THE AMERICANIZATION OF EMILY

Kudos to my buddy Kelly Greene for recommending THE AMERICANIZATION OF EMILY (1964) to me. I remember when this film was released (I was nine years old at the time) and, due to the leads, James Garner and Julie Andrews, the title and the way the film was marketed, I naturally assumed that it was just another romantic comedy and of no interest to me at the time (or perhaps ever).

Boy, was I wrong.

I can only imagine how audiences at the time reacted to this deeply cynical anti-war film. Paddy Chayefsky's screenplay gets a little bit preachy at times but that's not enough to undercut this magnificent black comedy. Garner stars as Lt. Commander Charlie Madison, a "dog boss" for Rear Admiral William Jessup (Melvyn Douglas). A "dog boss", as explained in the film, is an aide who can get anything his commanding officer wants and needs: food, booze, clothes, and women. Especially women. Charlie, a self-avowed coward who froze in combat and pulled strings to get posted to his current assignment, is basically a pimp. He supplies his buddy Lt. Commander Paul Cummings (James Coburn), with a steady stream of beauties from the motor pool, English women assigned as drivers for various officers. Among the women is future LAUGH-IN star Judy Carnes.

Another driver in the pool is Emily Barham (Julie Andrews), a war widow who is desperate to find some meaning in the insanity of war even if means sleeping with a succession of men in order to be fulfilled. Emily and Charlie clash at first but eventually fall in love. Emily knows that Charlie is a shit heel but he's at least an honest shit heel, a man who knows exactly what he is and isn't afraid to admit it.

But things take a wild turn when Admiral Jessup (who is more than slightly mentally impaired), comes up with the wild idea that the first American to die on Omaha Beach on D-Day must be a Navy man. And what's more, his death must be filmed and documented so that the dead man can be used for propaganda purposes. It's a wild scheme and Charlie wants nothing to do with it, but through a series of plot turns, Charlie finds himself on his way to Omaha Beach and a rendezvous with destiny.

SPOILER: Charlie dies on the beach, making him the fabled first sailor to die on D-Day. He's turned into an international hero which shocks Jessup back to his senses while Emily is left to mourn yet another man taken from her by war. But Charlie isn't dead and when he returns to the base he's full of courage and ready to go public and reveal the truth about the whole scheme. Charlie is ready to risk it all before Emily reminds him of his innate cowardice and that it's the coward that she loves, not the fake hero.

EMILY features a great supporting cast including Keenan Wynn, Edward Binns, William Windom, Steve Franken, Alan Sues (another future LAUGH-IN star) and Sharon Tate (unbilled). Chayefsky's screenplay, based on a novel by William Bradford Hie, is first rate and director Arthur Hiller displays a sure hand moving the narrative from war time romantic comedy to a searing indictment of war and the men who wage it.

However, I do have a quibble with the last act. We see Charlie "die" on the beach and he's immediately proclaimed a dead hero. Didn't anyone bother to check his body to see if he was really dead or not? After all, for Jessup's insane scheme to succeed, didn't the kill need to be confirmed?

All that aside, THE AMERICANIZATION OF EMILY is a first rate film with Garner and Andrews both delivering outstanding performances, among the best in their respective careers. It's nothing like I expected it would be from all those years ago and it was a pleasant surprise to discover this brilliant gem of a film.

Highly recommended.

SCENE OF THE CRIME

A lone cop, investigating a series of raids and murders on Los Angeles area bookie joints, is gunned down by a man with a twisted left hand and a dark splotch on his face. The cop is found with a thousand dollars cash on his body, an effort to frame the cop as being on the take. There are a handful of witnesses to the crime but none of them want to cooperate. It's up to veteran homicide detective Lt. Mike Conovan (Van Johnson) to investigate the murder because the dead cop was his former partner.

SCENE OF THE CRIME (1949) has some noir elements but being produced by MGM, it's not as down and dirty as noirs from other studios. Thus, it's more of a police procedural story with Conovan, Fred Piper (John McIntire) and C.C. Gordon (Tom Drake) the team of detectives out to solve the case. What's interesting is that the bookie joints that are the targets of the robbers and killers are all "outfit" joints, that is, run by organized crime on a large scale. The cops never go after the bigger fish in this film, they're content to find and capture the two-bit punks doing the robbing and killing.

The investigation leads Conovan to stripper Lili (Gloria DeHaven). They strike up an uneasy relationship with Conovan only wanting information while Lili longs for something more. This puts added strain and pressure on Conovan's marriage as his wife Gloria (the gorgeous Arlene Dahl), worries about Mike constantly and desperately wants him to leave the police force.

Conovan and his men eventually run down all of the various leads and find their men but the bad guys won't go peacefully. There's a nicely staged gun battle at the climax of the film in which the crooks meet their end in a hail of lead.

SCENE OF THE CRIME is a good little crime thriller. Van Johnson, eager to play against type, does a decent enough job but he's never quite entirely convincing as a hard boiled detective. His screen persona as a romantic comedy lead and song and dance man is just too well constructed to be overcome in one movie. He's just too nice a guy to ultimately pull this kind of material off consistently.

SCENE OF THE CRIME sports a great supporting cast including Leon Ames, Donald Woods, Norman Lloyd, Jerome Cowan and Tom Helmore. Kudos to director Roy Rowland, screenwriter Charles Schnee and cinematographer Paul Vogel, all of whom contribute to the films' effectiveness.

It's no masterpiece but SCENE OF THE CRIME stands as a durable crime/mystery film. Check it out.

BEACH PARTY

After the Roger Corman directed Edgar Alan Poe films of the early 1960s proved to be box office gold for low budget studio American International Pictures, the company was eager to find another cheap-to-exploit genre to see if lightning could strike twice. Producers James H. Nicholson and Lou Rusoff struck upon the idea of a teenage "sex" comedy built around the then burgeoning surf craze that was sweeping the nation. Featuring a cast of pretty young women and handsome young men, a handful of authentic surf tunes by Dick Dale and the Del Tones, and some first rate production design by Daniel Haller (who worked as a cinematographer on several Roger Corman films), BEACH PARTY (1963) looks and sounds better than it had to in order to be successful. But that's a big plus for this kitschy, campy teen comedy that served as ground zero for an entire sub-genre of films in the 1960s.

Following in the wake of the wildly successful BEACH PARTY, AIP gave audiences MUSCLE BEACH PARTY (1964), BIKINI BEACH (1964), PAJAMA PARTY (1964), BEACH BLANKET BINGO (1965), SKI PARTY (1965), HOW TO STUFF A WILD BIKINI (1965), SERGEANT DEADHEAD (1965), DR. GOLDFOOT AND THE BIKINI MACHINE (1965), THE GHOST IN THE INVISIBLE BIKINI (1966), FIREBALL 500 (1966) AND THUNDER ALLEY (1967). Most of these films starred Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello and even when the narratives didn't take place on a Southern California beach, the films all followed the same routine, formulaic plots.

BEACH PARTY sets the template for this short-lived cycle of films. It focuses on the fun and frolics enjoyed by a group of teenagers (most of the actors were in their twenties or older), who populate a beach (and beach houses), for a period of days. The kids have no visible means of support, no jobs, no references to families of any kind. They exist only to have fun, fun, fun in the summer sun.

Anthropologist Robert Orville Sutwell (a bearded Robert Cummings) and his knock-out assistant Marianne (Dorothy Malone), rent a beach house to observe the mating rituals of this new tribe of American teenagers. The focus of their observations are Frankie (Frankie Avalon) and Dolores (Annette Funicello). Dolores makes a play for Sutwell to make Frankie jealous while Frankie takes up with German bar maid Ava (Eva Six) to fight back.

The supporting cast includes Chuck Woolery look-alike John Ashley as Ken, Jody McCrea as Deadhead (think Archie Comics character Jughead), veteran comic actor Morey Amsterdam as bar owner Cappy, and Harvey Lembeck as klutzy motorcycle gang leader Eric Von Zipper ("You stupid!"). Sexpot Yvette Vickers has a non-speaking part as a girl practicing yoga and the identity of "Big Daddy" (which is revealed at the end of the film), is a nice surprise and a clever bit of cross promotion for other AIP films.

Directed by William Asher, BEACH PARTY is a squeaky clean romp that delivers lots of music, dancing, teenage romance, and slapstick comedy (it ends with a pie fight!). A great film? Hardly. But it's an interesting and semi-important one because of what came next. If you're going to see one of these '60s "Beach" movies, you might as well start (and end) with this one.

DEADBEAT: MAKES YOU STRONGER

Whatever you do, don't call them zombies.

The protagonists in Guy Adams' 2013 novel DEADBEAT: MAKES YOU STRONGER are NOT zombies. They make that point explicitly clear over and over again. But they are the living dead, the walking dead (nope, can't use that one either!), or simply "reanimates", people who were alive, died and then mysteriously, inexplicably, returned  to life. Adams plays fast and loose here (hell, he down right cheats) by not providing any real explication for just exactly how it is that these fine gents, Max and Tom, managed to return to the land of the living after being stone cold dead. He leaves it up to the readers' imagination. Is that Adams being a clever writer or a lazy one? My vote is for lazy but you might lean the other way.

Our heroes, Tom and Max, own and operate a small nightclub in London that specializes in jazz and blues. The name of the club? Deadbeat, of course. They become involved in a wild adventure involving a life insurance company, a nefarious funeral home and a mad doctor. It's all part of a sinister body organ harvesting plot that Tom and Max run afoul of and, rather than go to the police, decide to play detective themselves (along with some pals, both living and reanimated) to solve the mystery and smash the crime ring.

Adams's narrative mixes heaping handfuls of humor and horror and keeps things moving at a breakneck pace. Each chapter is narrated by a different character (although Tom and Max get the majority of the storytelling), so we see events from multiple points of view. DEADBEAT: MAKES YOU STRONGER is a fast paced, funny, breezy little horror novel that doesn't take itself seriously and lets you know that you shouldn't either.

Recommended for horror fiction fans.

ARROW IN THE DUST

ARROW IN THE DUST (1954) is an utterly routine B Western movie. Shot in vivid Technicolor and produced by minor studio Allied Artists, the film stars noir icon Sterling Hayden as U.S. Cavalry deserter Bart Laish (sounds similar to the latter DC Comics character Bat Lash, doesn't it?). Laish is on the run at the beginning of the film and when he stumbles across the ruins of  an ambushed Army wagon, he discovers a way out of his predicament. He takes the uniform and name of a dead officer and rides on to join up with a wagon train headed for Oregon. There are a handful of soldiers attached to the train to provide protection from the marauding Indians and Laish, disguised as a major, quickly takes command.

He repeatedly saves the wagon train from attack, falls in love with lovely young Christella (Coleen Gray), has his identity revealed by cagey Lt. King (Keith Larsen) and butts head with a cantankerous crew boss played by hawk-faced Lee Van Cleef. Laish vows to see the settlers to safety and then turn south towards Santa Fe but after saving the day in a fiery and explosive cliff top battle, Laish discovers that he's won a measure of redemption by siding with the travelers and opts to stay with them on their voyage.

Hayden is good and Van Cleef's part is extremely limited, but director Lesley Selander keeps things moving at a good clip even though plot and narrative surprises are few and far between. Hell, they don't exist.

What's truly interesting about this film can be found in its' director. Lesley Selander, a name unknown to me, despite all of my many years of film watching, was a prodigiously productive filmmaker directing 127 films (and dozens of television episodes) between 1936 and 1968. The vast majority of Selander's output were B westerns, which, by necessity were limited by budget and shooting time restraints. But Selander managed to work with the material that was given him and turned out solid, entertaining fare picture after picture. While far from a genre auteur Selander still must be respected and admired for having such a long, durable and steady career.

Thumbs up for Western movie fans.

THE SHADOW: THE SHADOW'S JUSTICE/THE BROKEN NAPOLEONS

I finished reading THE SHADOW VOLUME 6 last night. It's another superlative pulp reprint collection from Nostalgia Ventures featuring two vintage Shadow adventures from the 1930s.

The first story, THE SHADOW'S JUSTICE, was originally published in the April 15, 1933 edition of THE SHADOW MAGAZINE. The second, THE BROKEN NAPOLEONS, hails from July 15th, 1936. Both yarns were written by Walter Gibson, under the house name of "Maxwell Grant" and both feature the Knight of Darkness operating outside of the usual confines of New York City.

THE SHADOW'S JUSTICE takes The Shadow, agent Harry Vincent and the heir to a vast fortune from the back streets of Havana, Cuba to the wilds of Michigan. Crooks are on the trail also as all of the players search for a hidden mine containing a fortune waiting to be gained, legally or by force of arms. The Shadow uses his legendary auto gyro flying machine to find the mine and there's an explosive showdown between the forces of good and evil within the mine tunnels.

Next, The Shadow and an agent-by-proxy, the gone-straight son of a deceased gangster, take a voyage into mystery and danger in THE BROKEN NAPOLEONS. The pair are on the trail of the super fiend Levautour (French for "Vulture), a mysterious criminal mastermind that leaves a sinister calling card at the scene of his crimes: one half of a broken Napoleon coin. Most of the action takes place on a private yacht bound from Bermuda to New York City. The young man, Curt Sturley, plays detective to find out which of the passengers is the crime lord while the Shadow (disguised, of course) is also on board conducting his own investigation. It's a good little mystery marked by more than one ship board shootout.

In addition to these reprints, the volume contains background material by pulp expert Will Murray, an article on illustrator Tom Lovell and a short bio of Walter Gibson.

Nostalgia Ventures has done a bang up job with this series and this volume is another winner. Thumbs up.

SCIENCE FICTION TERROR TALES

I finished reading SCIENCE FICTION TERROR TALES (1969) this morning. It's the third Groff Conklin edited science fiction anthology I've read recently and as usual, it's a mixed bag of stories. I was familiar with almost all of the authors here but I had not read any of these stories before. There are fifteen stories which divide neatly into three categories: the very good, the average and the didn't-work-for-me.

The very good stories include ARENA by Fredric Brown. It's easy to see why this one is widely regarded as a science fiction classic. It was adapted in an issue of Marvel Comics' WORLDS UNKNOWN comic book series back in the '70s and was, of course, loosely adapted by Brown himself for a first season episode of STAR TREK (by coincidence, the first episode of the original series I ever saw.) The other very good stories are THE LEECH by Robert Scheckley, MICROSCOPIC GIANTS by Paul Ernst, IMPOSTER by Philip K. Dick (a surprise because I have not liked any of the PKD novels I've read) and LET ME LIVE IN A HOUSE by Chad Oliver, who, in addition to being a very good science fiction writer represented by none other than Forrest J. Ackerman, also taught anthropology at the University of Texas right here in Austin.

The five good stories are PUNISHMENT WITHOUT CRIME by Ray Bradbury, THROUGH CHANNELS by Richard Matheson, LOST MEMORY by Peter Philips, NIGHTMARE BROTHER by Alan Nourse and PIPELINE TO PLUTO by Murray Leinster.

Finally, the didn't-work-for-me stories: MEMORIAL by Theodore Sturgeon, PROTT by Margaret St. Clair, FLIES by Isaac Asimov, THE OTHER INAUGURATION by Anthony Boucher and THEY by Robert A. Heinlein.

As you can see, lots of big name authors represented here and, as always, your mileage may vary.

Thumbs up.

BIRDMAN OF ALCATRAZ

I'm pretty sure that when I first heard of the 1962 film BIRDMAN OF ALCATRAZ, my overactive young imagination conjured up various scenarios, none of which were true.

First, "Birdman" sounds a lot like "Wolfman". Him, I knew about. So I naturally assumed that this film was about a were-bird of some kind, a hideous half-man, half-bird creature. With a title like this, it had to be a horror film, right?

If not that, then perhaps it was about a costumed superhero, you know like Batman. A masked crime fighter, maybe with the ability to fly, who lived in some place called "Alcatraz." No?

When I finally found out what "Alcatraz" was (a place I eventually visited in 1994), I figured, oh, this guy builds a pair of mechanical wings and escapes from prison by flying over the walls. Nope.

Of course, none of those six-year-old me fantasies proved correct. What BIRDMAN OF ALCATRAZ turned out to be is a remarkable true story, brought to life by a terrific cast, a literate screenplay and assured direction by a mid-century master American filmmaker.

Let's start with the supporting cast for a change. Consider this line-up: Karl Malden, as an evil warden (Malden also played a vicious bad guy in Marlon Brando's ONE EYED JACKS (1961), one of my favorite Westerns, by the way), tough guy Neville Brand, who usually played thugs and crooks, as a sympathetic prison guard, Telly Savalas (with some hair!), as a fellow prisoner and veterans Hugh Marlowe (another warden) and Whit Bissell (a doctor) in small but important roles.

Towering above them all is the magnificent Burt Lancaster as Robert Stroud, the real prisoner who gained the name "Birdman of Alcatraz" through a lifetime of studying birds while behind bars. Technically, Stroud did the bulk of his research while imprisoned (for life) at Leavenworth Prison in Kansas. When he was eventually transferred to Alcatraz, he wasn't allowed to take any of his animals with him. Nonetheless, by that time he had become a much renowned expert on various avian diseases. But despite his knowledge and fame outside of prison walls, he was never released from prison and spent the rest of his life behind bars.

Based on the book by Thomas E. Gaddis (played in the film by Edmond O'Brien, who also serves as narrator), Guy Trosper's screenplay is a measured, compelling examination of a man shut off from society who finds solace and redemption through his study of the animal world. John Frankenheimer's direction is masterful and the performances are all uniformly first rate.

But it's Lancaster who owns this film. His performance is dazzling, a brilliant transformation of a man who starts off angry at the world only to eventually become a noble, heroic figure. Lancaster manages to dial down his usual swagger and larger-than-life screen persona to depict Stroud as a bent, but never broken, man.

BIRDMAN OF ALCATRAZ earned four Academy Award nominations: Best Actor (Lancaster), Best Supporting Actor (Savalas), Best Supporting Actress (Thelma Ritter, as Stroud's mother) and Best Black and White Cinematography.

Highest Recommendation.

GANGSTER SQUAD (THE BOOK THIS TIME)

Not long ago, I watched the 2013 film, GANGSTER SQUAD and posted a positive review of it here on the ol' blog. After seeing the film, I was interested in reading the book that it was based on. As luck (fate?) would have it, a few days later I found a copy of the paperback book at a library sale for the grand sum of fifty cents. How could I go wrong?

GANGSTER SQUAD by Paul Lieberman is a thick book. But the 550 pages of text fly by at a fast clip thanks to Lieberman's breezy, casual writing style which at times carries faint echoes of the prose stylings of James Ellroy. Using LAPD documents and oral histories of the men and women involved, Lieberman delivers a colorful portrait of the Gangster Squad, a secret unit of LAPD cops formed with, at first, the sole aim of harassing gangster Mickey Cohen. Lieberman eschews a strict, formal chronology and his narrative (which contains a multitude of characters), skips around in space and time.

Lieberman also leaves out an index, notes on sources, a formal bibliography or any of the other standard accoutrements of a work of historical non-fiction. He keeps things loose and informal and does acknowledge the many interviews he conducted over the years with survivors of the Gangster Squad, their spouses and their children (in some cases, grandchildren).But the story is so engaging, the anecdotes so rich and vivid, that I really can't complain.

The inevitable comparison between the source material and what ended up on the screen in the movie version shows the film (of course) playing extremely fast and loose with the historical facts, but hey, it's Hollywood.

What's interesting here is how the Gangster Squad eventually evolved into the Intelligence Division of the LAPD, moving from a "non-existent" secret unit to having their offices adjoining Chief Parker's digs in police headquarters. The unit is made up of various straight-arrow cops but the big three characters here are Jack O'Mara (played in the movie by Josh Brolin), Jerry Wooters (Ryan Gosling) and surveillance expert Conwell Keeler (Giovanni Ribisi).

Cohen, played in the film by Sean Penn in an over-the-top performance, comes across as a two-bit punk with delusions of grandeur. Oh, he was definitely a big time mobster in Los Angeles, but his reach, fame and reputation didn't extend too far beyond the City of Angels. Cohen was convicted and sent to prison twice for income tax evasion and never engaged in the kind of spectacular shoot-outs depicted in the movie.

GANGSTER SQUAD is vividly drawn portrait of a city in transition, moving from the organized crime hey-days of the pre-war era to the end of the line in the late 1950s and early 1960s. There's plenty of brave, intrepid cops, clever con men, B-girls, gangsters and TV stars (Jack Webb and DRAGNET rate an entire chapter).

Both the book and the movie are enormously entertaining but if you must choose a version of GANGSTER SQUAD to experience, stick with the facts and go with Lieberman's book. It's richer, fuller and wilder than anything a Hollywood screenwriter could conjure up. 

Thumbs up.

THE BROKEN GUN

THE BROKEN GUN (1966) is the third Louis L'Amour book I've read recently and so far, I've yet  to read anything by L'Amour that I would consider a "standard" Western.

The first book of his that I read, BORDEN CHANTRY, was a murder mystery set in the old West, while BOWDRIE was a collection of pulp short stories about Chick Bowdrie, a lone Texas Ranger THE BROKEN GUN, despite the terrific and evocative cover art by the great James Bama isn't a period piece at all. It's an adventure story set in contemporary Arizona.

Dan Sheridan, a writer of western books (fiction and non-fiction) is the hero here. When Sheridan purchased an antique, broken Colt pistol in New Orleans, he discovered a document rolled up and stuffed into the barrel of the revolver. That document sends Sheridan to an immense ranch in Arizona where he sets out to discover what happened to a couple of Texas cowboys and their crew of punchers when they drove cattle from Texas to Arizona back in the 1872. All 27 men vanished without a trace and Sheridan is determined to find out what happened to the men and to whom the land really belongs.

He's aided in his quest by Pio Alvarez, a friend (and fellow special forces fighter) from Sheridan's tour-of-duty in Korea. The two men and beautiful land owner Belle Dawson are up against the murderous Wells family who own the land and will kill anyone who tries to take it away from them.

Sheridan displays some remarkable survival skills when he's marooned in the desert mountains. He's incredibly capable and resourceful and manages to get out of any trap and predicament that the bad guys put him in. I can't help but think that L'Amour is doing some wishful projection here by having his hero be a two-fisted, rugged and highly capable man of action as well as a bestselling author.

THE BROKEN GUN climaxes with a brutal, knock-down-drag-out fight between Sheridan and Colin Wells before everything is neatly wrapped up. The true owner of the land is revealed (it's no surprise) and all is well that ends well.

BROKEN GUN is a fast paced little actioner that has plenty of colorful villains, harsh terrain, a damsel in distress and a couple of crackerjack heroes. It's not terribly well written but L'Amour knows how to keep you turning pages. Worth reading if you're a western fan.

FIGHTING ELEGY

The most important thing you need to know about Seijun Suzuki's FIGHTING ELEGY (1966), is that it's only half of a film. Taken on it's own superlative merits, it's a satisfying, compelling half of a film. But it ends abruptly and there is clearly much more of the story to be told. The film was based on a novel by Takashi Suzuki and director Suzuki clearly intended to make the follow-up, second part of this story using the rest of the book as source material but when his next film, BRANDED TO KILL, performed poorly at the box-office, plans for FIGHTING ELEGY 2 were abandoned.

It's a shame as I would really have liked to see where the story and characters went following this thoroughly engaging first film. Set in pre-war 1935 Japan, FIGHTING ELEGY is the story of Kiroku Nanbu (Hideki Takahashi), a teenager fraught with sexual anxiety and Catholic guilt. He's in love with the beautiful, chaste and virginal Catholic school girl, Michiko (Junko Asano). But he's so shy and clumsy around girls that he's forced to excessive masturbation to relieve his tensions. When self pleasure proves inadequate, Kiroku finds an outlet in violence.

He joins a teenage gang of young toughs and struggles to master their fighting techniques. With the help of an older man, Turtle (Yusuke Kawazu), Kiroku learns the necessary fighting skills and rises in the gang hierarchy. His rebellious ways soon earn him an expulsion from his school at the same time he learns that Michiko, his one true unrequited love, is leaving to join a convent.

Kiroku is transferred to another town where he quickly falls in with the local gang. But widespread rebellion is in the air and Kiroku sees an opportunity to fight for something larger than gang turf by joining the revolution spearheaded by Ikki Kita (Hiroshi Midorigawa), whom Kiroku had met previously.

FIGHTING ELEGY begins in a light hearted manner and gradually becomes darker as Kiroku's journey takes him into real danger. Director Suzuki, as he did in TOKYO DRIFTER, uses lots of French New Wave jump-cut editing to move things along at a brisk clip. The screenplay, by Kaneto Shindo, mixes humor with violence and aching, yearning young love. The cast is uniformly solid, Kenji Hagiwara's cinematography is sharp and crisp and the whole package is a first rate portrait of a troubled young man struggling to find his place in the world.

Not as gonzo brilliant as TOKYO DRIFTER, FIGHTING ELEGY is nonetheless a superb film. Check it out if you get the chance but remember, the ending will leave you hanging for something that doesn't exist.

Recommended.

ARMORED CAR ROBBERY

With a running time of 67 minutes, ARMORED CAR ROBBERY (1950) is propelled by a lean-as-a-greyhound screenplay by Earl Felton and getting-better-with-each-picture direction by Richard Fleischer. Working for the B unit at RKO, Fleischer produced a run of six classic films noir over a three year period. The films include: TRAPPED (1949), FOLLOW ME QUIETLY (1949), THE CLAY PIGEON (1949), ARMORED CAR ROBBERY (1950), HIS KIND OF WOMAN (1951) and his masterpiece, THE NARROW MARGIN (1952).

  Stripped of any hint of moral ambiguity, ARMORED CAR ROBBERY is a straight-ahead cops and robbers thriller that moves like it was shot from a cannon. William Talman plays criminal mastermind Dave Purvis who recruits a gang to pull off the title caper. His gang consists of Benny McBride (Douglas Fowley), Al Mapes (Steve Brodie) and Ace Foster (Gene Evans). They've got a solid plan until, of course, something goes wrong during the heist (which takes place early in the film).

The gang is interrupted by tough-as-nails LAPD detective Jim Cordell (Charles McGraw, the living embodiment of Dick Tracy) and his partner. The partner is killed in a shoot out, McBride is wounded by Cordell and the gang goes on the run with Cordell and his new partner, rookie cop Danny Ryan (Don McGuire) on their trail. McBride's estranged wife (and Purvis's lover) burlesque performer Yvonne LeDoux (the smoldering Adele Jergens), holds the key to catching the fugitives. The cops bug (without a warrant), her dressing room and automobile in the hopes of gaining information.

Things move at a brisk clip as Cordell and Ryan pursue the bad guys across a landscape of now vanished mid-century Los Angeles. The cinematography by Guy Roe lends the appropriate shadows to scenes of night action and the chase climaxes in a grisly accident on an airport runway.

Lean, tough and stripped down to the essentials, ARMORED CAR ROBBERY is a swiftly paced crime thriller that features one helluva cast of noir icons and plenty of machine-gun fast dialogue. It's as hard-boiled as they come.

Highly recommended.