American Women who Served in Vietnam

A Piece of My Heart: The Stories of 26 American Women who Served in Vietnam - Keith Walker

The middle and late 1980s saw an outpouring of memoirs about the Vietnam War. Maybe people needed a decade to cool the passions of the late 1960s and early 1970s and recover from depression over the 1975 withdrawal before they felt like thinking about the war. Eager to profit from renewed interest, publishers released excellent books. Oral histories about American women in Vietnam were Home Before Morning: The Story of an Army Nurse in Vietnam (Lynda Van Devanter), In the Combat Zone: Vivid Personal Recollections of the Vietnam War from the Women Who Served There (Kathryn Marshal), and the book under review here

About 15,000 American women served in Vietnam. Journalist and filmmaker Keith Walker interviewed nurses (14 army, one Navy and the remaining 11 represented organizations such as the Red Cross and the USO). Walker provides introductions to the women's monologues. Though only a paragraph long, expressive details include one interviewee who covered her eyes with her arm during her entire talk

Walker uses ellipses to show hesitations and silences and indicate distress so the text should be read slowly. The extended monologue gives an idea of the shared experience many veterans, male and female. The interviewees have a range of political opinions and responses to the war. Many see their experiences in a positive light and reject casting themselves as victims.

They also share the tension of never knowing where the enemy was except everywhere and being under attack. The nurses underwent repeated exposure to the injury, disability, disfigurement, and death of men who were terribly young. One nurse wanted to ask her mother to check around and see if she could find one whole 18 year old man. Women recount feeling fear, boredom, callousness, and the gradual loss of the ability to feel that prolonged stress causes.

Readers who have read more than a few memoirs of Vietnam Veterans will be struck at the common themes, like male adrenaline junkies. Some women talked of the intensity of work in-country and the tedious blandness of life back home after so much excitement. “The one thing Nam did for me was that I felt like I could walk on water,” says a nurse. The women also reported that on coming back stateside, like male veterans, they too suffered PTSD, usually called delayed stress. They dealt with alcohol and substance abuse, changed jobs and residences frequently, experienced nightmares and had trouble finding somebody who would understand them. More than male memoirists, however, the women remark on the beauty of the country.

 I recommend this book as readable and valuable oral history which underlines the personal and unique instead of the historical. Critics rank it among the best oral histories about the war. Anyone wishing to learn more about ordinary women who gave extraordinary service in the Vietnam War would do well to read this book.

The Ides of Perry Mason 93

Note: In the first couple of seasons (1957-58-59), the classic Perry Mason had the cool look of film noir. Granted, Raymond Burr in the title role tends to talk rapidly, lots of actors get into hambone territory, and the stories are complicated. As time passed, the stories never become more streamlined or comprehensible. From 1960 on, the plots tended to be ripped from the headlines of the day, which dates the show: ESP, JD's, open wheel race cars, corporate espionage, folk music and beatniks. By the 7th season, many of the story lines and scripts were lame compared to earlier seasons. Exhausted Raymond Burr remarked that the show should have ended after the 5th season. Gutsy, considering that he was making a million a season, amazing money for those days - William Tallman as Hamilton Burger was making only $65K.

The Best of Season 7 (1963-64)

The Case of the Nebulous Nephew. Season 7 was kicked off with this incredible episode. Two heartless scamsters aim to con two harmless old ladies. But after living with the two women for a little while, one fraud becomes fond of them and argues for abandoning the nefarious plan. But his henchman (scoundrel Hugh Marlowe of course) objects and ends up murdered. Besides the stellar acting, the long set-up is without a wasted scene or line. The writers make points about staying in touch with your values, feeling family loyalty, acting as a faithful retainer, undergoing wartime deployment and its effect on romance, and using love and faith as guides to belief, despite having little evidence. Up there with TCOT Perjured Parrot and TCOT Nine Dolls, this may be my favorite episode ever.

The Case of the Deadly Verdict. Janice Barton has played the part of the society party girl to the hilt. Her madcap antics have ended up in the death of a boyfriend who fell from the balcony of an Italian guest house and the partial paralysis of her sister in a car wreck. Now Janice was caught in a lie by DA Hamilton Burger and refuses to tell her lawyer Perry Mason the whole truth. So she has been convicted of murder and sentenced to die in the gas chamber. Perry and Paul pull out the stops to exonerate her. This is a somber, quiet episode with plenty of Hitchcockian moments. Perry broods and in a rare-as-hen's-teeth moment of losing his signature unflappability he throws a medicine ball into a lout’s gut. All the acting is exceptional in this episode, especially videogenic Julie Adams as the troubled accused.

The Case of the Nervous Neighbor. Charles Fuller (Richard Rust) hires the Paul Drake investigation agency to locate his missing mother, Alice Fuller Bradley (Shelia Bromley). Paul’s operatives locate her in an assisted care facility. She is suffering from amnesia, which for once has a reasonable explanation: she sustained a traumatic brain injury and in an unconscious state killed her husband with a fireplace poker. So the first court room scene is Burger waiving prosecution, sympathetic to the case of the accused. However, after the trial the son acts in an ill-considered way that leads to his mother ending up accused of killing a smarmy operator played by, in a bold casting decision, Paul Winchell (Jerry Mahoney puts in no appearance – a mercy).  William Talman’s DA Burger tears Richard Rust’s character to shreds in a great interrogation scene. Francis X. Bushman puts in a funny cameo as a nursing home Romeo and ever reliable Les Tremayne pops up too. All the actresses - Katherine Squire (the nurse) and Jeanne Cooper (of The Young and Restless fame) – put in great performances. And the tone, look and ending are as Hitchcockian as we’ll ever enjoy in the series. In my Top Five Fave Episodes.

Honorable Mention: TCOT Shifty Shoebox features the incredible Constance Ford, and overall the acting is quite good in this plausible story of adults have genuine grown-up problems. TCOT Drowsy Mosquito takes Perry and the Gang out of LA and features Arthur Hunnicutt in the crusty prospector role that he owned in scores of TV westerns and Strother Martin as a small-town main-chancer.

Happy Birthday Henry Wade

Note: Born in 1887, veteran of WWI Major Sir Henry Lancelot Aubrey-Fletcher, 6th Baronet KStJ CVO DSO, was Lord Lieutenant of Buckinghamshire from 1954 to 1961. Under a pen-name, he was also one of the leading authors during the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. In their classic reference book Catalogue of Crime, Barzun and Taylor said of him: “Though insufficiently known in the US, Wade is one of the great figures of the classical period. He was not only very productive but also varied in genre. His plots, characters, situations, and means rank with the best, while his prose has elegance and force.”

Lonely Magdalen: A Murder Story – Henry Wade

In this classic English detective story from 1940, a sex worker is found strangled in a park in Hampstead Heath. Scotland Yard is called in and young insightful Inspector Poole is assigned a case that is rapidly growing cold. With no clues, he inquires into the background of the victim.

So right away we depart from Golden Age mystery. Mercifully. Instead of a loathsome uncle poisoned in a library in a country house, we have a gritty urban setting, with the victim a woman of the town, worn out and in the abyss, killed brutally.  We are not treated to the usual troop of suspects gathered in a room as a climax. Wade spurns police worship, because here the cops are prone to human error and their irresponsible lack of professionalism leads to an ambiguous reveal. Uncertainty in a reveal is a rarity in mysteries up to WWII. Worry not however: in the 2013 edition Arcturus released they provided a map of the scene of the crime, a mainstay of Golden Age mysteries.

Henry Wade started his career with mainstream puzzlers and made his way over to more stimulating police procedurals and crime novels. This mystery features a middle section that is more like a flashback in that it describes the backstory of the victim (another departure: usually victims in the Golden Age were barely sketched out). Unlike Golden Age writers who want to spare the feelings of the reader, Wade assumes we can handle settings, incidents and motives without seeking out the fainting couch and sending the maid to fetch the sal volatile. Chronicling how drinking devastated the lives of the victim and her husband, Wade is ahead of his time when he theorizes about a genetic predisposition to alcoholism, a possibility today's experts are learning more about.

Wade wrote as many as 22 detective novels or story collections between 1926 and 1957. The Hanging Captain and Mist on the Saltings were published by Harper Perennial in a series of great re-issues in the Eighties.

The Nones of Perry Mason 92

Note: I have a dim view of comparisons but here I go, Cool and Lam versus Perry Mason. The Cool and Lam novels, written under the A.A. Fair pen name, are known among us happy few for their comedic elements and witty banter between Donald Lam and Bertha Cool. They are generally shorter and move through twists and turns quickly. Donald Lam, a former lawyer with a knack for getting into trouble, and Bertha Cool, a brassy and independent detective, make for an entertaining pair because they contrast: while both are tough as nails, he's quiet and insightful and she's as sensitive as a fire hydrant. These novels delve into the seedier side of life, with more emphasis on family problems and private investigation than courtroom drama, police procedures, or legal technicalities. 

Owls Don’t Blink – A.A. Fair a.k.a. Erle Stanley Gardner

The mysteries under the pen name A. A. Fair  feature the private eye partnership Bertha Cool and Donald Lam.

Like all famous whodunit partnerships ranging from Holmes & Watson to Gravedigger Jones & Coffin Ed and Nick & Nora, Cool & Lam appeal to readers because, though they are both smart about figuring out scams, they are opposites in personality. Impulsive Bertha Cool has a hair-trigger temper and has only a porous filter between her brain and her mouth. Ex-lawyer Donald Lam has a sound grip on legal matters and police procedures. Lam is a master at interrogation, making inferences, and keeping his mouth shut. He frustrates Bertha mightily by being impossible to pump for information. 

Bertha is recovering from a health scare so she doesn’t push herself away from a hearty meal. Lam has a slight build, but is skilled in boxing and jujitsu. Because they know they make a good team, they like each other enough to banter affectionately but frankly.

Owls Don’t Blink is set mainly in the French Quarter of New Orleans. Lam is on the trail of a missing woman. Bertha arrives in the Big Easy with the New York lawyer who has hired them to find an ex-model for reasons he is reluctant to explain. As Lam often does, he locates the woman very easily - too easily, in fact. Then, a corpse is discovered in the missing woman’s former apartment.

The scene shifts from New Orleans to Shreveport and from there to Los Angeles, though there is also a desert scene where Gardner can describe the landscape he loved so deeply. Plenty of action and convoluted incidents capture our attention before the conclusion, which is complicated. The scams and schemes in this novel are ingenious, but the best point is the interplay between Lam and Bertha, between Lam and the persons of interest in the case.

The time for this mystery is early 1942 (at the latest) so with the decisive Battle of Midway yet to be fought, the outcome of the war with Japan is a question mark. Bertha wants to keep Lam a civilian because he attracts big money cases. She is trying to finagle a deferment for him - maybe 4F, "not acceptable for military service" since he was a disbarred attorney.

Crime Crashes Off "The Rock"

Note: In this movie future producer of the classic TV series Perry Mason, Gail Patrick, plays an earnest and even-keeled nurse. She is cool and calm enough to be guided through long-distance abdominal surgery. She ought, however, to wear the surgical mask over her nose too. We learned such technical niceties in 2020.

King of Alcatraz
1938 / 54 minutes
Tagline: “He Changed his Prison Stripes for a Pirate's Hat!”
[internet archive]

Robert Preston and Lloyd Nolan are two radiomen on a cruise ship. They are frenemies who brawl over boop-a-doop girls named Dixie. One day in San Franciso they are almost run down by a speeding car.  It was being chased by cops because a gangster stole it to escape police custody.

The gangster J. Carrol Naish is sly enough to escape from Alcatraz by claiming he needed medical attention. He was also resourceful enough to disguise himself as an old lady to get aboard the same cruise ship to which our two sparks guys were assigned. But he impulsively kills a traitor on board ship though the victim will be soon missed. And the plan to take over the ship, change course, and then escape into the wilds of Central America seems half- baked, at best. The sailors call him “King of Alcatraz” out of contempt.

Too much time is spent establishing the rivalry of Preston and Nolan. But in short order, the movie becomes fast-moving to a fault, never giving the movie-goer’s attention a second to wander. Gail Patrick’s part is under-written and there’s no time to give her any chance to act. The climax was rushed and breathless. J. Carrol Naish does not give himself up to the dark side of the hambone as he was so often to do later in his career, which may disappoint movie-goers who are bracing themselves for when he leaves “restrained” in the rearview mirror.

The movie is still worth an hour because Robert Florey is the director.  His images of the tramp steamer make it feel as if it were in the moist grip of subtropical humidity.  A movie-goer has to respect Florey’s attention to craft, even in lowly movies like this one. No missteps at all when it comes to camera work.

Dennis Morgan and Anthony Quinn have tiny little parts. This B-movie was Robert Preston's first movie. What a voice that guy had! Ya Got Trouble!

Other Gail Patrick Movies: Click on the title to go to 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
·         My Man Godrey
·         Murder by Pictures
·         Artists and Models
·         King of Alcatraz

The Kalends of Perry Mason 91

Note:  In the 271 episodes of the original TV series Perry Mason (1957 - 1966), many business dramas unfold. Relatable were family businesses fighting over succession and bigger companies that were bedeviled by competitors, office romances, or rivalries over promotions. Writers liked to examine the dark sides of businesses in the arts, entertainment, and high fashion.

There’s No Thief like a Bad Book

As professionals, the Mason writers were probably of two minds about the cultural phenomenon entitled Peyton Place (1956), marveling at its massive success and cultural impact but also taking jabs at the literary racket, plagiarists, and authors of bad books that become best-sellers.

The Case of the Wayward Wife (1/23/60). The premise is shaky because it would have been impossible for a prisoner to keep a journal in a North Korean POW camp. Still, author and sage Arthur Poe manages to do just that. During an escape attempt, however, he is re-captured and his journal ends up in the larcenous hands of his fellow soldier Ben Sutton. Back in the USA, Sutton publishes the journal under his own name. Ordeal becomes a best-seller, and attracts the attention of movie producers. Sutton is an all-round heel because when not reaping the fruits of plagiarism, he is blackmailing the family of his wife Sylvia. Sylvia makes the wrong choices at the wrong time and place and ends up in the dock accused of Sutton’s murder (regal Bethel Leslie played three times the murdered louse’s nice wife who ends up Perry’s client). Besides the shaky premise, Poe’s Stoicism-lite is neither consistent nor convincing. The subplot of the blackmailed family members clouds the story. But the acting is superb and the mood somber even if the writing tries to pack ten pounds of story into a five-pound sack.

The Case of the Prankish Professor (1/17/63). In a university classroom, a condescending English prof stages a shooting as the basis for a writing assignment. That the prof would traumatize at least 10% of the students in the room for the sake of a writing prompt shows that his judgement is unsound, his pedagogy dubious. He is thrown a curve ball when the sister of one of his former students accuses him of plagiarism. It seems he filched the manuscript of trashy novel L'Affaire Annabelle and published it under a pen-name. Referring to the best-selling Peyton Place ripoff, a bookstore clerk leers, “If it smells, it sells.” The prof is spared the embarrassment of a scandal when he is murdered with a letter opener to the pump. His wife, long-suffering and noble, ends up in the dock. Good acting especially from the relentless and greedy sister, played by dynamic Joyce Van Patten.

The Case of the Skeleton’s Closet (5/2/63). Richard Harris is full of rage and hostility against his ex-wife and young children because after the divorce she changed their surnames from his to her maiden name. So he writes a tell-all book called Dishonored, about the tawdry high jinks of dwellers of an upper-class LA suburb. His ex-wife is afraid the tacky book will disgrace the kids and she wants it pulled from the market. Their scenes of bitter argument hiss and sizzle, kudos to Michael Pate and Peggy McCay. In a poignant scene, a broken young woman is weaving a basket as her occupational therapy. I ask my weaving and basket-making wife if that stereotype of “basket weaver as basket case” still dogs her and her buds. “Only with narrow-minded people,” she says with a glare that adds, “like you.”

The Case of the Bountiful Beauty (2/6/64). Ryan O’Neal plays a small part as John Carew, the boyfriend of Debra Dearborn (gamine Zeme North). John has told Debra stories of his bad-girl step-mom Stephanie (Sandra Warner, a Joan Collins type). Budding writer Debra has woven these stories together into a lurid novel like – you guessed in one - Peyton Place. The book becomes a best-seller, attracting the attention of a rotten movie producer (John Van Dreelan, a George Saunders cad). This episode illustrates the tendency of this series to paint the entertainment industry in the worst colors. In an episode that features superb acting, the best character is an agent man who protests his innocence and calls our favorite lawyer “Perry baby.”

European Reading Challenge #8

Swan Song – T.J. Binyon

With the success of Gorky Park (Martin Cruz Smith) and Kolymsky Heights (Lionel Davidson) in the early 1980s, publishers were more open to mysteries, thrillers, and adventures set in the Soviet Union.

This 1982 thriller takes a quiet Russian professor of English Literature into perils. During their college days, Vanya, Tanya, Alek, and Lyuba spent their nostalgic summer of lifetime. After graduation, while Vanya steered clear of politics with a job in academe, Alek jumped feet first into a career with KGB, keeping an eye on domestic sources of trouble like nationalism and religion. Tanya became an internationally recognized film director. Idealistic Lyuba became a teacher, first in the far east, but then in Tallinn, Estonia and Suzdal, the heartland of medieval Russia.

This adventure novel touches on the mysterious ‘Russian soul.’ Also, called the “Russian heart,” it is stereotypically moral, tough, and profound but also prone to pessimism and fatalism. In the manner of her ancestors, Lyuba, who is prone to engagement and commitment, gets involved with a religious group that combines mysticism with hysterical nationalism and knee-jerk xenophobia. Also persuasive are the nods to Soviet reality in the last decade before the system keeled over of a coronary, like little food in the stores, much stair climbing due to broken elevators, and widespread apathy and cynicism about the future. The story is narrated by Vanya.

Author Binyon was a professor of Russian literature so he had the historical knowledge to write a convincing story with the background of the development of various religious groups and movements that diverged from the established Russian Orthodox Church. They were characterized by their own interpretations of scripture, practices, and beliefs. Binyon even refers to the Skoptsy, 18th-century sectarians known for practicing self-castration as a means of getting a handle on lust. 

Anyway, in a yet another of never-ending examples in the history of not only Russia, in the novel bad people hijack the sincere religious inclinations of ordinary people.

One of the Oddest Books Alive

Wisconsin Death Trip -Michael Lesy

First published in the early 1970s, I found this strange book on a remainder table in the middle 1970s. A half-dozen moves later, I'm surprised I never lost it like I lost a cool Rolling Stones book by David Dalton.

It is a combination of old photographs and news stories of Wisconsin country life in the late 19th century, during an economic slump. The photos were taken by Charley Van Schaick, a photographer in Black River Falls. There were 30,000 plates in the Van Schaick collection of which 200 were chosen for publication in this book. The news accounts were taken from a newspaper called the Badger State Banner. Along with stories about arson, psychosis, drunkenness, and other high times of the good old days, this is typical

Joseph Shotgoe, aged 45 years, who lived in the town of Rose, Waushara County, tried to kill his wife with a kettle of hot water. A 14-year-old daughter sprang between them and saved her mother but was badly burned herself. The father then got a rope and . . . attempted to hang himself, but being discovered by neighbors was rescued before life was extinct. His wife soon [afterward] went to the barn and discovered that her husband had taken the lines out of the harness, put them over a beam, and hung himself

Looking at the photographs of country people at the end of the 19th century, I recalled in an essay by Edmund White or David Sedaris which said the French see us Americans as simple and nice. We’re uncomplicated, unencumbered by any sense of the tragic.

Yeah, right. Check out these news stories and photographs of a happy-go-lucky people.

Happy Birthday Ed Lacy

Classic Mystery with POC. In the late Fifties and early Sixties, Toussaint Marcus Moore is an African-American detective in two novels written by Ed Lacy.

Moment of Untruth - Ed Lacy

In the first, Room to Swing, Moore finds himself investigating in a southern Ohio town and tracking down a killer. Facing a hostile white community, he has to deal with Jim Crow customs and being suspected in the assault of a police officer. This novel won the Edgar award for Best Mystery Novel in 1958.

The other was Moment of Untruth (1965). Touie’s wife Frances announces with glee that she is pregnant, to which he secretly reacts, “Damn, just what the world needed – one more kid … another colored kid.” Realizing that his mail carrier’s income will not make the nut when Frances goes on maternity leave, he calls his former employer at a PI agency for a short-term job.  The old partner sends him to glamorous, sweaty Mexico City where a wealthy widow wants him to catch the murderer of her husband.

Although the culprit is obvious, the plot has unexpected twists that make this an agreeable read. In Acapulco, then as now a fun park for the affluent, Touie feels disgusted at going through other people’s dirty laundry. He feels sympathetic toward his main suspect, who’s also a minority. Touie contemplates the uncomfortable notion that he is only “an Uncle Tom doing the white folks a favor.” Another highlight that distinguishes this novel are memorable side characters, especially Janis, the drunken blonde from Texas and Frank, a retired American black who hilariously comes into a fortune, which does him little good.

Academic critics regard Touie Moore as a transitional figure – the decent man who does his best and doesn’t let prejudice or his own anger and frustration steal his joy– between the supermen Coffin Ed and Gravedigger in Chester Himes’ incredible novels in the Fifties and Ernest Tidyman’s character Shaft in the Seventies. Readers who like the tough, tense, and realistic detective fiction in the Hammett and Ross Macdonald tradition should get a kick out the Moore novels.

William Hopper Week 4/4

Note: This is the final of four tributes to William Hopper. During one of his many showings of The Deadly Mantis Svengoolie referred to William Hopper as “that guy from Perry Mason,” which probably put the noses of his elderly audience out of joint. I’m sure there are still many true-blue fans that remember Hopper fondly as private investigator Paul “Hello, Beautiful” Drake, breezy, friendly, approachable, dogged, and so blunt that Mason said, "I'm glad you're not on the jury." After the Perry Mason show ended in 1966, Hopper did TV once in a while. A heavy smoker like many men in his generation, he suffered a stroke on Valentine’s Day 1970 and held on until March 6. Like the other Bill, Talman, Hopper was taken when he was only in his fifties.

20 Million Miles to Earth aka The Beast from Space
1957 / 1:28
Tagline: “Monster from Outer Space Runs Wild!”
[internet archive]

20 Million Miles to Earth is an unjustly forgotten monster movie directed by Nathan Juran, notable for its memorable stop-motion animation by Ray Harryhausen. The plot revolves around a US spaceship returning from Venus that crashes off the coast of Sicily. A local boy loots the flotsam and sells his find – an egg – to a vacationing zoologist. Inevitably, bad luck takes a hand when a small creature with the torso of a human being and tail of a T-rex escapes and grows into a monstrous beastie. And now it is acting as incensed as any other critter taken from its natural stomping grounds.

Whenever Harryhausen's stop-motion animation is in the spotlight, I have to take a moment and say a prayer of thanks for the technicians who worked through the tedious process to craft this special effect. The performances of the human cast also contribute to the attraction. William Hopper tops the bill as Col. Calder. 

His mission to Venus was to confirm if human life could adapt to the atmosphere. He brought back the egg of a local creature for study, to see how its physiology survives the harsh environment on Venus. The research endpoint was to imitate that alien physiology for human use and thus colonize Venus.

Hopper's portrayal is marked by a sense of urgency and scientific curiosity. His character's fights with the Venusian creature highlight the tension between the human goal to generate knowledge and the creature’s anger, frustration, and fear. Hopper's performance is memorable for its intensity. He effectively conveys the desperation and determination of a scientist faced with an extremely strong beast that emits loud blood-curdling cries. Hopper’s scenes with a love interest are pivotal in establishing the film's balance of suspense as to whether the cute couple will fall in love before or after they catch the monster that stinks so ferociously that animals flee from it.

The film's simplicity in plot and character development allows the special effects to shine, but the setting should not be overlooked. In a film dominated by visual spectacle, the settings of Sicily and then Rome are different, unexpected, and credible. The fight in the Calabrian barn is well done. The critter tearing up picturesque Roman streets is especially terrifying as is the monster’s fight with an elephant from the zoo. Viewing fleeing Romans instead of fleeing Tokyoites or Osakans in a monster movie makes a welcome change. But the climax in the Colosseum really rocks, so to speak.

20 Million Miles to Earth is a testament to the era's innovative filmmaking, with William Hopper's performance standing out as a key element that enriches the film's scientific intrigue and action scenes. 

As for the connection with the classic TV series Perry Mason Thomas Browne Henry (General Mackintosh) played a hard-nosed but honest lawyer in TCOT Sleepwalker’s Niece, one of the best villains ever in TCOT Dubious Bridegroom, and a finely done cornered perp in TCOT Treacherous Toupee. This movie was the last one in which William Hopper got top billing. For nine years after 1957, he was busy as hell in the greatest courtroom series in the history of creation.

William Hopper Week 3/4

Note: This is the third of four tributes to William Hopper who played Paul Drake, Perry Mason’s private detective on the classic series. After he was discharged from the Navy in 1943, William Hopper, his brown hair turned white due to service in a combat zone, was also a heavy smoker. He sold cars for nine years. It seems strange that although he performed hazardous duty in underwater demolition and maritime sabotage, he was prone to stage fright and had little confidence to return to acting. From the early Fifties, he landed parts in B-movies and did some TV. In 1955, he played the father of Natalie Wood’s character in Rebel without a Cause. 

The Deadly Mantis
1957 / 1:19
Tagline: “Engulfing the World in Terror!”
[internet archive]

The Pentagon is growing concerned about disasters, disappearances and crashes involving Air Force personnel at a remote base in the Arctic. A five-foot appendage like a hook is found at a ruined facility but biologistic experts can't identify it.

Naturalist Ned Jackson (William Hopper) is called in by Maj. Gen. Mark Ford (Donald Randolph, mustached) to consult on the appendage. Ned is assisted by a comely journalist Marge Blaine (Alix Talton). Jackson theorizes that it might be from an insect like the praying mantis after Marge, with the tenacity of Lois Lane, presses him for a hypothesis.

The theory is supported soon after a deadly mantis terrorizes an Eskimo village, giving the director a chance to insert stock footage of villagers desperately paddling their kayaks away as their packs of sled dogs run somewhere. The element of surprise that a good monster reveal requires is thus taken off the table in short order.

Ned and Marge are sent to the Arctic to investigate first-hand. We movie-goers get some comic relief in the form of the sex-starved men at the remote base ogling Marge.

Hey, “some,” as in “a little.”

We also get perfunctory romance between Marge and the base commander Col. Joe Parkman (Craig Stevens). To me, the genuine comic relief is Marge throwing over Ned Jackson for Col. Joe after five minutes of interaction. Cast into a despondent funk, Ned kind of disappears and plays no role in the final disposition of the oversized bug. It just strikes me that the silver lining to our Bill Hopper being cast as Bookworm Intellectual in this Festival of Dull is that at least they didn’t make him wear horn-rimmed glasses or have him say they had to save the creature to study it for science.

This is a singularly uninspired science fiction movie. Seeing the mantis flying between places where it wreaks mild havoc is neither interesting as a special effect nor scary. We never see the mantis eating people so the mantis is not the stuff of nightmares. We hear the roars of the mantis but instead of being chilled to the bone, we idly wonder if in fact insects have lungs with which to roar. The movie even fails to make us movie-goers feel pity for the beastie who didn’t ask to be woken up by seismic activity and was doing only what comes naturally.

I watched this movie on a Sunday afternoon when it was too hot and smokey from wild fires to do anything safely outside. A healthy person might want to watch this undemanding movie when they have just finished an especially difficult mental task. It may also be the ticket for somebody coming out of an anesthetic after an outpatient medical procedure. So even mediocre movies have their place and uses.

As for the connection with classic TV series Perry Mason, dropping the officer and gentleman parts, Donald Randolph played the smoothie perp in TCOT Cautious Coquette and the victim that had it coming in TCOT Spanish Cross. Paul Smith, who played an ogling corporal in this, had a tiny part in TCOT Jealous Journalist and a bigger part in TCOT Meddling Medium, an episode that exploited the hot topic in 1961 of ESP. Too many of the post-1960 scripts, torn from the headlines, were silly and slapdash, which Burr and Talman groused about, with little effect.

William Hopper Week 2/4

Note: This is the second of four tributes to William Hopper who played Paul Drake, Perry Mason’s private detective, on the greatest courtroom drama in the history of creation. When World War II began, Hopper left roles in B-movies and enlisted in the Navy. He became a frogman that specialized in underwater demolition and maritime sabotage. He took part in the Ulithi landing, missions on Peleliu and Angaur, and pre-invasion prep in the Lingayen Gulf and the Battle of Leyte. He won a Bronze Star. His wartime experiences turned his brown hair white. 

Over the Goal
1937 / 1:03
Tagline: “Exciting Thrills of the Pigskin Parade!”
[internet archive]

Most of the product of classic Hollywood was disposable stinkers. Therefore, in efforts to watch the Pre-Perry Mason work of Barbara Hale, William Talman, and William Hopper, we movie-goers will sometimes run across B-movies that force us to kiss off standards for a good movie and see where looking at the picture as a cultural artifact goes.

What does their humor tell us about Americans in the Thirties? Humor often arises from shared cultural experiences, such as college football.

In this sports comedy, a rich alum of Carlton College has willed his entire estate to the private institution if its football team can somehow manage to win three games in a row, something they have never done in the history of the pigskin program. The finances of the college are in such bad shape that even a one-time amount will do financial good in the short-term.

So it’s a disaster when its star half-back William Hopper meets a moral dilemma in the form of love versus football. His GF’s father, a doctor, has told her she should extract from Hopper the promise to give up football for the sake of his cornflake knee. Hopper makes his face do an insipid smile as he promises not to ever play again, lest he suffer never-ending orthopedic pain and complications.

We can see humor being used to reinforce cultural norms. When his roommate worms out of the half-back his promise not play football so he won’t be a “cripple for life,” the water boy says in mock-wonder, “Giving up football for a girl. Who would believe it?” No societal pressure back in the good old days to prioritize relationships, especially for men. Much societal pressure to play hurt, for the sake of the team and college.

The humor in this movie also turns on stereotypes of college kids. Nowadays college students don't provide the building blocks for vivid stereotypes, merely seen as anxious and depressed, lazily cheating with ChatGPT, living on junk food, and partying all night.

But back then the stereotypes were more various. Coeds are better students than college boys: Lucille Martin in this movie goes the Gobi Desert on a study abroad program.

College boys are more given to pranks, practical jokes, fighting, rumbles and fantasizing about coeds. College boys are always up for antics like kidnapping the mascot of the opposing team, in this case a bear named Imogene (warning: the chain around her neck will make post-modern movie-goers sad).

College students go out of their right minds when they hear swing music, because it brings out their energetic and rebellious spirit. College kids, in fact, are willing to start protests and demonstrations over any issue, at the drop of a hat. In this movie, they have a rally to persuade a half-back to play in the big game.

Not that the stereotypes are limited to college kids. Black people are portrayed as highly strung and easily alarmed. Country people are ill-dressed and cranky, though bumpkins will do as they are told if the orders are simple enough for them to comprehend. Lawyers will resort to high jinks in order to gain a fee. Cops, judges, and politicians cave in to powerful interests and ask how high when big shots say jump. Sports play-by-play guys will talk in overblown language (why affected talker Howard Cosell in the 1970s was ever thought something new has always escaped me).

The dopey water boy with the infectious smile and surfeit of personality is played by Johnnie “Scat” Davis. He played trumpet in the popular Fred Waring Band and can be heard on How'm I Doin’ on vocals. With undeniable screen presence, he gets two musical numbers in which to prove he has studied Cab Calloway and Louis Armstrong as closely as Mick Jagger studied Tina Turner’s moves. Also of interest are Hattie McDaniel and Eddie Anderson in early movie roles.

William Hopper is rather bland. If this movie was his chance to grab the brass ring and become a star, he didn’t rise to the occasion. Legend has it his heart was not in acting, at least not in the Thirties, and maybe not in sports movies awash with clichés that were tired by 1930.

William Hopper Week 1/4

Note: This week, presented are four tributes to William Hopper, who played Paul Drake, Perry Mason’s private detective. He became an actor because his mother Hedda (actress, then a powerful gossip columnist) pushed him into the profession. “When I worked at Warner Bros.,” stage-shy Hopper said, “I was so scared I stuttered all the time.” It’s sometimes impossible to spot Hopper in his early roles unless he is standing up and thus using his height and good looks to advantage. Also, his youthful brown hair, before WWII made it white, makes him hard to recognize.  He appears in ‘blink and you’ll miss him’ roles in TCM stand-bys such as Stagecoach (1939), Knute Rockne, All American (1940), The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942). 

Public Wedding
1937 / 1:00
Tagline: “Married by Mistake Only to Enjoy It”
[internet archive]

In this zany rapid-fire comedy, Jane Wyman, her con-man father, and three minions run a threadbare carnival act. They face intractable money problems that may even force them to into an activity that involves work. This prospect is so horrible to the quintet that they hit upon the idea of raising money with a public wedding. That is, they are putting on a sham wedding as an event at which advertisers can buy time and space to market their goods and services. And the down-home Americans of the time get an hour or two of entertainment for the price of admission.

Two problems arise. Two of the minions make off with all the proceeds. And Wyman ends up married to a young unknown artist (William Hopper) for real. In a satire of the news-hungry press of the time, the remaining minion (Dick Purcell) recruits his fan dancer GF to stage a suicide attempt as a publicity stunt in order to pump the juicy story of an artist as a bum that left an innocent girl at the altar to pursue his art.

The publicity enables Wyman to set up Hopper up as a portrait painter for the rich and famous in the social register.  Wyman argues to Hopper that a successful artist needs to build up notoriety before he can sell paintings. Hopper argues, "Good, sound, honest work will be appreciated in the end" to which Miss Practicality answers, "Well, who the heck wants to wait till the end?" Hopper’s dream is to set up a scholarship fund that sends art students to Europe for study abroad. But the con-man father exploits this idealistic plan for his own larcenous purposes.

A lot of incident is packed into a comedy that is only an hour long. The tone is rather slap-happy. In her first part at the top of the bill, Wyman seems very young and feisty but has the charisma a movie star needs. Hopper, sadly, not so much. He has all the power of attraction of The Young Suitor in a Charlie Chan movie. Seeing his hair in its original brown is odd given we are used to seeing Paul Drake’s white hair.

Usually a heavy or a heavy-handed character, Berton Churchill as the father is funny in the American blowhard tradition of the Frank Morgan’s Wizard of Oz and W.C. Fields’ Larson E. Whipsnade in You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man. Looking to weigh about 80 pounds, tiny Marie Wilson as the fan dancer provides additional comedy. Fastidious Dick Purcell* makes a moue of disgust and barks “Why don't you cover your mouth with your hand when you yawn” to which she replies huffily, “And get bit?”

Even when the script is lame, the nutty story makes its own kind of giddy sense. So the movie checks the box of creating its own world. Credibility is impaired by Hopper asserting his right to wear the pants in the family when they both know Wyman is the brains and gasoline of their alliance. The man who runs the restaurant is stereotypically Greek, but this does not seem so old-fashioned to me who lives in a place where people still use the expression “Greek restaurant.”

*Never thought you would ever see in the same sentence "fastidious" and "Dick Purcell," did you? This blog is full of surprises.

The Ides of Perry Mason 90

Note. The is the second Perry Mason novel, published in 1933. The courtroom scene really is a rocker – it’s easy to see why the mystery reading public went crazy over Mason novels. H.R.F. Keating, critic and no mean crime novelist himself, included this mystery in his list-book, Crime & Mystery: The 100 Best Books.

The Case of the Sulky Girl – Erle Stanley Gardner

Sulky Frances Celene brings to Perry Mason's attention a problem that would make any young rich lively woman pout. Performing the helpless girl routine for which Mason doesn’t fall, Fran explains that after her father passed away, the terms of his will had it that Fran could marry anytime she wanted, as long as she contented herself with a lump-sum payment of $5,000 (about $120,000 in our 2025 dollars). But if she held off marrying until after she was 25 she would receive a million-dollar fortune (about $23 million smackeroonies).

Though Our Favorite Lawyer had cautioned her that he is not much interested in cases that involve wills, he perks up considerably at the mention of a million dollars. Perry Mason in the Dirty Thirties was tougher and shiftier than he was to be during the Eisenhower years. Hey, hard times and all, sometimes a guy has to get dubious – shonky, like the Australians say – to get the job done.

The will also stipulated that her large fortune is be managed by her uncle Edward Norton. In the event that Norton gives up the duty or is unable to carry out the duty, the entire fortune passes to Fran. Later the cops will put a bow on that motive.

Fran requests that Mason visit her Uncle Edward in order to convince him to find the wisdom and kindness in his flinty heart to grant his consent to her marrying a young man named Rob Gleason. Perry goes to Norton's mansion, only to find out that Norton is a scrupulously honest trustee that has actually grown the inheritance in the slough of the Depression.

However, Norton is so full of integrity, as inflexible as an adding machine, that it is no-can-do on Fran marrying Rob at the age of 23. The paragon of virtue remembers Fran being a wild teenager in the Roaring Twenties. Unc is determined to prevent Fran from losing a pile of simoleons to a fortune-hunter, or given it’s Southern California, a gambler or a blackmailer or a con-artist or a fortuneteller or a cult leader.

Sadly, virtue turns out to be less than its own reward. Not that I’m pardoning the killer or blaming the victim, mind, but a factor in the motive was Uncle Edward being an uncompromising model of rectitude. Perhaps if Unc had been less ready to call the cops when he thought a crime was going down, the killer would not have bashed in his skull with a walking stick. Wrapping up Fran’s motive with the cute bow, the nameless cops and Deputy DA Claude Drumm put Fran and Rob on trial for murder in the first degree.

Sure, we get the stock characters of the pulps: the shyster lawyer, the cynical newspaper man, the knuckle-walking cops, and the unethical DA that “loses” notes of an inconvenient interview. Also dating this are running boards, cuspidors, and cameras with flash lamps (I wonder how acrid magnesium flash powder smelled). Men wear hats and pince-nez on black ribbon.

But for my money the period touches are just incidental. They don’t make the setting quaint or distract from the narrative magic. Gardner assumed his readers would use their imagination to fill in descriptions of people, places, interiors, and weather. He correctly thought that readers wanted a fast-paced story in which a resourceful hero assisted an underdog to come out on top, their innocence exonerated, while The Authorities would hang* innocent people due to crooked thinking, misinterpretation of evidence and arrogant certainty they are doing the right thing.

 

*The last execution by hanging in The Golden State took place in Q on May 1, 1942, nine years after the release of this mystery.

Gay Sparkling Musical Hit!

Note: My dive into the movies of Gail Patrick continues apace.  

Artists and Models
1937 / 1:37
[internet archive]

As we would expect of a musical comedy, the plot is just an excuse to string together pop music of the day, comic songs with yodeling, dance numbers, and skits. Hollywood musicals are parodied in two extravaganzas that are worth watching, especially for movie-goers like me who genially despise musicals.

A curious antique, this picture gives a sense of what the folks thought was funny in the late Thirties. Jack Benny was a comedian whose image was a subtle mixture of diffidence and conceit. His character here is a blowhard PR man who bumbles his way to professional success and manages to attract society luminary Gail Patrick. Seeing Gail Patrick propose to reticent Jack Benny is like seeing Pallas Athena mopping the floor. Plus, with regard to 19-year-old Ida Lupino – all vigor and bloom - asking 43-year-old Benny to marry her, well, Hollywood really was a factory of fantasy.

The folks also thought knock-about comedian Ben Blue was funny. He sang, danced, and mugged in the tradition of Red Skelton. His physical business will remind the beholder of moderate to severe neurological symptoms. In an odd sequence, Blue interacts with two marionettes who stroll by giving him the saucy eye as if they were sex workers. As if we were not doubting our senses enough, another marionette sidles up, a foppishly-dressed Englishman with a posh accent. The marionette strokes Blue’s thigh and says, “Spring arrives, the sap begins to rise,” suggesting that they might experiment with relations in the form in which they arise in English boarding schools.

The finale is Public Melody #1. Despite Paramount’s cooperation with the FBI, J. Edgar’s bureau apparently did not have a problem with this sequence that satirizes the ambushing ways of the FBI (though one doubts Bonnie and Clyde would be amused). In Public Melody #1, FBI agents storm a peaceful black neighborhood like Harlem with their tommy-guns blazing. Louis Armstrong plays his trumpet a little but does more feets-do-yo-stuff stuff than we feel comfortable with in 2025. It stings to see the giant and genius Armstrong made small in view of the fact that he was one of the most talented and popular entertainers in the history of our country, white or black.

Martha Raye also sings and dances in Public Melody #1. I don’t know anything about the art or history of dance in 20^th century America. But it looks to me as if Martha Raye is doing a parody of the freewheeling and athletic gyrations of jitterbugging. Good enough but things get weird. The print posted on IA is sharp enough to discern that Raye’s skin type starts, per the Fitzpatrick Scale, at light brown, then morphs to an olive tone, and finishes at medium white. This lightening is so strange that I struggle to make a meaning. My pea-sized brain just churns to a halt.

Our brains, however, were designed to tease out meanings so let’s consider another message: like Martha Raye, we too, Mr. and Ms. Movie-Goer, can learn from those Magically Wise Minorities and loosen up and sing and dance and have fun as if life were not one goddamn thing after another. Take risks, face fears, be grateful. Life isn’t working for The Man every night and day.

However, in 1937, this positive psychology, this self-help, was decidedly not the message that some ill-willed censors saw in Public Melody #1. This number was ordered snipped from the movie by some southern distributors because they thought their communities below the Mason-Dixon would not stand for blacks and whites performing together, such mixing implying the equality of the races. At any rate, sticking a thumb in the eye of racists, segregationists, and white supremacists, even if inadvertently, was (and is) a good thing.

This review grows long so we can’t cover in detail the parody of hillbilly songs by Judy Canova and her family.  Singer Connie Boswell is appropriately kept in silhouette for her number Whispers in the Dark. But we do miss her sisters and the harmonies. Artists Peter Arno, McClelland Barclay, Arthur William Brown, and John Lagatta do their rendition of England’s most famous fashion model Sandra Storme. Rube Goldberg and Jack Benny trade barbs.

Basically, this movie works as an artifact of American Oddness if one is in an anthropological mood. It’s interesting to think about social changes that render certain kinds of humor outdated and stock characters unfunny. Self-analysis may be stimulated by scenes that make us laugh though Our Better Angels know we ought to be outraged.

Other Gail Patrick Movies: Click on the title to go to 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
·         My Man Godrey
·         Murder by Pictures
·         

Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science

The Brain That Changes Itself - Dr. Norman Doidge

Medical students used to be taught that the brain was fixed. The brain was likened to a machine that had specific parts to perform specific functions. Ageing and trauma impaired function forever. Parts wore out and no tune-ups could really bring the brain back to optimal perception, memory, or attention.

Doidge’s thesis in this book is in fact, the brain changes all the time, not only with ageing and injury, but through everything we experience. The machine model is not the way to view the brain. It is not hard-wired forever for this or that function. Doidge explores the seminal concept of neuroplasticity, showcasing the brain's capacity to rewire itself in response to experiences, learning, and recovery from injuries and trauma.

For instance, Doidge argues that we have senses we don't know we have. We don't think much about balance until we feel dizzy. It is scary feeling to suddenly lose the confidence that we are not going to fall. The sense of tumbling down may induce panic too. Doidge describes new devices that can tell the brain to re-route signals to stay balanced. The brain does not care about the source of a signal but can process that signal and change its function to adapt to perform novel tasks.

The main appeal of this book is the lucid writing. Any thinking person who in interested in the topic will get much out of reading it. It also gives heart to readers who have left middle age in the rearview mirror. Don't renounce physical exercise, never quit reading.

The Nones of Perry Mason 89

Note: Raymond Burr built up quite a reputation playing villains in the late 1940s and early 1950s. For instance, he plays a gangster who steals a diamond in the Martin & Lewis comedy You’re Never Too Young in 1955. Nothing, not even seeing Brother Ray, will induce me to watch a movie in which zany hijinks ensue when grown-man Jerry masquerades as a 12-year-old child to recover the diamond. Just the premise makes me breathe shallow.

Walk a Crooked Mile
1948 / 1:31
Tagline: “Smash Up of a Spy Ring!”
[internet archive]

Raymond Burr plays the muscle for a gang of Communist spies during the early Cold War era. Their mission is to steal nuclear secrets from a facility in California. The FBI, however, gets hot on their trail because of a tip from Scotland Yard.

Burr plays Krebs, a Communist thief out to steal atomic secrets. Conveying a sense of menace and danger, his character adds tension and intrigue to the film.  He beats people up. He picks secrets up at a drop in an 24/7 laundry. He takes part in a climactic shoot-out. Looking as if he is tipping the scales at nearly 300 pounds, he wears a suit floppily that calls to mind a loose-fitting Japanese samue.  A trim beard makes him look a tidy saboteur. The beard also makes him conspicuous in a population where clean-shaven is the norm and expectation. I would think the last look a spy would go after is conspicuous and memorable.

The FBI agents are played persuasively as smart dedicated men who are human enough to make mistakes. They conduct muggings to relieve persons of interest of evidence and commit B&E to toss apartments. They enter hazardous situations with no back-up. They carry precious evidence out of the office instead of locking it up. They leave suspects by themselves after they’ve been interrogated. They are fooled when the Communist spies disguise themselves as clergymen. They use “Slavic” to describe a “nationality” when in fact it is an “ethnicity.” Just as prone to as anybody else, they are subject to thinking errors like overgeneralizing, filtering, and anchoring.

None of my quibbles detract from the basic messages that 1) the Communists use vicious means in pursuit of their inhuman ends and 2) the FBI is working diligently to counter this menace. I never got the feeling that the anti-Communism in this movie was the dumb hysterical anti-communism that brought into disrepute principled anti-communism. In one scene an immigrant landlady in San Francisco glares at Burr and says heroically, defiantly, “My whole family was killed by men like you because they didn’t answer questions. I’m the last one that’s not going to answer questions.”

The production is very smooth and easy to look at it. Noirish angles and scenes of shadows and light dramatize the good guys and demonize the bad guys as they develop plans to counter each other.  The voice-over and jiggly camera give a feeling of a documentary. The voice-over is omniscient so it takes us into Communist meetings which is a little strange.

As I always say, I’m easy-going and open to meeting movies where they are coming from, so I liked the tense process of breaking up the spy ring. The film itself, directed by Gordon Douglas, is considered a solid example of Cold War-era film noir, blending crime thriller elements with political intrigue.

As for the connection with the original Perry Mason TV series, Frank Ferguson plays the owner of a laundry that is a drop for the Communists. Shocking he is a spy because he looks like the personification of Midwestern Reliable. He was a Sheriff in TCOT Perjured Parrot, an expert in TCOT Angry Dead Man, and another sheriff, though more of a dimbulb martinet, in TCOT Bluffing Blast. But his best performance was as good old Walter, the faithful friend of Frances Reid of in TCOT Golden Venom.

Pre-Mason Burr: Click away

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]
Pitfall (1948) [internet archive] [my review]

Mac Fontana #1

Black Hearts and Slow Dancing - Earl Emerson

Regional setting, sense of humor, and deft writing are combined in this first-of-a-series mystery novel that features Mac Fontana. A firefighter and arson investigator, Mac has been through the mill, with a wife killed in a car crash during his own trial in the death of a woman he slapped to death. He’s moved to the Seattle area with his young son and been pressured into becoming the sheriff in addition to his duties as fire chief in the village of Staircase.

In Mac’s jurisdiction, a fireman from Seattle is found tortured to death. Mac’s investigation uncovers civic corruption in aid of urban sprawl. During his search to distinguish the good guys from the other kind, Mac is forced into an oil tank to die, tempted into You-Know by the victim’s strength-training GF, and supervises his crew at the arson fire of a church. Emerson has skilled hand for the rousing scene.

This is more a crime novel than a mystery since the perps are easy to spot. Readers that are leery of series books will have to tolerate the standard devices of local setting, emotionally damaged hero, diabolical moguls and their depraved minions. The barnyard language and humor, plus the loud stupid-on-purpose  atmosphere of a men’s locker room may be too much of a familiar thing for readers who spend quite enough time in a men’s locker room in real life, thank you very much. The three female characters can be summed up bluntly: one is a pain, the next a flake, and the last a brute.

What may or may not balance this for prospective reader: the wide-ranging action rocks, the pace is brisk, the plot twists and turns in remarkable ways. Plus, there is a Rin Tin Tin, a German Shepherd named Satan. The presence of a wonder dog wins extra points, of course. While this novel did not win any awards, Emerson has won honors for other novels, so he is writer that readers can trust will deliver an entertaining mystery.

The Kalends of Perry Mason 88

Note:  A. A. Fair is one of the many pen names of Erle Stanley Gardner, creator of defense lawyer Perry Mason. The mysteries under the Fair pen name feature the private eye partnership Bertha Cool and Donald Lam.

Double or Quits – A.A. Fair

Writing as A.A. Fair, Erle Stanley Gardner released the fourth and fifth Bertha Cool – Donald Lam mysteries in 1941. In March, Spill the Jackpot had portly Bertha Cool lose weight due to a bout with a virus.  In December, Double or Quits finds Bertha and her crack investigator Lam taking the day off to go fishing. Learning from her health scare, Bertha becomes determined to make time for self-care.

But another angler at the pier turns out to be Dr. Hilton Deverest, an M.D. with a big problem. Jewels from his safe have disappeared and so has Nollie Starr, his wife’s social secretary. He hires Cool and Lam to find the secretary, get the jewels back, and let Nollie know that the doc will let bygones be bygones. Things get complicated for Cool and Lam when their client is found dead on the floor of his garage with his car engine running.

At this point with the case heating up, Gardner tells the tale of how Lam pressures Bertha to make the agency a partnership. Bertha howls as if stabbed, but agrees after Lam applies psychological judo. The first thing new partner Lam does is boost the wages of the agency secretary Elsie Brand. Not just a pretty name (I had two aunts named Elsie), she is a Gardnerian Ideal Woman: taciturn, loyal, resourceful, quick-witted, kind, and easy on the eye.

The setting and motivations are plausible. The characterization isn’t deep but Gardner gets across that the characters are adults having real-life problems. Dr. and Mrs. Deverest have a marriage so troubled it borders on the sick. The doctor’s niece Nadine Croy is dealing with an ex that is milking her for money. Heartless con men exploit widows’ loneliness and discontent. In a fine scene, Elsie Brand’s cooking appeals to cop’s appetite which proves to be his undoing since after Bertha makes him pay for his mooching a free meal, his nasty inclination to push people around, and his all-round poor judgement. Lam has great interrogation scenes and in one he plays a doctor like a fish, getting him to toss his professional ethics overboard.

More cheering is the relationship that Lam has with Elsie. It is not of the platonic nature of the one between Perry and Della. Near the end of Double or Quits, a nurse solemnly warns Elsie not to be alone with Lam because, under the influence, he might be “abnormally stimulated.”

Gardner writes, “Elsie Brand laughed in her face.”

True, the plotting gets convoluted and the reveal requires the focus of reading a loan agreement. A key deduction feels improbable. But this is worth reading just for the enjoyment of the comical interplay between brainy Lam and hard-charging Bertha, plus of the tender back and forth between Lam and Elsie. It’s strange how the Cool & Lam novels are a little hard-boiled and a little cozy at the same time. While the characterization is not what a hardcore reader of Faulkner would call strong, the characters are the best thing going for it.

European Reading Challenge #7

Franz Kafka – Jeremy Adler

This short, copiously illustrated biography tells about the life and times of the subject in enough detail to hold the interest of but not overwhelm the non-specialist. There are many pictures of Prague and the important people in the writer’s life. Also included are Kafka’s drawings from his notebooks.

In accessible language, Adler makes the point that the Jewish Austrian-Czech writer and novelist who wrote in German tore up the blueprint for the 19^th century novel. For example, he used both ordinary and implausible characters. Josef K. is an ordinary bank employee who is arrested one day for no apparent reason and put on trial. Gregor Samsa is a fabric drummer who wakes up one morning to find he has been transformed into a winged beetle. In plain language and a lucid style, Kafka creates characters that anybody anywhere can relate to.

Making the personal and private seem universal, Kafka deals with abstract concepts like “integrity,” “reality,” and “individuality,” as concepts that thinking members of all cultures must contend with in the modern world. His description of urban alienation and anxiety speak to readers who feel isolated in the world, cut off from traditional ways of thought.

The word Kafkaesque has entered our language like Orwellian and Dickensian. It usually describes being trapped in a bureaucratic nightmare of incompetent or mean or zealous (or all three) clerks, pointless protocols, and incomprehensible paperwork. But it seems unfair that Kafka’s name should be associated with such negative meanings when he had such a positive and humane soul. 

Besides, given the Nazis branded Kafka’s art “degenerate” and burned his books, that must mean he’s worth reading.

Forty Witnesses Saw the Killing

Note: Gail Patrick moved beyond ingenue parts when she played Cornelia the mean sister in My Man Godrey. After dozens of parts as the socialite bad girl, retirement from acting drove her batty with boredom. With her husband Cornwell, Gail Patrick Jackson formed the company that produced from 1957 to 1966 the greatest courtroom TV series in creation. One wonders if it was due to Jackson – a lifelong Democrat - that the writers so often returned to themes such as class inequality and friction, the treatment of marginalized groups, and the various forms of corruption in the business world and the entertainment industry.

Murder by Pictures
1936 / 1:09
Tagline: “Forty Witnesses Saw the Killing, But Not One Could Pick the Killer!”
[internet archive]

Gangster Nate Girard (Onslow Stevens) hosts a shindig celebrating his acquittal from a murder charge. But the party is pooped when his attorney is shot to death. No gun is found, but, as the tagline hints, forty witnesses are all suspects. 

In this large pool is Meg “Nutmeg” Archer (Gail Patrick) stands out because her father was killed by Girard. She could have provided evidence that convicted Girard, so Girard wants her to take the fall for the lawyer’s killing. The flatfoots suspect that news photographer Kent Murdock (Lew Ayres) is helping Nutmeg evade the meshes of the law. A flashback explains how a photo of the actual shooting exists and like the rifle in that famous Western (Winchester ’73?), the negative keeps changing hands.

At only 69 minutes, this comic mystery can’t help but move briskly. The clever twists and non-stop turns make up for the now creaky wisecracking. So much in style then, nowadays nonsense grates if the viewer is not in the right mood for period word play.  "Aw, come on. Skin back your ivories. You're as limp as spaghetti. You're the saddest group of courtroom victors I ever trained a lens on."

Granted, though, classic American tall-tale wackiness hits the mark when a deadpan cop reports: “We got her life story from Oklahoma. When she was 12 she shot out all the candles on her birthday cake. They call her Nutmeg.”

Beware: Confusing is the first fifteen minutes. The acquitted killer gives useful information in an aside that is easy to miss due to the muddy sound. Three brash newspaper reporters – Lew Ayres, Benny Baker, and Paul Kelly – all seem to be named Murdock. Trying too hard to hit the screwball comedy note, Ayres takes to the shower with his pants on. Also, Gail Patrick’s backstory is related to what everybody at the time would have known but we post-moderns have forgotten: that in the early Twenties the Osage Nation in Oklahoma were the richest people per capita in the world, which attracted murderous whitemen on the ruthless hunt for oil money.

There is one connection to the classic Perry Mason TV series. Appearing in this movie as his usual comic relief bumpkin is a 30-year-old Benny Baker, who in his fifties was to appear in three episodes of the series. He was good as a cold gambling commission bureaucrat in TCOT Gambling Lady, but he was great as the nasty henchman in TCOT Carefree Coronary and the worst adult male role model in the world in TCOT Shifty Shoe-Box with the great Constance Ford.

Other Gail Patrick Movies: Click on the title to go to 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
·         My Man Godrey