con with a past that won’t stay buried. Kansas City cops tagged him as a person of interest in a million-dollar bank job. No charges, no conviction - but the stink stuck. Now he’s got a plan to clean up his name and maybe make a buck doing it. He slips into the skin of a dead bank robber, aiming to infiltrate the gang that pulled the heist, sniff out the loot, and cash in on the insurance company’s reward. It’s a long shot, but it’s all he’s got.

Complication walks in wearing lipstick and carrying a law textbook. She’s sharp, ambitious, and not buying his cover story. He keeps her in the dark, but she knows he’s sitting on something big. Love and lies don’t mix well, but he’s already in too deep.

The casting sells the whole thing. John Payne, tall and built like a linebacker, plays the lead with just the right mix of brains and brawn. He talks fast, hits hard, and looks like he’s been through hell and came out one mean hombre. Coleen Gray, as the girlfriend, nails the role of a law student - smart, articulate, and not easily fooled. Preston Foster plays the bitter ex-cop with a chip on his shoulder and a vendetta against the system that chewed him up and spit him out. He’s got a grudge against insurance companies and the political machine that cost him his badge.

The trio of crooks are pure pulp. Neville Brand’s face looks like it’s been through a meat grinder - he’s the kind of guy who’s been beaten so many times he forgot how to flinch. Lee Van Cleef is all sharp angles and sneers, a human ferret who mocks women for falling for him. Jack Elam, sweaty and twitchy, seems like he could snap any second. These guys live for the rush - crime, booze, cards, and chaos. They know the endgame: the chair, the gas chamber, or a rope around the neck.

The film’s atmosphere is pure noir. Payne’s war hero knows medals don’t buy coffee. Cops beat him bloody trying to force a confession, then shrug when they realize he’s clean: “These things happen.” Van Cleef roughs him up over a misunderstanding and mutters, “It just fell out that way.” Victimizers always act like invisible fate pulled the trigger. Payne’s got the final word: “I know a sure cure for a nosebleed - a cold knife in the middle of the back.”

Sure, the plot’s a stretch - three hardened criminals follow a stranger to Mexico. But once you swallow that, the rest is gravy. A few quibbles: a woman in skin-darkener playing Mexican, and no clue how Payne bankrolls his trip south. Still, the twists keep coming, and the silences speak volumes.

The Nones of Perry Mason 101

 Note: Bertha Cool and Donald Lam are mismatched private eyes in Erle Stanley Gardner’s offbeat mysteries written under the pen-name of A.A. Fair. Cool’s tough, practical, and money-hungry; Lam’s wiry, brainy, and clever. Together they tackle scams, murders, and human folly with sharp dialogue, twisted plots, and plenty of friction - more psychology than procedure, always fast and unpredictable.

Fools Die on Friday – A. A. Fair

The story kicks off in the cramped office of Cool & Lam, where the air smells of trouble. Carlotta walks in looking like she’s got a secret she doesn’t want to share. Says her uncle’s wife, Daphne, is planning to slip her husband a poison pill that’ll put him six feet under. She wants Bertha and Donald to stop the poison from hitting the bloodstream.

Lam takes the case like a guy who smells a rat and wants to see the whiskers. He figures Carlotta’s playing her own game, and he’s not wrong. Bertha warns him to keep his nose clean and his hands off anything that’ll make the client squawk. Lam ignores her and dives headfirst into the mess. His way of stopping the poison? Carlotta and the reader have to admit - it’s clever, even if it blows up in his face.

Then the bodies start piling up. Two murders, and the cops come sniffing like bloodhounds. Enter Frank Sellars, a detective who’s all grit and no grin. He’s old-school, hates amateurs, and Lam’s his favorite punching bag. Bertha, who’s got a yen for staying out of jail, cozies up to Sellars and leaves Lam twisting in the wind. She doesn’t want Lam behind bars, but she’s not about to go down with him either.

Sellars plays rough. He thinks Lam’s a liar even when he’s telling the truth, and a choir boy when he’s spinning yarns. Lam’s got that knack for looking innocent while he’s pulling stretchers, and it drives Sellars nuts.

This one’s a little different from the usual Gardner fare. Longer than most - about 270 pages in the Dell edition - but it moves like a getaway car. The plot’s tight, the action fast, and you don’t feel the extra weight. Bertha and Lam are at each other’s throats more than usual, and Bertha’s ready to toss Lam under the bus if it keeps her in the cops’ good books. Lam, as always, attracts a city woman - Ruth Otis - because she thinks Lam’s both “nice” and “hard as concrete,” which is Gardner’s way of saying she’s in trouble and knows she needs help.

Cool & Lam stories aren’t about dusting for prints or playing Sherlock. They’re about people - crooked, clever, and sometimes just out of their depth - getting tangled in their own schemes. Gardner knows the score: people are a cocktail of motives good and not, ingenuity, integrity, and boneheaded moves, shaken and served with a twist of unpredictability.

Lew Archer #1

The Moving Target – Ross Macdonald

It is 1949. Oil millionaire Ralph Sampson has dropped out of sight. His wife, confined to a wheelchair, hires PI Lew Archer to find out whether hubby Ralph is making illicit love with an able-bodied floozie or if he was kidnapped. Getting kidnapped is not in the course of daily life for millionaires, but Ralph has been in midlife crisis mode for a spell. So he has taken up with gurus, astrologers, and fortunetellers, the usual Southern California new-age types that help people work through issues of ethics and mortality for hefty fees.

I’m not sure that Macdonald cared that much about constructing a plausible plot with a steady tempo, but in this novel the plot is as tight as a tourniquet and the pace is hellish. No, I think Macdonald’s primary artistic interest was to construct a gallery of lowlifes around the hero so that Archer can comment on the human condition with his keen sense of right and wrong.

Archer is not a scold, however, since he makes mistakes and kicks himself around the block like earnest people will. With high standards (without being high-minded), a cool attitude, a little arrogance, his lines hit the mark and so does his ironic - but not too - humor.

The electric clock in the kitchen said twenty after four. I found a box of frozen oysters in the freezing compartment of the refrigerator and made an oyster stew. My wife had never liked oysters. Now I could sit at my kitchen table at any hour of the day or night and eat oysters to my heart’s content, building up my virility.

He is a skillful interrogator who knows how to elicit a range of responses from his subjects in order to squeeze information out of them. He even gets an alcoholic drunk to collect information from her so the end justifies the use of not always honest means. A depression and two world wars made people in the USA astute and detached and efficient and not always nice in their ways of getting on in life.

In terms of serious writing, Macdonald's style flowery, imaginative, metaphorical, enjoyable.

“Why not?” I said. “The night is young.” I was lying. The night was old and chilly, with a slow heartbeat. The tires whined like starved cats on the fog-sprinkled black-top. The neons along the Strip glared with insomnia.

All served with tasty dialogue like a greaseburger festooned with bacon.

“You’re taking this pretty seriously,” I said. “Why don’t you go one step further and take it to the police?”

“Trying to talk yourself out of a job?”

“Yes.”

The fast-paced investigation goes in all directions and a fireworks finale goes way beyond Miss Scarlett in the library with the rope. Macdonald was one for convolutions and surprises and that’s alright with me.

The Kalends of Perry Mason 100

Note: The 100th article with some connexion to Perry Mason - at this point, even I’m starting to suspect I’m the defendant. "Ya gotta believe me, Mr. Mason. He was dead when I got there!"

A Tribute to Barbara Pepper

The comedienne appeared in four episodes of Our Favorite Show, the classic TV courtroom drama Perry Mason.

In TCOT Vagabond Vixen (11/16/57) she is cast as the titular vixen’s mother who runs a diner in New Kingman-Butler, Arizona. When Perry ensconces her in an L.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.” Snooty members of the upper-middle-class Paul and Perry exchange looks when Paul describes her as “the salt of the earth.” This was probably Pepper’s best part: she brims with life and punch, persuading us that she’s somebody who never lets the trials of life steal her joy for too long.

She was the Nosy Neighbor Witness in two outings: Mrs. Diamond in TCOT Violent Vest (4/29/61) and Mrs. Williamson in TCOT Prankish Professor (1/17/63). Mrs. Diamond, a floor-below neighbor, provides damning testimony that saw the accused around midnight carrying out men's clothing and saw a man entering or leaving her apartment many times. Next door neighbor Mrs. Williamson always takes her rake to the leaves not to Zenfully promote mindfulness and present-moment awareness but so that she can keep an eye on the comings and goings of residents of the other bungalows.

Our Barb is credited as “Fat Woman” in TCOT Left-Handed Liar (11/25/61). This “ripped from the headlines” episode exploits the real-life rise of the modern health club. Fueled by celery juice, Les Tremayne tyrannically runs Health House, a Vic Tanny-like fitness center, welcoming one and all, bodybuilders, housewives, or college students. Mean Girl Veronica Temple (Leslie Parrish) is taking four women through punishing calisthenics. Pepper’s Mrs. Dwyer tries but fails to touch her toes and moans pathetically “I simply can’t reach any lower, Miss Temple - it hurts!” “It’s supposed to hurt!” Veronica barks like Lee Ermey in Full Metal Jacket. Ah, the Sixties - when there was no gain without pain and it was still socially acceptable to mock the unfit.

Let’s Remember

Barbara Pepper’s story is a fascinating, bittersweet slice of entertainment history. In 1930, at just 15 years old, she signed a contract to become a chorus girl - a decision that shocked her parents. The notion that such a contract could hold legal weight without parental consent is almost unimaginable today. Yet, thanks to an agent who personally knew her father and persuaded the family to “let her try,” Barbara stepped onto the stage.

She didn’t just try - she dazzled. With striking beauty and a natural flair for dance and comedy, Barbara earned a coveted spot in the legendary Ziegfeld Follies of 1932 and later appeared in two seasons of George White’s Scandals. Her talent caught the eye of Eddie Cantor, who urged her to head west to Hollywood in 1933. Barbara followed that advice, chasing stardom with determination.

Hollywood stardom, however, proved elusive. Despite her gifts and relentless networking, Barbara never became a marquee name. Instead, she carved out a career in dozens of films - often in brief roles that showcased her looks, though occasionally she landed speaking parts in B-pictures like The Rogue’s Tavern and The Hollywood Stadium Mystery.

Tragedy struck in 1949 when her husband died in a car accident. Grief led Barbara down a difficult path of self-medication with alcohol. This struggle cost her dearly: even her longtime friend Lucille Ball hesitated to cast her as Ethel Mertz in I Love Lucy, fearing that adding another drinker to a set already coping with William Frawley’s issues would be too risky.

With two young children to support, Barbara turned to jobs in laundries and food service. Her once-glamorous figure changed, and her voice grew gravelly - a brass edge layered over years of hardship. Still, she kept working, appearing in small roles throughout the Fifties and Sixties. She even found a niche on television, most memorably as Arnold the Pig’s “mother” in about 30 episodes of Green Acres. Jerry Lewis admired her comedic style and cast her in several of his films.

But the toll of years - weight gain, drinking, and relentless struggle - undermined her health. Forced to leave Green Acres, Barbara’s heart gave out in 1969. She was only 54.

Barbara Pepper’s life reminds us that behind the glitter of show business often lies grit, heartbreak, and resilience. She never became the star she dreamed of being, but her story deserves to be remembered - not just for the roles she played, but for the courage she showed in a world that offered few second chances.

 

European Reading Challenge #11

Farewell Espana: The World of the Sephardim Remembered - Howard M. Sacher

This history for the general reader provides informative overviews of Sephardic communal and intellectual history, with many colorful stories and asides of Sephardic scholars, traders, artisans, community leaders, and religious figures.

From about 711 to 1492 in the different kingdoms of Spain, Jews, Muslims, Roman Catholics lived together in comparative peace, though it must be said that the Christians were ever pushing south into Moorish territory. The Spanish, or Sephardic, Jews made up a large, prosperous, dynamic, learned community that even had its own language Ladino, a mixture of Old Spanish and Hebrew.

But by the 14th century living together gave way to shocking pogroms, such as the massacre in 1391, in which 30,000 Jewish people were killed. Then, the Inquisition began in the late 15th century. Sacher’s descriptions of the unfolding of this gory phenomenon are illuminating and blood-curdling.  In 1492 the Sephardic Jews were expelled from Spain by Ferdinand and Isabella and they spread throughout the Mediterranean littoral and the Ottoman Empire, as well as to Holland, England, the Western Hemisphere.

Sacher’s account of Balkan Sephardic communities during the Holocaust is especially enlightening albeit heart-wrenching. Sometimes he makes broad generalizations about large groups of people (mystical Balkan soul, etc.) but this is the only quibble I have with this compelling chronicle.

You'll never see the target till the very end!

The Tall Target
1951 / 1:18
Tagline: “You'll never see the target till the very end!”
[internet archive]

Noir master Anthony Mann directed this terrific historical thriller. It tells the story of guarding Abraham Lincoln from assassins while he rode a train to Washington, D.C. via Baltimore (“a nest of secessionists”) for his first inauguration in 1861. Dick Powell plays the dedicated bodyguard whose self-appointed mission is to protect the President-elect.

Movie-making genius went into creating the images for this movie. Steam and smoke coming from the train. The cramped spaces of the train, both inside and out of passenger cars. The jumpy light emitted by swaying lanterns. Fight scenes in half-light; amazing is the scene where Powell is holding the head of a suspect in the path of a train wheel that might start at any moment in order to force information out of the treacherous bastard. The ‘end justifies the means’ violence is very post-World War II.

Which brings us to the noir mindset of the picture. Powell is self-appointed because his superiors, corrupt martinets to a man, have heedlessly disregarded overt threats to Lincoln. The American tendency to be always on the make is parodied by an obnoxious little boy. No matter the situation he asks, “What will you give me if I told you.” The greed for money and power drives a Northern major (Adolphe Menjou, duplicitous as usual) to take up sedition as a business practice. In the noir tradition of misdirection and betrayal, regular working guys (Leif Erickson) don’t look like hired killers and loyal union majors don’t look like traitors. Snappy noir dialogue delivered deadpan is also in place: “You don't need a doctor. Just a long box.”

The writing captures the restlessness of the period just before the Civil War. People are saying for the thousandth time the same tedious things about politics and the future of the country, never listening, hating the other side as if they were rats. Sectional divisions are in comments such as “Must all of you New Yorkers be so insufferably boorish” and “I know you think us Southerners a benighted people.” An Abolitionist (Florence Bates) betrays the activists’ tendency to see only problems and tropes, never people, when she asks an enslaved woman (Ruby Dee) tactless questions. Lincoln as a charismatic leader is captured when the bodyguard Powell observes, “I was only with [Lincoln] 48 hours, but when he left he shook my hand, thanked me, and wished me well. I was never so taken with a human man.”

The movie also examines the motives of would-be assassins. Southerners don’t want their way of life disrupted with free labor and are sure the tyrant Lincoln will start a war. Some fanatics are drawn into conspiracy and plots by the teenage boy’s immature taste for underground leagues with secret passwords and arcane handshakes. Thankfully, fanatics are not organizers and Powell says of an inept extremist “He wouldn't shoot off anything except his mouth.”

This is a marvelous example of film-making. Almost all of it takes place at night, lit by lanterns and lamps. No music adds to the tension. The acting is stellar.

Prize-winning Historical Novel

From The Guardian: Among the 2,000 UK adults surveyed, 85% were unaware that Britain forcibly transported more than 3 million Africans to the Caribbean, 89% did not know that Britain enslaved people in the Caribbean for more than 300 years, 63% support a formal apology to Caribbean nations and descendants of enslaved people – up 4% from 2024, and 40% support financial reparations, also reflecting a 4% increase from the previous year

Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth

This deadly serious novel won the prestigious Booker Prize in 1992. It is not only a historical novel about the 18th-century English slave trade - it is a work of moral excavation. It belongs to that rare class of fiction which attempts to examine the economic and ideological machinery of empire while also probing the psychological and spiritual costs exacted by its relentless operation.

Unsworth’s narrative, set against the backdrop of the triangular trade, is not content to merely dramatize the horrors of race-based chattel slavery. He is concerned with the broader implications: how the trade deformed the societies it touched, not only in West Africa, where it fomented internecine warfare and corrupted indigenous institutions, but also in England, where it infected the very language of commerce and law. The enslaved are not only victims of violence but of a system that rationalizes cruelty through euphemism and legalism.

The novel’s title is no accident. “Sacred hunger” refers not only to the literal hunger of the enslaved, but to the metaphysical hunger of the slavers - their greed, their need to justify their actions, their spiritual emptiness. Unsworth is at his most perceptive when he shows how this hunger is not confined to villains but is diffused across the social spectrum. The captain, the doctor, the investors - they are all implicated, all compromised.

There is a moment, early in the novel, when the captain and the ship’s doctor “touched glasses and drank, but it was the spirit of enmity they imbibed that afternoon, and both of them knew it.” This sentence is characteristic of Unsworth’s style: deceptively simple, yet freighted with irony and foreboding. He has a gift for the kind of prose that appears transparent but is in fact densely layered, drawing on both the rhythms of 18th-century English (Roderick Random) and the moral themes of the post-modern novel (Gravity’s Rainbow).

What distinguishes Sacred Hunger from the more conventional historical novel is its refusal to sentimentalize. The characters are not types but moral agents, often blind to their own motivations. The novel’s scope is epic, but its insights are intimate. Greed, obstinacy, despair - these are enduring elements of the human condition that are the fuel and exhaust of historical forces.

Unsworth’s achievement is to show how the slave trade a logical extension of a society built on profit, obedience and hierarchy. In this sense, Sacred Hunger is not only a novel about the 18th century - it is a novel about us.