IMDb meta-data is one hour and twelve minutes, rated 6.5 by 73 cinematizens
Genre: Mystery.
Verdict: A misfire.
Affable but cynical Dennis persuades the sponsors of his failing radio mystery program to offer a reward for a notorious cracksman name of Jimmy Valentine. The search narrows his location down by means of the script to Smallville, where everyone suspects everyone else of being Jimmy. Or do they?
Meanwhile, Dennis finds a squeeze, gets to like the town, and, oh incidentally, finds Jimmy but does not. Huh? Yeah, that is what the fraternity brothers said.
It turns out Jimmy has company. The first half is farce and the second half is more serious and there is a nice denouement if the viewer can last that long.
Though radio precipitates the action no further use is made of it. Too bad.
The original story came from that master of irony, O’Henry in ‘Retrieved Reformation.’ Director Bernard Vorhaus handled it well. His HUAC blighted career is described elsewhere on this blog. This film was cut to fit a fifty minute television spot as ‘Unforgotten Crime’ which made it memorably incomprehensible.
Contextual note: In April 1942 the Bataan Death March began when 80,000 exhausted and starving Filipino and American prisoners of war were marched 100 kilometres with neither food nor water. As many as a third died en route. The subsequent surrender of the bastion on Corregidor yielded another 15,000 prisoners. Filipino officers were singled out for torture, abuse, and murder. The defence at Bataan and on Corregidor threw off the Japanese timetable by three months which significantly slowed and impaired the descent on New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. While news of the defeat figured in the newsreels in theatres before movies like this were shown, the story of the death march was suppressed until late in 1944.
‘Roar of the Press’ (18 April 1941)
IMDb meta-data is runtime of one hour an eleven minutes, rated 5.9 by 86 cinematizens.
Genre: Mystery
Verdict: Oh hum.
The irrepressible Wallace Ford returns from a media assignment in the sticks with a naive bride and sets up house in glamorous New York City. She is agog. The wives of other journalists visit her to tell her the bad new about being married to a hack. Her head spins.
Meanwhile Ford is rushing back and forth. After all it is not everyday that a well known public figure falls out of high window to his death — splat — in front of his very eyes. Off he goes in pursuit of this scent and that leaf like a dog in the park.
The date is important. The faller was the chair of an America First Committee. Was his death an accident or murder? If the later did it have to do with his seedy private life, or the Committee? Ford tangles all these questions up, observed by some stereotypes.
The stereotypes try to mislead Ford but without success so a more direct approach is taken. It seems the faller had disrupted some criminal plans and Ford, being the first upon the body, may have taken an important piece of paper from the dead man.
These villains erred in bringing Sheriff Micah into their scheme and he turns coat and joins forces with Ford. Meanwhile the naive wife makes dinner and watches it go cold. Night after night.
The villains are Nasties bent of disrupting rubber supplies to the US Army, and the faller had sniffed them out. Ford never does seem to know what is happening. Typical journalist, a lot of noise and little substance.
The ingredients are there for a good story and the players could do it. But the story is incomplete and while the directing is lethargic, the elastic is stretched too thin.
12 January
1616 Captain Major Francisco Branco founded the Brazilian city Belem on the Amazon River delta. It has ever after been the portal to the vast region of the Amazon. It is much storied in Brazilian literature. Then there was Klaus Kinski. When Henry Ford set up a rubber planation in the Amazon, Belem was the base. Two books about this effort are discussed elsewhere on this blog.
1836 HMS Beagle with Charles Darwin aboard landed in Sydney, Australia. He went for a walk in the Blue Mountains where legend has it that he realised the sedimentary layers of rock not he escarpment could be read downward like a book into the past.
1895 The National Trust was founded in Britain with the purpose of preserving the best of the past.
1932 Ophelia Wyatt Caraway was elected to the U.S. Senate from Arkansas. The first woman to be so elected. She the active support of Huey Long whose national ambitions were in full flower. Caraway was the widow of the previous incumbent. She campaigned as hard as Huey always did.
1969 In Miami quarterback Joe Namath led the New York Jets to a 16-7 upset victory over the heavily favoured Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III. When the Jets were deprecated in a press conference, Namath angrily retorted that ‘We will win. I guarantee it.’ The assembled representatives of the media mocked him, mimicked him, laughed at him, and hissed their derision. Not so at the end of the game. The Jets defence stopped the most prolific scoring team of the NFL. The game was not as close as the score indicates. There the historic NFL and the upstart AFL came level in the public mind. NFL owners had refused to expand the League for fear of diminishing income, leading others to found the rival AFL.
11 January
1787 William and Caroline Herschel identified two moons of Uranus’s, Titania and Oberon. Uranus has twenty-seven moons in all and counting.
1908 U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt declared the Grand Canyon a national monument. TR had seen it on his travels in the West and never forgot it. He was green avant le mot. We’ve been there and saw why. A Park Ranger I talked to pointed out a plaque honouring Teddy for his long campaign to protect the Canyon.
1922 Insulin was first used to treat diabetes in fourteen year-old Leonard Thompson. The discovery of the insulin is credited to London Ontario GP Frederick Banting who moonlighted at the University of Toronto where he was allowed to use the laboratory. Though the National Library of Canada web site on this day in history has not mentioned this achievement.
1935 Amelia Earhart flew solo from Honolulu to Oakland, California. A $10,000 had been offered to the first person to make the flight non-stop and she did it, flying 2,400 miles in 18 hours. The aim of the sponsor was to promote air travel to Hawaii. It was her first solo flight of any distance.
1964 U.S. Surgeon General Luther Terry reported that smoking is associated with major health problems including lung cancer. The tobacco industry’s pressure on the Surgeon General before, during, and after this report was unremitting but successive presidents stood by the facts. Ah, the good old days when facts counted. His example inspired later Surgeons General like Charles Everett Koop to assert the facts, making Sergeant Friday proud.
10 January
45 BC Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon to start a civil war. The phrase ‘crossing the Rubicon’ entered the popular vocabulary as ‘an irrevocable decision’ in the early 1600s per the OED.
1840 Uniform Penny Post mail system began in Great Britain with distinctive green pillar boxes. It used the first pre-paid postage stamp known as the Penny Black offering safe, speedy, and cheap delivery of letters at a single flat rate. In addition, the Penny Black was the first adhesive state. A mint condition Penny Black today might fetch £3-4000.
1901 A drilling derrick at Spindletop Hill (near Beaumont) Texas, produced an enormous gusher of crude oil beginning the Texas black gold oil boom. Cheap fuel from Texas powered American industrial development for the next three generations.
1927 Fritz Lang’s silent film “Metropolis” premiered in Berlin. It remains a landmark in cinema which we have seen several times, most recently in a near complete restoration from Argentina with orchestral accompaniment at the Sydney Opera House. There are so many remarkable images it was hard to choose one. Lang left Germany when he split with his wife, Brigitte Helm (the robotrix in the film) who was an ardent Nazi. She sicceed the Nasties on him because of his Jewish grandmother, and he ran for it. In Hollywood he proved both his genius and his malignance.
1946 In London at the Methodist Central Hall the United Nations General Assembly convened for the first time with fifty-one nations represented. Inspired by this meeting, Nelson Rockefeller convinced his family to give the land in New York City to the United Nation gratis for a building site. A biography of Rocky is discussed elsewhere on this blog.
‘Scared Stiff’ (1945)
IMDB meta-data is runtime 1 hour and 5 minutes, over rated 4.9 by 130 cinematizens.
Genre: Allegedly mystery.
Verdict: Clank goes the Tin Man.
Here is the set-up. Take notes or take a walk.
Tin Man is the chess reporter for a rag in California. A nephew of the rag owner, he observes the state chess championship which ends in a riot that he does not notice. He is as literal-minded, inept and imperceptive as a dean numbed by McKinsey management training seminars and bayoneted with KPIs.
In frustration the managing editor sends him to Grape City or Center, or what is the difference. To get there he takes the product placement Greyhound bus where we met the cast.
Tin Man tries to play chess on a large lap set, jostled by his seat-mate. The lap set attracts the attention of other travellers. On board is an antique shop sales clerk that Tin Man has, against the odds, noticed. Also present is the dynamite called Veda Ann Borg. Riding along is a whiz kid and minder, who provide the chorus.
The bus stops at a motel in Grape Center or City and the malarky begins in earnest. Tin Man’s seat-mate stopped jostling him, because…. someone stabbed him in the back. Whoa. The bus passengers are held in the motel, owned by an identical twin actor. These twins are each chess nuts who never speak to each other. In the basement are swinging wall panels, concealed doors, and spooky shadows. The ingredients are there but it fizzles.
Meanwhile, a notorious murderer has escaped from the slammer with his gang and he making for….? Yep, the motel because..… There is a valuable chess set that Kubla Khan gave to Marco Polo somewhere, and antique girl has some of the pieces, and someone else, others, have the remainder. I never did sort that part out. Neither did Tin Man. It did not seem to matter.
There is much to’ing and fro’ing in the interstices of the motel, while Tin Man mugs. Think about that, a Tin Man trying mug. Very trying, indeed.
The menacing Barton MacLane is limited to a line or two, and wasted. The director must have confiscated Veda’s detonator because she just mopes around. The annoying whiz kid is annoying.
But mostly all the actors stand around waiting for the Tin Man to mug. Is the director Frank McDonald responsible for the lifeless result? We will never know. It has also been released under the title ‘Treasure of Fear.’ Be warned.
9 January
1768 In London retired cavalry sergeant-major Philip Astley staged the first modern circus by doing trick riding in a tight concentric circle that allowed him to do things otherwise impossible. That went well and he added other acts and built an amphitheatre. He took his troupe on tour to France. The term ‘circus’ comes from the circular track via Roman circuses or circuits.
1799 British Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger introduced income tax to fund war with Napoleon’s France.
1868 In Fremantle the Hougoumont, the last ship to transport convicts to Western Australia. WA was founded in 1829 by free settlers. The shortage of labour for the work to be done led the setters to petition London for convicts who began to arrive in June 1850.
1909 The British Nimrod Expedition with Ernest Shackleton reached a the farthest South latitude (88°23′ south) then recorded about 90 miles from South Pole when the weather made it impossible to continue.
2007 Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs demonstrated the iPhone. That is barely a decade ago. More than one billion have now been sold. After a Nokia, after a Sony Ericsson, after an HP, I switched to an iPhone 3 and never looked back.
‘Archangel’ (1998) by Robert Harris
Good Reads meta-data is 432 pages rated 3.8 from 7906 litizens.
Genre: Fiction
Verdict: Meticulous and engrossing.
Soviet historian Robert Kelso delivers a keynote address at a conference in Moscow circa 1996. He is jaded; he is cynical; he is bored; he is a high diver. He graduated from the best universities and published well-reviewed books and then….. He went from a promising young man to a bitter middle aged one. Still the conference sponsor paid his way to Moscow and put him up in a posh hotel to make snide remarks about the work of others, so there he is.
Then a blast from the past knocks on his hotel room door. Not his past but the P A S T. Papu was one of the lowly guards when Stalin died and he says there was this notebook. In return for all the alcohol in the hotel room mini-bar Papu tells Kelso the notebook was buried in the grounds so explosive was its contents. After his middle-aged bladder takes Kelso to the toilet he returns to find Papu gone.
In the haze of a hangover the next morning, Kelso sees in this story an opportunity to jump start his stalled career. He will find Stalin’s testament, translate it, interpret it, publish it and return to the fast track of the main game.
There are a couple of problems to deal with. First is finding Papu. Second is funding anything since his personal credit cards are maxed. Third, he is not good at keeping things to himself.
Still Papu could almost be followed by his body odour. Meanwhile, Kelso tries to verify aspects of his story with some library and archival research which he used to be good at, which he used to enjoy, which he still knows how to do. But merely by consulting the sources, he leaves a trail were anyone watching, and in Russia there is always someone watching.
He crosses paths with a dedicated Old Stalinist who scares him. Indeed this Stalinist seems to have his own army. He is purposeful, organised, efficient, and surrounded by dedicated followers.
Then a journalist enters the equation. Talk about loose lips. This guy cannot shut up. Soon every one is after that testament. Even the vodka-soaked President in the Kremlin, Boris, wants it, and sends a hapless secret policemen after it in competition with the Stalinist, the historian, the journalist, and who knows who else. It is not a secret well kept.
The trail leads north to the title city, and in the forests primeval there Kelso and the others find much more than they bargained for. It was a testament alright, but not the kind most of them had anticipated. Let’s just say it harks back to an earlier, passing remark about Trokhym Denysovych Lysenko.
I liked the portrayal of the ever so polite academic backbiting at the conference for its realism. The characterisations of all the players were superb from the law student daughter to the crazed Stalinist and the dutiful secret policeman who discovers that the water is far too deep even for him, and most of all the bullies from Special Operations (code for Death Squad). I also liked the archival and library work. Strange, no?
I also liked the idea that the Stalinist was the puppet master using the avaricious journalist, Kelso, and others for his own ends from the get-go.
But I am not sure what to make of the implicit ending. Would a Marakov really settle things?
Robert Harris has a long list of splendid novels based on historical incidents.
I am pretty sure I read this at the time of publication but none of it came back while it read on the Kindle.
‘The Inner Circle’ (1946)
IMDb meta-data is runtime of 57 minutes, rated 6.1 by 255 cinematizens
Genre: Who dunnit?
Verdict: Whoosh!
Smug PI with feet on desk, telephones to a newspaper a want-ad describing the secretary he wants to hire as she walks in the door and hangs up the telephone. He is flabbergasted.
This Dream Girl takes over.
After the opening credits we saw a veiled woman in black looking up this very same PI under the esses for Smug in the telephone book as she carefully stepped around the dead man on the floor of a man cave. Oh, oh. Now that telephone books are no more, what does Tom Cruise sit on now? So asked the fraternity brothers.
In a whirl Dream Girl books PI for a secret meeting with a veiled mystery woman all in black with a Hollywood accent. Could this be a set-up? Could it be anything else?
The Woman in Black takes him to the man cave. Turns out the victim was Rush Limbaugh, a hatred radio shock jock and part-time blackmailer. She asks PI to dispose of the body in return for favours many….. The fraternity brothers perked up at the thought.
PI may be a sleaze but he demurs and she clonks him with a handy clonker. All of this is observed by the nosy gardener peering in the window. Fred Mertz, ever reliable, appears and arrests PI for being dumb. It is an open-and-shut case. Thereafter it gets complicated.
It seems Dream Girl set-up PI so that he would be arrested. She would then be a witness and spring him. Somehow this would shield her sister, whom Dream Girl thought had dusted the stiff. Seems though Sis had not done the deed. It was all wasted effort.
Fortunately the blackmailer kept carbon copies of all his illegal demands. Whoa! What is carbon copies asks the fraternity brothers. Plural, singular it is all one to them.
By now the focus shifts to finding the killer who miraculously appears and when implicated pulls a gat to provide the evidence. The denouement is done as a live radio broadcast re-enactment. Nice gimmick that, and free advertising for PI.
Now that the murder is cleared up, Fred arrests PI and Dream Girl for obstruction of justice. The end.
It is fast and furious. Loved the reference to the ‘wolf tie.’ No idea what the title means.
8 January
1800 L’Enfant sauvage d’Aveyron emerged from the forests when his age was estimated by twelve. He had been sighted as early as 1797. Later he was given the name Victor and died in 1825. François Truffaut’s film of the same name is a meditation on humanity and inhumanity, nature and nurture.
1816 Sophie Germain became the first woman to win a prize from the Paris Academy of Sciences for a paper on elasticity. Her mathematical studies of Fermat’s Last Theorem shaped investigations for a century or more.
1889 Herman Hollerith patented a punch card calculator. In hindsight it was a forerunner of computer programming. Well do I remember nocturnal visits to the computer centre in the dead of an Edmonton winter with boxes of punch cards.
1912 The African National Congress was founded in Bloemfontein (South Africa) to campaign for voting rights. It was originally called the South African Native National Congress. Later it opposed apartheid. Its most famous member became Nelson Mandela.
1994 Valeri Polyakov left Earth for the Mir space station where he spent the following 437 days. A record that remains. He could not walk upon return. The picture below shows the shuttle Atlantis docking with Mir, giving the relative size of each. The shuttle is much smaller than a Boeing 747. Ergo Mir was not roomy. Wikipedia says Polyakov is alive and well these days.
