A fairly standard crime programmer with more than a touch of noirish nihilism and an interesting lecture in the middle—complete with graphic demonstrations!—on the properties of high-voltage electricity. Don’t tell me that 1930s movies had anything but the highest educational aspirations.

Linemen/linesmen (the screenplay uses both forms of the term) “Lucky” Walden (Cabot) and Steve Carroll (Norris) have been partners repairing power  lines for a dozen years, but they go back ‘way further than that. Once they were best buddies in the orphanage together, and they regard each other not just as friends but as brothers.

Bruce Cabot as Lucky

One day Lucky, addicted to gambling, lashes out with a wrench in an altercation with a crooked gambler, Charlie Edwards (Hopton). Edwards dies and Lucky is sentenced to the electric chair. However, Steve tracks down a witness to the incident, Ned Burns (Owen), who swears—falsely—that Lucky was merely acting in self-defense. Lucky’s sentence is commuted to life and then, when he courageously acts to minimize fatalities in a prison accident, Warden Summers (Hamilton) persuades the powers-that-be to grant him parole.

Virginia Grey as Kitty

Edward Norris as nice-guy Steve

Once he’s out, he eventually, thanks again to Steve, gets a job with the power company owned by Bronson (Clement). But Lucky repays all of Steve’s kindness by making a play for Steve’s girl Kitty Ryan (Grey) . . .

Jean Chatburn as Betty

It’s the portrayal of Lucky that really makes the movie. The screenplay cleverly gets the dichotomy across that, while Lucky is a real charmer, alluring to women (and boy does he know it), possessed of many fine qualities and capable of behaving with great generosity of spirit, he’s at the same time a self-serving narcissist who exploits people to his own ends and who’ll throw anyone under the bus at a moment’s notice if it’s in his interests to do so. And he’s a past master of projection: in a phonecall to Kitty we overhear him stabbing Steve in the back (metaphorically!) and projecting onto Steve all the womanizing attributes that are in fact Lucky’s own.

Plus, of course, we actually witnessed him commit what was at the very least manslaughter.

Charley Grapewin as Lt. Dan Gray

So he’s no hero. And yet it’s as a hero that he behaves most of the time he’s on screen. This dissonance between our instinctive response to the gallant fellow who’s braving hazards and saving lives and our knowledge that he’s in many ways rotten to the core gives the movie its edge and also, for example, makes us more tolerant of its occasional weak attempts at humor.

Cliff Edwards as Hi-Line

Supporting roles are played by, among others, Charley Grapewin as Detective-Lieutenant Dan Gray, the cop who acts as Lucky’s parole officer; Cliff Edwards as Hi-Line, a likable yet somewhat risible member of Bronson’s team; Warren Hymer as the prison electrician, Shorty, who dies in the accident where Lucky shows his selfless courage; and Roy Gordon as Detective Al Blochman, the cynical detective who believes Ned Burns’s testimony has a stench of “smoked mackerel” and sets out to prove it.

Clay Clement as Bronson

Lawyer and heart attack waiting to happen Frank Harrison (Riehle) has been exploited in the offices of Jaffe & Associates, Attorneys at Law, for twenty years, doing all the work yet forever not quite attaining the partnership that old man Martin Jaffe (Charof) promised him so long ago. Even though Martin these days rarely comes into the office, still the partnership doesn’t materialize.

Martin’s son Roman (Schwartz), educated by his pop into the cutthroat approach to life, has recently been employed as the office junior. What poor Frank fails to realize until ‘way too late is how big a mistake he made by antagonizing Roman, and in particular by letting Roman catch him masturbating to porn at his desk . . .

Richard Riehle as Frank

A Bad Thing is well made and well performed by its three principals. (Other players are Molly White as Frank’s much younger wife June, Ferrell Marshall as Martin’s much younger wife Linda, and Kristen Besinque as the secretary/receptionist of another company.) Riehle delivers an appropriately blimpish Frank while Schwartz and Charof manage to make their two characters each, in their way, ghastlier than the other; Schwartz is helped by the fact that he bears a more than passing physical resemblance to Mark Zuckerberg, right down to the array of smug facial expressions.

Jonathan Schwartz as Roman

Despite all the pluses, though, I’m not sure the movie finally works for me. The nasty little extortion scheme that Roman works out simply isn’t ingenious or watertight enough. (Without going into detail, the evidence he manufactures is inconclusive and could easily be destroyed.) Also, if Frank is such an able attorney, surely he could have walked out and gotten himself another job years ago?

Richard Riehle as Frank (left) and Alan Charof as Martin

So long as I didn’t think too hard about the plot, A Bad Thing kept me interested and entertained. But in the end, though, I came away from the movie a tad dissatisfied. It seemed to me everything was building up to some or other mindspinning reversal as finale, and yet the movie—disappointingly—settled for one of the obvious default conclusions.

Celebrated mystery novelist Cornelia van Gorder (Moorehead) has rented an old house in the middle of nowhere, The Oaks. It’s a sufficiently creepy place that all the servants up and leave her except her maid/companion Lizzie Allen (Lane) and her chauffeur, Warner (Sutton).

Agnes Moorehead as Cornelia

She’s rented the house from Mark Fleming (Bryant), realtor nephew of local bank president John Fleming (Stephens), who’s off in the forest on an extended hunting vacation with local coroner and John’s personal physician, Dr. Malcolm Wells (Price). When Fleming Sr. tells Wells he’s robbed the bank of a million bucks in bonds and arranged that naive clerk Victor Bailey (Steele) will be the patsy for the crime, the good doctor murders him, then chucks the body into a handy forest fire; in his role as coroner, he can ignore the bullethole and register Fleming’s death as caused by the conflagration.

Vincent Price as Wells

The million bucks is somewhere in The Oaks, probably in a secret room. Can Wells get to it before local top cop Andy Anderson (Gordon)?

Oh, and did I mention there’s a serial killer called The Bat on the loose? He wears a mask and clawed gloves, and kills his victims—all women—by ripping their throats out.

Cornelia and Lizzie (and Warner) are obviously very vulnerable in The Oaks. Even so, Cornelia invites a pair of house-guests: Dale Bailey (Edwards), the newlywed wife of the wrongly imprisoned clerk, and Judy Hollander (Hood), his ex-secretary, who has undivulged evidence that should exonerate him in court.

That’s just the setup. Now let the murders begin . . .

Lenita Lane as Lizzie

This is the third of three screen adaptations of a play that was based very loosely on Mary Roberts Rinehart’s novel The Circular Staircase (1908); the other two were The Bat (1926) and The Bat Whispers (1930). The story in the stage version was deliberately altered from that of the novel (which, for example, doesn’t have the Bat character) by Rinehart and her playwriting collaborator, Avery Hopwood, to avoid copyright problems. Even so, when the first movie adaptation of the play was released there was a (perfectly justifiable) outcry from the Selig Polyscope Company, which had bought the screen rights in The Circular Staircase for their own adaptation of the same name (1915).

Gavin Gordon as Anderson

Elaine Edwards and Mike Steele as Dale and Victor

John Sutton as Warner

I confess that for years I avoided this movie, even though I’d invested a whole dollar (or, on reflection, maybe just 99¢) in a DVD of it, because I assumed it was just some cheesy horror flick. In fact, as I’ve now discovered, it’s a dose of absolutely splendid fun, with one or two risible moments eclipsed by plenty of mystery, invention and occasional creepiness, complete with a few cinematographically noirish moments. A further genre connection is provided by the presence of Agnes Moorehead, who featured in a number of noir and noirish movies and was a favorite of Orson Welles. (She was his first choice as the investigator in The STRANGER [1946], but he was overruled and the part went to Edward G. Robinson instead.)

Elaine Edwards (left) as Dale and Darla Hood as Judy—a still that perhaps encapsulates the Mary Roberts Rinehart oeuvre

Harvey Stephens as John Fleming

John Bryant as Mark Fleming

I also have DVDs of the other two screen adaptations of the play, bought under similar circumstances, so if I come across them on the shelves I’ll try to post about them here.

Incidentally, The Bat (1926), a novelization of the play and movie, was published as if by Rinehart and Hopwood but was in fact written by Stephen Vincent Benét. Today it’s probably the ghostwriter’s name you’d want to put in big letters on the cover rather than those of the supposed authors.

A neat little piece of UK borderline noir that must have been a very welcome second feature back in the day. Indeed, it was B-features of this kind and caliber, not to mention all the EDGAR WALLACE MYSTERIES and Edgar Lustgarten’s cheesy true-crime shorts, that first made me a dedicated cinemagoer. Sad that there’s no room for such stuff in the modern multiplex.

Miles Harrington (Tom Drake) came to the UK for the love of a British girl. She dumped him cruelly but somehow he never quite went home, and now he holds a secret torch for her kid sister Sue Miller (Eaton)—as does she for him. Trouble is, Sue’s going steady with Miles’s business partner Don Redman (Kaufmann).

William Hartnell as Tracey

Shirley Eaton as Sue

Miles and Don run a used-car dealership, Highgrade Autosales, in London. While Miles himself is as straight as a die, the same can’t be said for Don or for Ken Prescott (Shaw), the company’s sales manager. Indeed, the two have been recruited by professional peterman Tracey (Hartnell) for a heist at Maxwells Chemicals, for which the use of a Highgrade Autosales car is for some reason extremely useful. The heist is successful, but during it the Maxwells night-watchman, Bob Johnson (Boolen), is coshed onto the critical list.

Maurice Kaufmann as Don

Almost immediately the cops, in the form of Detective Inspector Matthews (Golden) and Sergeant Brace (Fontaine), suspect Tracey of involvement; they’re just as quick to establish the Highgrade Autosales connection.

Tom Drake as Miles (left) and Charles Brodie as mechanic Charlie

Tracey reckons airhead braggart Don is a danger and suggests Ken takes a terminal precaution. Ken obliges, but not before his girlfriend Judy (Mayne) gets an eyeful of the stolen folding stuff. Ken has notions of running away to the Continong with the lettuce and the recently de-boyfriended Sue, forgetting that Sue might prefer Miles to the Human Octopus and Judy might be resentful.

Big mistakes, both.

Richard Shaw as Ken

As I say, this movie’s a neat little number, and the action moves on apace. The safebreaking sequence builds up some real suspense thanks to the actors, the dialogue, the direction and especially Brendan Stafford’s very noirish cinematography. William Hartnell—best-remembered these days as the first and finest Doctor Who—turns in a bravura performance as the professional thief who maintains an almost friendly relationship with cops like Matthews and Brace: they’re not going to rough him up and, if he’s nicked, there are no hard feelings on his part. Shirley Eaton is almost alarmingly hot as the femme who isn’t actually fatale, in the sense of conniving amorality, but who’s most certainly dangerous to know.

Michael Golden as Inspector Matthews

Yet the movie isn’t without its problemettes.

At times the Highgrade Autosales premises seem almost less like a used-car lot and more like a cross between a garage and a cocktail bar; this allows for an idiotic sequence early on where we’re forced to watch a group of hep cats, equipped with balloons and a Dansette, rock around a small portion of the clock to make sure we fully appreciate that, whatever else this movie might be, it’s not, you know, square.

Deirdre Mayne as Judy

The vicious quadrilateral between Miles, Don, Ken and Sue is often handled extremely clumsily. For example, a sequence in which a hungover Don asserts to Miles his rights to Sue—Miles rightly calls out Don’s sexism—is so hammily done that I couldn’t help but wonder if Don’s hangover wasn’t feigned.

And then there’s the important plot point that hinges on someone mistaking a broken drill-bit for a match, and trying to light his cigarette with it. Even someone who was as hungover as Don was in the previous paragraph would surely have noticed that a cylindrical piece of cold, tempered steel wasn’t quite the same as a wooden matchstick.

I could go on.

Yet the fact is that, for me at least, the strengths of Date with Disaster very much outweigh the weaknesses. Yes, I can find fault but, back when I was a teenager seeing these movies in a triple bill, this was the kind of stuff I applauded at the end.

I discovered, incidentally, that Richard Shaw’s article has been deleted from Wikipedia—a casualty, I assume, of American Wikipedia editors assuming that the USA is the whole of the English-speaking world. He did a lot of work for TV in the UK, and for me is one of those actors whose face is immediately recognizable even if often I can’t immediately put a name to it. Shame on Wikipedia for (in this instance) cultural insularity.

This movie is sometimes confused with “classic” horror outing The Dentist (1996) dir Brian Yuzna, probably because in both of them Corbin Bernsen plays a psychopathic dentist. Of course, if you really want to view a classic screen psycho dentist you should look no further than John Shaner’s Dr. Phoebius Farb in the Roger Corman movie The Little Shop of Horrors (1960).

But back to Beyond Suspicion:

Successful family dentist Dr. Stan Benderman (Bernsen), widely admired in the community for his willingness to do pro bono work for the poor, is in fact a sex-crazed serial killer. His standard m.o. is to seduce an attractive young woman—typically one of his dental assistants—and then persuade her to marry some schmo and take out a big insurance policy on him. Then Stan murders the poor sap and the two schemers split the insurance money.

Markie Post as Joyce

Corbin Bernsen as Stan

The first such crime we witness is a more elaborate one. Stan’s seemingly long-term mistress Gloria (Barnes) has just married a sucker, Brad Shaw (Hansen), who has wealthy parents (Murphy and Hilton, I think; the movie’s credits aren’t helpful here). With accomplice Duke Curran (Swayze)—an ex-con whom Stan is “philanthropically helping”—Stan murders the parents; the cops assume it’s a burglary gone wrong. After enough time has elapsed for the heat to die down and Brad to inherit, Stan and Duke off Brad.

Don Swayze as Duke

Suzanne Barnes as Gloria

Stan’s wife, Joyce (Post), is aware of his reputation for philandering but only when she catches him in flagrante does she walk out, taking son Christopher (Best) with her. Stan tries to woo her back but, becoming suspicious that he might be a killer, she contacts the cops. Soon she’s working with Ron McNally (Grammer) of the ATF, allowing McNally’s team to bug her house so she can trick Stan into incriminating himself. But if Stan should ever catch on . . .

This is a surprisingly interesting TV movie. Its plot might seem a tad ramshackle on first viewing, but this is because it’s in fact based quite closely on real events. The real murderer who provided inspiration for the character of Stan Benderman was Dr. Glennon “Glenn” Engleman, a dentist convicted in 1980 of a string of murders and suspected of others; he died in jail of diabetes in 1999.

Matthew West as Christopher

Kelsey Grammer as McNally

You can find quite a lot more about Engleman’s murderous career here, although the site links him (incorrectly) to The Dentist rather than to the more obscure Beyond Suspicion. The current movie acknowledges as its source a nonfiction book about Engleman, Susan Crain Bakos’s Appointment for Murder: The Story of the Killing Dentist (1988).

Markie Post and Corbin Bernsen are fine as the two main players, and they’re given some good support by the likes of Janet Graham as Stan’s dental assistant Silvia, Laurie O’Brien as Joyce’s mysteriously unnamed best friend, John Putch as ATF cop Lipsky, Don Swayze (looking alarmingly like older brother Patrick) as Duke, Jeanne Cooper as Stan’s Tarot-reading psychic mom Renata, and Suzanne Barnes as Gloria. Donré Sampson has a pleasing cameo as Turner Isaacs, a felon who muddies the water by making a false confession to Brad Shaw’s murder. Kelsey Grammer is a bit flat as the main cop, and a couple of the other supporting cast are best quickly forgotten.

Laurie O’Brien as Joyce’s (unnamed) best friend

Janet Graham as Sylvia

Direction and cinematography are nothing special, and the music (by Chris Boardman) is much as you’d expect. In those respects Beyond Suspicion is a perfectly competent but in no way exceptional outing.

What pulled the movie out of the crowd to me, however, was Karen Clark’s screenplay. Bearing in mind the constraint of having to conform to real-life events, this is very neatly put together, and toward the end it becomes of some interest as it tries to dig into the mind of Stan Benderman (and, by extension, that of Glenn Engleman). To say that Stan gets turned on by killing would be true, but a gross (and misleading) oversimplification: so far as we’re given to understand, he has no sexual interest in his victims. It’s more that, for him, killing is both a complement to and a substitute for sex.

Jeanne Cooper as Renata

This becomes plain as Joyce is trying to entrap him and he reminisces about a dental assistant he once “helped”: Marcia (or Marsha). In the usual way, he found a husband for Marcia then knocked off the husband for the insurance money.

To Joyce he claims (we assume falsely) that he was never sexually intimate with Marcia: they did share intimacy, but it was what he calls homicidal intimacy.

“When you’ve been keeping a secret to yourself for weeks and months and you finally get back together with your partner . . . shee, there is such an outpouring, such a . . . release. That’s what I had with Marcia. It’s the ultimate intimacy.”

And, obviously, for him it’s the ultimate turn-on. Serial killers are for obvious reasons generally loners, but Engleman, the fictional Stan’s template, operated with a series of ad hoc accomplices who were also his sexual partners. The screenplay’s attempt to provide a psychological rationale for this pattern of behavior—perhaps following the lead of Bakos’s book?—is I think to be lauded.

Donré Sampson as Turner Isaacs

Beyond Suspicion (1993) is not to be confused with a different TV movie of minor noirish interest, Beyond Suspicion (1994); I have the latter on the list for future coverage.

Tendre Poulet (1977; vt Dear Inspector; vt Dear Detective) was one of my favorite movies watched in 2019, so naturally I had very high hopes for this, its sequel. Well, the good news is that On a Volé la Cuisse de Jupiter is really very amusing; the bad news is that it’s not a patch on its predecessor, I think because it’s self-consciously a screwball comedy involving crime rather than a crime movie with a wonderful sense of humor.

Annie Girardot as Lise

The puzzling news is that there’s not the slightest reference to the thigh of Jupiter (“la cuisse de Jupiter”) in the movie. According to a commenter on the Word Reference forum,

The god [Dionysius] was said to be born out of Jove’s leg. Se croire sorti de la cuisse de Jupiter means to believe that you are someone much more important than the others, like the son of the greatest of gods. It’s a set expression in French, and very derogatory toward the one who believes this about himself.

That doesn’t seem quite to fit either: it’d mean the title translated as something like “Someone has stolen the source of the bee’s knees.” There’s a little twist right at the end of the movie that this might refer to, but it’s a bit of a stretch.

Whatever: The underpinning of the movie is archeology, and the artifact that spurs the plot is a piece of statuary—not Jupiter’s thigh but Aphrodite’s buttocks. The object’s dug up on the (seemingly fictional) Greek island of Heraklios by eager archeologist Charles-Hubert Pochet (Perrin). Lise Tanquerelle (Girardot) and Antoine Lemercier (Noiret), the principals of the previous movie, just happen to be there on their honeymoon, and so naturally get drawn into the ensuing saga.

Philippe Noiret as Antoine, in disguise

Just as the astonishing hotness of Catherine Alric’s character, Christine Vallier, was the root cause of all the trouble in the previous movie, it kicks off the plot here . . . even though this time she’s playing the part of numbskull Charles-Hubert’s wife Agnès. Once again she’s seemingly unaware of the effect her scantily clad body might have on passing males; once again she has an innocent delight in sex.

Catherine Alric as Agnès

In this movie, everyone assumes she’s having an affair with sturdy Greek boatman Aristote/Aristotle Serakis (Dafnis), and certainly he’s infatuated with her. With her connivance he steals the marble buttocks—although not in order to sell them but simply to get them valued by an expert, Hermann von Blankenberg (an uncredited Alexandre Mnouchkine, one of the movie’s producers).

What the two conspirators don’t know is that von Blankenberg’s a crook, part of an international art-smuggling gang.

Francis Perrin as Charles-Hubert

Aristote/Aristotle is murdered, his throat slit by von Blankenberg’s crazed hitman, Stéphano (Tsachiridis), and Charles-Hubert and Antoine are assumed by Greek cop André Spiratos (Dudicourt) to be the killers. Soon enough our four main characters—Lise, Antoine, Agnès and Charles-Hubert—are on the lam. They learn from an old friend of Antoine’s, museum curator Zacharias (Carel), that the buttocks are merely a section of a complete statue. Needless to say, von Blankenberg and his crew are intent on collecting the whole piece, including the feet—currently resident in a remote monastery.

Nikos Dafnis as Aristote/Aristotle

There are lots of funny lines and incidents. The one that perhaps made me grin the most came when Lise’s mom (Dubost), seeing Lise off on her honeymoon, tells her that her own honeymoon was a great success because it rained the whole time. There was also the quarrel between Charles-Hubert and Agnès over the future of the antiquity he’s dug up. Agnès is focused on its monetary value, Charles-Hubert on the glory:

Charles-Hubert: “Just think, I’ll be the one who discovered Aphrodite’s buttocks.”

Agnès’s response is obvious, and hilarious:

“Well, you’d better choose between Aphrodite’s buttocks and your wife’s.”

Marc Dudicourt as Spiratos

Alexandre Mnouchkine as von Blankenberg

Nikos Tsachiridis as crazed killer Stéphano

As you’ll have guessed, the humor in this movie is somewhat more ribald than in Tendre Poulet (the language is spicier too), and I’m not sure this was a good ploy on the part of the moviemakers. One of the joys of Tendre Poulet was that, even though the underpinning of its plot concerned sexuality, it was all done with such an air of innocence that no one outside the evangelist freakshow would have been too bothered had the movie been granted a U rating.

You can’t say the same of On a Volé la Cuisse de Jupiter. It’s by no means out-and-out raunchy, but it’s definitely a comedy for grown-ups and with inoffensive but more than fleeting nudity. Catherine Alric, through sheer charm (and despite being the one who’s more than fleetingly nude), manages to retain the Tendre Poulet balance, despite the script, but the rest of the movie doesn’t.

If ever a movie had a tortured genesis, Gun Cargo was it. Production started on what was initially called Contraband in the early 1930s, probably in 1934, although sources are divided as to exactly which year. Money ran out soonish, and the project was abandoned until 1939, when initial footage was added in the form of the Board of Inquiry hearing that forms the frame story, the main story being told in the form of flashbacks from here. Seemingly at the same time, in 1939, a barroom sequence was imported from the (very much more interesting) 1930 Lupe Velez movie Hell Harbor to pad out the running time a bit and in a desperate attempt to provide the main plot with some resolution and a link to the framing device of the hearing.

Another addition that seems to have been made in 1939 was an appallingly dubbed barroom rendition of “I Dream of Jeanie” by cowboy crooner Smith Ballew, who appears nowhere else in the movie yet gets second billing. Go figure. Presumably Ballew’s agent insisted on the prominent billing and then the pair of them watched their “win” backfire.

Rex Lease as Jim

The movie seems to have been finished (if finished it can be called) in 1941, at which time, according to the AFI, it was approved for theatrical release—at least in the state of New York; at that point its running time (calculated from the recorded footage) appears to have been about 55 minutes. However, it appears what was by now named Contraband Cargo was never in fact theatrically released. If so, its first release came in 1949 as a TV movie, now known as Gun Cargo and cut to 48 minutes. This version appears to be the only one that survives.

Phew!

Arlene Ray as Helen

The backstory, alas, is rather more intriguing than the movie itself, which is marked by incoherent plotting, dodgy pacing and ham acting—characteristics you’d expect given the way the piece was slapped together.

William Farnum as the Chairman of the Board of Inquiry

It’s 1906 and Mr. Winthrop (Ince), owner of the Winthrop Line, sacks the skipper and crew of the Black-Rover. He plans for the ship to take an illicit cargo of contraband weaponry to Santino. Winthrop’s nephew Fred (Frazer) suggests they employ newly qualified skipper Jim Parker (Lease) for the voyage, with Jim himself as First Mate; if need be Parker can have an “accident at sea” to cover up the plot.

Robert Frazar as Fred

So a new crew is recruited—the worst scum and vagabonds thedastardly duo can find in the harbor—and off the Black-Rover sails. Also aboard are the ship’s cook Gimpy (Holmes) and Jim’s fiancée Helen (Ray), who with Gimpy’s cooperation has smuggled herself aboard as the extraordinarily unboyish galley boy Herman—the flatteringly figure-hugging pants were a big mistake so far as disguise was concerned.

Gilbert Holmes as Gimpy

Jim discovers the illicit cargo. There’s a mutiny, a huge storm at sea, an assault on Helen’s virtue that’s as subtle as something out of a Tod Slaughter movie, some strategic amnesia . . . all linked together by a strongly accented voiceover narration that’s clearly meant to be Jim speaking but sounds nothing like him.

John Ince as Winthrop

Most of the cast were far better known for their B-movie oaters than for anything else, and that probably could be said of Allene Ray as well, although her real reputation was built upon the action serials she made, doing all her own stunts, first for Pathe and then for Universal. With the advent of the talkies her career foundered because her voice, while generally judged pleasant enough, simply didn’t suit the new medium. She retired from the screen in 1930. Gun Cargo was, because of its complicated history, by a good measure the last of her movies to be released, but it seems also to have been the last she made. It was a sorry way for her to bow out, but at least it can be said that the banter between her and Gilbert Holmes, as Gimpy, is, albeit sometimes a tad heavy-handed, perhaps the main—arguably even the only—reason to watch the movie.

Smith Ballew as the barroom singer

The first feature movie of Stanley Kubrick, the one that so embarrassed him in later life that he tried to erase it from history. For a long time it was thought the only two copies left in existence were the one held by the Kubrick family and a dreadful video copy. But then in 2010 an original copy was discovered languishing in a film laboratory in Puerto Rico, and this has since been restored by the folks at George Eastman House.

Kubrick dismissed the movie as a “bumbling amateur film exercise” and in a way one can see his point. It was an indie production, produced on the cheap with amateur actors and funded by family members, and that’s in many ways what it plays like. Yet it has points of interest, too, and for those—not just its curio value as Kubrick’s maiden voyage—it’s well worth watching.

The movie makes extensive use of voiceover, both from the characters and an anonymous narrator (Allen). It’s this narrator who starts the proceedings:

“There is war in this forest. Not a war that has been fought, nor one that will be, but any war. And the enemies who struggle here do not exist unless we call them into being. This forest, then, and all that happens now, is outside history. Only the unchanging shapes of fear and doubt and death are from our world. These soldiers that you see keep our language and our time, but have no other country but the mind.”

The declaration of non-specificity is all well and good, but later on there’s a fleeting reference—perhaps in actor improvisation?—to a bunch of the baddies as “lots of Reich.”

Kenneth Harp as Corby

Four soldiers from an unknown country, but with noteworthy American accents, were shot down a couple of days ago behind enemy lines and have been wandering through the forest ever since. They are:

• Lieutenant Corby (Harp)
• Sergeant Mac McFarlane (Silvera)
• Fletcher (Coit)
• Sidney (Mazursky)

They resolve to build a raft so as to travel to safety down the nearby river. However, they discover that, just on the far side of the river, there’s a house occupied by those “lots of Reich,” including a full general (Harp again). The idea germinates within Mac that they could do their cause some good by knocking off the enemy general on their way out of Dodge:

Mac’s thoughts in voiceover: “If only this [his binoculars] was a rifle sight. Then I could make the red eye between his ears.”

Frank Silvera as Mac

Also, they come across three young women fishing, one of whom (Leith) discovers them. They seize her and tie her to a tree in what is apparently regarded as one of yer iconic cinematic moments . . . which I suppose it very well might be if gazing at astonishingly beautiful young women tied to trees is your thing.

Virginia Leith as the Girl

Leaving the callow, nervously fragile youngster Sidney—generally addressed by the others as Kid—to stand guard over the Girl (as she’s credited), the others go off to do a bit more raft-building. In their absence Sidney’s mental instability comes to the fore. Imagining that the largely saturnine Girl is becoming fond of him he woos her, often using Shakespearean imagery—even though she is entirely uncomprehending of English—he releases her, his mind filled with thoughts of a passionate interlude on the forest floor. But she makes a run for it and he shoots her dead.

Paul Mazursky as Sidney

Mac arrives on the scene and Sidney, now completely cracked, explains himself amid a paroxysm of overacting:

Sidney: “It wasn’t my fault. The magician did it. Honest! Prospero the magician. First we’re a bird, and then we’re an island. Before I was general, and now I’m a fish! Hurrah for the magician! Oeugghharghh bwhahahaha . . .”

And he rushes off, cackling maniacally, to plunge himself into the river, which he’s now convinced is a river of blood.

To which all one can really say is “Yeah, right.”

There’s plenty more plot to go before matters are resolved, if indeed they truly are. Kubrick makes interesting use of the fact that the cast double up their roles, playing members of the enemy as well as “our guys.” In particular, Harp plays the General and Coit plays his smirking Captain; Harp, as if just to confuse you about his “Reich” status, vocalizes the General in a passable imitation of Winston Churchill. Later, as the General lies dying, there’s a very effective moment when Harp-as-Corby looks down on him and clearly is struck suddenly by the recognition that the enemy officer is in effect himself. If this were less subtly done it might seem hokey, but as it is it’s a nice indicator of the way armies deliberately dehumanize their foes.

As I’ve indicated, the screenplay has its moment of risibility—although, be it noted, Sackler later won a Pulitzer and a Tony for his play The Great White Hope (1967). It isn’t helped by the fact that the dialogue was very obviously rerecorded and dubbed in. Even so, it’s quite adventurous in places. I especially liked a sequence early on when we here a chorus of overlapping voices representing the confused thoughts of the soldiers as they begin today’s trek through the forest.

Kubrick’s prior experience was as a photographer for Look, in which capacity he’d made a couple of short documentaries, so it’s hardly surprising that the cinematography is very lovely. Yet it’s sometimes not altogether fluent, as if Kubrick were more intent on creating a chain of beautiful stills than a flowing whole.

And some of his cinematographical experimentation seemed to me to fall flat, as when our guys are beating up a couple of Reichs they’ve come across: we see parts of the sequence through the eyes of the victims, watching as fists come zooming toward their faces. To be anachronistic, there’s something very Pythonesque about this effect.

The one element of the movie that lacks the talented-amateur sense of the rest is the soundtrack. This was composed and conducted by Gerald Fried, who’d worked with Kubrick on one of those documentaries and would work with him again on KILLER’S KISS (1955), The KILLING (1956) and Paths of Glory (1957). Fried went on to have a distinguished career as a soundtrack composer; he’s probably best known for his collaboration with Quincy Jones on the score for the TV miniseries Roots (1977), which brought them a Primetime Emmy Award.

The tree scene

Although she has almost no dialogue, Virginia Leith, as the Girl, has a disproportionate impact on the movie: she’s the one cast member whose performance seems fully professional (although, to be fair, the difference may have been exaggerated by the fact that, with just one word of dialogue, her performance wasn’t hamstrung by the dubbing). This was her debut movie in what was to be a surprisingly low-key career. Noir lovers may remember her especially for her spellbinding performance as Ellen Kingship opposite Robert Wagner’s psychopathic Bud Corliss in Gerd Oswald’s A KISS BEFORE DYING (1956), adapting the Ira Levin novel. She also has a minor role in the noirish Patrick Quentin adaptation Black Widow (1954) as the disillusioned artist ex-flatmate of the manipulative Nancy (Peggy Ann Garner). Leith died just recently, aged 94, in November 2019.

Kubrick’s description of Fear and Desire as a “bumbling amateur film exercise” is thus not far wide of the mark; even so, like many an indie movie since, it has a certain refreshing audacity in places that means the hour or so spent watching it is far from wasted.

Fans rushing to theaters to see Virginia Leith clad as represented in the movie’s poster were destined for disappointment.

A striking piece of science fiction neonoir, set in near-future New York City. For a couple of years now the Bentham Grid has been in place:

“The Grid takes all those things unique to you—your Social Security number, your passport, your debit and credit accounts—and links them to one thing: your DNA.”

It’s an absolute boon to the public, because no longer do you need to carry credit cards or car keys: a gentle touch will enable the Grid to take a tiny sample of your DNA, thereby identifying you with almost complete accuracy.

Samantha Strelitz as Alana Winston

Jeff Nissani as Jacob Foucault

And the Grid is a boon to law enforcement, too. There’s less crime in NYC today, Mayor Reid (Marie) boasts in an interview with journalist Alana Winston (Strelitz), than there is in Cheyenne, Wyoming.

But of course that level of safety comes at a price: New Yorkers are living in the ultimate surveillance society. It seems to be a price most of them are willing to pay.

John Di Domenico as Alan Pollard

Janice Marie as Mayor Reid

Today the Grid picks up, as she brushes against a handrail after her interview with the mayor, that Alana Winston is a plurality—i.e., that there’s more than one of her in the city. The Grid’s director, Alan Pollard (Di Domenico), sends in crack agent Jacob Foucault (Nissani), and before long both Alana Winstons, tagged Alpha and Omega, are being interrogated at HQ. Which is the “real” Alana? And which is a time-traveling visitor from the future, here to try to subvert the Grid?

Samantha Strelitz as Alpha . . .

. . . and Omega

The latter has come here because

“You’ve replaced freedom with the illusion of safety. But we’re not safe, Foucault. Neither are you.”

This seems to be a concerted effort by the future folk. As Foucault explains in voiceover,

“Alana Winston was the nineteenth plurality to be identified and captured by the Immigration Special Investigations Unit. These pluralities brought us questions rather than answers. . . . But the next plurality would change . . . everything.”

Plurality is an extraordinarily well put together short movie, and I was astonished to find that the sole accolade it has picked up has been the Audience Award as Best Short Film at the 2013 Gold Coast International Film Festival. The performances are excellent, especially from the two principals—I’ll be looking out for more work from both of them—and Jon Chen’s cinematography, giving a chilly blue cast to the outdoor scenes to convey a futurey feel to the proceedings, is a joy to behold:

Pakk Hui’s soundtrack perfectly complements the onscreen action without ever being obtrusive. All in all, Plurality is exactly what a short movie of this genre should be: a taut narrative, near perfectly rendered, that delivers its punch and then is over.

Wesli Spencer as Agent Simmel

Jeff Nissani as Jacob Foucault

Wesli Spencer offers good support as a junior member of the Immigration Special Investigations Unit, Agent Simmel, and Leah Goldman is splendid as the voice of the Grid, which she renders as a chillingly exact replica of our car’s GPS.

You can find Plurality on the excellent DUST channel on YouTube, but there’s a better copy on Vimeo.

Mida King (Dane), showgirl star of a string of Broadway hits, is a relentless gold digger: she lures men, milks them dry, then dumps them. One of the luckless men, Turk (McNally), refused to be dumped, and so Mida framed him for murder and watched him get sent up the river.

Patricia Dane as Mida King

But now, en route to New York for a reopening of his trial, Turk escapes the train on which he was being transported and, from the gloomy depths of Grand Central Station, phones Mida’s dressing room at the Harmony Theater on Broadway and informs her sweetly that he’s on his way to kill her.

Virginia Grey as Sue Custer and Van Heflin as Rocky Custer

Not unnaturally sent into a panic, Mida runs out on the second act of her current show and heads for Grand Central and the private railcar owned by her current fiancé, rich smoothie David V. Henderson (Daniels). Not so very long later, David and the longtime fiancée he dumped in Mida’s favor, Constance Furness (Parker), discover Mida’s corpse naked in the bathroom of the railcar.

But the railcar was locked from within.

And even the medical examiner can’t initially establish how Mida was killed.

Inspector Gunther (Levene) is soon on the job, and rounds up all the possible suspects. These include PI “Rocky” Custer (Heflin), Rocky’s wife/assistant Sue “Butch” Custer (Grey) and a wearisomely large assortment of others:

Stephen McNally as Turk

• Roger Furness (Hinds), the stuffy father of the jilted Constance
• Pearl Delroy (Gilchrist), maid/masseuse/confidante to the murdered woman
• Baby Delroy (Wells), Pearl’s showgirl daughter, who’s Mida’s understudy
• Frankie Ciro (Conway), proprietor of the Harmony Theatre, where Mida’s latest show is, er, showing, and who’s another of the men Mida has used, abused and discarded
• Paul Rinehart (Lynn), Mida’s ex-husband, jettisoned after a brief marriage, who now works on the control board at Grand Central and is thus, alongside Tuck, a very obvious suspect in Gunther’s eyes
• Ramon (Bohnen), a professional (bogus) psychic, Mida’s stepfather who married her mother not long before the latter died and has recently been trying to chisel money out of Mida

Betty Wells as Baby Delroy and Sam Levene as Gunther

Connie Gilchrist as Pearl Delroy

We’re given the backstory to Mida’s murder through flashbacks corresponding to the reminiscences of some of these characters, notably Pearl. Inconsistencies emerge in the characters’ accounts of their actions—all the usual stuff you’d expect in a whodunnit. The episode set in Gunther’s office is a very long one and essentially, despite various comings and goings and some attempted humor (much of the latter centered around attempts by Gunther’s dumb-cop sidekick Detective Arthur Doolin [Mitchell] to placate his girlfriend over the phone), a very static one.

The length of this sequence is symptomatic of the way the movie doesn’t seem to know quite how to tell its own story. We’re next taken, at Rocky’s instigation, to the theater for more talk, more reminiscence and more irrelevant, desultory action.

Tom Conway as Frankie Ciro

Roman Bohnen as Ramon

Finally, again at Rocky’s suggestion, everyone goes to the railroad car in Grand Central, where much the same pattern is repeated until, at last, there’s the drama of the denouement: Rocky solves the case, not only of who committed the locked-room murder but of how it was done.

This rickety three-act structure—plus a prologue—would suggest the script was originally written for the stage and then adapted for the screen, but I can find no evidence this was the case. The effect of the ponderous structure is to infuse the movie with a sort of apathetic lassitude—I found I was checking the clock often to see how long there was to go—such that even Van Heflin’s periodic efforts to inject some energy into the proceedings get nowhere, like a fine actor failing to warm up a cold audience. Virginia Grey, usually reliable, is given nothing to work with here. The only other actor who sparks is Betty Wells as the soubrette.

Cecilia Parker as Constance

Samuel S. Hinds as Roger Furness

The action in the movie’s “theater” section, such as it is—a brief and pointless brawl between Rocky and Frankie, an attempted stickup by Turk, soon defused—is so blatantly just a tacked-on device designed in hopes of reawakening our flagging interest that, ironically, it merely makes matters worse. I began wishing the movie had been made by PRC or Monogram, studios whose Z-feature offerings were very often (far from always) crapola but who usually got basics like pacing and plot development approximately right.

George Lynn as Paul Rinehart

Millard Mitchell as Detective Doolin

And, sure enough, who should turn up in an uncredited bit part but Tom Dugan, veteran Poverty Row actor, who knew all about B-movies with dumb cops in them because he was often the dumb cop. Here, though, he’s Eric “Schnelly the Mooch” Schneller, a dubious underworld figure who’s an integral part of Frankie Ciro’s alibi. He gives Schnelly the Mooch a verbal tic in a hackneyed attempt to infuse life into the part, but it flops.

Mark Daniels as David

Every now and then a bit of dialogue or a piece of microplotting transcends the drabness of the rest. For example, Pearl explains that the murdered woman, who from the start of her career was totally open to intimates like Pearl about her gold-digging intentions, renamed herself Mida King because of the legend of King Midas. And, adds Pearl:

“She sure had the golden touch. She put the golden touch on men.”