FRIGHT

FRIGHT (1950) is the first book I've read by the legendary Cornell Woolrich. It won't be the last. In fact, as soon as I finished FRIGHT last night, I started reading BLACK ALIBI (1942 and the basis for the classic 1943 horror film THE LEOPARD MAN). So far, so good. I'll post a review when I finish it. 

But for now, FRIGHT.

 Wow. 

This book is permeated with a palpable sense of paranoia in every paragraph. Every page is soaked with doom. Bleak House may have been a novel by Charles Dickens but it's where Woolrich's characters live their lives of impending annihilation. 

FRIGHT is set in the New York City of 1915, an odd choice for a noir novel, but Woolrich makes the time period work to his advantage. Young Prescott Marshall, a successful Wall Street broker is scheduled to marry the love of his life, the incandescently beautiful Marjorie Worth. But a drunken night on the town finds Prescott saddled with a blackmailing vixen who will stop at nothing to bleed the young man dry. In a furious fit of anger, Prescott murders the woman, just hours before his wedding ceremony. 

Prescott and his bride immediately move from New York to a never-named city somewhere in the heartland. Prescott gets a job at less pay than he made in New York and things are going okay until a strange man shows up in Prescott's office. Prescott is convinced that the man is a detective from New York who is following Prescott's trail. Prescott's paranoia leads him to commit two murders before he and Marjorie return to New York where more lives are ended. 

Just when you think this is the bleakest, most depressing ending to a story you've ever read, Woolrich pulls his trump card from up his sleeve by delivering a sucker punch, never-saw-it-coming epilogue that pulls the rug out from everything. 

To say any thing more about the twists and turns that this brilliant novel takes would spoil the delight of discovering them for yourself. No spoilers here.

Read FRIGHT and prepare to be plunged into a nightmare world in which one bad deed leads to another, and another, and another. 

Highest recommendation. 

THE TAKE

Years before he played Lando Calrissian and Gotham City District Attorney Harvey Dent, Billy Dee Williams headlined the mediocre and morally ambiguous crime film, THE TAKE (1974) .

Looking for all of the world like a made-for-television movie with a TV-centric cast to boot, THE TAKE is the story of San Francisco police detective Lt. Sneed, who is sent to Paloma, New Mexico to help take on the burgeoning organized crime ring (hereafter referred to as "The Syndicate") muscling in on the city. Sneed arrives in town just in time to take part in a courthouse shoot-out that leaves several dead, including three cops. Sneed is under the command of harried police chief Berrigan (Eddie Albert). Another cop, Captain Dolek (Albert Salmi) sticks close to Sneed and with good reason. 

Come to find out that Sneed and Dolek are bent cops, with both of them on the payroll of mob boss Victor Manso (Vic Morrow). Sneed plays both ends against the middle as he continues to take money from Manso (money which he launders through real estate developer Oscar (Sorrell Booke)) while heading up a strike force to bring down Manso's drug and counterfeiting operations. 

The best cover for a crooked cop is to be a good cop is Sneed's philosophy and he not only succeeds at this but he gets away with it. That's right, a crooked cop is the hero of this run-of-the-mill crime film. Sneed not only pockets the cash at the end of the film, he's promoted to captain for his troubles. 

I don't know if director Robert Hartford-Davis and screenwriters Franklin Coen and Del Reisman wanted to make some kind of a "statement" film about how corrupt many American police departments were in the mid '70s or if they wanted to try to cash in on the DIRTY HARRY phenomenon by having a cop who breaks all of the rules but is, in the end, the only man who can do the job. 

Either way, THE TAKE is a lackluster effort from all involved. A couple of decent action scenes and beautiful New Mexico locations can't save this one. 

Thumbs down.

THIS GUN FOR HIRE

Alan Ladd, who had already appeared in bit parts in several films (including CITIZEN KANE (1941)), became a bonafide movie star with his role as hired killer Raven in THIS GUN FOR HIRE (1942). Although short and skinny, Ladd brought a simmering intensity to this and many other roles that followed. Although best known for the immortal SHANE (1953), Ladd starred in several classic film noirs including THE GLASS KEY (1942), THE BLUE DAHLIA (1946), APPOINTMENT WITH DANGER (1951) and HELL ON FRISCO BAY (1955).

In GUN, Ladd was teamed for the first time with Paramount studios' "It" girl of the 1940s, blond bombshell Veronica Lake. Ladd and Lake strike genuine sparks in GUN and they worked together in several subsequent films including THE GLASS KEY, THE BLUE DAHLIA and SAIGON (1948). 

Based on a novel by Graham Greene, THIS GUN FOR HIRE opens with contract killer Raven (who has a soft spot for cats), gunning down not one, but two people. Can't leave any witnesses, you know. He's paid off by slimy Willard Gates ( Laird Cregar), in marked money, which means that as soon as Raven tries to spend any of the bills, he'll be spotted. 

Raven goes on the run to track down Gates who works two jobs. By day, he's an executive with Nitro Chemical Corporation in Los Angeles while by night, he's the impresario of The Neptune Club. He's hired Ellen Graham (Lake), a sexy, singing, sleight of hand magician for his nightclub. Ellen, it turns out, is the girlfriend of police detective Michael Crane (Robert Preston) who is on Raven's trail. And she's also been asked by a U.S. Senator to find out the inner workings of Gates and his boss, Alvin Brewster (Tullly Marshall), both of whom are planning to sell a formula for poison gas to the Japanese. 

All of these various plot threads eventually weave together with Ellen, first taken hostage by Raven, then rescued by him and ultimately aiding him in his quest for revenge. There's a well staged action set piece in a Los Angeles rail yard before the climax in the headquarters of Nitro Chemical. 

Part film noir, part wartime spy thriller, THIS GUN FOR HIRE is a first rate film all the way. Ladd and Lake are both top notch but it's Laird Cregar who steals the show. Creger, who died incredibly young at the age of 31 in 1944, comes across as the illegitimate love child of Sidney Greenstreet and Raymond Burr with Charles Laughton serving as the midwife. The rotund, oleaginous actor oozes plummy menace in every scene he's in. Cregar was a standout in other film noirs: I WAKE UP SCREAMING (1941), THE LODGER (1944) and HANGOVER SQUARE (1945).

With a screenplay by  Albert Maltz and the legendary W.R. Burnett and ace direction by Frank Tuttle, THIS GUN FOR HIRE is a winner. 

Recommended. 

THE ANDERSON TAPES

Based on the bestselling novel by thriller writer Lawrence Sanders, Sidney Lumet's THE ANDERSON TAPES (1971), is a slick-as-a-whistle, first rate, New York City set crime film, a viable sub-genre of films that dominated the cinematic landscape of the 1970s. 

Sean Connery, anxious to avoid typecasting and shed his image as British super spy James Bond, stars as veteran criminal Duke Anderson. Freshly released from prison, Duke is already busy plotting his next caper and it's a doozy. He plans to rob all of the units of a swank New York City apartment building, a structure in which his girlfriend Ingrid (the smoking hot Dyan Cannon), resides as a kept woman. 

Of course, Anderson will need a team to execute the heist. He recruits Tommy Haskins, a gay antiques dealer (Martin Balsam in a terrific against-type performance), young ex-con The Kid (Christopher Walken in his first film role, and getaway driver Edward Spencer (Dick Anthony Williams). For old times sake, Anderson includes Pop (Stan Gottlieb), another ex-con, as lookout. 

But Anderson's caper is financed by mob boss Pat Angelo (Alan King, in another bit of offbeat casting) who insists that Anderson include loose cannon muscle man Socks Parelli (Val Avery), a goon that Anderson has orders to kill during the robbery. 

The second half of the film follows the crime itself but at various points in the narrative, Lumet flashes forward to the aftermath of the robbery, feeding us bits and pieces of information from the point of view of various robbery victims and making us wonder, who the guy on the stretcher (seen in numerous scenes) is. 

The police get wind of the robbery while it's in progress and launch a SWAT team assault on the building. The commander of the SWAT team is Captain Delaney (Ralph Meeker, playing his part broadly and for laughs) and a very young Garret Morris as patrolman Everson. 

Throughout the film, Lumet shows us various police and federal agencies that have all of the various players in the drama under constant surveillance through cameras, microphones and wire taps. Despite this constant monitoring by Big Brother, all of the data the various agencies have collected through the course of the film is ultimately worthless because it was all gained illegally. 

Filmed entirely on location in New York City and with a jazzy/electronic score by the great Quincy James, THE ANDERSON TAPES is a masterfully executed work by one of the greatest American filmmakers of the latter half of the twentieth century. 

Highly recommended. 

A TOUCH OF DEATH

First published in 1953, A TOUCH OF DEATH by Charles Williams was one of the early entries in the line of Hard Case Crime reprints of vintage crime fiction . It's a white knuckle descent into hell that asks the question, just what you be willing to do for $120,000 (a sizable amount in 1953). 

For one Lee Scarborough, the answer is anything. Scarborough is the classic noir trope, the average, decent guy who plays the fly trapped in a web spun by a deadly black widow in the form of Madelon Butler, as fatale a femme as I've ever encountered in all my years of reading crime fiction. 

Scarborough is tasked with breaking into a supposedly empty house in search of the aforementioned money. Seems Madelon's husband embezzled the money from the bank where he worked. But now Mr. Butler is dead and the money is missing. But Scarborough finds the house isn't empty when he discovers an extremely drunk Madelon in a bedroom. Knowing that she holds the key (literally) to the location of the money, Scarborough takes the unconscious woman from the home and goes on the run. 

The pair hole up at a deserted cabin where they are soon found out by a murderous brother and sister duo who are also after the money. Scarborough and Madelon return to the house where Madelon commits a murder before setting a torch to the ancient structure. 

Lee and Madelon flee once again and take refuge in his apartment where a deadly mental game of cat and mouse plays out. Every time Lee thinks he has an answer to their predicament (cops everywhere are hunting for them), he finds out that the ice cold Madelon is already at least one, sometimes two steps ahead of him. 

And when Lee launches his final plan to recover the money from three different safety deposit boxes, he discovers that Madelon has one last twist of the knife to deliver.

A TOUCH OF DEATH moves at a shot-from-a-cannon pace as the likeable patsy Lee finds himself falling deeper and deeper into a swirling nightmare of a situation from which only one of them can escape. 

This is the first book by Charles Williams that I've read but rest assured it won't be the last. 

Highest recommendation.

BLACK GUNN

Regular readers of this blog (and I sincerely hope you're one of them), know of my fondness for the "blaxploitation" films of the 1970s. These vintage genre films (almost all of them crime/action thrillers) take me back to my high school years and I genuinely dig the action, clothes, cars and music that's found in these films. Tough guy heroes, beautiful women, vicious bad guys and lapels out to here. Gotta love 'em!  Guilty pleasure? You betcha but I'm not going to apologize to anyone for liking these films. 

Kudos to TCM which often runs "blaxploitation" films in their late Saturday night/early Sunday morning time slots dubbed "TCM Underground". That's where I recently caught BLACK GUNN (1972), a Jim Brown vehicle that I had never seen before. 

The film kicks off with an explosive blast, a heist at gunpoint by a group of masked robbers against the money room of a mob controlled gambling den. The crooks get and get away with cash and a set of ledgers that threaten to blow the lid off of organized crime in Los Angeles.

Turns out the robbers are the leaders of the Black Action Group (B.A.G.), a para-military group similar to the Black Panthers. B.A.G. is made up of Vietnam vets and ex-cons and the money is going to buy weapons for an armed uprising against The MAN. 

One of the members of the gang, Scott (Herbert Jefferson Jr.), deposits the ledgers in a safe inside of his brother's night club. His brother? Gunn (Jim Brown). When Scott is killed by the mob, Gunn seeks revenge by launching a one-man war against the gangsters. 

The gangsters are led by used car salesman Capelli (Martin Landau) who is aided by a couple of vicious thugs, Rico (William Campbell) and Ray Kriley (Bruce Glover, who always played great psychos). There's also the luscious, mob connected Toni (Luciana Paluzzi, one of the Bond girls in THUNDERBALL) and Gary (I WAS A TEENAGE FRANKENSTEIN) Conway as a crooked politician. 

BLACK GUNN is a fairly routine crime/action film but director Robert Hartford-Davis keeps things moving at a good clip and stages several effective action set pieces, including the climatic dockside gun battle/car chase which ends with lots of things blowing up real good. 

BLACK GUNN made for a pleasant diversion on a cold, rainy November afternoon. Definitely recommended to fans of "blaxploitation" films or for those curious about the genre.