Cover Up

Here’s an oddment.  Cover Up, released in 1949.  William Bendix, Dennis O’Keefe, Barbara Britton, Art Baker.  Directed by Alfred E. Green, whose career goes back to the silents; first picture of note is the pre-Code Stanwyck, Baby Face; did biopics of Jolson, Jackie Robinson, and Eddie Cantor.  Original screen story by O’Keefe, under a pseudonym.  Cinematography by Ernest Laszlo, who also shot D.O.A., Stalag 17, and Kiss Me Deadly, before going on to Judgment at Nuremberg, and an Oscar for Ship of Fools.  The razor-sharp black-and-white in Cover Up is the best thing about it.  The picture is less than the sum of its parts – not incoherent, but lukewarm – and you can wonder why I was curious about it in the first place.

For openers, Bendix.  He gets top billing, although he plays second banana to O’Keefe.  Bendix did a lot of lovable saps, the best-known being The Life of Riley, but he did solid work for Hitchcock, in Lifeboat, with Alan Ladd in The Blue Dahlia, and as Babe Ruth.  You could do worse, though, than to check him out in The Dark Corner, a nifty little noir where he plays very much against type.  Dark Corner has two serious weaknesses, Clifton Webb doing the same character he did in Laura, a year or so before, and Mark Stevens, who’s a Godawful stiff, as the hero.  It has two serious strengths, Lucille Ball, as the private eye’s Girl Friday, who gets him out of the frame, and Bendix, who has the part that used to go to Raymond Burr, before Perry Mason.  Bendix plays the muscle with alarming menace, thick-tongued, and his eyelids shuttered.  His body English is top-heavy, but he has a predator’s grace.  He’s sly, like many stupid people, and gets what he deserves, in the end, spoiler alert. 

Secondly, we’ve got Dennis O’Keefe.  You either know or you don’t.  O’Keefe did a lot of amiable and undemanding B’s, but in 1947 and ‘48 he made two pictures back-to-back with Anthony Mann, T-Men and Raw Deal.  Raw Deal is probably the best part O’Keefe ever got, and it features Claire Trevor, along with both John Ireland and Raymond Burr as the bad guys.  T-Men, though, is the one that really holds your attention.  Undercover cops, infiltrating the mob.  Alfred Ryder, almost invariably a yellowbelly and a slime, in over a hundred features and TV episodes, here gets to play the stand-up guy, who goes down without ratting out his partner to the mob torpedoes.  Charles McGraw, who once in a blue moon got to crack a smile or even be the hero (in Narrow Margin), is the torpedo in this picture, and one of the chilliest psychopaths in the Anthony Mann stable, which is going some.  O’Keefe, at the end, coming after McGraw, is past the point of no return, and clearly off the leash.  He heaves himself up the gangplank, in a fury, and you can feel his physical force.  It isn’t a shock cut, or a sudden scare, or some camera trick.  The camera’s steady.  He’s coming at you, and you shrink back.  His forward movement is that implacable.  You can’t help it.  Raw Deal and T-Men were both shot by the great cinematographer John Alton.

So, what is it with Cover Up?  It just doesn’t have any tension.  You keep wanting it to go somewhere, like it’s the Little Picture That Could, and the air keeps going out of its tires.  O’Keefe comes to town, he’s an insurance investigator, he’s going to file a report on a suicide.  He meets cute with Barbara Britton.  They’re a little old for their characters, but believable, and kinda sweet.  He checks in with the local sheriff, Bendix, and begins to smell a rat.  The guy shot himself, but the gun’s gone missing.  Bendix affects unconcern.  O’Keefe pokes around.  The town clams up.  It doesn’t take long for O’Keefe to figure out it’s murder, staged as a suicide.  Bendix, no fool he, already knows.  The question is, why is Bendix covering it up, or is he in fact the killer?  But mostly, O’Keefe is sticking around because he’s moony over Barbara.  Her dad, the local banker, turns out to be a suspect.  O’Keefe, however, is half-hearted about all this.  Oh, and it’s Christmas.  You can tell because they keep playing the opening bars of carols on the soundtrack.  Then, the only real suspect, the saintly retired doctor you never actually get to see, dies off-screen of a convenient heart attack.  The best moment in the movie, coming up.  Barbara finds the missing gun, at her dad’s, and goes to plant it, at the doctor’s.  O’Keefe shows up.  She hides.  He finds the gun.  Over his shoulder, you can see her reflection in a framed picture on the wall.  He sits at the dead doctor’s desk, and you realize at the same time he does, that the dead doc was left-handed.  Of course, so was the murderer.

Yadda-yadda-yadda. It isn’t Bendix, and it isn’t the dad.  O’Keefe and Barb realize the only obstacles to their happiness are their own cold feet, the stage door closes as Dancer and Prancer lift off.  Inoffensive.  It’s a pretty poem, but you can’t call it Homer.  In other words, it’s not noir enough.  O’Keefe pretends to be hard-boiled, but come on, he’s soft on the girl.  Bendix tries on some ambiguity, but too much Dutch uncle, not enough sinister.  The dad, with his rosy cheeks and white hair, is he cooking the books at the bank?  Not.  You want the worm in the apple, the serpent in the garden.  I expected a little less sugar, and a little more bite.  The snake never shows up.

l'Art du Crime

The Art of Crime is another show I’ve discovered, streaming on MHz, and I like it, but…

It’s funny what pulls you in, and what waves you off.

Very often, you find a book series, or TV, to be an acquired taste. I wasn’t drawn in right away, for example, by Jackie Winspear’s Maisie Dobbs books. I loved her memoir, This Time Next Year We’ll Be Laughing, but it took me a couple of books to warm up to Maisie. (Once I was sold, I was sold.)

I’ve tried to read James Benn’s Billy Boyle series – I read two start to finish, and cracked the spine on a couple more, hoping my first impression was wrong – but I’m sorry, they leave me cold as a mackerel. (This is a private opinion, obviously; your math may differ.) 

A show it took me the entire first season to even tolerate was Brokenwood, and well you might ask why I bothered, but something kept pulling me back, and I’m glad it did: I think I had to get over my aggravation with DI Mike Shepherd, who just seemed like one of those guys you’d go out of your way to avoid in the workplace.

 A classic example of this is Death in Paradise, which is hands down the most annoying show on television. They had the inimitable Ben Miller for the first season, and he’s the reason I watched Primeval (along with Doug Henshall), but then they cast the utterly execrable Kris Marshall, and almost killed the show. Seriously, if not for the supporting characters and the Caribbean landscapes, I would have given up.

Speaking of, although I’m nuts about Deadly Tropics (which is a terrible and uninviting title), but like the cast more than the scripts, I’m crazy about the local scenery of Martinique. Here’s another one. I was on the fence about Signora Volpe, even if the hot ex-spy and her hot Italian love interest give it romantic appeal, what convinced me were the fabulous Umbrian backdrops. Which, circling back, is a big selling point of The Art of Crime.

It’s shot in Paris. Ça suffit. Some of the surrounding countryside ain’t too shabby, either. But mostly, it’s in the city itself, and often some unrecognizable alley, off the beaten path. It’s not always the Champs Elysées, although you get a lot of I.M. Pei’s pyramid at the Louvre. I think they shoot inside the Louvre, too, but staircases and hallways, not the galleries, apparently. I’m not actually sure. They obviously got permission to shoot interiors at the Musée d’Orsay, once famously a train station, serving the southwest of France. And certainly other locations I don’t recognize. This is a big plus for me,

I have to admit, and not just in this show. I love the genuinely terrible Armin Mueller-Stahl policier variously titled Midnight Cop, or Killing Blue, because they shot it in Berlin and never showed a single familiar landmark, like the Brandenburg Gate or the Memorial Church. The Art of Crime opened an episode at the Temple de la Sybille, an architectural folly on top of an artificial waterfall in the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, sixty-one acres of manicured grounds in the Nineteenth that I’m embarrassed to say I never heard of, or visited. And it’s clearly as famous to Parisians as the Bois de Boulogne. That’s exactly my point. When somebody who knows a place intimately uses the landscape as character, you see it with a fresh eye.

I don’t mean to damn The Art of Crime with faint praise. It’s got a cool premise, not necessarily art theft, but art adjacent crime. This is the French OCBC, not a fictional crew, that investigates cultural property trafficking – smuggling, counterfeits, money laundering – and our entrée is to team a streetwise plainclothes cop with an artwise academic. They expend a little too much nervous energy at the beginning, rubbing each other the wrong way, but you let it go. (It’s like Jonathan Frakes; you don’t take Riker seriously until he grows his beard.)

 The obligatory exasperated senior officer, on the other hand, is a much better character in this show, not a wet blanket but a full narrative partner. There’s also the trope where the art expert explains herself to her psychiatrist, not to mention explaining herself to imaginary artists, Toulouse-Lautrec, Hieronymus Bosch, da Vinci. The only superfluous character is the art expert’s dad, an unnecessary aggravation.

I should be clear, that I in fact find it quite charming, in spite of the occasional too-cutesiness.

You realize they established certain dynamics, but after the shakedown cruise, they didn’t throw the excess cargo overboard. Somebody on the team was too proprietary. Be that as it may. I’ve finished Season Three (out of an existing eight, but only two episodes a season), and I’ll finish them.

I think, as I’ve said before, that there’s a different rhythm to European cop shows. It’s an enlivening change of pace.

I Was Misinformed (IMDb)

Back when, in what now seems like the Bronze Age, a guy named Col Needham started the Internet Movie Database. He was a movie nerd who lived outside Manchester, UK, and he began by scribbling notes in longhand. When he was fifteen, he got his first computer, a DYI with 256B of memory. (You read that right, 256 bytes.) This was the early 1980’s, so VHS had been introduced. Col didn’t have to go to the movies to see movies, anymore. And he was still taking notes, but now he was storing them on his computer, in a program he’d designed. The online community was primitive and insular, Col and his like-minded movie pals were file-trading on USENET. He eventually wrote a searchable database, and in 1990, he published the software for free. At this point, websites – such as they were – were college-based, or research lab proprietaries, and IMDb launched in July of 1993, at Cardiff University, in Wales. It was one of the first hundred or so websites ever curated for any purpose, anywhere. They went mainstream in 1995.

It’s worth noting that IMDb was all user-based. They were amateurs, and the database was compiled in much the same way - if you think about it – as the Oxford English Dictionary. Ask a select group of people with an odd enthusiasm, or Attention Deficit, to hunt up the earliest use of a word, say, or Robert Redford’s first screen credit (Season 3 of Maverick, 1960). See, makes it look easy.

Thirty years ago – that long ago, and that recent – AOL began sending everybody in Christendom trial CD’s of their dial-up software. Every two weeks, according to a recent article in the Post, traffic to IMDb doubled. And they started taking ads. This was a crazy idea. Nobody understood you could monetize the Web. IMDb now averages 250 million users monthly, one of the fifty most-visited websites in the world. (I hesitate to inform you that it’s owned these days by Amazon.)

Back in 1995, my public library in Provincetown, Mass., didn’t have internet, and I started going up-Cape to Orleans, where you could use their public library to log on to catalogues for print media, and pull up material on the screen at will, whereas before you had to go all the way to Boston, to the big public library on Copley Square, and research magazine and newspaper morgues on microfilm – and you were of course confined to what they had on file, the Boston Globe, the New York Times, the papers of record. For me, this was revelation, apotheosis, to have access to this limitless archive. It wasn’t limitless, really, there were probably no more than a couple of thousand gateways, if that, open to public browsing, where you didn’t need academic credentials – and it was an even greater revelation to stumble onto this clunky, user-generated, fan directory. It was a vanity project, or in Col Needham’s frame of reference, an Ed Wood picture, but as far as I was concerned, a wet dream.

This, seriously, is one of those “Let’s put on a show,” moments, Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney trying to save the orphanage. Col Needham and his wife Karen, and a few other dedicated goofs, made it happen. God bless.

Here’s the link to the Washington Post article.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/movies/2025/02/23/imdb-internet-history-col-needham/?itid=sr_1_1d1d1435-765a-42fa-8ec6-21385c936a6d

The Gap in the Curtain

John Buchan wrote six Richard Hannay novels, the first and best-known being The 39 Steps, with its propulsive chase story, but he wrote another series, of five books, with a markedly different tone and a very different hero, Sir Edward Leithen.  Hannay is sort of a muscular Christian, brash and unambiguous, Leithen is more thoughtful, and acts less with animal cunning than with his wits. 

The first of the Leithen books is The Power-House, written before the Great War, and serialized in Blackwood’s in 1913.  Conan Doyle had introduced Professor Moriarty in “The Final Problem,” in 1893, and Moriarty is our template for the arch-villain.  All the same, Moriarty is still mortal, not superhuman.The bad guy in The Power-House is modeled expressly on Nietsche, and he heralds a new breed of heavy.  “Someday there will come the marriage of knowledge and will, and then the world will march,” he tells Leithen, and you feel the chill of Mein Kampf, a good twenty years before Hitler makes it come true.

The Power-House is still my favorite of the Leithen novels, and in fact my favorite Buchan, but Buchan explored odd venues in the Leithen stories, not least with The Gap in the Curtain, from 1932, about precognition.  It’s a thriller, with elements of science fiction and the supernatural, the title a spooky evocation of eavesdropping on the future.  Five people attend what might as well be called a séance; two of them foresee their deaths.  Spoiler alert: the predictions come true, but. 

Buchan wrote fast and loose, and called his penny-dreadfuls ‘shockers.’  He perhaps took his historicals more seriously, The Blanket of the Dark (another knockout of a title), Witch Wood, Midwinter.  He never gave less than good weight.  The Gap in the Curtain is a novel of ideas, along the line of H.G. Wells, with its social and political commentary, but it’s chiefly an entertainment.  You don’t have to give it a lot of deep thought to enjoy the ride, if all the same you swallow some sulfur with the molasses.

Buchan died in 1940, of a stroke.  He was Governor-General of Canada.  He’d been a lawyer, a diplomat, a spy.  His last novel, Sick Heart River, was published after his death.  In the book, Edward Leithen is given but a year to live, and he goes off on a quest into the wooded wilderness of the upper Mackenzie River.  It’s a story about redemption, and clearly Leithen foresees his own death.  Buchan had no such premonition, although you can only wonder.  Leithen is the closest thing to autobiographical we find in Buchan, and his career arc as a character is an alternate history to Buchan’s own.  I’d prefer to think Buchan didn’t see it coming.  I’d rather not see it coming, either, but sooner or later, the curtain parts for us.

Happy Time

Looking for something to cheer us up over New Year’s, we streamed The Happytime Murders.  Melissa McCarthy, Maya Rudolph, what’s not to like?  It’s got puppets, mixed with live action, so like Roger Rabbit, you might be thinking, those cute ‘toons.  Well, first off, I have to warn you, it ain’t for the faint of heart.  It’s incredibly crude, beyond Dumb and Dumber, for example, with the explosive laxative scene.  Happytime Murders tops that, with puppet ejaculation.  (And if you’ve stopped reading, this very minute, I get it.)  There’s a barrage of graphic language, and violent dismemberment – although it’s doll stuffing, not blood squibs – but disturbing, nonetheless, to picture Raggedy Ann and Andy, torn limb from limb, before your very eyes.

Pull up your socks, snowflake.  This movie is hysterical.  I was laughing so hard, I thought I was going to wet my pants.  I know, I’m a sick puppy.  There are some extremely troubled minds behind this picture, led by the late Jim Henson’s son Brian, and it’s an acquired taste, but I have to say it’s demented genius.  It calls up Mel Brooks or Don Rickles, at their most demonic.

It is a mystery, a parody of hard-boiled, actually, with first-person voiceover narration, and all the genre tropes.  The private dick blows cigarette smoke in the cop’s face when he’s being interrogated; the puppets snort sugar – puppet cocaine – in the vice den; the (human) stripper bites the tip off a carrot while she’s pole-dancing, to get the (puppet) rabbits in the audience worked up.  I want to give you the flavor, but avoid giving too much away: half the kick of the movie is not being anywhere near ready for what they come up with.  Admittedly, it’s shameless, and they’ll stoop to anything for a laugh, but there are throwaway bits you’ll miss if you blink.  The private eye goes to a porn shop early on, tracing a lead, and on the back wall are posters for X-rated DVD’s.  I’m not going to tell you the titles, which are jaw-dropping, my point is the attention to detail.  The camera only glances in their direction, and your glimpse is fleeting, but the set design is a shock reveal, intentional and gratifying.

Granted, you’re not in this for the plot twists, which you see coming.  The surprises are in how they hit the expected beats.  A nod to Basic Instinct, say.  You’re going, WHAT?  A lot of it is that you can’t believe what you’re seeing.  Did they really do that? you ask yourself.  And then there’s the gag reel, over the end titles, which is of course a peek behind the scenes, and you get to see how they did do that.  Chinatown it ain’t, clever as it is in execution, but it ain’t Steamboat Willie, either. 

They got sued by Sesame Street. 

Deadly Tropics

The search goes on, for something watchable.  Ghosts, on CBS, streaming on Prime, is terrifically charming (and very light), and I’m not the only one to think so.  A wide circle of my friends, a group with widely divergent tastes, are smitten with it.  I’m also much taken with The Musketeers, although I aired some of my grievances in a Substack column a couple of weeks ago.  But more narrowly, looking in the genre of criminal enterprise, I’ve been toggling back and forth between BritBox, Acorn, and MHz – I only allow myself one subscription at a time.

Shetland is back, Season 9.  Blue Lights kind of lost me, in the second season, I don’t quite know why.  Scott & Bailey ran five years, and I wish there were more: I could watch Amelia Bullmore in damn near anything.  Troppo left me cold, even with Thomas Jane.  I took a flyer on The Jetty, because Jenna Coleman, how could you not?  (I was a huge fan of Victoria, which is admittedly a royal soap, but I thought it was more engaging than The Crown.)  The Jetty collapses of its own weight, as it telegraphs every beat of its glaringly familiar reveals.  Sorry. 

I’m pleased, therefore, to give you Deadly Tropics.  (Not a great title, and the original, Tropiques Criminels, isn’t any better; you wonder why imagination failed.  They could have called it Martinique Heat – almost anything would be better, to draw an initial audience.)  What the series very definitely is not, is a French knock-off of Death in Paradise, to which it’s been compared.  Just for openers, Tropics is nowhere near as annoying.  Paradise, which I’ve continued to watch faithfully (even through the ghastly Kris Marshall years), depends on a repetitive trope, and let’s be honest, fatigue sets in.  Deadly Tropics is much more of a policier, and strains credulity a lot less.  I could do without the exasperated male superior, mopping his brow and fretting that les femmes will embarrass him, but nothing’s perfect.  Baseline.  New commanding officer sent to Martinique from Paris to take over the homicide squad.  (Her former husband’s a bent cop, and she shouldn’t be tarred with his brush, but she is.)  Resistance from her ranking junior officer, also a woman, with radically different approach to policing.  Blah-blah.  New girl actually born on the island, but left as a child; has lots of family there, but doesn’t speak Creole, doesn’t really know the culture, although she herself is black.  The local woman cop - who, as it happens, is white - is a lot less structured in her methods, as relate to work, and her personal life.  This is mostly window-dressing, because the team manages fine, after some early missteps.

In other words, the show starts with a concept, and then essentially discards it.  There’s a genuine chemistry between the leads, Sonia Rolland and Béatrice de la Boulaye, and the scripts are spry and tight.  The scenery is lush, the locations feel authentic, the politics and so on seem to fit.  I don’t know from sex tourism, or the music scene, say, but it all has a gloss of reality.  As with Candice Renoir, the police procedures may or may not be exact, but you get a strong sense of the Caribbean, just as Candice gives you the Mediterranean influence.

The mysteries themselves aren’t taxing, but they’re not formula.  About half the time, you can guess it’s the dad, or the ex, or the plastic surgeon.  The storylines play fair, and they aren’t gimmicked.  I’ll settle for plain old GBH, and a garden-variety blunt instrument.

Joyeux Noël!

Robicheaux in Heat

Clete Purcel is of course a literary landmark, in that he reflects the hero’s weaknesses as well as his strengths.  As a trope, the Lone Ranger has Tonto, and the sidekick is a mechanism – sometimes comic relief, sometimes standing in for the reader, sometimes an atavistic force.  To take one example, I like Elvis Cole, but I adore Joe Pike.  Joe does stuff Elvis couldn’t bring himself to.  I like to cite the exchange in one of Robert Parker’s novels.  Spenser tells Hawk, the difference between us is that I’ve got rules.  Hawk lets a beat go by, and says, I got rules, I just got fewer than you do.  (Fewer, maybe, but Hawk’s rules are inflexible.)  Clete Purcel, in James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux books, is more than a convention, and a lot less comforting.

“Clete’s most dangerous adversary lived in his own breast.”  (The Glass Rainbow)

Dave Robicheaux has many flaws; disloyalty isn’t one of them.  The same may be said of Clete.  Clete is often to be found pulling Dave’s chestnuts out of the fire, even while Dave is doing his best to rescue Clete from his own worst impulses.  The dynamic is like two drowning men trying to save each other, the struggle may pull them both under.  Dave, an alcoholic in recovery, can be passive-aggressive, and can’t help himself, although he recognizes his behavior as damaged.  Clete’s in recovery from a lifetime of poor choices, and keeps making them, not hoping the results will turn out differently, but wanting them to be the same. 

The word you might think we’re looking for, here, is enabling.  One of the curiosities of the Robicheaux series is that Dave, an honest man with a good heart, can so consistently fail to protect himself from his own vulnerabilities.  But the deeper point is that Dave’s relationship with Clete isn’t a quid pro quo, there isn’t any one hand washing the other.  The two men aren’t codependent – which is therapeutic language – they’re in love.  Their trust in one another is unconditional.  Facing predators, it’s a primal, animal survival instinct.

This is a meta sort of comment, following on the above, about trusting your instincts.  I’ve read most of the Dave Robicheaux books, and I noticed something consciously, as a writer, this time around.  James Lee Burke doesn’t get in his own way; if fury, or emotion, threatens to overwhelm the narrative, he leans into it, he doesn’t hedge his bets, or second-guess the demonic.  He lets it roll, and the effect is startling.  It doesn’t break through the wall, it’s still in character, you’re hearing Dave’s voice, but it’s unfiltered, or uncalculated, it’s Dave in the raw.  He appears to be in flames. 

As it happens, just as I suddenly became aware of this, in the second act of The Glass Rainbow, Burke proceeded to jump the shark, or so it seemed.  He reels it in, but it was a little disconcerting.  I was ready to follow wherever it led, and where it was leading was over a cliff.

Didn’t happen.  The lesson I took from it from is, yeah, when the demon tempts you, surrender.  If you dare nothing, nothing will come of it.  Burke, at his best, runs hot.  Which can be scary.  Is he going to pull his own chestnuts out of the fire?  And it’s even scarier when it’s you doing it.  Strike a match.  Light the fuse. 

Short Cut to Hell

Seriously, how could you resist?  There are pulp novels, and B-pictures, with titles made for the bottom half of a double bill on the drive-in circuit.  (A phenomenon that doesn’t exist anymore, of course, and that’s half the point.)  It’s a marketing ploy, sure, but it’s a conscious esthetic choice.  I Spit on Your Grave, from 1951, falls somewhat short of its lurid promise, while I Married a Monster from Outer Space delivers quite nicely – never an expressive actor, Tom Tryon is as flavorless as a boiled rutabaga – although you never know.  Sometimes the tease is exactly that, an empty handshake.

Short Cut to Hell, which I stumbled across on YouTube, is less than the sum of its parts, but some of those parts are pretty juicy.  The opening shot, with Yvette Vickers sashaying down the hotel corridor in a skintight dress, is a visual the rest of the movie can’t begin to live up to, the male gaze made flesh.  And the long third-act set piece on the assembly line of the aluminum foundry is terrific.  Short Cut to Hell is the only picture James Cagney ever directed, an oddity by itself, apparently as a favor to the producer, A.C. Lyles.  It’s a remake of This Gun for Hire, and doesn’t even come close.  The lead isn’t bad, but he’s got nothing on Alan Ladd.  The two actors that show the most chops are Georgann Johnson, who did a lot of TV, early and late, and should have gotten better parts and more airtime, and Orangey the cat, a two-time winner of the Patsy award (Rhubarb and Breakfast at Tiffany’s).  The rest of the cast is wallpaper. 

The rewrite is credited to Ted Berkman and Raphael Blau (collaborators on Bedtime for Bonzo), based on a screenplay by W.R. Burnett and Albert Maltz, who shouldn’t need an introduction - The Asphalt Jungle and High Sierra are Burnett’s; Maltz did Mildred Pierce and The Naked City – and they adapted the Graham Greene novel.  The director of photography is Haskell Boggs, best known for three Jerry Lewis pictures (along with I Married a Monster from Outer Space, as it happens), and he shot Short Cut to Hell in black-and-white VistaVision.  I’ve talked about this process before; it was a widescreen competitor to Cinemascope, that lasted from the middle 1950’s into the middle 1970’s, and has been used since mostly for special effects work, Star Wars, for example.  VistaVision used two frames, side-by-side, which gave it enormous depth of field, and color saturation (Hitchcock loved it).  When you shoot with it in black-and-white, you get deep, deep blacks.  For example, in Short Cut to Hell, in the factory floor scene, the patrol cops are wearing leather jackets, and you see the light catch the folds in the leather.  That, boys and girls, is good cinematography.  You have to wonder what John Alton, the great black-and-white DP who shot Raw Deal and T-Men, among others, might have done with it, if he’d had the chance.

You see where I’m going.  Short Cut to Hell is a great title, but it isn’t a great picture, by any stretch.  There are plenty better.  All the same, it’s got bits that stick to the ribs.  I wouldn’t call it adventurous; Cagney uses a pretty conventional format, and except for Georgann, as noted, the acting is generic.  The best thing about it is the look Haskell Boggs brings to the shadows.  So, watch the beginning, and then skip through, until about 58 minutes in, to the factory chase scene, which is gonna hold your attention.  The rest, not so much.

Artifice

 

We watched Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, the sequel, the other night, and it’s got its share of entertaining moments.  (We watched the original the night after, and it’s better, but of course it has the virtue of originality.)  One of the coolest things about the sequel, BB, is the title sequence, a long overhead tracking shot of the picturesque little town, swooping down below the trees and among the houses, which you immediately realize is a model – and if you know the first movie, you know it’s the model of the town hidden in the attic of the haunted house.  Meta, in other words.

Seeing as it’s a Tim Burton movie, you know it’s going to be self-referential, and mischievous.  (In all honesty, you’d think the same thing if it were a Tarantino, or a Wes Anderson.)  That title sequence, unhappily, promises more mischief than the picture delivers.  Tim Burton is clearly having fun, right at the beginning, but the movie gets a little labored, later on.  The light-heartedness of the opening sequence is an homage to Hitchcock’s title sequence for The Lady Vanishes.  This, also, a model, the camera panning from a matte drawing of the mountains, and over the train tracks buried by avalanche, with a dolly shot across the snow, closing on the hotel window, and a lap dissolve into the lobby, crowded and chattering.  (In the dolly shot, a car goes by in the background, between the buildings, and you know it’s a toy: you can almost see the string pulling it.)  I think you’re meant to know the snowbound exterior is a trompe l’oeil, it’s an inside joke.  Hitchcock enjoyed that stuff a lot, and liked to share. 

For example, he tells a story about how he did the plane crash in Foreign Correspondent.  Near the end, they crash in the ocean, and he shows it from the cockpit POV.  The plane goes into a dive, and you see the water coming up at them, and when they hit, seawater smashes through the windscreen and soaks the pilots.  Real water, mind, they didn’t have CGI.  Here’s the trick.  The inside of the cockpit is a mock-up, instrument panel and windshield, with a rear-screen projection set-up to show the ocean rushing up at them.  Behind the rear-screen, he has a huge tank of water, up on scaffolding, and two big pipes, aimed at the cockpit.  When the film loop being projected shows the plane about to hit the surface of the water, they pull the plug, like flushing a toilet, and this enormous volume of water bursts through the screen and into the cockpit and soaks the stunt guys.  Cut.  You just know was Hitch like a kid in a candy store. 

A little of this goes a long way.  You can show your audience, or the reader, what’s behind the curtain, but you have to be careful not to break the spell.  They’re going to trust you, that you’re playing by the conventions.  A country house, some brittle conversation over cocktails, a little below-stairs intrigue, these are simple pleasures.  You don’t spoil it.  The same is true of camera artifice or FX.  The fourth wall is there for a reason. 

Here’s the opening model shot of The Lady Vanishes.

https://www.google.com/search?q=the+lady+vanishes+title+sequence&sca_esv=5bf84f1c9db1b0c0&rlz=1C1CHBD_enUS851US851&biw=2133&bih=1192&tbm=vid&ei=_dMFZ8DnLfaMm9cPwrnm4QY&ved=0ahUKEwiA2urvioCJAxV2xuYEHcKcOWwQ4dUDCA0&oq=the+lady+vanishes+title+sequence&gs_lp=Eg1nd3Mtd2l6LXZpZGVvIiB0aGUgbGFkeSB2YW5pc2hlcyB0aXRsZSBzZXF1ZW5jZTIFECEYqwJI7TFQqglYjx5wAHgAkAEAmAHJAaAB2Q6qAQU5LjYuMbgBDMgBAPgBAZgCD6AC6g3CAg0QABiABBixAxhDGIoFwgIKEAAYgAQYQxiKBcICBRAAGIAEwgILEAAYgAQYkQIYigXCAgYQABgWGB7CAgsQABiABBiGAxiKBcICCBAAGKIEGIkFwgIIEAAYgAQYogTCAgUQIRifBZgDAIgGAZIHBTkuNS4xoAekPQ&sclient=gws-wiz-video

Cultures & Their Disconnects

I read a book this past week that my sister gave me, A Killer in King’s Cove, the first of a mystery series by Iona Whishaw, a Canadian writer new to me but maybe not to the rest of you – the first book came out in 2015, her most recent in 2024, eleven of them so far.  King’s Cove is set in 1946.  The heroine, Lane Winslow, an SOE courier and clandestine op in Occupied France during the war, and troubled with PTSD, has exfiltrated herself to the woods of British Columbia, wanting to leave her past behind.  Not, of course, to be.  Lane, much like her cousin in spirit  Maisie Dobbs, is fated by temperament, a sense of duty, and her fatal curiosity, to be drawn toward the flame.

I’m making it sound more melodramatic than it is.  The story-telling is relaxed and even a little shaggy-dog, not my usual preference for hard-boiled blunt force trauma.  It leans on charm - by which I don’t mean fey, or whimsical, or labored hillbilly slapstick.  Characters who present as genuine, not tics or tropes.  Round, in other words, in the use of the word E.M. Forster gives us, not flat.  There’s something, I may say, Canadian about this, as distinct from British, a very different kettle of fish. 

This is actually where I’m going, here.  Another book I read, recently – again, a gift, so not something I might necessarily have stumbled on, all by my lonesome – is The Lost Man, by the Aussie writer Jane Harper, known on these shores for The Dry.  And then there’s the thoroughly subversive In the Woods, an Irish procedural, Tana French’s debut novel, which I also picked up this year.

The mystery story is essentially conservative.  This isn’t an original observation, on my part.  It’s generally agreed to.  The social compact is broken, murder being the most grievous breach of the common good, and the cop, or the private dick, or the avenging angel, knits up the raveled sleeve, and repairs the damage.  This is the classic set-up of an Agatha Christie, or S.S. Van Dine; not that it isn’t corny, and readily parodied, but Christie, for all that she may be dated, still puts the bar pretty high.  And moving forward, to somebody like Ross Macdonald, even at his most anarchic, in The Chill, say, the larger purpose of a social good is served.

Having said that, I’ve noticed some things mysteries and police procedurals don’t have in common, when set in exotic locales: not Christie, in Death on the Nile, or Martin Cruz Smith’s Arkady Renko books, the visiting fireman, but homegrown.  We’re used to the attitudes and accents of an Inspector Morse, or an Inspector Lewis, because we’ve seen a lot of PBS Mystery, and we’ve accustomed ourselves to how the Brits present these kinds of stories.  Cable broadens the overview.  I’ve mentioned Dr. Blake (Australian), Brokenwood or My Life Is Murder (New Zealand), and Blue Lights (Irish).  I’ve also picked up on Candice Renoir, in French, and the German police series Tatort – in its many different local iterations, the Dresden version my personal favorite, the Berlin storyline disturbing and too deeply creepy, even for me.  Speaking of, I also happened on the Hindi cop show Dahaad, which I wrote about on this blog, in September of last year.  Creepy, yes, but compelling.

Here’s my point.  Watching this stuff, which can come from very different cultural biases, you can be thrown off.  The case of Tatort, for example.  The series will do half a dozen episodes per season in a particular German city, so each season you get a few in Berlin, a few in Hamburg, a few in Frankfurt, and so on.  I followed, specifically, the Dresden episodes, over three seasons.  One of the things I found fascinating about it was the hangover from the not so distant past, of East Germany.  This attitude – shame, in fact, with some of the older characters – is of course not even present when the setting is Hamburg or Frankfurt.  For a German audience, it’s a crucial subtext. 

Same thing with Dahaad, this dissimilarity, or cognitive dissonance.  If you’re used to the rhythms of Bosch, or The Wire, or Barney Miller, for that matter, watching the beleaguered but furiously obstinate Bhaati and Singh fight their corner against religious politics, misogyny, caste prejudice, and plain willful ignorance is really something to behold.  Any lesser person would cave.  And although you might harbor the suspicion that Bollywood is going to simply paper over these intransigent differences in favor of a happy ending, by the actual end, you’re pleased not to be drowned in cynicism, although the happy is ambiguous.

We find, maybe, that something’s gained in translation, rather than lost.  I know there are other examples of this phenomenon that don’t in fact work, because I’ve tried to watch them and given up, but that doesn’t signify.  What’s fascinating to me is how these shows manage as best as they do, to tell stories that only work in their own context.  It seems obvious, but it’s not, that the conventions of a narrative depend on the inner tension between discipline and chaos, and arbitrary social structures aren’t just good manners, but a survival mechanism.  In this particular narrative construct, the Western hero is often an avatar of indiscipline; that’s not the only model for a story.