The Ides of Noir: Black Magic

Note: Probably taking on the part because it was not playing a heavy, Raymond Burr appears only in the opening scene. He’s his handsome self not only because of the trim beard but also he’s dressed to the nines as his “man about town” character has just gone to the opera in the Paris of 1848. He plays Dumas, Jr. who questions his father Dumas, Sr. about his latest writing project, a biography of the Italian adventurer Cagliostro in Paris during the run-up to the French Revolution.

Black Magic
1949 / 1:40
Tagline: “...It Will Hold You in its Spell!”
[internet archive]

The best thing going for the movie is its striking sets and film noir-influenced cinematography _ shadows, light, and mirrors everywhere. The traditional noir theme of doubling is cleverly used, with Karen Guild playing both Marie Antoinette and a young aristocrat caught in a treasonous plot. The costumes and opulent furnishings of the French courts are amazing, and Cagliostro’s palace is pretty cool. Even the seemingly hundreds of extras are superbly costumed.

The tone of the movie is out of control to the point of kooky. In this boiling cauldron of a film, many scenes have undeniable power - like the “I can afflict” moment, the live burial, and the swordfight. But there are also scenes that are hard to take seriously. Cagliostro falling victim to mesmerism in the royal trial sequence made me squirm in embarrassment for Orson Welles the hambone. Even I had to mutter, “What the hell!” - and I’m usually an easy-going movie-goer willing to go anywhere a director points.

Welles, in almost every scene as Cagliostro, is sometimes brilliant with that incomparable voice of his, but other times too earnest. He makes his eyes pop, which is funny instead of ardent. Though Welles isn’t the first actor you think of when it comes to wearing clothes well, he looks well-turned out in a few highly-worked outfits.

He convincingly plays a fearless main chancer who lets his power over mediocre people from all walks of life get out of hand. Like greed heads from Caligula to Musk, he starts to believe his own hype. He loses our sympathy due to his predictable megalomania and ruthless treatment of the young aristocrat. Akim Tamaroff plays his sidekick with dignity and plausibility. Margot Grahame does a creditable job as Mme. DuBarry, a figure that loomed large in the American pop imagination for reasons obscure to me.

See it. It’s worth viewing primarily for its look. While it’s a bit long and the tone overheated, it’s also moody, which has its appeal. The word seems to be that Welles had a hand in the direction, though nothing is written down. Shot in Rome, the movie was the most fun he’d ever had making a film, said Welles.

As for the connection with the original Perry Mason TV series, Berry Kroeger plays Dumas, Sr. in the opening scene. With a superb radio voice, Kroeger appeared in seven episodes, often as a crook, sometimes as the richly-deserving victim, sometimes as the culprit, never as the accused. My favorite was his performance in TCOT Lame Canary in which he plays a soft-spoken insurance broker steeped in fraud up to his elegantly tied full windsor knot.

Perry Mason 145: Retail, Ramblers, and Respectability

Retail, Ramblers, and Respectability: A Field Guide to Class Warfare in Perry Mason

A hardcore reader can approach the Perry Mason novels as a set of field notes on how people actually organize power outside of big cities. Gardner isn’t writing theory, but he keeps circling the same structure: a small social world where three kinds of people - local elites, the striving middle, and the plebian drifters - keep bumping into each other, usually just before different interests collide and something goes pop.

Start with the local elite who happen to control money, property, or legal leverage in a village, town, or small city. They get to define what counts as a reasonable story about those resources. In The Case of the Lame Canary (1937), shady businessman Walter Prescott operates exactly this way. He uses money, divorce law, and the threat of scandal to frame the situation to his advantage. He is in a position to decide what others will believe. Something similar happens in The Case of the Crooked Candle (1944), where wealthy owners and speculative businessmen stay comfortably removed from risk, letting caretakers and local professionals absorb the consequences. Power flows downward, but burden of risk rarely does.

Then there is the petite bourgeois world, which is where Gardner seems most at home. These are people whose entire lives depend on being seen as trustworthy: shopkeepers, clerks, aspiring professionals, and women trying to secure a foothold in a precarious economy. In The Case of the Shoplifter’s Shoe (1938), the Trent family’s jewelry business runs on reputation alone; once suspicion enters the picture, their livelihood starts to dissolve almost immediately. Or take The Case of the Borrowed Brunette (1946), where Eva Martell’s problem isn’t just that she is impersonating someone - it’s that she lives in a world where even a hint of impropriety can permanently close off economic options. What Gardner shows, over and over, is that this middle tier is held together by a delicate fictions such as pretty is as pretty brands itself. 

Finally, there are the disconnected figures - drifters, hitchhikers, opportunists - who seem, at first glance, to exist outside the system entirely. But they’re actually essential to how it works. In The Case of the Vagabond Virgin (1948), Veronica Dale survives by constantly adjusting who she is to the situation at hand. She is not rooted anywhere, which makes her both useful in a badger game and dangerous if she starts spilling. These are the characters who carry messages, stage encounters, and keep lookouts. They are not the masterminds, but nothing much would happen without them.

Put these pieces together and you get a kind of informal map of American social life: elites generate the pressures and possibilities, the middle class absorbs the shocks, and the marginal figures make everything move. Perry Mason’s role, in this light, is less that of a heroic individual than of a go-between - someone who can pass from one world to another, translate between them, and, at least temporarily, make the whole arrangement a bit more fair for the underdog, the unjustly accused, no matter their station in life.

Perry Mason 144: TCOT Stuttering Bishop

Note: The plot is so complicated it needs a plot of its own just to keep track of the plot. Near the end, you might think you know who did what to whom and why, but you are wrong because Gardner is hiding extra whoms and whats behind secret doors. Only in the last chapter does Perry Mason pull off the big reveal where he explains everything to Della and Paul like a magician explaining why the pretty lady didn’t scream when she was getting sawed in half, and you sit there nodding like “Yes of course that makes sense” while inside your head your Wise Mind be objectifying, “Wait … what?”

The Case of the Stuttering Bishop – Erle Stanley Gardner

This 1936 mystery opens with Perry Mason grumbling over paperwork until Della Street rescues him with a visitor: an Australian bishop named William Mallory. Mason’s antennae twitch immediately - Mallory stammers, unexpected in a man whose calling demands fluency.

Mallory spins a tale as tangled as threads in a seamstress’ stash. Renwold C. Brownley - one of Gardner’s grandiose tycoons - wrecked his son’s marriage and drove Julia Branner, the daughter-in-law, to Australia. Desperate, Julia gave up her baby for adoption. Now Brownley wants his grandchild back and has hired shady detectives to locate the heir. Julia insists the girl they’ve found is a fraud. Mallory predicts Julia will soon seek Mason’s help.

She does - and promptly lands in deeper trouble. Brownley turns up dead, and Julia is charged with murder. Mason believes her innocent but faces a client who won’t explain why she's innocent. Meanwhile, Mallory vanishes after an attack, and imposters parade through the case like phonies preaching sincerity. 

The plot is a labyrinth - one of the most complex in the canon - yet the limited number of suspects keeps the guessing game manageable. No courtroom theatrics here; Mason and D.A. Hamilton Burger even share a civil conference, a collegiality that would vanish in later books. What remains constant is Mason’s relentless pursuit of truth, armed with logic and a gambler’s nerve.

Bottom line: A first-rate puzzle, rich in deception and character interplay. For longtime fans, it’s a showcase of Gardner’s confidence in his readers’ ability to keep pace. For newcomers, it’s proof of why Gardner ruled the mystery world for decades and sold a half-billion novels.

The Nones of Noir: Sorry, Wrong Number

Note: In film noir fashion, the phone becomes an instrument of the fickle finger of fate. Its use for overhearing conspiracies and failing to call for help underlines themes of miscommunication, helplessness, and modern alienation.

Sorry, Wrong Number
1948 / 1:29
Tagline: “Tangled Wires … Whispering of Murder! Tangled Lives … Fighting to Escape!”
[internet archive]

In Lucille Fletcher’s famous radio play a rich woman finds her imperious self in deep trouble when she overhears a murder plot on the party line, i.e. a telephone line shared by many subscribers in New York City in those long-ago days of public pay phones and soda fountains in drugstores.  

Paramount persuaded Fletcher to adapt the play for the silver screen.  To the 22-minute radio script, Fletcher added backstory with the film noir stand-by, flashbacks. The many flashbacks are seamlessly woven into the narrative (with even a flashback in a flashback) without any relief of the mounting tension of the rich woman, confined to her bed, on the phone, flipping her lid.

Barbara Stanwyck is superb. On one hand, her character is a familiar Stanwyckian fighter. A spoiled and selfish rich woman, she takes no prisoners as she irritably and commandingly barks orders and throws her weight around. On the other hand, her troubled soul is subject to panic attacks due to her fear of abandonment and fending for herself in a hostile dangerous world. Her distress gives her heart palpitations, chest pains and physical weakness. Dr. Wendell Corey claims she does not have a genuine cardiovascular problem but she is confined to her bed, unable to engage in activities of daily life, which probably worsens her case of nerves. Her untreated anxiety, which she’s apparently had since she was a child, makes it impossible for her to be anybody’s notion of a good wife

Burt Lancaster is effective as her husband from Grassville, a town name that broadcasts “wrong side of the tracks.” In the flashback of their courtship, he says, “There’s nothing nice or pretty about my life.” He evinces no love or respect for his mother, no sense of security and comfort related to a woman who had a drunken husband and eight little ingrates like Burt to take care of. Having a hole where he should have a little gratitude is one reason he doesn’t have the slightest inkling how to be a good husband.

Between Barbara’s anxiety and Burt’s broken emotions, no wonder their marriage is troubled. He didn’t realize when he married her that Barbara expected him to be either a poodle or a sextoy as required. Kicking against his pampered dependence, Burt strikes out on his own by orchestrating murky activity that draws the attention of the authorities and mobbed-up plug-uglies like William Conrad (who, like Raymond Burr, was a stout fellow often cast as the imposing villain; his voice was perfect). Some critics complain that virile and tough Lancaster is miscast as a cowardly drip but I would argue he was a similar mix of weak-brained and spineless in Criss Cross and Come Back Little Sheba.

Ann Richards plays the old girlfriend of Burt Lancaster.  Her odd voice – she sounds like a snooty bookworm - doesn’t seem to go with her Grassville origins or that her character is married to a poorly paid civil servant. She calls Barbara to tell why she thinks her special prosecutor husband is investigating Burt. The flashback of her following her lawyer husband and his colleagues to Staten Island is a great set piece. The subway station looks menacing even in daylight. Staten Island looks desolate, a bleak place where bad people get up to bad things.

As in many noir movies, sheer bad luck takes a hand when Barbara calls the police to report the murder plot. The desk cop is distracted by a baby who getting set to either bust his watch or creep off a table. It’s a funny scene in keeping with the all the other scenes in that it stokes nervous anticipation as to what in hell is going to happen next. Stanwyck’s mounting hysteria as the movie progresses is both terrifying and wonderful - this kind of cinematic excitement being exactly why film noir thrillers are so satisfying.

There are other stellar moments of tension. While Ann and Burt talk in a restaurant, they are constantly interrupted when they desperately need to talk and Burt is distracted by a shady European in the background. Makes the movie-goer want to throw something. Cadaverous Wendell Corey plays the doctor and it’s also exasperating when he is interrupted by his impatient wife while he’s in a phone booth. One of the few breaks in the tension is the montage of Barbara and Burt’s European honeymoon, the familiar “romantic idyll” montage that women’s movies inevitably had.

Despite her memorable performance, Barbara Stanwyck lost to Jane “Johnny Belinda” Wyman for Best Actress Oscar that year. I don’t take awards and prizes seriously so I don’t care, but there’re lots of movie-goers that still say Stanwyck was robbed. I don’t recommend movies very often but this is the rare movie where you know you are being played like a pinball machine but you don’t mind because the thrills are so delicious.

Perry Mason 143: Beware the Curves

Note: This 1957 outing is one of the best PI team Bertha Cool & Donald Lam books. Gardner plays to his strength - courtroom drama - while giving us a detective yarn that’s sly and thoroughly entertaining. 

Beware the Curves – Erle Stanley Gardner writing as A. A. Fair

John Dittmar Ansel strolls into Cool & Lam’s office claiming he’s a writer - a claim supported by his bushy hair and delicate hands. He wants Bertha and Donald to find a fellow named Karl - last name unknown - who hailed from Citrus Grove, a sleepy suburb of Santa Ana. Ansel says he met Karl in Paris six years ago, Karl gave him a killer idea for a story, and now Ansel wants to buy the exclusive rights.

It sounds routine, but Lam’s instincts start buzzing. Donald knows Ansel’s tale is baloney. Lam as usual tells Bertha nothing of his suspicions.

Donald Lam tracks down the name – whose holder Karl Endicott was murdered - and delivers it to the client. Worse, a cabbie dropped off a fare at Endicott’s house right before the killing, and the fare looked an awful lot like Ansel. So much for the “just a writer wanting to do the right thing” routine.

But Lam is surprised when the client wants more. Lam points out that if Ansel cared about the murder, he wouldn’t have made three blunders: hiding the truth, omitting that the suspect looked like him, and vanishing without a phone number to warn him that the cops are so interested in the case that they ran Lam out of town when he asked too many questions.

Bertha Cool, however, accepts a second assignment: determine whether it’s safe for the client to return now that the only man who could identify him in the murder case is dead. It isn’t safe - the client is arrested in an elaborate police trap. Donald schemes, keeps Bertha in the dark, dodges the amatory attentions of two honeybunnies, and plays consultant to his law school buddy defend Ansel.

Gardner serves up a lean, readable mystery with a love affair, revenge, small town corruption, political monkey business, and even a climactic murder trial, which is highly unusual in a Lam & Cool novel.

Bertha rues the day she ever met Donald (and it’s a hoot), Donald dazzles, and the courtroom finale is worth the four hours reading this novel will take. No Perry Mason-style lecture for the reveal - just Gardner’s trademark legal fireworks.

The Kalends of Noir: Algiers

Note: This movie from 1938 isn’t formally classified as film noir - since the noir style is usually said to crystallize in the 1940s - but it certainly displays many proto-noir traits and is often viewed as a key precursor to the genre.

Algiers
1938 / 1:32
Tagline: “Strange Loves Hiding in the Casbah City of Secrets!”
[internet archive]

Pepe Le Moko is fed up. The gentleman thief been two long years holed up in Algiers after pulling off a big jewel heist in Paris. He suffers a painful longing for The City of Light and its coffee, boulevards, and night life. He’s sick of the narrow streets and same old faces of the Casbah, the native quarter which, like Queens, has a high per capita of secrets and iffy people.

The movie is more a study of characters in the suffocating boredom of a life of involuntary expatriation than a story with a beginning, middle and end. Too, for the long-term expatriate with a case of clinical nostalgia, see how little it takes for expats to develop passionate and destructive desires and aversions.

Charles Boyer is a suave thief, dressed in sharp suits with silk ties.  He’s on good terms with everybody, including Police Inspector Slimane (Joseph Calleia, excellent as a weasel). The discerning movie-goer may also be reminded of Tarzan, the white guy who just has to show up and he’s the King of the Jungle. A foreign jewel thief appears one day in the Casbah and becomes Big Shot on the Esplanade. One doubts Algerian crooks – given their ancestors were into piracy and the related enslavement of Europeans - would have meekly accepted such a Jacques-come-lately.

We post-modern movie-goers have to make allowances in another case too. Boyer’s mistress Inez is played by Sigrid Gurie. She was of Norwegian stock, so they had to use skin darkener on her to make her look like a Berber. She looks like the walking wounded staggering out of Zoom Tan. That faux pas is made up for by her fine performance as a woman that’s totally immune to sweet reason, especially from a narcissistic jerk like Boyer’s Pepe. Having been on the receiving end of more than a couple sinister looks from women in both professional and private contexts, I can testify that Gurie’s baleful look is a persuasive mix of hurt, indignant, and threatening.

As for Hedy Lamarr and the love triangle, it’s reasonable to believe that Pepe and Hedy’s Gaby character bond over their common homesickness for Paris; they are from the same district, in fact. They are both trapped, he in the Casbah and she in an engagement to a gross rich man she does not love.

Stir-crazy Pepe falls in love with her because he so bored  with hiding out in the Casbah. “Music, singing, gibberish,” Pepe moans. “I'm sick of everything. It's like walking in my sleep.” I have no trouble believing that he falls for her because she’s new in town and so gorgeous and smells nice. Pepe’s longing for Paris and his love for Gaby pull him out of his sanctuary and into inevitable downfall -resonating deeply with the doomed protagonists and fatal attraction that define noir.

In her first Hollywood role, Hedy gives Gaby almost no personality. She’s stunning to look at but emotionally distant - like the Toronto skyline seen from the 401 on the way to Belleville.  Plus, from the stiff way she moves, the movie-goer would never think she was a tennis player and swimmer.

Shot by James Wong Howe, Algiers emphasizes dark, claustrophobic alleys and oppressive atmosphere - especially in its Casbah sequences - mirroring the chiaroscuro aesthetic central to noir. We see twisty narrow streets and warrens and light has to shove and bump to get through dust and smoke from hookahs. There are weird close-ups Boyer’s greedy appraisal of Hedy Lemarr’s over the top pearls. Boyer and his boyz interrogate the informer Regis (Gene Lockhart) and a hand-held camera moves around the table where the cats are playing with mouse.

I’m glad I watched this movie because Howe’s images are striking. And some scenes have their own snap, crackle, and pop. James M. Cain received a screenwriting credit for "additional dialogue" so some of the dialogue swishes by the ear like a bird getting a bit close. But it’s too long, the love story is weak, and the scene in which Boyer sings a happy song while shining his shoes was way Gene Kelly. So odd, so out of place.

European Reading Challenge #5

I read this for the European Reading Challenge 2026.

Through the Lands of the Serb - Mary Edith Durham

This 1904 travel narrative is a book that invites comparison with the old, stern tradition in which the road is a trial that tests patience and endurance. Think Alexander William Kinglake’s Eothen, or Impressions of Travel brought Home from the East. Durham’s narrative possesses the same austere courage: she goes not to be pleased, but to see; not to collect pretty impressions to describe prettily, but to learn the stubborn contours of reality.

Durham travels among peoples whom Europe had reduced to abstractions - “Balkan,” “bandits,”  “tribal,” “victims of the Turk,” “turbulent” - and she restores to them the dignity of complexity. Her Serb lands are not arranged for the visitor’s comfort. The mountains oppose her, the tracks dissolve into mud, and hospitality is generous yet nervous the spy-happy cops will notice aid to the stranger. Violence lies close beneath the surface of custom. In Čačak, a city in central Serbia, she is invited to the execution of four killers:

Taken aback, I listened, speechless, while the plan was unfolded. I was to rise very early and to drive for three hours up the mountains with the condemned men and the file of soldiers who were to carry out the sentence. The words called up before me a picture of the grisly little procession crawling uphill in the grey of the dawning. Adding up the pros and cons rapidly, I said to myself that it was my duty to see everything, but searched my brains for a decent way out of it. Then I recollected that if I went, for the next fifty years it would be said that all Englishwomen were in the habit of seeing men shot before breakfast. Gripping thankfully at this idea, I said I had rather not accept the invitation; I had not come so far to see Servians killed. My reply caused disappointment ….

Durham records these facts without sentimentality, and this sensible restraint gives the book its authority. One senses, as in Eothen, that the writer accepts discomfort of varying kinds and degrees as part of the travel experience.

The strength of the book lies in Durham’s eye for social detail. She notes dress, gesture, and ritual with the exactness of an ethnographer. A village council, a blood-feud recalled at supper, a roadside inn filled with suspicion - such scenes are sketched briskly, yet they carry the accumulated weight of credibility.

Kinglake often shields himself with irony and it took being in the midst of plague to shake him out of it. Durham is not ironic. Durham allows earnestness to appear. She feels no sense of disenchantment with European civilization and progress.

Kragujevatz otherwise is brand-new, and here as elsewhere it is easy to see that the Servians have done more in fifty years for the improvement of the place and the conditions of life than the Turk did in four centuries. Much yet remains to be done, nevertheless a journey from Servia into Turkey is like stepping off the pavement into the sewer.

Her sympathy for the Serbs, especially Serbian women, is candid and at times severe in its judgments of Western ignorance and indifference. This is travel narrative sharpened by conscience. She does not merely observe injustice; she names it, plainly and without rhetorical flourish.

At times, the prose hardens into documentary, and readers seeking late Victorian ornament may find it spare and plodding. But this bareness is integral to the book’s ethic. Durham writes as one who believes that the traveler’s duty is neither to flatter the visited nor to entertain the reader, but to instruct with the truth expressed faithfully.

She is deeply invested in questions of imperial pressure, ethnic identity, and violence. Her advocacy for Balkan peoples encourages a restrained, sincere tone. One place where dry English humor appears most clearly is in Durham’s self‑presentation. She acknowledges her own cultural naïveté. She occasionally casts herself as faintly ridiculous - out of place, gamely handling endless ritual politeness, dealing with the chaos of travel arrangements in three or four languages, all broken. This self‑deprecation is modest but important; it softens what might otherwise seem like a purely anthropological voice.

Through the Lands of the Serb remains a stimulating work. In an Edwardian age inclined toward comfort, it stands, like Kinglake’s best pages and in her memorable High Albania, as a reminder that travel, pursued by dogged and unafraid people, is an encounter with difficulty, and that difficulty forces us to face the world directly, not through filters of a common language or routines where everybody knows their lines.