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.