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 not with the heightened self‑consciousness  of travel writing in the Twenties and Thirties, but with that older, sterner tradition in which the road is less a literary diversion than 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 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. She 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.

Perry Mason 142: The Blue Gardenia

Note: Raymond Burr battled his weight his entire life. At 6’2” he looked his best at 185 pounds but reached peaks between 250 and 300 pounds. Because of his weight, he was typecast as the villain. Over and over and over. But he never just phoned in a performance. His performance in this movie is second only to his outstanding performance in Pitfall.

The Blue Gardenia
1953 / 1:28
Tagline: “There was nothing lily-white about her!”
[internet archive] 

Raymond Burr's performance in the 1953 picture The Blue Gardenia is an outstanding example of his ability to portray the heavy. Directed by Fritz Lang, this thriller with noir trappings features Burr as Harry Prebble, a sleazy and manipulative “painter of calendar girls.”

Burr's portrayal of Harry Prebble is marked by a chilling blend of the smooth charm and predatory menace of the stereotypical ladies’ man. He effortlessly embodies the character's ravenous nature, making Prebble as repellant and compelling as a wolf. His interactions with Anne Baxter's character, naïve Norah Larkin, are particularly striking. Burr's ability to switch from suave to sinister in seconds adds a layer of tension to their two scenes together.

One of the most vivid aspects of Burr's performance is his physical presence. He uses his imposing height and rotundity to dominate scenes, creating a sense of unease. His physicality is complemented by his nuanced facial expressions, especially his rare smiles and expressive eyes. He laughs gently as he asks caressingly, “"Do you know what a mermaid's downfall is?"

Burr's body language highlights his versatility as an actor. I don’t know how Burr does it, but when Prebble spikes the woman’s drink with Roofies, his movement seems practiced. This gives the movie-goer the distinct impression that Prebble has date raped many times before.

Burr knew how to use his deep voice too. His warm, confident voice seems trustworthy, which contrasts sharply with the character's remote calculating eyes and underlying malevolence. This vocal performance helps to create a sense of duality in Prebble, making him both alluring and threatening. On the telephone, in a voice devoid of care, sympathy, or support, he deals with a distraught woman who needs to talk about their future together. In the upscale Chinese restaurant, his voice is warm and friendly as he urges the woman drink up, have another Polynesian Pearl Diver. “These aren't really drinks. They're trade winds across cool lagoons. They're the southern cross above coral reefs. They're a lovely maiden bathing at the foot of a waterfall.”

By the middle 1950s, Burr had put in dozens of performances playing a portly villain. As an actor serious about his craft, he must have kept himself from getting bored by creating heavies who were believable and multifaceted. As an illustrator, Prebble genially entertains the women working the switchboard at a newspaper in LA by drawing caricatures. Naturally, he flirts with them and that does not make us feel foreboding. But Prebble also eavesdrops and grabs women’s hands inappropriately, both of which indicate he is not to be trusted.

Overall, Raymond Burr's performance contributes much to this critique of 1950’s dating culture of ladies’ men with black books; good girls being responsible to stop men from “trying something” or if not, running the risk of being labelled a hussy; putting out or walking home so women carried change on dates in case they had to call somebody to pick them up. Burr worked with director Fritz Lang on this movie, not the only time he worked with a well-regarded director; for example, Anthony Mann in Raw Deal and André De Toth in Pitfall.

As for the connection with the classic Perry Mason TV series, Richard Erdman, a brilliant character actor, appeared in seven episodes, as a villain, victim and upstanding citizen. In TCOT LostLast Act, the movie-goer wonders if he was expressing his own opinion when his character says, "The theater is something very special to me, Mr. Mason. It's been my family, my home; everything I've ever wanted. When I'm inside a theater, I'm in a church. When I see a great play, I hear angels singing. When I see great performances, I'm walking the streets of Heaven. Those streets are very clean and beautiful, Mr. Mason. They should be kept that way." 

Perry Mason 141: TCOT Borrowed Brunette

Note: This mid-period novel is highly regarded despite downsides. Rather talky: Mason and Drake have extensive and complicated conversations exonerating the persons of interest. Boo. Familiar characters such as Della, Lt. Tragg, and DA Burger don’t play roles. Boo. But there are many more suspects than the usual three or four, all of whom have cool retro names: Orville L. Reedley, Cora Felton, Daphne Gridley, Carlotta Tipton, Arthur Clovis and Helen Reedley. Yay.

The Case of the Borrowed Brunette – Erle Stanley Gardner

The 28th Mason outing (1946 vintage) arrives with quaint relics such as ration books and rules still written by men with loud voices and heavier wallets. Gardner obliges with two enterprising women: one trying to wriggle free from a husband who treats matrimony like a deed of ownership; the other dabbling in Hollywood fakery for rent money and a shot at being noticed. Naturally, they end up in Mason’s office - who else handles the odd and the risky with such breezy assurance?

Soon enough, the expected corpse appears (Gardner never taxes the reader’s patience once a gun is introduced), and the police, with their touching faith in surfaces, decide the case is already solved. A blackmailer is perforated, a pistol turns up where it shouldn’t, and the DA’s bulldog begins sharpening procedural knives. Mason, as ever, cares less for appearances than for chronology: when, precisely, did the curtain fall on the extortionist - and how inconveniently does that timing clash with the official story?

What’s curious this time is who isn’t crowding the stage. The regulars - Della, Tragg, Burger - hover in the wings while Gardner parades a livelier rogues’ gallery, all named as if christened by a casting director with a flair for the Trollopian: Reedley, Gridley, Tipton, Clovis. Mason and Drake talk - and talk- but the chatter has caffeinated purpose, an almost mathematical pleasure in elimination.

It’s a surprisingly gripping exercise in pure reasoning, provided the reader can swallow the old impersonation chestnut without stamping a foot. If you can, Gardner rewards you with one of his tidier contraptions: fewer courtroom fireworks, more clockwork intrigue - brisk, clever, and difficult to set aside even for dinner.

Perry Mason 140: The DA Holds a Candle

Note: The Thirties. After the Crash. Streets full of men with empty pockets and eyes like busted windows. Gardner’s lawyers - Mason, Selby - grinding through the gears of a system built on hustle and hope. Dog-eat-dog law, chiseling as survival, free enterprise chewing its own tail while the headlines scream and the ink runs. We Americans used to read everything – books, magazines, comics, almanacs – even newspapers. 

The DA Holds a Candle – Erle Stanley Gardner

This 1938 mystery is the second of nine Doug Selby mysteries Gardner published between 1937 and 1949. Like its siblings, it first ran in The Country Gentleman, a rural magazine with 2.5 million subscribers - a fact that tells you plenty about Gardner’s intended audience and about his deliberate turn from big-city Perry Mason theatrics to the moral politics of small-town justice.

The setup is classic Gardner: Selby, the idealistic young D.A., and his loyal sidekick Sheriff Max Brandon jawing about a roadhouse that smells of trouble. Big-city gamblers run poker games involving local rich kids with more allowance than sense. One of those kids is heir to a sugar-beet empire, and Daddy Beet isn’t shy about throwing his weight around at city hall. Brandon is a straight-shooter out of pulp tradition. Sylvia Martin - Selby’s girlfriend and crusading reporter, a sassier cousin to Della Street - would love nothing better than to see the beet magnate taken down a peg.

Unlike The D.A. Calls It Murder, the first Selby outing, Gardner keeps his plot lines separate until the right moment. It starts small: a poor kid in hot water over a bad check - an offense that exposes how casually the town’s well-off can endanger the children of mechanics and secretaries. Then the screws tighten. A hitchhiker turns up dead in an auto camp, carbon dioxide the killer. Two buckos rented the cabin, but five other suspects lurk in the wings. Gardner spins the web with his usual skill, pulling threads until everything knots in a neat, satisfying finish.

No courtroom pyrotechnics here. Gardner is less interested in legal showmanship than in the everyday bargaining of a pastoral county where everybody knows everybody - and expects favors. Sylvia wants scoops in exchange for endorsements. The beet baron wants slaps on the wrist for his DWI-charged son and sneers that Selby can’t “hold a candle” to big-city D.A.s, branding Brandon a “comic-opera sheriff.”

Gardner makes it clear that reformers like Selby fight uphill battles against cronyism and corruption, and must match the toughness of the crooks they pursue. Social justice matters to Gardner, but so does individual grit. Selby believes reason and logic can untangle the nutty behavior of ordinary folks and curb abuses of authority such as nepotism, cronyism and favoritism. That faith drives him, even when the change-hating system - and incurable human nature - push back hard.

Gardner also touches a hot Thirties theme: generational friction. The old guard clings to Victorian proprieties; the young toss them aside for ‘free love,’ mistaking license for freedom and charm for character. Gardner doesn’t preach, but the warning is there.

Readable? Absolutely - especially for the plot mechanics, which are first-rate. Mystery expert Mike Grost calls the 1938–1942 stretch one of Gardner’s peaks, and this book backs him up. No fireworks, no Perry Mason theatrics - but a clear sense of why Gardner kept setting stories in towns like the ones where he grew up, where power operates not formally, but through position, money, and reputation.

Perry Mason 139: Perry Mason in the Forties

Note: On TV, Perry Mason sailed into WWII and came back with a wounded arm. In Gardner’s books? Mason never enlisted - though Donald Lam did, serving in Naval Intelligence. I get teary-eyed reading the scene in which Elsie Brand expresses her pride when he enlists. Honoring loyalty, one day I’m going name a Weimaraner after Elsie Brand.

Perry Mason in the Forties: The Ultimate Trio

The Case of the Baited Hook (1940)
Topped FictionDB’s list with a perfect 5/5 rating, marking it as the highest-rated Mason mystery of the decade. Celebrated for its intricate gripping plot.

The curtain rises on Perry Mason’s office at midnight, stale with smoke. A wealthy architect arrives with a masked woman. He warns Mason to watch the newspapers; ruin looms for them both. No questions, no answers. Mason accepts half of a $10,000 bill - a staggering sum in the early Forties.

From this cryptic start, Gardner spins a web of law, finance, and identity. Mrs. Tump, a shrewd advocate for a young woman scarred by an illegal adoption, adds depth as one of Gardner’s tributes to forthright womanhood. Action unfolds in dialogue: Mason fencing with men whose words conceal more than they reveal. 

The stakes? A stock swindle, a trust fund in peril, and a lucid exposition of agency law. Russian émigrés, a baby farm, and a fraudulent share deal complicate the maze. Mason’s first challenge: discover who his client is. 

No courtroom fireworks this time - only hearings and maneuvers on arcane legal points. Della Street stands as partner in peril and strategy. TCOT Baited Hook is Gardner at his most intricate: a drama of masks and motives, completed only on the final page.

The Case of the Careless Kitten (1942)
Also earned a 5/5 FictionDB score. Heralded for its clever twist and tight legal drama within its serialized Saturday Evening Post run.

Published during WWII, this Perry Mason novel carries the wartime undertone of fear and suspicion. Japanese families were being sent to internment camps, and though the book never names it, that shadow lingers. Komo, a character who calls himself Korean but is seen as Japanese, embodies the era’s prejudice. Gardner uses him as a mirror for judgment and misunderstanding.

The mystery begins with Franklin Shore, a banker missing for ten years. His sudden message summons Mason to a meeting, but Mason finds a corpse instead. From that moment, the story races through eighteen sleepless hours of danger and deception. Della Street, Mason’s loyal secretary, is arrested; Tragg gloats, Burger smirks, and Perry plays chess with the law.

Threads of greed and jealousy tighten as Shore’s reappearance threatens family fortunes. A kitten named Amber Eyes sparks the plot, proving even small things turn big wheels.

Gardner writes lean and vivid, blending human drama with legal maneuvering. Beneath the intrigue hums a question of belonging - what kind of American are you? Komo doesn’t answer. His silence and presence speak for the times.

The Case of the Lonely Heiress (1948)
Another 5/5 FictionDB favorite, widely praised by readers and critics for its emotional depth and suspenseful pacing. Frequently cited for character-driven storytelling.

In early 1948, Perry Mason faced one of his most unusual cases. It began with Robert Caddo, a dubious publisher of Lonely Hearts Are Calling, a magazine mixing plaintive ads and lurid confessions. Among its columns appeared an ad from Marilyn Marlow, a young heiress seeking a suitor “untainted by avarice.” Police suspected fraud, claiming Marilyn was a fiction to boost circulation. Caddo begged Mason to prove her real.

Mason doubted the story - until he learned Marilyn’s mother had inherited a fortune from eccentric George Endicott and planned to pass it to her daughter. This prospect enraged Endicott’s relatives. Soon, the nurse lay murdered, the weapon found in Marilyn’s car. Circumstantial evidence tightened around the girl as the law moved to indict her.

From lonely hearts to lethal passions, Mason unravels a skein of greed and deception.

Honorable Mention: TCOT Silent Partner (1940) and TCOTVagabond Virgin (1948)

The Ides of Dick Powell: Susan Slept Here

Note: This 1954 comedy has a plot that would not fly today. A middle-aged man and a minor six months short of legal fall for each other and get married. Back then lots of people probably said “peeyew” at May/December romances but at the same time just as many folks just shrugged at teenaged girls getting married. The early Fifties saw the peak of teen marriage in the US.  In 1954, approximately 6.1% of women who were 16 years old got married. This translates to about 6,361,000 women who got married at the age of 16.

Susan Slept Here
1954 / 1:38
Tagline: “WHAT GOES ON? When a girl almost 18 latches on to a man-about-town?”

In the early 1950s, millions of American girls under 18 were marrying, yet this comedy cheerfully ignores that reality and plunges into pure fantasy. Dick Powell plays a weary Hollywood screenwriter desperate to escape the fluff factory. Like Sullivan in Sullivan’s Travels, he yearns for grit and truth, so he asks his police pals to find him a genuine juvenile delinquent for research.

On Christmas Eve, two vice cops deliver Debbie Reynolds to his apartment. She’s been arrested for brawling - specifically, breaking a bottle over a drunken sailor’s head because he was acting like, well, a drunken sailor. Rather than jail her for the holidays, they beg Powell to babysit until she’s shipped to detention.

Convincing audiences that Reynolds – the impossibly adorable singer of Tammy - could be a JD takes effort. At first, she’s a wildcat, rattling Powell’s underemployed household of secretary and houseman. Then she discovers she’s read one of his novels and softens. The Christmas morning phone call from Powell’s fiancée Izabella (Anne Francis) is a comic gem: Reynolds innocently makes Powell sound depraved, chirping that they stayed up all night “playing games… card games.”

Soon Powell learns Reynolds faces six months in reform school unless she shows “visible means of support.” His solution? Marry her. Cue a neon-lit Vegas spree, dancing till dawn, then snoozing in a cab back to L.A. - a $1,500 fare in today’s money.

Powell flees Hollywood to write his magnum opus, aided by Glenda Farrell’s world-weary secretary (still funny, though the old-school man-hungry shtick hasn’t aged well). Les Tremayne supplies comic surprises as Powell’s frazzled lawyer, and Alvy Moore shines as the street-smart houseman. Red Skelton pops in for a cameo - mercifully silent, though his trademark mugging sneaks through.

Meanwhile, Reynolds tries to “grow up” with mixology, horseback riding, and golf - Izabella’s turf. Her mimicry of Francis in home movies is priceless, as is her ambush of Powell lip-syncing to one of his own dreadful scripts on the late show.

Technicolor is the film’s secret weapon. Anne Francis, with eyes like animated sapphires, looks alternately divine and deranged thanks to genius costuming. And Reynolds’ dream sequence? A riot of color and surreal comedy that actually advances the plot.

This is a looney holiday fantasy - half screwball, half satire - wrapped in eye-popping hues. It’s not reality by longshot - Powell’s Oscar statue sometimes narrates from its own point of view - but it’s a fascinating artifact of mid-century Hollywood.