Ed Gorman's Blog, page 109

Remembering my friend Howard Browne

Howard BrowneEditor's Note:
Thanks to Howard Browne's flippant remark upon reading Richard Shaver's "letter to the editor" at Amazing Stories, Ray Palmer dove into that fabled trash basket to retrieve it. Thus began the Shaver Mystery.


Copyright 1999 Newspaper Publishing PLC
The Independent (London)
November 15, 1999By Jack Adrian
HOWARD BROWNE was that unusual beast, a writer who not only succeeded on both sides of the editorial desk, but who was equally at home in two quite disparate genres, hardboiled detective fiction and SF/ Fantasy. His fantasy, in particular, was of the swashbuckling kind, a million miles - or rather, bowing to the genre, a million light years - from his tales of mean streets, mainly written under his pseudonym John Evans (one of many: others included Lawrence Chandler and Lee Francis).
He successfully jumped media, too, as well as genres, turning, when the pulp magazines began to wither and die in the early 1950s, from writing punchy, riveting prose to creating compelling screen- and tele-plays. And, like all able fictioneers, even at an advanced age he could still turn disaster into triumph - two rejected screenplays, "The Violent World of Jake Lingle" and "A Bowl of Cherries", upon which he had lavished much care and attention, he transformed into a brace of fine late (very late: he was then in his mid-eighties) novels, Pork City (1988) and the hilarious Scotch on the Rocks (1991).
Howard Browne was born in Omaha, Nebraska, the son of a baker, in 1908, and began his education in Lincoln, Nebraska. However, he dropped out of high school and rode the rails (i.e., hid in the boxcar) to Chicago to seek his fortune. He worked as a legman, or stringer, for a local newspaper before, at the age of 21, securing a post as department-store credit manager, a position he held for over a decade and which gave him an unparalleled insight into the psyche of his fellow men.


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Richard Matheson TELEFILM TIME MACHINE: THE STRANGER WITHIN (1974) Movie Morlocks

TELEFILM TIME MACHINE: THE STRANGER WITHIN (1974)Posted by Kimberly Lindbergs on June 27, 2013 The acclaimed horror and science fiction author, Richard Matheson passed away earlier this week at age 87 and in appreciation of his work I decided to devote my latest installment of Telefilm Time Machine to THE STRANGER WITHIN (1974). This noteworthy ABC Movie of the Week was based on one of Matheson’s original short stories (Mother by Protest aka Trespass), which was first published in 1954. Matheson was also responsible for the script of THE STRANGER WITHIN and even though it might not have the strong cult following of some of his other popular telefilms such as THE NIGHT STALKER (1972) and TRILOGY OF TERROR (1975), it does have its own kind of eerie charm.

This sparse drama unfolds in the barren hills of Los Angeles, California at the home of Ann and David Collins (Barbara Eden and George Grizzard). Ann is an artist and David is a teacher who returns from work one afternoon to find his wife waiting for him with some unexpected news. We soon discover that Ann’s managed to become pregnant even though her husband had a vasectomy three years earlier. How did Ann become pregnant? Why is she suddenly devouring salt and drinking large amounts of black coffee? And when did she become immune to the cold and gain the ability the speed read text books? These are just a few of the odd questions that begin to plague the couple as they try and navigate the strange situation they’ve found themselves in. Things are further complicated by Ann’s medical history, which suggests that the pregnancy could kill her but when her doctor (Nehemiah Persoff) recommends she gets an abortion, the medical procedure is continually delayed due to Ann’s recurring health problems. The couple eventually turns to friends (Joyce Van Patten and David Doyle) who suggest Ann should undergo hypnosis in an effort to find out more about her unusual condition but this only seems to complicate matters. As Ann’s behavior becomes increasingly erratic her marriage begins to suffer but she insists on giving birth to her fatherless child regardless of the consequences.
At first glance THE STRANGER WITHIN seems to be just another twisted take on ROSEMARY’S BABY(1968), which generated plenty of knockoffs and copycats. But Richard Matheson penned his strange tale of parenthood fears, suburban paranoia and a marriage on the rocks 13 years before Ira Levin published his best-selling novel that was the basis of Polanski’s film. If we’re going to make comparisons it’s best to acknowledge that Levin was probably inspired by Matheson’s unmatched ability to take familiar settings and situations and turn them upside down while exposing the cold, dark, terrified and tender underbelly of the American psyche.
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John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13 from Movie Morlocks

Ed here: I'm one of those John Carpenter fans who devoutly wish his career had stayed on track. He directed four or five of the most exciting, darkest B movies of his generation, movies that will last forever. Precinct 13 is one of them. I haven't seen the Ethan Hawke version. The trailer put me off so much I gave it a pass. Carpenter's original I've seen at least six times and will watch it again several more times.

From Movie Morlocks Posted by R. Emmet Sweeney on November 19, 2013

Carpenter’s first feature, the sci-fi comedy Dark Star, had started as a student film project during his time at USC, completed in stops and starts when money became available. Assault marked his professional debut, with a full cast and crew to go along with producer demands. The reported budget was $100,000, and he had twenty-five days to shoot it in. Originally titled “The Anderson Alamo”,  Assault was his homage to Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo (1959). Unable to afford an editor, Carpenter cut the film himself, using the pseudonym “John T. Chance”, the name of John Wayne’s character in the Hawks Western. Without the resources or the acting talent at Hawks’ disposal, Carpenter reduces the earlier film’s leisurely story to its central siege sequence. John Wayne, , Dean Martin, Walter Brennan and Ricky Nelson hole up in the one-horse town’s prison to guard inmate Claude Akins, whose land-grabbing brother has sent his hired goons to break him out. The prison interior becomes a proving ground, where Martin battles his alcoholism and Nelson enters maturity, and Carpenter uses Precinct 13 to similar effect. Outside of the station house all the characters are ciphers, while inside their inner lives begin to leak out.The four narrative strands are: Ethan Bishop (Austin Stoker) is a rookie cop sent to oversee the shutdown of Precinct 13; a local gang, who has stolen a large cache of weapons, stalks through the town; a father and daughter innocently prepare for their day; three convicts are being transported through town on a bus. A sick prisoner lands the bus at Precinct 13, while the father is chased in as well, as the only eyewitness to a cold-blooded murder. Shot in various locations in Los Angeles, from Watts to North Hollywood, the exteriors are wincingly bright, exposing vice in every shot. A bulbous warden lands a blow at cuffed inmate Napoleon Wilson (Darwin Joston) before he is transferred, while the silent gang commits random acts of violence. Anarchy is in the air.
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New Books: GRIND JOINT by Dana King

What I wanted to do in Grind Joint is to write a story about how shortsightedness, and an unwillingness to consider unintended consequences, can make a bad situation worse. Penns River, Pennsylvania, has been economically depressed since the mills closed in the early 70s. Improvements in Pittsburgh never seem to make it as far as Penns River.
Twenty-First Century America has an answer to local economic woes: build a casino. They’re licenses to print money. They may be for the casino, and they may do well for jurisdictions with the savvy to negotiate a good deal with the owners. Penns River is in over its head, even more so when a Russian mobster with a connection to a casino silent partner wants to take over the “ancillary” businesses from the local crime operation: loan sharking, prostitution, drugs as needed.
Penns River isn’t equipped to handle this. The chief of police is good for the small town this used to be; not for a possible mob war. Detective Ben “Doc” Dougherty has been around more: nine years as an MP, with a tour early on in Iraq. Doc turned down better offers elsewhere to return to Penns River for a simple reason: it’s home. He has a proprietary interest in the town and a harder core than the Russians expect. His cousin, Nick Forte, is a private investigator from Chicago, who has returned to Penn River to visit his sick mother. Nick has a harder core than Doc expects.
Grind Joint is a story of how thin the line is between what we think of as normal, and what’s out of control. People who live in small towns think the danger and corruption they read about and see on the news is far from them, when, in fact, it’s one bad decision—one bad break—away. What we see as Baltimore, South Central LA, or, going farther back, Cabrini Green or Bed-Stuy can show up anywhere. Crime seeks loose money, and is drawn to it like ants to a picnic.
As H.L. Mencken said in the quote I used as the epigraph: There is always an easy solution to every human problem--neat, plausible, and wrong. That’s true on both sides of the law in Grind Joint.


Grind Joint, with an introduction by Charlie Stella, was released November 16 by Stark House Press.

One of my favorite pieces by Harry Whitington King of The Paperbackst

My writing life has been a blast. With all the fallout, fragmentation, frustration and free falls known to man I've careened around on heights I never dreamed of, and simmered in pits I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy, and survived. Maybe it's just that I forget quickly and forgive easily.Looking back, I find it perhaps less than total extravaganza. It all seemed so great at the time: Doing what I wanted to do, living as I wanted to live, having the time of my life and being paid for it. I worked hard; nobody ever wrote and sold 150-odd novels in 20 years without working hard, but I loved what I was doing. I gave my level best on absolutely every piece of my published work, for one simple reason: I knew of no other way to sell what I wrote.I've known some wonderful people in the writing racket. For some years, I lived in a loose-knit community of real, hard working writers – Day Keene, Gil Brewer, Bill Brannon, Talmage Powell, Robert Turner, Fred C. Davis. Out in Hollywood, Sid Fleischman and Mauri Grashin are friends, as were Fred C. Fox, Elwood Ullman. And via mail, Frank Gruber, Carl Hodges, Milt Ozaki. Death flailed that company of gallants – Gruber, Fox, Hodges, Ullman, Keene, Gil Brewer, Brannon, Fred Davis – all gone. Talmage Powell's inimitable stories appear in anthologies and magazines and, as of this writing, as I did in the wild and wonderful fifties when we all were young and pretty, I persist.The fifties. The magic. Time of change. Crisis. The end of the pulps and the birth of the "original" paperbacks. In recent years critic-writers, Bill Pronzini, Christopher Geist, Michael Barson and Bill Crider have kindly referred to me as king of the paperback pioneers. I didn't realize at the time I was a pioneer and I certainly didn't set out to be "king" of anything. I needed a fast-reporting, fast-paying market; the paperbacks provided this. I wrote 8, 10, 12 hours a day. Paperback editors bought and paid swiftly. We were good for each other.The reason why I wrote and sold more than almost everybody else was that I was living on the edge of ruin, and I was naive.James Cagney once said, "It's the naive people who become the true artists. First, they have to be naive enough to believe in themselves. Then, they must be naive enough to keep on going, using their talent, in spite of any kind of discouragement or doublecross. Pay no attention to setbacks, not even know a setback when it smites. Money doesn't concern them."Money concerned me. I'd never have dared become a full-time writer if I'd known in the forties that the critically acclaimed "authors" I admired from afar were college professors, ad men, lawyers, reporters, dogcatchers or politicians by day. Fewer than 500 people in the U.S. make their living from full-time freelance writing. Since 1948, I've been precariously, one of fortune's 500. I persist.Because, in 1948, 1 didn't know any better, I quit my government job of 16 years and leaped in, fully clothed, where only fools treaded water. I had a wife, two children and gimlet-eyed creditors standing at my shoulder. I had to write and I had to sell.At that precise moment, the publishing world was being turned upside down by the Fawcett Publishing Company. When they lost a huge reprint paperback distribution client, they decided to do the unheard of, the insane. They published original novels at $.25 a copy. Print order on each title: 250,000. They paid writers not by royalty but on print order. Foreign, movie and TV rights remained with the writer. They were insane. They were my kind of people. Bill Lengel, Dick Carroll and later, Walter Fultz. Elegant men. One hell of a publishing company.for the rest go here:
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The Joseph Losey version of "M" by John M. Whalen

Last Saturday my friend, Fred Blosser, and I went to the American Film Institute’s Silver Theater in Maryland to see a movie I never knew existed. In 1951 director Joseph Losey filmed a remake of the famous Fritz Lang movie, “M.” Everybody knows about Lang’s version. It’s hailed as a cinematic masterpiece of German Expressionism. But hardly anybody has heard of Losey’s version, and even fewer people have ever seen it.As you know, the original “M” starred Peter Lorre as a creep who prowls the streets of a German city at night killing little girls. The story is about how the police can’t seem to catch the guy even though they tear up every seedy, sinister place they think he might be hiding out. This causes the criminal element a lot of concern, since the police raids are having a negative impact on all their rackets. To end this situation the criminal element decides to team up and find Peter Lorre and turn him over to the cops so they can have some peace and quiet.Losey’s version updates the story to 1951 Los Angeles. The movie was filmed on location in the seedy Bunker Hill section of Los Angeles, and has more daytime scenes than Lang’s noirish presentation, but it still retains the moody atmosphere of a good noir movie. Losey added a new character to the story, an alcoholic lawyer who works for the mob. Played by Luther Adler, he serves a crucial function in the story, forced to serve as the murderer’s attorney in a mock trial held by the criminals.In place of Peter Lorre, this version stars character actor David Wayne as the killer, and he delivers an amazing performance, particularly in the climactic mock trial scene. In fact everyone in the film, including Martin Gable as the top mobster, Howard De Silva as the cop in charge of the case, and Raymond Burr as one of Gable’s henchmen, turn in incredibly realistic performances.  As does the city of Los Angeles itself.It’s too bad this film got lost in the shuffle. There were two reasons why that happened. First was the fact that Fritz Lang hated it, and most critics at the time dismissed it as a cheap ripoff. The other was that Losey was one of those filmmakers who got in trouble with Joe McCarthy and the House Unamerican Activities Committee. Shortly after the film was finished he was handed a subcommittee subpoena and fled the country to London, where he remained until his death at age 75.As for David Wayne, he might best be remembered for his role of Inspector Richard Queen on the 1970s TV series, Ellery Queen. But what I most remember him for is a part he played in the “Aren’t You Surprised to See Me.” episode of the Route 66 TV series. In this story, filmed in 1962, Tod and Buz the two guys in the Corvette are in Dallas, Tex., when they have the bad luck to run into Caine, a man who considers himself the Avenging Angel of the Almighty. He goes from town to town, captures someone and tells the police he will kill that person unless the city can go for 24 hours without committing a sin. In Dallas he takes Buz hostage. Wayne gave a chilling performance as the maniac killer. Seeing him in M reminded me very much of that route 66 story. Makes me wonder if Stirling Silliphant, creator of the show and writer of that episode, had ever seen Wayne’s version of M. I wouldn’t be surprised. Silliphant was a very eclectic personality.So far the 1951 M is not available for viewing anywhere but in AFI theaters, part of a series of LA crime films they’re showing. It it comes to your town, check it out.

Jake Hinkson on why the western version of "High Sierra" is better than Bogie's

Joel McCrea and COLORADO TERRITORY (1949)


















When Raoul Walsh remade his 1940 gangster flick HIGH SIERRA almost twenty years later as the Western COLORADO TERRITORY, he improved on the story. Today, the Western isn't as well known as the gangster story. I suspect this has everything to do with the fact that the original movie starred Humphrey Bogart, while the remake starred Joel McCrea.
Today, Bogart is one of only a handful of golden age movie stars still remembered by the public at large. We like to talk about stars as immortal figures, but the truth is that we're only now entering the second century of filmmaking and most of us have already forgotten most of the last century's biggest stars. Don't believe me? Take a poll of the people under thirty and ask them if they know who Bette Davis was. Ask them if they can name a Gary Cooper movie. Go back further. How many can have any clue who Pearl White was?
This isn't a lament. Nor is it a "what's wrong with these kids these days." Movie stardom is, relatively speaking, still a new phenomenon. Maybe this is just what happens to movie stars. Nobody really gets to live forever.



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DETOUR’S DETOUR Posted by David Kalat from Movie Morlocks long but excellent

DETOUR’S DETOUR Posted by David Kalat on March 10, 2012Once upon a time there was a motion picture called Detour (1945). It was a small, wiry thing, gristle and bone. It would have been the runt of any litter, except for the sad fact that it came from a litter of runts, movies made for pocket change and thrust out into the world without support, left to fend for themselves in a harsh and competitive environment.What Detour lacked in polish and graces it made up for with a steely constitution. It was made of stern stuff, this angry little poem written in the language of failure and defeat. Its flickering frames contain a story of an aspiring artist whose talent would seem to merit one kind of fate, glorious and celebratory, but whose life is shuttled down a cruel detour to a very different destination. He begins his adventure dreaming of a new life in a sunnier world, and finishes up lost and lonely, an exile.The grubby little picture flailed its way across movie screens in 1945 with no greater or lesser prominence than any of its impoverished brethren. It was a B-movie, and such things have no shelf life. Detour, however, did. More than a half-century later, film critics and fans were still falling over themselves to shower it with accolades. In movie parlance, Detour had “legs.”It was fashioned by a man named Edgar G. Ulmer, who like some Jewish mystic of myth had a habit of pulling clay from the ground and giving it his special imprint such that it could come to eternal life, a Golem. Detour was not Ulmer’s only bid to cinema immortality, but it was his most distinctive and memorable. His own life had been touched by such detours: an artist of no small ability whose destiny was redirected, stunted, misfired. For the pointy-heads who took up Detouras their cause-celebre, the film and its maker were a recursive Moebius strip, art and artist endlessly reflected in one another.Ulmer has been called many things—King of the B’s is a common title. But the nickname says more about his circumstances than his role within them. Look past the fact that he made low-budget programmers, look only at the films themselves, and we can see he was heir to the grand traditions of German Expressionism, and a direct precursor and inspiration to the avatars of the French New Wave. That he worked in American genre pictures, mercenary as mercenary gets, makes his legacy that much more important: here was living proof that the world of European high-art cinema and American commercial moviemaking were not mutually exclusive.Or so film historical conventional wisdom would have you believe. Real life is never so tidy.

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GRIND JOINT LAUNCHES SATURDAY!

 
Speaking of books, amici, Saturday is the official book launch of Dana King’s,  Grind Joint . If you can’t make it to the launch itself, order it pronto because this one really sings. It’s catching high praise from authors like Jack Getze and John McFetridge (two great writers themselves) …
Dana KingSaturday, November 16, 2013Coffee & Crime author breakfast at 10 am
Dana King grew up in Lower Burrell, about ten miles from Oakmont. The fictional town of Penns River, where Grind Joint takes place, is an amalgam of Lower Burrell, New Kensington, and Arnold, so there is a local angle in inviting this author to come to Mystery Lovers to present Grind Joint, his brand new Mafia crime thriller.
A new casino is opening in the rural town of Penns River, Pennsylvania but just where the money is coming from no one really knows. When the body of a drug dealer is dumped on the casino steps shortly before its grand opening, Detectives Ben “Doc” Dougherty and Willie Grabek have figure out not only who’s behind the murder, but what it means. Grind Joint is a mesmerizing mix of betrayal, police action, small town politics, sudden violence and the lives of the people of a town just trying to look after itself.
Mystery Lovers loves to take a gamble on introducing new authors to our customers. You can bet this one will be a local winner. To quote the late Leighton Gage: You’re going to be surprised and delighted. It’s a great book, and I recommend it unreservedly.
Join us for coffee, pastries and conversation with Dana King. The event is free, but reservations are suggested. Call us at 412-828-4877, or use our Contact Form to let us know you are coming.

Forgotten Books: The Garner Files by James Garner with Jon Winokur

I wish I hadn't read this book.
   I first saw James Garner the night "Maverick" appeared on a Sunday night way back in 1956. I've been a fan of his acting ever since.
   To repeat I wish I hadn't read this book; even more I wish he hadn't WRITTEN it.
   I don't know who Jon Winokur is but he has served Garner poorly. I'm not naive enough to believe that the Garner of movie and TV fame is the Garner of reality. But Winokur (or Garner who did after all have the last word) should have given us an impression beyond that of an inexplicably angry man who carries so many grudges it's amazing he can stand upright.
   The most irritating issue in the entire (and frequently irritating book) is Garner's treatment of Roy Huggins.  Now I have mixed feelings about Huggins as a man. He named names to House UnAmerican Activities so he could keep his own enviable career going. I've written before that I don't know what I would've done in the same circumstances. Fifty-fifty I would've named names.
   That said Roy Huggins is one of the giants of television. He created among other shows "Maverick," "The Fugitive" and "The Rockford Files." Note that "Maverick"created Garner's stardom and "Rockford" helped sustain it.  He quotes  Huggins' line: "I love Jim Garner and he hates me." Garner agrees and then bitterly brushes Huggins off.
   Garner is nice to film and tv crews, supports liberal causes, loves his wife and daughter, appreciates what some writers, directors and actors have done for him. I believe all this. I don't think he's this terrible guy.
   But all the people he's punched or wishes he'd punched (we get it he's a macho man), all the people he thinks have ripped him off or let him down, all the people he mocks or belittles...you know some of this would add texture and spice to the average Hollywood autobiography. But here the tone of these incidents and opinions quickly begin to make you wonder why, after all his success, he's still so troubled by a life he's clearly earned and deserves...but a life that leaves him singularly unsatisfied.
   The other negative is that Winokur speeds through numerous moments that could easily have been expanded and developed. If they had been there wouldn't have been so much room left for all the bitching and misery.