He Scratched her Tender Skin...

The Animal Kingdom
1932 / 1:25
Tagline: “He scratched her tender skin and found a savage!”
[internet archive]

In this Pre-Code love drama, Tom is the owner of a small press in Connecticut. He wants to publish art, not tripe. His father fears that idealistic dreamer Tom lacks punctuality, focus and persistence.

Tom had a three-year romantic relationship with Daisy, a magazine illustrator who wants to paint seriously. They had a vague idea that marriage wasn’t in the cards, that love was a bourgeois thing. But Tom met Cecelia while Daisy was away studying the great art and artists of France. After a whirlwind month that featured judgement-clouding “infatuation,” Tom married Cecelia.

Optimistic Tom wants to maintain a friendship with Daisy, because he knows they are good for each other. They like exchanging news. They give each other advice about making genuine art but making a living too. Daisy realizes with dismay that she loves Tom like crazy, bourgeois thing or not. She bails to Nova Scotia to get him out of her system.

At first Cecelia seems okay with Tom hanging with his bohemian buds. However, in the course of time, Ceceila envisions herself to be the project manager with Tom as the project. “See his ability to organize and carry through? That’s all me!” For his own good mainly but so they can live in the city, not the suburbs, and be the charming power couple in a busy social and professional life.

Playwright Philip Barry puts this complicated triangle in a social world. Cecelia allies with Tom’s father to make Tom a success, whether or not success costs Tom what he thinks is his integrity. Tom selfishly uses his ex-pug butler Regan (William Gargan, comic relief) as a good luck charm. Tom and Daisy’s hipster friends are pulling for them, but feel powerless to snap Tom out of his “bewilderment.” Cecelia keeps an ex-lover in thrall because as a lawyer he (Neil Hamilton) might be handy in advancing the scheme to sell Tom’s publishing house to a conglomerate. No triangle is an island.

Leslie Howard played Tom on the stage in this Phillip Barry play so he’s comfortable in the role. Howard has a warm gentleness that movie-goers will recall from The Petrified Forest. His lightness and tenderness disarm our judgement that Tom might be merely passive and immature. Even puritans like me will understand him doing the head over heels thing with somebody as attractive as Cecelia.

On top of easy to look at, Ann Harding as Daisy is likeable, a rare mix of talent, intelligence, and courage to want a baby even if it means being a single mother in 1932. Harding also has this aura of “Hold me when I’m hurting” that is compelling. "Easy on the eye," "likeable," "compelling," hell - who am I kidding? I'd storm Troy with Menelaus to get Ann Harding back. 

Myrna Loy as Cecelia could have played the part as an unapologetic social climber, but does not. Cecelia thinks she is doing the right thing for everybody involved, manipulating and coercing Tom to get on the path to success in the world of publishing, not an industry that coddles the thin-skinned. A puritan like me, however, has qualms about Cecelia’s esteem of ephemera such as popularity, the high life, status, and money.

The Pre-Code movie is worth watching, if the movie-goer has a yen for a rather talky movie about adult situations. I don’t think it is a “comedy of manners” because there are few one-liners and scenes are not played for laughs. The ex-prizefighter is there for comic relief, which implies to me the playwright himself thought the tone was generally serious, on the level, unironic.

The Nones of Perry Mason 86

Note: Raymond Burr was a demon for work, appearing in more than 50 feature films between 1946 and 1957. He was typecast as the villain because his stoutness gave him a commanding menacing presence. Film historian Alain Silver described Raymond Burr's psycho private investigator in Pitfall as "both reprehensible and pathetic," a characterization also cited by film historian Richard Schickel as a prototype of film noir. 

Pitfall
1948 / 1:26
Tagline: “A man can be as strong as steel … but somewhere there's a woman who'll break him!”
[internet archive]

In an incredible performance, Raymond Burr portrays a brutal private investigator that stalks Lizabeth Scott. She was connected with a case of embezzling that the insurance company, represented by Dick Powell, has to make good. Scott and married-with-young son Powell have brief dalliance that does not amount to much. However, Burr the Burly Brute wants Scott body and soul. He schemes to own her by setting up Powell in an ugly trap. Excellent plotting, pace, and climax with realistic characters.

Burr makes the most of an extended part as an ex-cop turned private investigator. He looks close to 300 pounds, making his head look small on a monolith of a body. The secretaries in Powell’s office nicknamed Burr “Gruesome” because he creeps them out. Doubtless ex-cop for cause, he hulks with repressed violence and moves as slow and leisurely as a cat as if to warn people to run away when he moves fast.

Whether he is redolent of threat or yearning for something nice to happen to him (for once), he stares with a faraway look, as if he has retreated to a place where feverish dreams are fulfilled and sociopathic plans hatched. The scene in which he visits the salon where Scott models clothes and forces her to show more bare shoulders by taking her shawl down will give the movie-goer a full-blown case of the heebie-jeebies.

Burr seems eerily oblivious of the repulsion he provokes. In his narcissism, he figures that if the object of his obsession spends a little time with him, she’ll get over his being horrible and not feel the compulsion to take a shower whenever he looks at her. In his stupidity, he never considers the hazards of driving to desperation a woman who keeps a gun in her apartment. It is too much to expect that imagination-free victimizers to ever conceive of themselves as one day becoming the victim.

The performances make this movie well-worth viewing. Powell looks and talks rather deadpan as he plays the bored suburban husband who makes it easy for noir trouble to find him. It’s his damn fault, he brews his own trouble: he doesn’t tell Scott he’s married – the fink – and, deeply wounded yet again by useless immature men, Scott drops him.

Jane Wyatt is convincing as the dependable wife. When Powell, in a rut, asks her, “You were the homecoming queen and I most likely to succeed, what happened,” she answers matter-of-factly, “We got married. I had a baby.” Quite sensibly, she tries to talk him out of his sulky FOMO and get him to appreciating what he’s got, which is only a life millions would trade their eyeteeth for 

Lizabeth Scott has delightful moments sporting about in a motor boat when she is actually smiling. This is a sea change from her usual defeated look caused by bad luck with the wrong kind of men (see The Strange Love of Martha Ivers). But due to Burr’s menace and stalking, it doesn’t take too long before she assumes her bewildered mien. She’s decidedly not a scheming femme fatale. She’s an ordinary woman who has been kicked around by life. She’s unlucky enough to get unwittingly involved with three clucks: a weak-minded boyfriend (Byron Barr), a bored insurance man (Powell), and a psychopathic detective (Burr).

I'm the kind of movie-goer that's also a moralistic prude so I get the message often sent in film noir: it doesn’t take much to go off the rails and once off, really bad stuff can come down. 

Pre-Mason Burr
Please Murder Me (1956) [internet archive] [my review]
I Love Trouble (1948) [internet archive] [my review]
Sleep, My Love (1948) [internet archive] [my review]
Ruthless (1948) [internet archive] [my review]

Taoist Tradition

The Importance of Living - Lin Yutang

Along with Pearl Buck, Lin enjoyed a vogue in the 1930s when many Americans were interested in our ally the Nationalist Chinese. Lin was not a philosopher but he interpreted Confucianism and Taoism in light, readable essays. Widely read in traditional literature, he translated many obscure Taoists and drunken poet-scamps so in this book, he includes wonderful passages on the Taoist good life that we English speakers won’t find anywhere else.

This book covers topics like fine living, reasonableness, education, art, and wisdom in a refreshing way, though we post-moderns have to be patient with regard to his views on gender and monumental silence about social class. He doesn't provide a counter to the argument of, "Hey, what if everybody listened to his inner layabout all the time? Where would society be then? Buncha slackers!  Huh?"

Lin's voice is humane and mildly dissenting. For instance, he writes

In this present age of threats to democracy and individual liberty, probably only the scamp and the spirit of the scamp alone will save us from becoming lost as serially numbered units in the masses of disciplined, obedient, regimented and uniformed coolies. The scamp will be the last and most formidable enemy of dictatorships. He will be the champion of human dignity and individual freedom, and will be the last to be conquered. All modern civilization depends entirely on him.

His thesis – that it is up to the individual to set his own standards for enjoying life and find her own pleasures – brings to mind Robert Graves' idea that "When people have lost their authentic personal taste, they lose their personality and become the instruments of other people's wills.

In the Taoist tradition, Lin says the point is not to “have a great philosophy or have a few great philosophers” but rather it is “to take things philosophically, to live in a way that makes life not only bearable but delightful.

Reading is key to enjoying life: “… [I]f one knows the enjoyment of reading, one can study anywhere, even in the best schools.”

Also by Lin Yutang

• Moment in Peking 
• My Country and My People

The Kalends of Perry Mason 85

Note: Gardner dedicates this 1953 story to Ralph F. Turner, author of Forensic Science and Laboratory Techniques, a publication that contributed to the field of Criminal Forensic Science. Turner's advances in the field of criminalistics added to the scholarly reputation of then Michigan State College, now my alma mater Michigan State University. The reveal of this mystery is, among Mason fandom, one of the most famous of all.

The Case of the Green-eyed Sister – Erle Stanley Gardner

What has poor old Ned Bain done to deserve such a troubled old age? He’s got the guilts on account of over-dutiful daughter Hattie who’s sacrificed her chance at a loving husband and family so she could nurse him and his dodgy heart. Instead of getting an honest job like any man should, his son Jarret has married rich and spends his wife’s money anthropologizing at ruins – i.e. fallen down buildings --  in the Yucatan. His daughter Sylvia is a loose-cannon manipulator and divorcee to boot. Snooty and cold Sylvia makes a poor impression on intuitive Della Street who sums up Sylvia with, "She'd cut your heart out for thirty-seven cents."

As if his children were not worry enough, a false friend, J.J. Fritch from their sketchy past, is trying to blackmail him. J.J. is threatening to tell the bank that Ned’s fortune is based on money stolen in a heist. Such a tale, of course, would wipe out the Bain family. Pal J.J. is using crooked PI Brogan to plague him. Daughter Sylvia goes to Perry Mason to get the family out from under its vulnerable position.

The actions careens around tight corners with the upshot being Perry Mason finds himself having to defend daughter Hattie on a murder charge. Who would have thought such a mousey woman would take a bad guy out with an icepick?

Gardner has socially-conscious fun as Mason dissects questionable police procedure such as priming witnesses and not bothering to look for evidence because their "gut instinct" tells them they've got the perp. Police corner-cutting happens so often in Perry Mason novels that one wonders if Gardner got guff from cops and DA’s who didn’t like their short-cuts and thinking errors being publicized. 

The trial scene in Chapter Fourteen, about 50 pages, is one of the longest in all the Mason novels. The reveal is clever and counts as one of the more famous endings among Mason fans. Mystery fans who like retro expressions (“lead pipe cinch”) will enjoy this readable story.

European Reading Challenge #6

The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life - Tom Reiss

This biography examines the life and times of Lev Nussimbaum, a stateless Azerbaijani writer who lived between the two world wars.

The narrative is a bit less on the mercurial, magnetic, and elusive personality of the subject than on the major geopolitical upheavals of the 20^th century, such as the collapse of empires after WWI, the rise of Russian Bolshevism, the tragedy of Weimar democracy and the rise of Hitler’s National Socialism.

Reiss departs from the intricate story of Nussimbaum’s short life (from the Caucasus to Central Europe to America to end in Posillipo, Italy) to give primers on the horror of the Cheka; the brutality of the Freikorps; and the global rise of conflicting revolutionary and counter-revolutionary groups. This will interest readers (like me) who knew about such phenomena only superficially.

Reiss’s narrative captures and holds our attention because he continually draws from eyewitness accounts in memoirs and interviews, and Nussimbaum’s letters to intimates and fragments of his autobiography. He compares this evidence against historical sources. Did Nussimbaum soften frightful events due to his own nostalgia? Or conversely when did he see harsh reality but soften it in his fiction? This critical approach allows the biographer to substantiate the claim that Nussimbaum was probably the author Kurban Said, who wrote the iconic novel Ali and Nino ​​(1937).

An exceptional work. The book is well-worth reading if a reader can’t stop reading about the painful history of 20^th century Europe. Historical figures are presented in an interesting way (such as the young bank-robbing Stalin knowing the subject’s mother). The vision of Baku at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries as the Paris of the East brings us closer to the culture, customs and peoples of the Caucasus and neighboring regions that are never mentioned in our schools or the mass media.

Chandler but More Heart & Soul

Ask for Me Tomorrow - Margaret Millar

Gilda was married to B.J. Lockwood, a nice guy that bad stuff just happened to since he never learned from experience and was too dumb to evaluate the risks of impulsive decisions. B.J.’s decision to run off with their pregnant 15-year-old house girl back to her natal village in Mexico left Gilda at loose ends. Gilda then married Marco, who had a paralyzing stroke soon after their nuptials.

Wanting to conclude unfinished business with B.J., Gilda hires young lawyer Tom Aragon to go down Mexico way and find him. Though he’s by no means an experienced detective, Tom is bilingual and quickly finds out B.J. and a con man named Jenkins were jailed on fraud charges. 

Their hapless plan to convert a poor Baja California village into a resort transformed into a criminal enterprise mainly because they were both out of their financial league. As Tom gets closer to his quarry B.J., however, three brutal murders eliminate informants.  

I found the ending a surprising hoot, while harder to please, less willing to be tricked readers of mystery may be less impressed.

Millar’s settings of Southern California and Mexico in the mid-1970s feel authentic and evocative though the attacks on the corruption in both places may put off readers who like those places. The dialogue is snappy and funny, but sometimes we wonder if it is likely that sleazy Mexican cops would really come up with such witty rejoinders. Many scenes shine as Gilda and Tom interact with each other, mainly by phone, and with a variety of curious characters. I think the exposition, dialogue and characterization make this one worth reading.

Margaret Millar was married to Kenneth Millar who wrote mysteries under the pen name of Ross Macdonald.

And the Butler-Blonde Battle was On!

Note: It’s impossible to have the Gail Patrick film festival without talking about this movie though it's hard to come up with anything new to say about one of the most popular screwball comedies ever. Mean Girl Cornelia was the role that typed Gail Patrick as The Sexy Smart Haughty One for the next dozen years. When Patrick retired from acting in 1948, inactivity drove her crazy. So she created the job of executive producer for the TV series Perry Mason and did that from 1957 to 1966.

My Man Godfrey
1936 / 1:34
Tagline: “...and the butler-blonde battle was on!”
[internet archive]

William Powell claimed that the only actress right for the part of Irene was Carole Lombard. Only an amateur critic, I hesitate to argue with a respected professional, but I wonder if at 24 years old Lombard was a little long in the tooth for the role of the giddy socialite Irene Bullock.

But I’m wrong since what trivializes a couple of years too old is that Lombard personified Thalia, the goddess of comedy. Only the powers of a goddess could make uproarious being flopped over Powell’s shoulder when he carries her up the stairs to toss her into a shower. Somehow she still manages to convey that she’s fakin’ and is as content as a puppy being carried. Even the way she lolls her head and shakes her hands is funny. Hilarious when she romps around on the furniture like a four-year-old, gleefully sing-song chanting “Godfrey loves me! He put me in the shower!” Lombard was a fearless actress, not afraid to look a wet and disheveled mess or act the looniest of tunes.

Lombard herself felt the character of Irene Bullock had a sense of tragedy about her. The movie-goer suspects that Irene’s bounteous love and compassion have been frustrated. Family with scads of kiddoes and doggoes or running a charity would be just the thing for her. Any foundation would benefit from her strength and kindness that badly need to find an object.

Also having a sense of the tragedy of the waste of talent was the character of Cornelia, the tough cookie sister played by Gail Patrick.

Godfrey: Very well. You belong to that unfortunate category that I would call the "Park Avenue brat." A spoiled child who's grown up in ease and luxury, who's always had her own way, and whose misdirected energies are so childish that they hardly deserve the comment, even of a butler on his off Thursday.

Cornelia: Thank you for a very lovely portrait.

Cornelia is hurt and angry at this devastating critique because she knows it’s true. She knows that she’s wasting her intelligence, adventurousness, and determination. She is all too aware that she is turning away from the challenge of life by hanging out with wastrels and worldlings. When ex-spoiled child Godfrey is taking his leave of the Bullocks, he has learned even from bad examples. He says to Cornelia:

You taught me the fallacy of false pride. You taught me humility....Miss Cornelia, there have been other spoiled children in the world. I happen to be one of them myself. You're a high-spirited girl. I can only hope that you use those high spirits in a more constructive way.

High spirits, a powerful psychological resource, run in all of us, already there, we don’t get high spirits from somewhere else. High spirits fuel the warrior in Cornelia, making it possible for her to face adversity and overcome obstacles. She needs to fight whatever is stealing her joy and dampening her high spirits, figure out her own values and work toward her own unique goals.

Other Gail Patrick Movies: Click the link below to read the review.

• If I Had a Million
• The Phantom Broadcast
• The Murders in the Zoo
• Death Takes a Holiday
• The Crime of Helen Stanley
• Murder at the Vanities
• The Preview Murder Mystery

Hercule Poirot #32

Mrs. McGinty's Dead - Agatha Christie

First published in 1952, the Belgian series detective is called upon by Superintendent Spence to gather enough evidence to Stay the Executioner’s Chop. Though he worked up the case, Spence doubts that James Bentley committed the murder for which he was tried and convicted. 

But if Bentley was not the culprit, who bashed Mrs. McGinty over the head, got her cash from under the floorboards, and secreted the hoard in a place her boarder James Bentley had easy access to? And why frame harmless Bentley, an out of work, lonely oddball?

Spence asks ageing detective Hercule Poirot to look into the case quietly. Poirot grants Spence’s request. He goes to the village of Broadhinny where the crime took place. To his misery, he is compelled to stay in a guest house with draughts, squalor, half-wild kids and dogs, and bad cooking. 

He meets his old friend the mystery writer Ariadne Oliver. She is having a rough time collaborating with a writer who adopting one of her series characters for a play. Her detective is a middle-aged Finnish vegetarian but the writer wants to make him into a handsome, dashing, meat-eating 35-year-old.

Through logic and method, Poirot quickly enough finds other probable motives and culprits and discovers what brought about Mrs. McGinty’s killing. There is another killing. This causes Bentley's execution to be postponed and gives more time for Poirot, by exciting his little gray cells, to untangle the mystery. Poirot's boundless self-confidence is always on display and always likable.

Agatha Christie was a plot genius. I shake my head in wonder at how she weaves her magic. Happily, Poirot is on stage from the first page. The entire mystery, in fact, is told from his point of view. The unfolding of the plot is smooth and plausible but too many characters make the reader sometimes pause and wonder, “Now who was this.” 

She doesn’t spend time describing and moves incidents along. When we readers are misdirected we know we are being conned and marvel that we still feel the suspense. High entertainment value, with all suspects gathered in a room for the climax and period references – still rationing in the early Fifties!

A Strange and Fascinating Woman

Note: This picture is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning play Craig's Wife by George Kelly. Directed by Vincent Sherman, it is the second of three films he made with Joan Crawford when they were “close to each other.”  When Sherman later revealed the affair to his wife, she observed “Well, I guess it’s too much to ask of any man that he turn down the opportunity to sleep with Joan Crawford.”

Harriet Craig
1950 / 1:34
Tagline: “A Strange and Fascinating Woman, at War with the Whole World.”
[internet archive]

Harriet Craig (Joan Crawford) is severe in her appearance, wearing clothes with straight lines, no curves. Harriet, particular to the point of being peculiar, keeps her housekeeper and her cousin Clair on the hop keeping everything just so. The upshot is that the house has all the warm coziness of the waiting area of a busy urology practice. Harriet keeps her husband Walter happy where it counts especially when she can use connubial delights to divert him from golf games with poker buddies.

But it is not like she is buckling to all the expectations of a stern patriarchy. Though she believes a wife’s duty is to look nice, she wears a hairstyle that is easy to take care of instead of attractive. Though Walter wants kids, she doesn’t want messes so they don’t have kids. In an incredible scene, she damages her husband’s reputation with his boss to head off Walter getting a promotion and a long business stay in Japan. Harriet feels she has achieved a secure stasis and doesn’t want anything as uncertain as kids or trips full of illicit temptations to rock the boat lest they all be devoured by chaos.

Harriet Craig escapes into perfectionism for safety, a fantasy world in which she is in control of the course of her mother’s dementia, Clair’s marital prospects, and her husband Walter’s promotions and business trips. She can’t face without anxiety the reality that she has control over none of these things. This movie is about how the world, other people, and her own unhelpful responses to normal changes in life all form a tornado to topple her perfect house of cards, to blow away her nutty belief that by dominating other people with her tyrant ways, she will exert control over what is in fact out of her sphere.

Wendell Corey is genial as Walter Craig. He’s probably best remembered as the dour police detective in Rear Window, being all judgy about Stewart sleeping with Kelly without benefit of clergy.  He plays Walter as a social and reasonable guy. The movie-goer can see it in his face when the realization strikes him that Harriet doesn’t like or trust other people when she claims, “We don't need other people to make us happy.” K.T. Stevens effectively portrays Clair as vulnerable in her lack of confidence and experience, defenseless against Harriet’s manipulations. Her nonverbals are expressive when it hits her that Harriet is playing fast and loose with reality.

Joan Crawford's performance is outstanding. Commanding. I had to re-evaluate my previous dismissal of her as a habitually over-acting movie star, associating her often overheated style too much with the melodramatic roles and situations of her many movies. Crawford brings to life Harriet Craig's embattled and controlling nature as she deals, not well, with a crazy world in which husbands tell each other, “Wives are mighty handy gadgets to have around the house.”

The Ides of Perry Mason 84

Gold Comes in Bricks – Erle Stanley Gardner writing as A.A. Fair

This 1940 exercise in noir-lite was the sixth of 30 novels starring the private detectives Donald Lam and Bertha Cool. Like Laurel and Hardy, the partnership features the shrimpy one (him) and the stout one (her). Temperamentally speaking, Lam is a thinking machine and Bertha a bull in a china shop. As Bertha frankly sums up:

You have something I’ll never have, Donald. You’re resilient. Put pressure on you, and you bend. Then as soon as the pressure is removed, you spring back. I’m different. Put pressure on me, and I put pressure back. If anything happens, and I can’t put any pressure back some time, I won’t bend, I’ll simply break.

The strain between contrasting styles is as funny as Bertha’s smarmy pseudo-concern over Lam’s love life. Women inevitably fall in love with Lam for his kind respect and willingness to listen. So Cool is always worried that Lam will end up in romantically deep waters and be too distracted to do his assignments for her. It’s a hoot.

This mystery opens with Lam taking lessons in the martial arts per the orders of Bertha, who likes her tobacco, liquor, steaks, and comfort. She thinks it would be the smart move to get Lam to toughen up in order to minimize recovery time after he gets beaten up on the job.

The client Henry Ashbury has brought them a problem of a debutante in deep trouble, the kind of case pulp writers enjoyed (even Faulkner used "deb in danger" in his notorious potboiler Sanctuary). Dad Ashbury is concerned about his independent-minded daughter Alta. She is burning through his money either by gambling or paying blackmail, and Dad fears both. He hires Cool and Lam to look into the girl’s financial dealings with her rummy friends. So that the daughter will not wonder why Lam is in the house he is to pose as Ashbury’s personal trainer.

To say this is a cockamamie plan is to say it all. Miser Bertha sees only visions of dancing dollar signs earned by Lam’s labor. Dubious but really shaking the tree, Lam uncovers a bewildering trail involving fraud, blackmail, and murder. As is usual in the Cool and Lam books, they make the situation worse until they grift the grifters and narrowly escape being arrested just for being pains in the neck.

During Gardner's lifetime, discerning hardcore readers like us thought the Cool and Lam novels were funnier, grittier, and sexier than the Perry Mason novels. For we happy few, the comedy between our two protagonists balance out the rushed or confusing endings.

Powerful Techniques for Positive Change

Change Your Life Now: Powerful Techniques for Positive Change – William J. Knaus

I read this 1994 self-help book because Dr. Knaus was one of the stars of cognitive-behavioral therapy. Self-help books, to my mind, are a waste of time if the author doesn’t have the credentials.

Knaus presents a five-point change program, which is easy to follow. His advice is founded on research up to that time. Having seen hundreds and hundreds of patients, Knaus knows change is not easy and people throw up roadblocks in their own path for various irrational and rational reasons. He tells ways to overcome obstacles of our own making. His suggestions can be adopted for all the usual problems: improving diet, quitting smoking, finding love, beating back the urge to procrastinate, and changing careers.

The writing style is from 1994, when Knaus was still able to assume that even general readers knew how to read. That is, the sentences are a little bit involved and he uses some big words. The writing is concise and practical, given the reader does not have anxiety or depression to the extent that professional help really would be a good idea. This is for readers who are serious about change, and disciplined enough to change on their own, with just a book.

Murder at a Hollywood Preview!

Note: The Gail Patrick film festival continues, having viewed If I Had a Million, The Phantom Broadcast, The Murders in the Zoo, Death Takes a Holiday, The Crime of Helen Stanley, and Murder at the Vanities. What’s with all the attention, a reader wonders, to a forgotten actress on what is largely a Perry Mason blog? Gail Patrick Jackson was the executive producer of the greatest courtroom drama TV show in the history of creation: Perry Mason.

 The Preview Murder Mystery
1936 / 1:00
Tagline: “Murder at a Hollywood Preview!”
[internet archive]

This B-picture is a murder mystery set in a movie studio during the Golden Era of Hollywood. While the fast-paced story isn’t too far-fetched and the characterization amusing, the main draw is the “behind the scenes in Tinseltown” feeling and look.

That is, the mise en scene is literally the back lots and the soundstages of World Attractions, Inc. Director Robert Florey is known for being a pioneer of noir so this collaboration with cinematographer Karl Struss is worth seeing simply for its look. Silhouettes, outlines, profiles, and shadows make images striking, especially intense faces talking on phones. Florey, like Bergman and Fellini and Spielberg, likes eye-catching faces. Without being too arty they make shots from angles above and below. Inevitably he uses mirrors, but not too much and always to unusual effect. The pace and the rhythm of the movie are really fast, with a few fluid images lasting mere seconds; see the scene at minute 22 when the homicide detective is questioning a group of scared witnesses.

Imparting a feeling of unreality is the Thirties tech of switch banks, lights, lifts, dollies, and other equipment so antique as to be unidentifiable. Also putting us off kilter are the actors mingling in a variety of costumes from various time periods.

I got the feeling the writers were telling inside gags about Hollywood. The horror star Batboy (or something) is upbraided by the director for being a scaredy-cat though he is the one notorious for keeping little kids up at night sleepless and scared with his character. But when the director takes a close look at Batboy’s Igor (or whatever), he is so unnerved he calls for a break. Ironically, the killer is trapped because the big clunky technology of movie-making is used against him.

Giving a funny meta feeling is the movie within a movie when we are watching people watch the preview of a bad musical The Song of the Toreador. Over the top musicals are thus parodied with silent heart-throb Rod LaRocque, who looks slightly embarrassed to be singing. Gail Patrick assumes the melty and dewy look that damsels don for being sung to in musicals.

All the professionals like the director and the actors are watching the preview with a calculating look, that dispassionate eye of artists, crafters, and creative professionals not wholly satisfied with the version they see, convinced they could have done something better or planning to do a technique in another way in the future. "When I do this again, I am convinced that I will do it more effectively" seems like it would be a healthy stance in an artist or a crafter.

Contrary to my expectations, the print posted at IA was VG+, with good contrasts and nothing washed out nor any dropouts of sound. Gail Patrick and Frances Drake both look wonderful in their bodacious brunetitude. Patrick does not have all that much to do but the air around her seems charged, as if she’s a pulsar funneling particles. Drake, with her expressive eyes and luminous smile, plays the astrology-smitten girlfriend of Reginald Denny. Drake plays a steadying influence on the boisterous Denny who was prone to hyperactivity.

In what must be an in-joke of some kind, the end cast list provides not the real stars but only the supporting players like Chester Conklin - like LaRocque, another unexpected blast from the past.

The Nones of Perry Mason 83

Note: After playing the heavy in San Quentin (1946), Desperate (1947), and I Love Trouble (1948). Burr was probably happy to accept the small but atypical parts of a police detective in Sleep, My Love (1948) and the slacker father in Ruthless.

Ruthless
1948 / 1:44
Tagline: “Power...and Money were his gods!”
[internet archive]

Raymond Burr has one scene in a flashback in the first 15 minutes of the movie. As the boy hero’s ne’er-do-well father, he’s dressed in the tacky duds of the early 20^th century American fop and cad: a flashy suit with wide pinstripes with a showy vest. The deadbeat dad sports an oily chevron moustache and jaunty straw boater. The movie-goer can see the dandy character is putting on the dog, playacting “larger than life.” With the gaudy patter of the hustler that’s all talk and zilch walk, it’s easy to see how he insinuated himself in a rich young girl’s affections and then disappointed her and their son when he bugged out, only to end up living with a harridan of saloon-keeper and procuress.

It’s nice to see a departure from his usual typecasting as the heavy.  Burr brings to the bumbler a tentative side, with a bashful spark of paternal affection. It's as if he's baffled his son even likes him, considering what a terrible father he is. His role, while far from central, is significant in the film's exploration of the role of family dynamics in stoking unbridled ambition.

Anyway, this improving drama is all about a man with a fatal flaw. Zachary Scott comes out of broken home with a weak father and angry depressed mother a man deeply unhappy with himself. Not connecting with himself, he can’t connect with other people either so he grabs things and throws his weight around. He grows crazy rich not only because he is driven by inner demons but also because he finds it expedient and fun to manipulate women and is willing to disregard pressures in our culture to reciprocate good turns.

American writer Alvah “Hollywood Ten” Bessie wrote the screenplay. He was one of nearly 3,000 American volunteers to fight in the Spanish Civil War. On the side of the angels, of course. So we'd expect that his take on insatiable greed and intemperate ambition American-style would be nuanced. Thus, he has Sydney Greenstreet quote from Obadiah 1:2-4 "Though you set your nest among the stars, From there I will bring you down," as a gloss on his own fall due to Zachary Scott's machinations. 

Like the Chinese say, "If you ascend high, heavy must be your fall."  It’s also the message we get from literature and virtue ethics: it’s sociopathic to be so venal and power-hungry and it’s stupid to build your happy home on the sands of money, property, status, repute and other shit you can lose or rivals can take away from you.

In a big cast, many actors do a fine job.  Totally plausible are the child actors Bobby Anderson (what an expressive face!), Ann Carter, and George McDonald. Diana Lynn plays two characters, one sweet, one designing, both subtly played. Lucille Bremer and Greenstreet play a power couple that revel in putting the screws to people. When Greenstreet yanks her hair to pull her head back and kiss her, it implies way more than we want to know about their intimate life.

As for the connection with the original Perry Mason TV series, noir duchess Martha Vickers appears in the 1959 episode The Case of the Jaded Joker as Sheila Hayes, a hard-nosed hustler determined to take financial advantage of the victim’s killing. Buffs will recall that she played Carmen Sternwood, the corrupt baby sister that posed for dirty pictures, who tries to seduce Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep (1946).

Nigel Strangeways #8

Minute for Murder - Nicholas Blake

The setting of this 1947 mystery was probably inspired by Cecil Day-Lewis’ wartime experience working in the offices of the Ministry of Information, which Orwell satirized in his novel 1984. Series detective Nigel Strangeways is working at the Ministry of Morale in the Visual Propaganda Division.

Despite his name, Nigel Strangeways is not a collection of quirks and mannerisms a la Nero Wolfe. He’s an ordinary guy, at least as ordinary as a guy with literary leanings can be. Transferred from Intelligence in the last days of the conflict, he is happy to greet a friend who is returning from Germany. The friend has an odd war souvenir, a poison capsule. After showing it off around the office, a hottie blonde secretary collapses and expires. Nobody can find the capsule of death.

Seven persons of interest have a variety of motives. Strangeways cuts through the psychology and motives to identify the perp. Well worth reading.

The author captures the tensions among different grades of staff and the problems of supervising talented and brilliant but temperamental people. The characterization and red herrings combine to make this longer than the typical whodunnit, but the psychology is so convincing and the plotting so inventive that we hardcore readers don’t mind. Not too much, though a page count greater than 250 rather taxes my patience with a mystery.

Others by the Same Author: Click on the title to go to the review

• A Question of Proof (1935)
• The Beast Must Die (1938)
• The Smiler with the Knife (1939)
• The Corpse in the Snowman (1941)
• Minute for Murder (1947)
• The Dreadful Hollow (1953)
• Whisper in the Gloom (1957)
• The Widow’s Cruise (1959)
• The Worm of Death  (1961)
• The Private Wound (1968)

The Kalends of Perry Mason 82

Note: Like Epictetus analyzing Medea, I apply the Stoic orientation to the crooked thinking of fictional characters in the TV stories of the original Perry Mason (1957 - 1966).  Even when I was little kid I didn’t like the idea of role models because I thought only weak-minded people needed to imitate anybody. Boy, was I dumb! Now that I reflect on my youth I think Perry Mason gave me a sense of professionalism: fairness, tidy grooming, clear thinking, fluent speaking and doing the right action with confidence.

The Case of the Cautious Coquette (Season 1, Episode 18; January 18, 1958)

Stephen Argyle: I've done nothing I'm ashamed of.
Perry Mason: You're very fortunate, Mr. Argyle, most people have a conscience.

Marcus Aurelius asked, “… [I]s a world without shamelessness possible? No. Then don’t ask the impossible. There have to be shameless people in the world. This is one of them. The same for someone vicious or untrustworthy, or with any other defect. Remembering that the whole world class has to exist will make you more tolerant of its members.”

That’s for when dealing with other people, the whole parade of brazen people acting badly. Massaging data until statistical significance is achieved. Denying credit to other people, especially subordinates. Stealing the ideas and work of others. Disregarding all social cues to sit down and shut up. Being confident deadlines will be relaxed for them. Playing dumb to avoid work, no matter the extra tasks for other people. Giving lame apologies after avoidable repercussions go off. Pretending they remember a conversation in which you approved their request.

Daily! Forever! Bring ‘em on!

But feeling ashamed of ourselves is tricky and complicated. On one hand, shame is rational and virtuous, for example, if I feel ashamed of my own cowardice, procrastinating telling a superior bad news just because they may get upset or it makes me look bad.

On the other hand, shame makes me not take showers in a locker room because I don’t want other patrons to see my sternotomy scar. Respect for people, I say to myself, suggests not to disgust people. But irrational is feeling ashamed of the appearance of my body, something I have zilch control over. How craven, to be worried about the reactions of people I don't even know, concerning things not up to me.

Like I said, shame is tricky and complicated.

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.

European Reading Challenge #4

Visas for Life – Yukiko Sugihara

Chiune Sugihara was the Japanese Consul General in Kaunas, Lithuania in 1939 and 1940. After World War II broke out, his office was inundated with requests for visas from thousands of Polish Jews that had to escape from Nazi-occupied Poland.

With the aid of his wife Yukiko, Sugihara issued 2,000 transit visas and saved about 6,000 lives. Because he issued the visas against orders, he risked his diplomatic career and his future. After the war, with the mean-spirited cowardice of bureaucrats at their most spineless, the Japanese government did indeed fire him from the dip service. Instead of honoring a man directly responsible for saving 6,000 lives who later built families that number as many as 55,000 descendants, the Japanese government canned him and forced him to live in impoverished obscurity, eking out a living translating and interpreting.

But before he died in 1986, in 1985 he received Israel's highest honor, recognized as "Righteous Among the Nations" by the Yad Vashem Martyrs Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem.

Today is Showa Day

Showa no Hi (昭和の日). This Japanese national holiday marks the start of the Golden Week holiday period. It was established in 2007 as a day to reflect on the events of the Shōwa period (1926 to 1989). When I was in Japan (1986 to 1992), April 29 was the birthday of the Emperor Hirohito, officially known as Emperor Shōwa. When the Emperor passed away in 1989, the date was observed as Greenery Day. To mark that eventful period in Japanese history, let’s read a non-fiction book about Japan.

The Straitjacket Society: An Insider's Irreverent View of Bureaucratic Japan - Masao Miyamoto

Miyamoto, a psychiatrist, studied in the US for 11 years. He spent three years of postdoc work in psychiatry and psychoanalysis before accepting a position as an assistant professor of psychiatry at Cornell. In 1984, he became an assistant professor at New York Medical College. He had to return to Japan for family reasons.

He was hired by the Japanese Ministry of Health and Welfare for his technical knowledge and abilities. A typical kikokushijo (帰国子女 literally “returnee children”) - Japanese returning to Japan after a long stay abroad for work or study - he ran into trouble. For one, he was a smart guy with a subversive sense of humor. For another, he was a doctor, member of a group not known for their modesty or ability to suffer fools. Lastly, to me, he seemed rather naive about re-entry shock. Did he really think those loosely educated and rigid bureaucrats who'd never lived outside Japan long would be tolerant of his meiwaku (causing everybody trouble)?

Bosses and colleagues bullied and upbraided him but in meetings he wasn't shy about telling them he found their reasoning wanting. He was used to the adversarial give and take in US academic and professional settings (i.e. bicker pits) where defending conclusions and positions – with and without logic - generates ideas and knowledge. What deeply stung the officials he worked for was that he wrote candid essays about bureaucracy for the leftish monthly Gekkan Asahi. Both as a chronicle of his re-entry shock and castigation of bureaucrats (a popular sport in Japan), these articles were such a hit that they were collected in a book The Straitjacket Society: An Insider's Irreverent View of Bureaucratic Japan (1994). The book is hilarious and, to bureaucrats like me that detest red tape, disheartening.

The beginning skillfully combines background information and his experience. He relates his surprise at a weekend excursion with his co-workers. The hot spring wasn't even a real one but had piped-in hot water. The food was awful. He found dull the drinking to get shitfaced and porno parties. Sick of it all, he announced that he was going back to Tokyo on the 10:00 AM train. No fewer than five colleagues who wanted to escape too volunteered to go with him, saying that it's not right to have to travel alone.

He uses the example of compelled togetherness to discuss the orientation of messhihoko (滅私奉公). Though it looks like an ancient four-character compound that would grace a kakemono scroll, it is but a wartime slogan the powers that be wanted the Japanese to bear in mind and behave accordingly. Messhihoko literally means “extinguish the self, serve the lord” and urges people to sacrifice themselves for the goals of the group. Miyamoto says that this message is so deeply drummed into people that even if they feel stressed, exhausted, or angry, they will resign themselves to the inevitable situation and, more importantly, not complain while doing as they are directed.

This book is not all psychological and cultural explanation. He also provides more nitty-gritty reasons why the Japanese bureaucracy is on auto-pilot. This is only one of many funny-sad conversations he has with superiors:

Miyamoto: You mean that once something is provided for in a budget you can't stop doing it? Why not?

Health ministry official: In the government offices, as long as a certain amount of money has been budgeted for a certain purpose, it has to be used up.

Surely it wouldn't matter if there was a little bit left over.

It's not that easy. Returning unused money is taboo.

Why is that?

Leftover money gives the Finance Ministry the impression that the project in question is not very important, which makes it a target of budget cuts the following year. The loss of even a single project means a smaller budget for the whole department. The director is going to take a dim view of that, since it affects his career prospects.

Full disclosure: I was the beneficiary of the custom “spend it or lose it” when I was an employee of the Ministry of Education. Near the end of the fiscal year, I would get calls from the administrators in my dean's office. They'd urge me to attend any meetings related to English education being held on mainland Japan as they would like to make resources available to me in the event that I thought it would be helpful to my professional development to attend conferences or conventions in Tokyo or Osaka or Kyoto in February and March. What a wonderful job that was.

The Japanese, weary of regulations besides skeptical of the competence of arrogant bureaucrats, avidly read Miyamoto's weekly magazine articles. They admired Miyamoto for telling the truth. But the government expressed their displeasure by assigning him to jobs with less and less responsibility and exiling him farther and farther away from Tokyo.

In April 1993 the articles were collected under the title Oyakusho no Okite (お役所の掟 Code of the Bureaucrats - a satirical reminder of the medieval guide of the same name) and became a bestseller. His bosses were angry and vindictive. Miyamoto was finally canned on the bogus ground that he was AWOL. He then made a living as a critic of the system until his untimely death. Masao Miyamoto, at the age of only 51, died of cancer at a hospital near Paris in 1999.

True Business Crime

Note: I’m not much of a reader of true crime: the motives are always the same and perps and their enablers display only slightly varying blends of cowardice, appetite, anger or thrill-seeking. When I do, I try to be selective. See Classic Crimes (William Roughhead), Small Town D.A (Robert Traver), For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder That Shocked Jazz Age Chicago (Simon Baatz), and The Spy in The Russian Club: How Glenn Souther Stole America's Nuclear War Plans & Escaped to Moscow (Ronald Kessler)

The Hard Sell: Crime and Punishment at an Opioid Startup – Evan Hughes

I could not put down this book about an opioid startup called Insys. They used strong techniques to market their FDA-approved drug, Sybsys, a powerful pain killer made of fentanyl. Since some of their sales techniques were illegal, the top executives were busted and went to trial. The trial was the opportunity for Hughes to take a deep dive to examine how these drugs are marketed and sold. In a tight overview of this trial, Hughes makes clear the fact the nobody gave a shit about the people addicted, harmed, and killed by the narcotic, not the drug makers or its sales agents nor the defense attorneys nor the federal prosecutors.

Readers and patients who are not aware of how drug companies influence doctors’ prescribing will find this an eye-opening book. It is an aggressive sales technique to target the top ten percent of opioid prescribing doctors in a state. It is iffy indeed to push doctors to prescribe higher dosages of any medication, much less the most powerful pain killer in the market, during an epidemic of opioid overdose deaths.

Out of their lane, sales staff urged the doctors to prescribe the medication even in cases when it was not indicated (so-called “off label”). Subsys was approved for breakthrough cancer pain, not aching joints. Going way outside the guard-rails, Insys inserted themselves into the pre-authorization process by out and out falsehoods and massaging the facts to persuade insurance companies to approve coverage.

Most egregiously, Insys paid doctors to give talks on the medication as a pretext to set up a ‘this for that.’ In other words, the company pays for presentations even to attendee-free meetings and the doctors prescribe the drug. Later federal prosecutors summed up the business model as one plus one equals two: “bribing doctors, conning insurers, making money.”

Under pressure from the market and the imperative to make money, the big bosses want all the market share. Under pressure from the bosses, the sales staff want the exhilaration of landing big accounts and money.  Under gimme-gimme pressure from sales agents and patients in pain, harried doctors write hundreds of scripts for an opioid painkiller, adverse effects on trusting naïve patients be damned. It takes courage to resist pressure.  As a humble minion a large public bureaucracy, I gently opine there have to be easier, less stressful ways of making a living.

And staying out of jail.

Also, as a part-time compliance operative myself, the other take-away I got from this book is that companies had better not be cheap like Insys when it comes to hiring in-house lawyers and compliance specialists. The federal regulations are many and convoluted. It’s very easy to make mistakes and run afoul of regs even with the best intentions. Companies need experts to navigate regulatory swamps properly.

Finally, more government oversight is needed over drug companies marketing and distributers between the drugmakers and doctors and pharmacies. Drug company bosses ought not to get coddled when it comes to fines and jail.