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.
7 January
1558 Calais, the last English possession in France, was captured by the French. Thereafter two countries became and remained separated by the La Manche after four hundred years of dynastic claims and counter-claims. Its proximity to England made Calais seem the natural target for D-Day in 1944.
1789 America’s first presidential election was held over a period of one month. Voters cast ballots to choose state electors; only white men who owned property voted. Three of the thirteen states did not participate because they had not yet ratified the constitution. George Washington won the election and the second place finisher, John Adams, became Vice President. Imagine what Faux News would make of that.
1927 The Harlem Globetrotters played their first game in Hinckley, Illinois south of Chicago. Abe Saperstein, a tailor, was the impresario and manager at a time when blacks were banned from competitive sports. The Globetrotters lived up to the name. Despite the showmanship, clowning, and antics, the team only ever lost one game. It nurtured many a great athlete and provided many with a living and a creative outlet. Saperstein is on the left below. But the way, the Globetrotters had nothing to do with Harlem but took the name because it had caché during the Harlem Renaissance at the time.
1965 The first hydrofoil ferry, the MV Manly, began operating in Sydney Harbour. They seem to walk on the water and cut the time in half for three times the cost of the ferries. Ridden a few of these.
2000 Beverley McLachlin became the first woman to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada. She grew up in Pincher Creek, Alberta, population of 3600.
6 January
1605 In Madrid Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616) published the first edition of ‘El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha’ (Don Quixote). Sometimes this is considered the first novel and it is the foundation of Spanish literature. Cervantes was duelist, debtor, soldier, slave, wounded veteran, and writer. I read a one-volume abridgement in college and that’s it.
1838 In Morristown New Jersey Yale grad Samuel Morse demonstrated the telegraph system for the first time at the Speedwell Iron Works. To prove the utility of transmitting electrical impulses by wires he used a code that came to bear his name.
1900 In Montréal work began on a modest chapel at the bequest of Brother André. It became the massive St. Joseph’s Oratory on Mount Royal. In the picture below the wooden steps in the middle are reserved for those who mount the hill on their knees as an act of penitence. We took the outer stairs when we visited.
1912 In Santa Fe New Mexico became the 47th state of the United States. Its state flag is below. The symbolism comes from Zia Pueblo with the sun at the centre of four directions, four stages of life, four times of day, and the four bases (first, second, third, and home). Kate’s mother grew up there.
2014 In Washington D.C. the U.S. Senate advised and consented to the appointment of Janet Yellen as chair the Federal Reserve. The first woman in that chair in the central bank’s 100-year history. Suspecting Yellen was Hillary in disguise, President Tiny replaced her with Homer Simpson. Fact or fake? Take a pick.
5 January
1891 Queensland’s the great shearers’ strike began, leading to the foundation of the Australian Labor Party to represent the interests of workers in parliament.
1895 In Paris in an elaborate public ceremony the blameless Captain Alfred Dreyfus was stripped of rank, humiliated, and trundled through the streets to become the sole inhabitant of Devil’s Island. Robert Harris’s novel about this affair will be discussed on the blog in a post.
1914 In Detroit Henry Ford paid a minimum wage of $5 a day and shared with employees $10 million in the previous year’s profits.
1937 In Lincoln (Nebraska) the first session of the new unicameral state legislature occurred. It is the only unicameral in the United States. (We will not mention Queensland.) George Norris led the campaign for the change which he started in Hastings as detailed in the discussion of a biography of Norris elsewhere on this blog.
1968 The Prague spring began when Alexander Dubček became First Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. It ended with tanks on 21 August. We saw some of the sites when in Prague.
‘Seven Keys to Baldpate’ (1947)
IMDb runtime of one hour and four minutes, rated 6.1 by 209 cinematizens
Genre: Old Dark House
Verdict: Shiver!
On a speeding train Spectacles is typing away on a barely portable typewriter. He has pages and pages of a manuscript. Just as the train slows for his two-minute stop at Asquewan Junction the lights go out in his first class compartment and….. the manuscript disappears. He shrugs off the loss of hours of work and disembarks. (!)
‘He shoulda saved to the Cloud,’ chorused the fraternity brothers.
Unlike Spectacles, viewers saw a dainty female hand turn off the light switch before the manuscript went poof.
At the Asquewan Junction depot a blizzard rages. As Spectacles prepares to walk ten miles to the Baldpate Inn, Blondie appears and warns him not to go because ‘It’s dangerous.’ She then takes refuge in the ladies’ room.
To abridge, Spectacles is a well published writer of ‘mysteries of the intellectual sort’ who had complained of distractions throwing him off schedule. Encouraged by Ellery Queen, he bets his publisher $5,000 he can finish a novel in a single night of uninterrupted work. The publisher called this bluff by offering him the only key to the empty Baldpate Inn. The inference is that the publisher wants the book finished, but he does not want to lose the $5000 bet, so he sent along Blondie to gum up the works.
Far from being vacant Spectacles finds a sinister European-accent in residence at Baldpate Inn claiming to be the caretaker. To make matters ever more menacing, European-accent wears an ascot! This is serious.
Blonde fetches up at the Inn, too, in need of shelter from the blizzard, she says, but she soon blows her cover and Spectacles starts to work when he realises the trick. Nothing will stop him from the work!
As more and more stereotypes show up, the tough moll, the hoodlum, the fence, the whiner, and the brain it seems there are a lot of keys to the Baldpate Inn out there. But Spectacles thinks all of these people have been hired to disrupt him. With that ego he should go into politics.
With about eight people in the empty Inn the villainous stereotypes start murdering each other. It seems there is a stash of jewels and a huge payoff going. They met there on the assumption the place would be empty. Now there is no room at the Inn.
There are satisfying numbers of creaks and moans in the Old Dark House, sliding panels, hidden doors, and the other accoutrements of mystery homemaking. As Spectacles begins to realise there is more at stake than his ego, he confronts situations such as he has written in his books, only to find that the responses he imagined on paper don’t cut it in reality. That is a nice running gag. I took it to be a jocular reference to his alter ego Ellery Queen.
Another running gag is his repeated attempts to start his next novel by typing a title page which starts as ‘One Key to Baldpate’ and by the end is ‘Seven Keys to Baldpate’ and counting.
Loose ends, there are a few, the missing manuscript pages from the train are never again mentioned! Gasp. While the name ‘Baldpate’ would seem to be a joke, nothing is made of it in the story.
This is a remake of a version done in 1937 which is also on You_Tube along with an earlier 1929 version. There were silent versions still earlier. Evidently a tried and true story for which the fees had been paid. I tried the 1937 version but found the audio out of sync and lost interest.
The original story was by Charles Chan’s creator Earl Derr Biggers.
Lew Landers directed in the house style of RKO, i.e., fast and furious. Landers has a 150 directing credits on the IMDb with six or more B movies a year. Philip Terry played Spectacles to a T. There is some goss on him in the discussion of ‘Double Exposure’ (1944) elsewhere on the blog. The assorted character actors were fine until they got bumped off. Harry Harvey as the local police chief is a delight as he applies common sense to the denouement.
4 January
1847 Using the masculine pseudonym Ellis Bell, Emily Brontë submitted the manuscript of “Wuthering Heights” to a publisher who had enough sense to publish it.
1965 In the State of Union address to Congress President Lyndon Johnson outlined the Great Society with a long list of measures that galvanised the nation – for a time – into a War on Poverty. Robert Caro’s magisterial biography of LBJ is discussed in other posts on this blog.
1999 For the first time since Charlemagne’s reign in the ninth century, Europe had a common currency when the “euro” became a financial unit in corporate and investment markets. This was the first step to the currency and coin Euro on 1 January 2000. The name had been decided in 1995.
2004 NASA’s rover ‘Spirit’ landed on Mars and it stopped transmitting in 2011, but its sibling, ‘Opportunity,’ just won’t shut up. Below is the first picture that Spirit sent home. N.B. both were designed to last six months. Both overachieved on the KPIs. No low-bid contractors were involved, evidently.
2007 Nancy Pelosi became the speaker of the House, the first woman to hold this post, which made her second in the line of succession for the office of President after the Vice-President. As of today, she’s back!
