Andrew Cartmel's Blog, page 4
July 12, 2020
The Tall T by Elmore Leonard and Burt Kennedy

But I love a good Western as much as any other genre, especially when it's as well written and well directed as this little low-budget gem from cult film maker Budd Boetticher (pronounced "Betticker").
Budd Boetticher did an excellent job directing The Tall T but the movie's crucial strengths lie in a skilful screenplay by Burt Kennedy based on a strong and efficient little short story by Elmore Leonard.


Basically The Tall T is the story of some bad men — very bad men — who want to rob a stage coach. But they get the wrong stage coach.


They're doomed because Brennan is a classic Elmore Leonard hero — intelligent, practical and ruthless.



He was, however, quite dismissive of the material that Burt Kennedy added to the screenplay, padding his original story: "it takes about 20 minutes to get going."


But when he gets back on that ill fated stage coach he finds that Usher's gang have murdered the station master and his little boy and put their bodies "down the well".

The original Elmore Leonard tale builds up a powerful feeling of dread as we wait for Usher's gang to execute Brennan and Doretta — they're going to kill them even if they get the ransom.

Of course, Brennan manages to turn the table on their captors, and in a surprisingly ferocious fashion. He gets a shotgun under the chin of one and pulls the trigger... "Don't look at him," he tells Doretta.

This is one of half a dozen Budd Boetticher Westerns that are said to be classics. If any of the others are as good as this, I'll report back to you.
(Image credits: All from IMDB.)
Published on July 12, 2020 02:00
July 5, 2020
Don't Breathe by Alvarez & Sayagues

Don't Breathe is often described as a horror film. Indeed, the Blu-ray cover trumpets it as the "best American horror film in twenty years." But I wouldn't call it a horror film at all...
I'd call it a suspense thriller. For a start, there's nothing supernatural about it. It's the story of three young burglars in Detroit.
And that crumbling, semi-abandoned, post-industrial city — a sprawling and eerie urban ghost town — is one of the stars of the movie.

The highly talented Fede Alvarez comes from Uruguay. He made his feature debut with the Evil Dead remake and would go on to direct The Girl in the Spider's Web, another movie I admire.

Incidentally, 'Money' is a bad choice of name... at a crucial point in the movie Rocky sends a text about him and we don't know what the fuck she's talking about.

Anyway, Money is a scumbag criminal who is on this robbery spree for the money. (What else?)
So is Rocky — but with her, the money is a means to an end. She's a single mother and wants to escape to a better life for her and her daughter.

Alex is providing them with entry codes for the alarm systems of houses, purloined from his dad's security company.
He is nominally in it for the money, too. But actually he's in love with Rocky, who is going out with Money, the scumbag.

If I tell you that the blind man is actually a tough and resourceful war vet, then you may be able to see how this home invasion could go badly wrong.

But thanks to the cleverness of Alvarez and Sayagues, this is completely inverted.

Don't Breathe is expertly written and beautifully shot, with cinematography by Pedro Luque and music by Roque Baños, both also Alvarez regulars.

Don't Breathe is a meticulously constructed roller coaster ride and when it finally concludes, leaving the sweat of fear to dry on us, all the loose ends seem neatly tied up.

But in fact one is in production. And, since it is co-written by Alvarez and Sayagues again — with Sayagues moving up to director this time — I would suggest you make a note of it.
If it's half as good as Don't Breathe it will still be on my must-see list.
(Image credits: All are from IMDB where the superb stills are by the aforementioned Gordon Timpen of the Society of Motion Picture Still Photographers, © 2016 CTMG, Inc. All rights reserved. And all images are the property of Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc. and are for promotional use only. Okay, dude?)
Published on July 05, 2020 02:00
June 28, 2020
The Turquoise Lament by John D. MacDonald

McGee is a kind of unofficial private detective who specialises in attempting to recover large sums of money which have been stolen or otherwise taken from the victim by unscrupulous means.
The deal is, if he's successful, he keeps half the loot and the other half goes back to his client. As he points out — half is a lot better than nothing.

The book has the fabulous, densely organised readability of Thomas Harris's Cari Mora and it is full of vivid interest on every page.

I often compare MacDonald to Harris. They are both writers who, with these books, are at the absolute peak of their craft.
The Turquoise Lament is gorgeously written, suspenseful as hell and terrifically funny.

It begins with McGee, summoned by a damsel in distress, jetting to Honolulu and glimpsing "a single tilted vista of Los Angeles in morning light" as he takes off in his connecting flight.
The purloined booty in this particular adventure is literally sunken treasure — pirate gold. And the methodical procedure of a modern undersea treasure hunt is masterfully evoked.

Like his creator, McGee is respectful of wildlife and very prescient in his environmental concerns. He notes that, "The eerie savage predators of the deep have gotten a very bad press."

The story of the treasure hunt is told with bravura economy. Here is the first sentence of Chapter 3: "Yes, we found the cannon and we found the gold."

Don't worry, though, there is more treasure under the ocean. And the huge wealth at stake makes a young woman the target of a charming, manipulative — and utterly murderous — psychopath.
Which is where McGee comes in.

In the frantic run up to Christmas in Florida: "Counter clerks radiate an exhausted patience leavened with icy flashes of total hate."

Another great virtue of the Travis McGee novels is that McGee is not a solo act. MacDonald had the great good sense to equip him with a comrade in arms, a brilliant semi-retired economist called Meyer (we never find out his other name).

Meyer is much more than a Watson to McGee's Holmes. Their partnership is more like Aubrey and Maturin in the brilliant seafaring novels of Patrick O'Brian.
This friendship is a thing of beauty and adds a huge extra dimension to these books. The McGee stories are never more compelling than when Meyer is in peril, as he is here.

He is memorably referred to at various times as "a very cold and strange entity", "an amiable maniac", a "jolly sociopath" and a "monstrous... non-person."
In the clutches of such a formidable villain, our heroine is up against overwhelming odds and appears certainly doomed.
But that very cold and strange entity and amiable maniac is, in turn, up against one Travis McGee...
So suffice to say this jolly sociopath and monstrous non-person gets what's coming to him.

I can scarcly convey to you just what an effortless pleasure it was to read.
(Image credits: The $1.25 Fawcett paperback and the rather rubbish British Hale hardcover (leg and gun) are scanned by me from my own library. The other covers are from Good Reads, with these exceptions — the Pan cover is from the Cotswold Library on eBay. The German paperback is from Mord Lust. The German three volume compendium — "blaue krimis" is from Book Looker.)
Published on June 28, 2020 02:00
June 21, 2020
The Dragon Masters by Jack Vance

Vance also wrote fantasy — terrific, distinctive fantasy: Dungeons and Dragons drew heavily on his writings. But, despite its title, The Dragon Masters is solidly science fiction.
It's set on the planet Aerlith, settled by humans in the distant future, and hinges on their periodic conflict with an alien race called the grephs (or the Basics — we'll explain that in a minute) from the star system Coralyne.
It's periodic because it takes place whenever Coralyne's orbit brings it close enough to Aerlith to enable an attack.

The grephs have an overwhelming technological advantage and raid and enslave the humans at will, carrying them back to their home planet and breeding them into different specialised forms to serve their warlike ends — Weaponeers, Heavy Troopers, Giants.

But, eleven generations before this story begins, the humans win a victory that enables them to capture a signifcant group of the grephs, or Basics.
"Basics" because the humans then proceed to turn the tables on their enemies and selectively breed them into a variety of forms, developed from this basic orginal. These new creatures are called dragons, and they are bred to be used in battle.

"Termagants darted into the lead, followed by silken Striding Monsters and the heavier Long-horned Murderers, their fantastic chest-spikes tipped with steel. Behind came the ponderous Juggers, grunting, gurgling, teeth clashing together with the vibration of their steps.

The genetic manipulation makes this story solidly science fiction, while the symmetry of the conflict gives it a certain savage, poetic irony.

And he makes the alien seem real by the confident use of exotic terminology, much of it invented but much of it also real, abstruse and archaic — like 'sacredote' (literally, a priest) or 'curvet' (a series of jumps on the hind legs performed by a horse — or in this case, a creature called a Spider).



"With silken ferocity the Blue Horrors ripped them apart.. What a terrible day... What awful events; what a great victory."
It was a great pleasure to discover that this novel still sparks that same sense of wonder that made me love science fiction in the first place.
(Image credits: The covers are all from the very useful Goodreads; I was pleased to be able to avoid most of the more sword-and-sorcery flavoured ones.)
Published on June 21, 2020 02:53
June 14, 2020
Red Dragon (the script) by Ted Tally and Thomas Harris

Harris has fared surprisingly well with screen adaptations of his books, not least because he had the good fortune to have two of his films scripted by the American playwright Ted Tally.

One reason Ted Tally's movies are so good is that his first instinct is to stick as closely as possible to the source material — an unusual attitude in the world of movies.


But they did work, and so brilliantly that Silence of the Lambs was a massive hit as a film, and Ted Tally won the Oscar that year for best adapated screenplay.
Unfortunately, no one saw fit to publish this award winning script in book form. (Maybe they'd like to rectify that error now...)


Not Ted Tally's Red Dragon. It reads like a dream. I genuinely couldn't put it down. I found it as a dark, scary and profoundly compelling as Thomas Harris's original novel.


Therefore Tally provides a brief prologue giving us a taste of the cannibal psychiatrist's schtick...


In between, Tally gives us an exquisitely riveting plot, told in clear, concise, dramatic scenes with first rate dialogue.

And he also adds his own beautiful touches... At the bad guy's gothic mansion of a house, there's a veranda where "ancient rocking chairs stir in the breeze, ridden by ghosts."
Later, when that house is torched and becomes an inferno Tally describes, "The rocking chairs on the porch, moving eerily as flames take them. One last ride for the ghosts."

What a pleasure to report that this screenplay based on it is a masterpiece in its own right.
(Image credits: The front and back cover of the script book are scans by me of my own copy. The other images are from IMDB, where most of the photos are by Glen Wilson and copyright either Glen Wilson or Universal Studios.)
Published on June 14, 2020 11:02
June 7, 2020
The Big Goodbye by Sam Wasson

Okay, so that's not true... I immediately rushed to ask my sister to buy it for me, for my birthday.
The book is called The Big Goodbye, a title that invokes the novels of Raymond Chandler, as well as summarising one of the major themes of this impressive study...

To wit, that the era when Chinatown was made — the 1970s — was a high point in the history of Hollywood film making, and a quality of work was achieved then that has never been rivalled since.

Sam Wasson was familiar to me through the splendid TV series Fosse/Verdon, which was based on his biography of Bob Fosse.

Wasson has done a thorough and admirable job of research.

And he's ferreted out facts that have added immensely to my appreciation of the film.

She suggested including the lovely, lilting 1937 song 'I Can't Get Started' by Bunny Berigan. This worked beautifully to evoke the period of the film.

To my delight Wasson even devotes a section of the book to Uan Rasey, the virtuoso session trumpeter who plays so unforgettably on the soundtrack.
And of course he also discusses Jerry Goldsmith, whose stellar music is no small part of Chinatown's greatness.


Robert Towne is one of the great screenwriters and I admire him considerably.
However, instead of his single credit on Chinatown, there should be three names on the movie.

Here is a website discussing "The memorable ending of the classic 1974 movie Chinatown, written by Robert Towne."

More than that, Roman Polanski was responsible for taking Towne's brilliant but vastly overlength and unfocused screenplay and hewing it down so that it unwaveringly followed private detective Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) and his story.

Taylor who did extensive, unacknowledged work on not only Chinatown, but virtually every screenplay Towne wrote.

If you haven't seen Chinatown, I'd suggest you do so immediately.

Or get someone else to buy it for your birthday.
(Image credits: The cover is from Amazon UK — fair enough, since that is where we bought the book. The other images are all taken from IMDB, where they also have a fine selection of posters I may well draw on when I write about the film itself.)
Published on June 07, 2020 03:55
May 31, 2020
A Touch of Death by Charles Williams

He specialises in compelling stories that don't fit into the usual recognisable templates of the crime novel.
And part of his approach is to propel his protagonist into a lethal situation which he, and the reader, don't fully understand.

Surviving the story will require working out what is going on and unravelling the mystery.
However, in A Touch of Death (also published as Mix Me a Redhead) it has to be said that understanding the situation is not going to be much help to our hero...
Lee Scarborough is an ex-college football player down on his luck. Like Jerry Forbes in The Concrete Flamingo he meets a beautiful woman who decides she has a place for him in a crooked scheme of hers.

Madelon is "Brunette, with a magnolia complexion and big, smoky-looking eyes."

Diana James enlists our hero's help in a plot which is, essentially, to rob a thief. She tells Lee that Madelon Butler murdered her husband and got away with it.


So Diana sends Lee to steal it. What could possibly go wrong?

And Lee is crawling along the ground trying to avoid being shot by a mysterious sniper: "I could feel the cross hairs of a telescope sight crawling all over me like long-legged spiders."

Chiefly these consist of some unconvincing hardboiled dialogue from our hero ("I like my women warm to the touch. And not quite so deadly with a gun").

When Madelon makes a reference to Homer's Odyssey and Lee doesn't get it, she says, "I guess they haven't made a comic book of it yet."

He finds himself assaulting a cop, dodging police road blocks, and generally feeling such tension that he's afraid his "head would blow up like a hand grenade."
And there is no escape from the situation. "This thing was like a swamp. Every time you moved, you sank into it a little deeper."

This is the fifth novel I've read by Charles Williams and I am impressed at how different all of them have been.
I can't wait for the next one.

Published on May 31, 2020 06:09
May 24, 2020
Dial M for Murder by Frederick Knott

Because while it's true this may not be great Hitchcock, Dial M for Murder is a great stage play — a masterpiece of suspense and surprise — and Hitchcock did a fine job of adapting it to the screen.
The play was written by Frederick Knott and it is considered one of the all time great stage thrillers, listed by Ira Levin in Deathtrap as being up there with Sleuth and Angel Street (aka Gaslight) — and, I should add, Deathtrap itself.

Not to mention Agatha Christie's masterpieces, The Mousetrap, Witness for the Prosecution and Go Back for Murder.
I've been making a study of these classic theatrical thrillers and Dial M for Murder was next on my list. I'm looking to get a copy to read, but meanwhile I wanted to see Hitchcock's film, so I ordered the Blu-Ray.

But, more importantly, it had a very useful documentary detailing the origins of Dial M for Murder.
I'd always thought it was an American play and had originated on Broadway. Far from it...

Because Dial M for Murder began its long life as television play on the BBC TV anthology series Sunday Night Theatre in March 1952.

Within three months of appearing on television, the play was on stage at the Westminster Theatre in London — and four months later it was on Broadway.

Nice going, Frederick Knott. (And screw you, Seven Stupid Producers.)
It's difficult to discuss too much about Dial M without revealing the fantastic, twisting snake's-nest of a plot devised by Knott (a perfect name for this writer, by the way).

But very little is what it seems as Frederick Knott unleashes a serpentine series of plot twists involving blackmail, murder, a deadly phone call, a crucially important housekey and a miscarriage of justice...

Or to put it differently, it's the story of a perfect murder which almost succeeds...
When I wasn't squirming with suspense, I was laughing out loud with pleasure.

And Hitchcock's approach with successful plays was to do the very minimum to make them filmic... essentially he wanted to preserve the nature of the stage experience.
A very smart move, because Frederick Knott's play is simply brilliant.

Knott would go on to write very little else — notably two other suspense thrillers for the stage, Write Me a Murder in 1960 and Wait Until Dark, another massive hit, in 1966.
I remember the movie of Wait Until Dark scaring the heck out of me on TV when I was a little kid.
I may have to watch that next.

Published on May 24, 2020 02:00
May 17, 2020
Twilight by Robert Benton and Richard Russo

My approach is to listen to interviews with directors who particularly interest me, archived on the DGA's invaluable website. These are often terrific, deep-dive interviews that last for several fascinating hours.
It's an approach that is leading to the discovery of some real gems, none of them more wonderful than this 1998 detective thriller by Robert Benton.

And then went on to direct Bad Company, The Late Show, Kramer vs Kramer, Places in the Heart...
And Twilight. Not to be confused with a series of teen-favourite movies about vampires and werewolves moping around the Pacific Northwest.

The novelist did some work on that script and Benton enjoyed collaborating so much that he sat down with Russo to dream up a private eye tale set in Los Angeles, a sort of modern day film noir.

I don't know how I missed Twilight when it came out, but it's an absolute beauty of a movie. Dark, sardonic, funny and thrilling, it pushes all the right buttons.
And it begins with one of the most perfectly formed brief anecdotes I've ever seen in a film.


Jeff is not very pleased to have their idyll interrupted by a middle aged detective. There's a scuffle, a gun goes off and...
Well, suffice to say, the entire premise of the ensuing story is set up here, beautifully and efficiently.


And not just financially. Jack and Catherine are out of their depth in a rising tide of blackmail and murder. And it's Harry's task to save them.

In no time at all Harry is being shot at and arrested, as he tries to work out who is doing what to whom and why.

Twilight may not have the stature of say, Chinatown or Night Moves. But it's certainly worth including in the same discussion.

In fact, I think I'll go and listen to Bernstein's music now.
(Image credits: The white English language poster is from Imp Awards. The black and white photo of Newman with the gun is by Lorey Sebastian and, along with the black poster is from IMDB. Reese Witherspoon with Newman out of focus in the background is from Zimbio. The Spanish poster and all the other images are from the extremely useful Movie Screen Shots.)
Published on May 17, 2020 02:00
May 10, 2020
Stain of Suspicion by Charles Williams

Like The Sailcloth Shroud it throws a sympathetic character into an inexplicably deadly situation.
This is one of the things that makes Williams's books so clever. The lethal menace makes the story a thriller, while our hero's attempts to find its source makes it simultaneously a mystery.

Bill Chatham is a disillusioned ex cop from San Francisco who is driving to start a new life in Florida when he gets into a minor collision in a small town in the north of the state.

The damage to his car means he will be stranded there for three days while it's repaired. They will prove to be a very eventful three days...
What ensues is a brilliantly engineered story as Chatham is caught up in the persecution of a young widow who runs the motel where he is staying.

Georgia Langston is the victim of vicious local gossip — the original title of the book was the ironic Talk of the Town — not to mention a systematic campaign of harassment.
The locals believe she killed her husband and got away with it. Chatham believes differently and sets out to clear her name.

The blazing heat of smalltown Florida is acutely evoked: "Shadows were like ink in the white sunlight."
The anonymous voice muttering obscenities over the phone to Georgia Langston is "like something crawling across your bare flesh in a swamp."

And the pressure is starting to tell on Georgia. "One of these days she was going to come apart like a dropped plate."
But not if Chatham can help it. And his interference is resented by those who really did kill Georgia's husband.


And he finds himself up against the head of the local police, Kelly Redfield, a good cop going bad under some mysterious intolerable pressure: "Somewhere inside Redfield a bunch of mice were eating the insulation off his nerves."

I don't want to give the secret away, so I won't say anything else, except that you might like to check out this taut, gratifying and superbly written tale.
(Image credits: The British Pan paperbacks are scanned by me from my own copies. The British Cassell hardcover is from LW Currey. The Mysterious Press eBook edition and the French Folio Policier are from Good Reads. The French Gallimard Serie Noire is from Amazon USA. The front and back cover of the Dell Talk of the Town are from Flickr. The Pocket Book edition with impressively irrelevant cover art by George Alvara is from Ipernity.)
Published on May 10, 2020 03:01