WHAT IF?

I was watching an old TWILIGHT ZONE episode the other night when I had a bizarre thought. The episode was from the second season. A PENNY FOR YOUR THOUGHTS originally aired on February 3rd, 1961. Written by the recently deceased George Clayton Johnson, the episode starred a pre-BEWITCHED Dick York as a bank employee who gains the ability to read people's minds when a coin he tosses lands on its' side.

Here's where my mind took off. THE ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN, the first live-action comic book superhero television series ran from 1952 to 1958. There were no other such shows until January, 1966 (fifty years ago this month!) when BATMAN debuted on ABC. What if some enterprising television producer was seeking to fill the eight year gap between ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN and BATMAN by acquiring the rights to a then dormant comic book character say, oh, Plastic Man? And what if said producer decided to cast York in the lead role?



That's right folks. I think Dick York would have made a perfect lead for a 1960s PLASTIC MAN television show. And what about this guy, his lovable sidekick Woozy Winks?



You know who would have made a good Woozy? 




Former third Stooge Joe Besser.

There you have it. My dream cast for a never realized 1960s PLASTIC MAN television show. Of course, I have no idea how the special effects would have been handled. I'm sure they would have thought of something cheap and crappy but I still think it would have been fun to watch York and Besser every week.

Whaddaya think?

THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK

It's curious that a movie set in France during the reign of King Louis XIV should star only one French actor. Of the five main characters in THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK (1998), only Gerard Depardieu as Porthos, is French. The rest of the cast? Leonardo DiCaprio in a dual role is an American, Gabriel Byrne as D'Artagnan is Irish, Jeremy Irons as Aramis is British and John Malkovich as Athos, is also American.

Still, it's a stellar cast in a handsome production of the Alexandre Dumas novel. Written and directed by Randall Wallace, the film finds the legendary Three Musketeers (actually, four) in retirement, their glory days behind them. Only D'Artagnan remains in service to the boy king (DiCaprio). But a mysterious man in an iron mask threatens to topple the crown and reveal long hidden secrets.

My main quibble with the film is that it takes more than half of the running time of 132 minutes to finally buckle some swash (or swash some buckle). No real sword fight occurs on screen for one helluva long time. Oh sure, there's political intrigue, broad comedy, romance and some dashes of derring do here and there but for a film starring one of the most famous sword fighting quartets in literature, I was expecting some swords to be drawn and crossed a lot earlier in the film.

While not as good as Richard Lester's THE THREE MUSKETEERS (1973) and THE FOUR MUSKETEERS (1974) for sheer exuberance and bravado, THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK is a solid costume drama with first rate production values, beautiful cinematography by Peter Suschitzky and a rousing score by Nick Glennie-Smith. Worth seeing.

"AIN'T NUTHIN' BUT A BUNCHA GODDAM CUSSIN'"

Man: "He really is one of our most indulgent filmmakers."
Alvy Singer: "The key word here is indulgent."- Woody Allen's ANNIE HALL (1977)

If you're a Quentin Tarantino fan you might want to stop reading this right now because chances are, you're not going to like what I have to say here. Go on. We'll wait for you to leave.

Are they gone? Good. Let's get down to it.

I must confess that I've only seen three Quentin Tarrantino films: PULP FICTION (1994), DEATH PROOF (2007) and, most recently, RESERVOIR DOGS (1992). Like millions of moviegoers, I fell for the hype when PULP FICTION was released. Everything I read about the film convinced me that this film and director were the second coming of CITIZEN KANE and Orson Welles, respectively.

Not quite.

PULP FICTION, for all of it's non-linear storytelling, good cast and outasite vintage rock and pop tunes, was, in my opinion, a vastly overrated piece of work. There's no real story of any kind here. There's no main protagonist. There are a couple of down-the-rabbit-hole sequences (the pocket watch story and the fresh-from-the-roadshow-cast of DELIVERANCE basement dwelling Gimp) that have absolutely nothing to do with what passes for a plot. The watch story is mildly amusing while the whole Gimp sequence made me squirm and wonder what the hell I had gotten myself into.

The whole thing with the briefcase is a direct steal, oh, I'm sorry, homage  to Robert Aldrich's infinitely better film noir masterpiece KISS ME DEADLY (1955). I'll grant that there are some wicked dance moves in the Jack Rabbit Slim sequence and Tarantino does have a flair for staging brutal, realistic action scenes. But what PULP FICTION has more of than anything else is dialogue. Tons of dialogue. Page after page of dialogue. These characters don't need guns to kill people. They can talk them to death. The incessant chatter goes on and on and on and you know what? It's just not that good. It's nowhere near as clever as QT wants us to think it is because the dialogue isn't about establishing and creating believable characters and advancing the story. No, it's all about Tarantino shouting from the roof-tops: "Look at Me! Look at Me! I'm a Writer! I'm a Director! I know a lot of useless pop culture and movie trivia and I'm going to cram as much of it as I can into this screenplay because there's no one to tell me no!"

Or words to that effect.

I didn't much care for PULP FICTION, despite the cult status it has gone on to achieve. I decided Tarantino just wasn't my cup of tea. I avoided his work until 2007 when QT and Robert Rodriquez teamed up for GRINDHOUSE. Again, everything I read about this old-fashioned B-movie double feature sounded intriguing so I decided to give it a shot. I thoroughly enjoyed Rodriguez's PLANET TERROR, the first half of the double bill. I loved the fake trailers. I was actually looking forward to the filmed (partly) in Austin Tarantino movie, DEATH PROOF.

Here's what happens in DEATH PROOF. A bunch of women meet in a cafe (the now demolished Omelettry on Burnet Road) for breakfast. They sit around and talk. For a long time. Then they get in a car and drive around Austin. They talk some more. A lot. They end the day at the Chili Parlor on Lavaca where they meet psycho killer Kurt Russell. He indulges in dialogue that once again exists only to showcase QT's immense wealth of pop culture trivia. The women are killed in a homicidal auto accident. Cut to Southern California and a new group of women. They talk. A lot. Russell shows up again and after about 45 minutes of talk, an extremely well staged car chase sequence takes place. The stunts and action are all first rate but my clothes had gone out of style in the time it took Tarantino to finally get around to something of interest. I swear, I came this close (holds up thumb and finger with very little space between them) to walking out of this turkey.

So, I decided that's it. I'm done. No more Tarantino for me. But wait, I'm a glutton for punishment because I recently decided to give him one more chance. I had never seen his debut film, RESERVOIR DOGS and the used copy at the thrift store was only a buck and I decided what the hell, why not give this one a shot? After all, the premise, a heist gone wrong, sounded promising.

Good Lord what an abomination DOGS is. Extreme violence. Extreme profanity (why do white guys get to casually drop the "N" bomb in Tarantino's films?) Extreme fracturing of space and time. And last but not least, extreme talking. Talking. Talking. Talking. Cool soundtrack though.

 Tarnatino thinks he's being cool by using a broken narrative (flash forwards and flash backs) to tell the story of a heist gone wrong. Trouble is, by breaking up the standard tropes of this sub genre he effectively eliminates any element of suspense. We know from the get-go that things go wrong but why should we care about these characters when we've just met them in a long and talky cafe sequence at the beginning of the film. Oh, and the fact that one of the men is an undercover cop comes as just as big a surprise to the audience as it does to the bad guys. But by the time that little plot point was revealed, I was far past giving a damn about the whole thing. I just wanted the sadistic violence and endless talking to stop. Please stop.

As you can no doubt guess, I won't be seeing THE HATEFUL EIGHT. Everything I've read about this film makes me think that every frame of this film is permeated with the stench of pretension. Shot in 70mm. A three-hour running time. An overture. An intermission. A title card announcing it as the "eighth Quentin Tarantino film." All of that's fine if you're David Lean and you're delivering LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (1962). But when you're QT and you're asking people to sit for three hours and watch eight people sit in a snow bound cabin and talk and talk and talk and talk and talk and talk and talk and talk and talk and talk.....well, you get the point.

QUARRY

I gave myself a copy of QUARRY by Max Allan Collins for Christmas last week. Originally published back in 1976, Hard Case Crime (have I mentioned that this company is my favorite publisher?), is in the process of reprinting all of the original Quarry novels with stunning new cover art by the legendary Robert McGinnis. This is the first in the series and it's a good one.

Quarry is, like Lawrence Block's character Keller, a professional killer. Plain and simple. He does it for the money but unlike Keller, he doesn't collect stamps. Collins does a great job of making us root for a protagonist with a tremendous amount of blood on his hands, past, present and future.

QUARRY starts with a bang with a hit in the men's room of an airport. The target's a drug runner, something which Quarry doesn't agree with and he threatens his agent, The Broker, to quit the business if he ever gets involved in another drug related assignment. The Broker sends Quarry to a small Midwestern town where the target is an unassuming milquetoast of a solitary man. Quarry and his stakeout partner, Boyd, watch the intended victim and Quarry does the job in his usual efficient manner.

But this being a hard boiled crime novel, something goes wrong. Boyd is killed, Quarry is attacked and the money for the job is stolen. Quarry breaks the rules and stays in the town and plays amateur detective in an attempt to find out who actually hired him for the job and who has his money. He uncovers (ahem) a comely former Playboy bunny and a well-to-do family with plenty of skeletons in the closet. The showdown takes place, appropriately enough, in a quarry and in the rain, which prefigures the climax of Collins's graphic novel, THE ROAD TO PERDITION (the rain part, not the quarry setting).

With a dare-you-to-stop-reading narrative pace, Collins had me turning the pages as fast as I could. I've read his other Quarry books and they're all good and well worth reading. It's nice to finally be able to see how this whole thing got started. Down and dirty, gritty and tough, QUARRY is a big thumbs up winner. Recommended.

CAT PEOPLE

I watched CAT PEOPLE (1942) awhile back but I've just been too busy lately to sit down and write about it. The new year offers an opportunity to play catch up with this and other films I saw in 2015 but haven't written about so let's see if I can clear off some of these notes and papers on my desk starting today.

CAT PEOPLE, produced by Val Lewton at RKO is quite simply one of the best horror films ever made. Lewton and director Jacques Tourneur got a terrific amount of bang for their buck with this low budget ($134,000), atmospheric masterpiece. Saddled with a shoestring budget and a corny title, Lewton and Tourneur along with cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca, delivered a slick, beautifully crafted meditation on sexual anxieties and the power of myth.

Irena Dubrovna (the lovely Simone Simon), believes she's a member of an ancient race of cat people. These people become cats when they are sexually aroused, or so the legend goes. Irena falls in love with architect Oliver Reed (Kent Smith) and as her love and sexual desires become more intense, so too do her fears of turning into a killer beast. She seeks help from psychiatrist Dr. Judd (the urbane Tom Conway, who would have made a terrific Ham in a 1942 DOC SAVAGE film), who uses hypnosis to probe her fears. Is Irena really capable of transforming into a cat or is it all just in her head, a very dark and disturbing neurosis that threatens her marriage?

Two sequences in the film are standouts and masterfully demonstrate what can be done to create terror with just shadows and sounds. The first is when Alice (the also lovely Jane Randolph), a co-worker of Oliver's, walks along a sidewalk at night, convinced she's being followed by something. The abrupt hiss of air brakes on a bus (which sounds remarkably like the screech of a cat) at the end of the sequence makes me jump every time I see the film even though I know it's coming.

But the most memorable scene by far is the swimming pool sequence in which Alice swims alone at night in an indoor pool. There's something else in the room with her, something not human. Again, we never see anything, just shadows on the wall and strange sounds but Lewton, Tourneur and Musuraca orchestrate everything so brilliantly, the viewer fills in the spaces in his or her own mind, creating something far more terrifying than anything that could be put on the screen at the time.

With a running time of 73 minutes, CAT PEOPLE is a tight, well constructed film that is rich in both psychological and sexual themes and  horror. The cast is good with Simon a stand out as the haunted and doomed Irena. A sequel, CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE was produced in 1944. Producer Val Lewton reunited stars Simone Simon, Kent Smith and Jane Randolph and turned the directing duties over to the team of Robert Wise and Gunther von Fritsch for the film which deals more with childhood fantasies than outright horror. And let's not forget the 1982 remake, directed by Paul Schrader with Nastassja Kinski and Malcolm McDowell. Kinski is one helluva sexy cat woman in the film which is loaded with explicit sex and violence. It's a visually stunning film but it's nowhere near as good as the original.

CAT PEOPLE is a bonafide classic horror film. Highest recommendation.

THE SHADOW'S SHADOW

THE SHADOW'S SHADOW, first published in February, 1933, was the 23rd adventure of the Master of Darkness. I finished reading the Pyramid Books reprint (from July, 1977) the other evening and it's another corker.

Master villain and international criminal Felix Zubian and wealthy man-about-town Douglas Carleton, plot to steal millions in diamonds. They know the only thing standing against them is The Shadow so they decide to take the fight to mysterious crime-fighter. Zubian and Carleton are aided in their fight against The Shadow by tough talking gangster Gats Hackett who refers to his two huge revolvers as "smoke wagons". Only in the pulps! The villains discover and capture two of The Shadow's agents, Harry Vincent and Rutledge Mann and through careful observation, deduce that The Shadow is really Lamont Cranston.

But The Shadow is, as always, a step ahead of the crooks He ditches the Cranston persona and becomes Henry Arnaud. There are several gun battles (with high body counts) before the final showdown in which all of the villains are slain and Zubian, before he dies, catches a glimpse of The Shadow's real face, which is neither Cranston nor Arnaud. What is the true face of The Shadow? Author Walter Gibson's not telling.

With a terrific cover by the legendary Jim Steranko, THE SHADOW'S SHADOW is pure pulp pleasure. Recommended.

BROTHERS KEEPERS

Even though it was published by Mysterious Press (a Warner Books imprint), BROTHERS KEEPERS by Donald E. Westlake doesn't qualify as a mystery in my book. Oh sure, a little bit of  deductive reasoning takes place and crimes (electronic eavesdropping, theft and arson) are committed, but basically this is a comic romp of a novel involving a New York City monastery and the monks who live there as they attempt to save their home from being sold and demolished to make room for a major new development.

Brother Benedict of the Crispinite Order is the narrator of this breezy tale. The order is devoted to thoughts of God and travel. The monks aren't necessarily opposed to travel but they don't engage in it to any degree as they are a fairly self-sufficient little group. But when a big developer threatens to buy the property and demolish it, Brother Benedict is forced to venture outside of the monastery in an attempt to save his home.

His travels take him first to the Long Island home of the developer where he comes under the spell of the developer's lovely daughter, Elaine. Elaine indicates a willingness to help Brother Benedict save the monastery but before he can pursue that avenue, the monks discover that their original copy of the lease has been stolen. When they attempt to reproduce the lease (using an illuminated manuscript), that document is put to the torch by the developer's son posing as a monk. Brother Benedict is forced to fly to Puerto Rico to confront Elaine and ask for her help. Of course, he falls for her and must make a very difficult decision: should he abandon his brothers and the monastery for the woman he loves or renounce Elaine and return to where he is safe and secure and stay with his brothers no matter what?

The third act introduction of a travel agent who wants to join the order puts a new twist on things and the climax finds all of the brothers boarding a bus to the developer's home on New Year's Eve for a final showdown.

BROTHERS KEEPERS was first published in 1975. It was reprinted under the Mysterious Press imprint in 1993. These brothers are more Marx than Crispinite and Westlake keeps things moving at a good clip. Mystery? No. Crime novel? Nope. Fun? You bet. Recommended.