John Ford's "The Rising of the Moon"

Today is St. Patrick’s Day, and as they usually do every March 17, the cable channel, Turner Classic Movies, is showing Irish-themed films all day.

Tonight at 8 p.m., TCM is scheduled to show John Ford’s “The Rising of the Moon.” (But, please check your cable guides. The times can vary and schedules can be different outside the U.S.) .

“The Rising of the Moon,” from 1957, is an unusual little black and white film with no big-name stars, except Tyrone Power who introduces segments of the picture.

The movie is in three parts, each a separate and unconnected tale, based on short stories and plays by Frank O’Connor, Michael J. McHugh, and Lady Augusta Gregory, and adapted by long-time Ford collaborator, screenwriter Frank S. Nugent.

The first two stories are told with a gentle sense of nostalgia. The last is harder and tougher. All three parts were made with care and artistry on location in Ireland.

Don’t miss this one.

Don’t Bother Seeing “I See a Dark Stranger”

St. Patrick’s Day is approaching and, ironically, I happened to watch a film the other night with a distinctly anti-Irish tone. But then, most of the English characters in this movie did not come across too well, either.

“I See A Dark Stranger” is a 1946 war film set in Ireland and England in the weeks prior to the 1944 D-Day invasion. I was expecting a noir thriller, but was disappointed.

Bridie Quilty, played by Deborah Kerr, a young, obstinate and none-too-bright young Irish woman who spent her life listening to stories of fights for Irish freedom from the British, decides to serve her country against its ancient foe by becoming a Nazi spy in England.

While working diligently and unthinkingly for a nest of spies gathering information about the coming invasion, she attracts the amorous attention of a British officer, played by Trevor Howard. Why the Howard character would think Bridie anything but an ill-tempered idiot is beyond explaining. Bridie makes Maureen O’Hara’s Mary Kate Danaher of “The Quiet Man” look like an easy-going hippie girl.

“I See A Dark Stranger” is part adventure film, which the producers supposed would be in the mold of Hitchcock’s “The 39 Steps,” and part slapstick comedy with most of the slaps coming in the last 15 minutes of the picture. But this movie is a 100 percent mess, although a technically well-crafted mess.

The film was co-written and produced by the team of Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder, with Launder directing. The two wrote the script for Hitchcock’s “The Lady Vanishes,” so this one should have been a lot better. But they did not have Hitch to guide them.

My advice is to skip “I See A Dark Stranger,” especially if you have any Celtic blood in your veins. You might want to skip it, too, if you are British because the movie is none too kind to your people either.

Now, so as not to leave you without a movie recommendation for March 17, do try to see John Ford's "The Rising of the Moon," Friday on Turner Classic Movies (in the U.S.). And, please check back here on St. Patrick's Day for a post on Ford's film.

FFB: Six Days of the Condor by James Grady

The violent spy thriller, Six Days of the Condor, is a fun, fast read from 1974.

Written by a first-time author, then in his mid-20s, James Grady quickly sets up a deadly predicament for his main character, Ron Malcolm, a man in his mid-20s, working for the CIA.

Malcolm is part of a research division in which half a dozen men and women read novels all day and turn in detailed reports on them, noting any passages that may reveal a deeper knowledge of the world’s spy agencies than any ordinary person could know.

This division is off on its own, housed in a Washington, D.C. townhouse. Into this quaint building on a residential street come three men with machine guns who massacre everyone working there – except Malcolm, who left through a back door to run some errands for his boss and pick up lunches for the staff. Malcolm returns to find his colleagues dead. He calls headquarters and arranges to be picked up and taken to safety. But the pick-up is a trap which he narrowly escapes and which sets him running for his life, not trusting anyone.

Why the employees are killed is not too hard to figure out. The people behind it are well disguised. Malcolm's struggle to figure it all out takes a backseat to his avoiding the hitmen and staying alive.

In a strange twist, Malcolm kidnaps a young woman and hides in her apartment. He explains his crazy situation, she forgives him and jumps his bones. Well, 1974 was not that far removed from the free-loving 60s.

With a little suspension of disbelief, Grady’s novel is a swift, action-packed yarn with several well-done, tension-filled moments that keep the pages turning.

A couple of minor criticisms of the book are its use of two old devices. One is concealing the identity of the bad guys by using only vague physical descriptions in scenes featuring them. The other is leading the reader up to a revealing moment, and then cutting it short with a chapter break. The following chapter jumping ahead in time to the characters carrying out the plan which was not revealed to readers. These devices are still in use.

Overall, Grady did a fine job of setting up and sustaining suspense, and his lean prose style made for an enjoyable read.

In 1975, Six Days of the Condor came out as a film, with many changes from the book, including its title, called “Three Days of the Condor,” starring Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway.

Western theme songs by Frankie Laine

One thing leads to another.

Last week, I posted about the Elmore Leonard short story, “Three-Ten to Yuma," which started me thinking about the two films based on it, one from 1957 with Glenn Ford and Van Heflin, and the other from 2007 with Russell Crowe and Christian Bale. As much as I liked the Leonard story, I cannot say I cared much for either picture. But, I do like the theme song from the original movie performed by Frankie Laine.

Laine was born Frank LoVecchio in 1913 in Chicago. During the 1930s, he sang with bands in nightclubs. In 1946, he recorded “That’s My Desire” for Mercury records. The song became a hit, and made Laine a national star along with fellow Italian-American recording artists, Frank Sinatra and Perry Como.

In 1949, Laine recorded “Mule Train,” which seems to be the song that opened up a new track in Laine's career – singing theme songs for Westerns.

Some of the movies he contributed to are the Burt Lancaster-Kirk Douglas “Gunfight at the OK Corral” from 1957, the Kirk Douglas “Man Without a Star” from 1955, and “3:10 to Yuma.” Along with the movies came TV theme songs. Perhaps the most famous was “Rawhide,” for the show starring a young Clint Eastwood. “Rawhide,” like “Mule Train,” is punctuated with whip cracks.

Then, in the 1970s, the story goes, funny man Mel Brooks was preparing a Western comedy and put out a call for someone to sing the theme song who sounded like Frankie Laine. How about Frankie Laine? the singer himself asked Brooks. And that, they say, is how he came to record “Blazing Saddles.”

Laine passed away in 2007.

Here are some links to Frankie Laine’s songs:

That’s My Desire

Mule Train

Gunfight at the OK Corral

Man Without a Star

3:10 to Yuma (the movie version)

3:10 to Yuma (another version)

Rawhide

Blazing Saddles 

And here is Laine with Perry Como in 1951 on The Frank Sinatra Show

FFB: Three-ten to Yuma by Elmore Leonard

Recently, my friend, Prashant, who blogs at Chess, Comics, Crosswords, Books, Music, Cinema, posted a piece about the 2007 movie, “3:10 to Yuma.” The film is a remake of a 1957 movie with the same title. Both are based on a story by Elmore Leonard.

While I have read many of Leonard’s contemporary crime novels, I have read few of his Westerns. I went in search of a copy of this one and found it is not a novel. Elmore Leonard’s “Three-ten to Yuma,” is a fairly short, short story – about 17 pages, in the hard cover collection of Leonard’s Western stories called, The Tonto Woman.

The two movies beefed up the back-story and tacked on motivations that are not present in the short story. In Leonard’s version, first published in Dime Western Magazine in 1953, Paul Scallen is a deputy sheriff in Arizona tasked with getting outlaw Jim Kidd from Tucson to the Yuma Territorial Prison, near the border of California. To transport him the roughly 250 miles, Scallen will escort Kidd on a train leaving at 3:10 in the afternoon.

He and the prisoner arrive in Tucson just before dawn and wait in a hotel room until it is time to walk down to the railroad station. While waiting, word gets out that Kidd is in the hotel, and members of his gang arrive in town and wait for him and the lawman to come out into the open.

Elmore Leonard’s tough, lean tale holds up as model of good storytelling, quickly setting up the situation, providing just enough background, building tension and bringing the tale to its violent conclusion.

Although the date is not stated, the story takes place between 1876 and 1909. Those were the years the Yuma prison was in operation. It was closed when a new prison was built and is today a museum.

(For more posts on books, please visit Patti Abbott’s blog.)

Mystery movie "Town on Trial" with John Mills

The 1957 British film, “Town on Trial,” starts with a visually-stunning series of quick shots, setting up the story in about 60 seconds, and ends with a sweaty-palm, acrophobia-inducing climax. It fills in the middle with a good mystery, told in a smooth, cinematic style by director John Guillermin.

A town is shocked by the murder of a gorgeous young woman, but the people close ranks against police investigators, revealing little for fear their reputations and that of their town will be marred.

A detective superintendent, played by a strong John Mills, is sent in to crack the case. He tramples all niceties and gets right to the point with the residents and especially with his prime suspects, peeling away the protective armor people placed around their less-than-upright lives.

This fast-moving, black and white movie has the feel of the great films made in post-war England, and, under Guillermin ’s guidance, feels modern with its intense performances and constantly moving camera.

For more about this film, please see (here) the review my friend Sergio posted a few years ago on his blog, Tipping My Fedora.

FFB: Where the Boys Are, Glendon Swarthout's novel of Spring Break, Sun and Sex

Right about now, thousands of college students are thinking about or heading out for spring break. So, it is a good time to look back at spring breaks past.

Other than a couple of newspaper articles in the late 1950s and a feature in Time magazine, the first major chronicle of kids hitting the beaches was Glendon Swarthout’s 1960 novel, Where the Boys Are.

In the book, two coeds, Merritt and Tuggle, travel from their cold, Midwestern college to Florida where they meet and bed a series of men – sometimes the same men – and party like crazy.

As fast as the girls and guys meet and hook up, they move on with only the memories of some so-so sex, except for one night of passion when Merritt and a musician get into some experimental sex and rock each other’s worlds. While the musician is the only one to show any signs of commitment – he wants to take her with him to San Francisco – Merritt is noncommittal, and soon has something more important and complicated to think about. Which of these guys, she wonders, is the father of the child she is now carrying?

Where the Boys Are is a comic novel, but not a laugh-out-loud comedy. The humor is dark and subtle and meant more to shock the parents of beach-bound students than to titillate those not old enough or financially able to take the trip. To those who go, it is something of a warning, but not a preachy one.

Glendon Swarthout (1918-1992), according to some brief, on-line biographies, taught at Michigan State University in the mid-1950s. After hearing spring break stories, he went to Ft. Lauderdale in 1958 to check it out for himself. The book was the result.

Swarthout was an interesting writer. Among his novels were several westerns including The Shootist, which was later made into a film starring John Wayne.

College kids getting away for spring break goes back a lot further than the 1950s. Students who could afford it were doing it in the early 1900s.

Ft. Lauderdale became a destination in the 1930s when the city built an Olympic-size pool and promoted the facility to college swim teams. The teams went, an annual swim meet was created, more and more students heard about the gathering and over the next couple of decades hundreds of kids flocked to the beach.

By the late 1950s, about 20,000 students went there for spring break. After Swarthout’s book and MGM’s movie of it came out, the numbers more than doubled. It got so big the mid-1980s saw several hundred thousand descend on the city. Ft. Lauderdale decided it did not need the headaches of being overrun every spring. The city began promoting itself as a great destination for families. Nothing throws a wet blanket on a wild party like the idea of a vacation with parents. For a while, the students moved up the highway to Daytona, and later to the Florida panhandle.

(For more posts about books, please visit Patti Abbott’s blog.)

Death Wish, a Movie Hit that Missed the Mark

"Death Wish," a 1974 movie based on a Brian Garfield novel, missed the point of the book and became a boxoffice smash.

In Garfield’s novel (reviewed here), middle-aged accountant Paul Benjamin, a man who could have been played by Jack Lemmon, is traumatized and enraged by the death of his wife and the near-death of his daughter at the hands of some New York City thugs. The police seem to be doing little to stem the rise in street crime and they have no hope of ever finding and arresting the men who assaulted Paul's family. He comes to believe the only solution is to get a gun and rid the city of criminals on his own. His repeated killings are part of his mental breakdown.

In the movie, middle-aged architect Paul Kersey, played by tough-guy star Charles Bronson, is  enraged at what happened to his wife and daughter. The scene of their attack is shocking in its brutality. (Almost as shocking as seeing  Jeff Goldblum playing one of the violent creeps.) After that scene, audiences were with Paul as he took to the streets, tempting punks to attack him, then blowing them away.

For the movie, Paul’s agony and psychological damage are reduced to quickly get to the action. Garfield spent a great deal of time – nearly half the book – describing Paul’s mounting anger and showing his descent. The movie’s Paul is angry, too, but he is soon provided with a solution.

After his wife’s funeral, Paul’s firm sends him to Arizona to supervise a development project. Changing Paul’s profession gave the filmmakers a chance to show Bronson in the desert sunshine overseeing the operation. On his last day out west, Paul is given a gift by a grateful client. The gift, he discovers on his return to New York, is a revolver. The gun goes into Paul’s coat pocket and Paul heads out into the streets at night hunting for bad guys. The movie becomes a blood fest as cool, cold-eyed Bronson knocks off criminals on streets, in parks, and on subways.

Director Michael Winner was an expert at staging violent scenes. He had worked with Bronson on three previous action films. They went on to do two “Death Wish” sequels. Two additional sequels starring Bronson were not directed by Winner.

The gunplay thrilled audiences. Seeing dirtbags get it, was highly seductive stuff. The filmmakers made it clear everyone Paul shot deserved it.

While Paul's transition from helpless victim to active vigilante was quick, Charles Bronson made the most of it, turning in a good performance. Later, when faced with a variety of dangerous situations, Bronson was too sure, and the only suspense was in how far he would let a potential mugger mess with him before he let him have it.

The movie left viewers cheering Paul who eludes the police until the end. A detective, played by Vincent Gardenia, catches up with him, and sounding like the sheriff in a western tells Paul to get out of town. Paul takes his advice. Arriving in Chicago in the last scene, he witnesses a group of toughs jostling people. He points his finger at them, in a gesture meaning they are in his sights, and indicating he has not changed, but will continue his one-man mission.

FFB: Death Wish by Brian Garfield

Brain Garfield’s 1972 novel Death Wish is not so much an action story as it is an indictment of a city and time when crime was increasing, people were scared, and cops and politicians were unable or uninterested in doing anything about it.

The first half of the novel focuses on Paul Benjamin’s rage and feeling of impotence after his wife and daughter are assaulted by a group of thugs. His wife dies of her injuries and his daughter is traumatized and committed to a psychiatric hospital. The cops investigating the crime have no leads and no hope of ever finding the criminals. While Paul rails against New York City’s crime problem, his son-in-law, a lawyer for a public defender’s office who spends his days in court representing violent punks, tries to calm him down.

Paul’s anger grows stronger. He is sick of feeling like a victim, cringing in fear when he walks down a dark street, and knowing hoodlums will get away with their crimes.

When he returns to work after a few weeks off, the partners in his accounting firm decide Paul needs a break from the city and send him to Arizona to work on a corporate merger. There, Paul is taken with the myth of the Old West, where a man with a gun could confront outlaws. Before leaving, he buys a revolver, hides it in his luggage and sneaks it into New York.

Now armed, Paul does not wait until he is preyed upon, he goes looking for trouble. He shoots and kills a junkie attempting to rob him, and when the sickening sensation leaves him, he has a feeling of accomplishment. Night after night, he goes out looking to repeat the incident. At first, he rationalizes the shootings by only killing those out to do him harm or in the middle of committing other crimes. Soon his actions leave him feeling nothing. He is as numb to the world as his institutionalized daughter.

A psychiatrist, interviewed in a New York magazine provides a profile of the unknown man whom the press is hailing as a vigilante and citizens are applauding for cleaning up the streets. The psychiatrist says the vigilante is a middle-aged man who has experienced a terrible act of violence either against himself or a family member and is driven by fear and a mental breakdown. The article startles Paul, but does not stop him. By the end of the book, Paul is roaming the streets like an animal, looking for his next victim.

Death Wish is provocative, but, with new fears of terrorism and mass shootings, this novel of street crime reads like yesterday’s headlines.

(For more posts on books, please visit Patti Abbott's blog.) 

Quirky Crime Film: Blast of Silence

Frankie Bono, an out-of-town killer hired to take out a New York crime boss, spends several days stalking his intended victim, learning the man’s routines, and picking the best spot to do the job in the off-beat, low-budget, noir film, “Blast of Silence.”

The grim, stoic Frankie, played by Allen Baron, who also wrote and directed this independently made, 1961 feature, goes about his business during the Christmas season and the contrast between the hired gun moving among the happy shoppers is striking.

More striking is the divided nature of Frankie. While he is a cold-blooded pro, he is also a lonely hitman. Accidentally running into an old buddy, Frankie is invited to a party, meets a girl, and desperately goes after her, stopping just short of rape. This makes for a very strange tangent in this odd, intriguing movie.

The many scenes of Frankie doing his job – contacting the man who hires him, buying an illegal gun, and following his target – are accompanied by strangely poetic narration. But it is not the usual first-person narration commonly found in film noir. It is second-person narration delivered, uncredited, by once-blacklisted actor Lionel Stander – he of the distinctive, gravely voice, who later co-starred on TVs “Hart to Hart.” The narration was written by once-blacklisted writer Waldo Salt, under the pen name, Mel Davenport. Salt later wrote the screenplays for “Midnight Cowboy,” and “Serpico.” The voice-over comes from an omniscient character who is talking to Frankie, commenting on his thoughts and actions, rather than informing the audience.

Shot entirely on the streets of New York in a documentary style, “Blast of Silence,” has the look and feel of early John Cassavetes and Stanley Kubrick films and is nearly a decade ahead of Martin Scorsese’s first efforts.

The movie was co-produced and photographed in gritty black and white on dark dreary days by Merrill Brody, a friend of Baron’s since grade school. Another plus is the film’s jazz score by Meyer Kupferman.

This excellent, 77-minute movie was originally released by Universal-International and has recently been given a new life on DVD by Criterion.