Black Murder – Carl Moore (1935)

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Well, I didn’t get too far into this story set in Haiti. First sentence:

Thunder rumbled and crashed, reverberated across white-topped distant mountains.

Was the author under the impression that it snows in Haiti?  John Martin isn’t thinking about the snow in them thar hills, he is more concerned about the voodoo drums, the tom-toms.

A year later John’s brother Don arrives in Haiti with John’s fiancee Wynne.   Don is searching for his older brother and is led by the police to his deserted home.  There the couple is left with two guards — Dumonnier and Manbrun — for protection.

Once inside the house, “their bodies fused, her lips restlessly on his, his arms encircling and crushing her loveliness.”  Say, isn’t she John’s fiancee?  How hard are they really looking for him?  Wynne says she just thought she loved John, but that it was really Don all the time.

That afternoon, the voodoo drums start again, or maybe it is just Bolero on the stereo. Overcome, Don carries Wynne to the bed.  It is already occupied by a naked clay figure of Wynne with a pin through it.  There is no no time for a menage-a-trois as they hear demonic laughter and find Dumonnier sprawled on the lanai, “his sightless eyes staring straight ahead, his bloodless lips grinning and mocking.  His head was split open as if from the blow of a great axe.”  Also, it is mentioned that his hat is missing.

Manbrun howls, turns on the couple, then charges into the jungle.  Don and Wynne think maybe they’ll just head out and come back when Sandals has built a walled compound in Port-au-Prince.  They run back through the jungle, their clothing slashed by thorns and sharp branches.  Don is conked on the head and he wakes up with in captivity with Wynne and his brother John.

There really is not much to the rest of the story.  There is a dance that seems to go on longer than The Matrix Reloaded rave-in-the-cave, a priest and priestess, and John Martin fakes being in a trance so he can facilitate their escape.

Later, as they are standing with police, John says, “Take me home, Don.  The spell is broken at last.”  Yeah, but I think it is going to be an uncomfortable moment when they decide who gets to ride in the back with Wynne.  John might even call shotgun.

These stories are so simplistic that they almost defy criticism.

Post-Post:

  • Published in Spicy Adventure, April 1935.
  • Also that month:  Erich von Däniken born, paving the Naza Lines for the Ancient-Alien-Industrial Complex.  For a dose of reality, here is an awesome debunking.

Twilight Zone S4 – The New Exhibit (04/04/63)

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We open in Ferguson’s Wax Museum.  Do these things even exist anymore? [1]   Mr. Ferguson himself is leading a tour which includes two sailors on the tamest furlough since Gomer Pyle went back to Mayberry. After checking out waxy Marie Antoinette [2] (who is sadly not topless in either sense of the word), they move on to waxy Cleopatra. This place ought to be called the Museum of Murdered Women.[3]

Next they are led to “the most infamous black-hearted killers of all time.”  They first meet the flesh-and-blood curator Martin Senescu who introduces them to the Murderer’s Row exhibit:

  • William Burke & William Hare – They suffocated their victims with pillows, frequently prostitutes.
  • Henri Desire Landru – French serial killer of spinsters and lonely widows.
  • Jack the Ripper – English serial killer of prostitutes.
  • Albert W. Hicks – A mate on an oyster boat who killed his entire crew with an axe. Given the attitude of this museum, I have to suspect that it was an all-girl crew.

Martin Balsam is excellent as Senescu.  He is clearly devoted to this exhibit, and is slightly creepy.  He steps on a switch that causes Mr. the Ripper to slash away with his knife.  This is a pretty good gag, but freaks out the sailors who “blow this creepy joint.”

Later as Senescu is dusting Landru, Ferguson tells him that the museum is going to close so he can sell the location a company for a supermarket.  Ferguson decides not to open a new museum because, even 60 years ago, he sees this is a dying industry.  He reasons that people see too much horror in every day life.

tznewexhibit03Senescu asks to buy the wax figures as he can’t bear to see them destroyed; although, he doesn’t seem to care much for Cleopatra and Marie Antoinette.  Movers deliver the figures to Senescu’s house.  He installs the exhibit in the basement which he has rigged up with a new industrial strength air conditioner.[4]

Weeks later, Senescu’s very patient wife is concerned that her husband still has no job and the new A/C is costing a fortune.  Senescu seems to spend all his time in the basement acting as a valet for his new friends.  Emma tells her brother Dave about the problems she is having with her husband.  He suggests that sabotaging the A/C might solve the problem.

That night, Emma sneaks down to the basement to take care of the A/C.  She is creeped out by the figures, but makes her way to the plug.  As she reaches to unplug it, Jack the Ripper’s arm slashes toward her and she screams.  The next morning, Senescu finds her dead on the basement floor and detects blood on Jack’s knife.

Fearing he will be blamed, Senescu buries his wife in the basement and repaves the floor.  Emma’s idiot brother Dave — an incredibly obnoxious performance — stops by and becomes suspicious.  After Senescu throws him out, he breaks into the basement. When he finds traces of Emma’s blood, Albert Hicks takes an axe to him.

tznewexhibit07Ferguson stops by and tells Senescu that a museum in Brussels wants to buy the figures.  While Ferguson is measuring them for shipment, Landru garrotes him.  When Senescu sees another dead body, he chews the wax figures out for betraying him.  He grabs a crow bar to destroy them, but they become animated.  They stiffly move toward Senescu claiming that he committed the murders, and fall on top of him.

At the Murderer’s Row home in Brussels, there is the titular new exhibit — Martin Senescu leaning on a shovel as he digs his wife’s grave.

After several very good 4th season scripts from Charles Beaumont, this one was a bit of a let down.  Everyone has an off-week, but this one might be due to the fact that Beaumont’s deteriorating health forced him to farm the job out to another writer.  There are a few rough edges that maybe Beaumont could have polished.

The causes of death are a little muddled.  Emma’s murder could be related to the switch that Senescu revealed during the museum tour — was she murdered or did she just step on that switch which made the wax figure slash her throat?  Dave’s murder is not seen which lends credence to the figures’ assertion that Senescu is the real murderer.  Then when Ferguson is murdered, we actually see Albert Hawks strangle him.  So are the murders 1) accidents, 2) committed by Senescu, or 3) committed by the wax figures?

When the wax figures advance on Senescu, how does he die?  He is portrayed as a murderer in the titular new exhibit, so it must have been a heart attack.  If he had been axed, suffocated, slashed or strangled, he would have been considered just another victim.

All of that is mostly just being churlish.  The strength of the episode is in Martin Balsam’s performance as Senescu.  He and Will Kuluva as Ferguson ground the episode.  Despite a few rough spots, this is still a good episode in the unfairly maligned 4th season.

Post-Post:

  • [1] Apparently they do exist, and there are even a couple of chains.  Here is fun article from Vice about a visit to one.
  • [2] Like Cersei on Game of Thrones, Marie Antoinette was put on trial for multiple crimes including incest.  Both had their hair cut off and were stripped naked (Marie at least got to put on a simple white dress (in front of her guards)).  Both were paraded through town to the jeers of the peons.  Marie was tied up, but at least got to ride in an open cart while Cersei was perp-walked naked on foot.  On the plus side, they didn’t chop off Cersei’s head at the end of the trip.
  • [3] It is not clear whether Cleopatra was murdered or committed suicide-by-snake. It is interesting that, like Cersei and Marie, her downfall was a nude-fest.  Several paintings (many sharing the unimaginative title The Death of Cleopatra) portray her as topless at her death.
  • [4] Oder, auf Deutsch.
  • Martin Balsam was last seen in The Equalizer.

 

The Shanghai Jester – Robert Leslie Bellem (1934)

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Every time Cliff Downey thought of that cablegram, his square jaw jutted, his icy gray eyes narrowed and his mouth became a grim slit in the hard granite of his face.

Downey is following a .38 automatic with his hand on the butt of a “chink” [1] bellhop — no wait, he has his hand on the butt of a .38 automatic and is following a “chink” [1] bellhop. Yikes — I guess that’s not much better!  This is clearly from a different era.

As the “yellow boy” [1] (OK, enough of that — you get the idea) raises his hand to knock on the hotel room door, Downey slaps it away. He is tracking a man named Muller but must be careful as the cable warned him that competitors at The Argus Detective Firm are also on Muller’s trail.  Downy has traced him over three continents to find him here in Shanghai.

Muller stole $750,000 of jewels from the Vandervorts in Chicago of the Chicago Vandervorts who are offering a $10,000 reward.  He doesn’t trust the Argus gang not to let him do the legwork, slip him a shiv, and steal the jewels from him for the reward. Muller does not answer the door, though . . .

He stared into the piquant, youthful features of a girl — a slender, elfin person whose tawny yellow hair tumbled in a glorious cascade over bare and intriguing shoulder, whose hazel eyes were demurely fringed with gentian lashes, whose bee-stung lips were parted to reveal two rows of tiny, even teeth.  Her boyish body was clad in a negligee that had fallen open at the throat to disclose creamy expanses of smooth girl-flesh swelling into twin firm half-globes straining beneath the soft silken restraint of a diaphanous brassiere.

The good news is, she is Muller’s daughter.  She calls her father out and Downey prepares to haul him in.  He asks Downey to wait until his daughter Babs goes to lunch so she doesn’t see her father perp-walked out.  She goes out, presumably after covering up her firm twin half-globes.  Quite the civilized gentleman, Muller tells Downey that he has the jewels, why not just let him go for his daughter’s sake — and Downey agrees.

Downey is no fool, though, and a few minutes later spies on the couple.  Muller tells Babs, who is not really his daughter, to go to Downey’s hotel, slip him some cyanide and steal the jewels back.  Babs braves the rain to go to Downey’s hotel.  In his room, he gallantly suggests she get out of those wet clothes, and she agrees.

Shortly she reappeared clad only in a bathrobe he had handed her.  His eyes drank in her beauty.  The robe had slipped down over her shoulders, revealing more than a glimpse of the firm contours of her bare and jutting breasts.  her unclad legs and creamy thighs peered forth boldly from the robe as she walked toward him.

Babs admits that she is actually Muller’s mistress.  But a girl’s gotta have standards — him being a jewel thief is just unacceptable to her, so she wants out.  You know, now that he’s busted.  She asks Downey to take her back to America and shows off “her smooth body, her perfect breasts, firm and pink-tipped and provocative.” Babs hands him the drugged drink which he covertly dumps; he then pretends to fall into “deadly sleep”.

Back in Chi-town [2], Downey’s boss chews him out because he heard the Argus Firm was handing over Vandervort’s jewels for the reward at that very minute.  Not so, Downey says — he had immediately pegged Babs as the Argus operative even though she was more of a Vargas operative.  The tip-off was that no man would call his daughter “Babs”.  Downey switched out some fake jewels to make her think she got away with the real jewels so the Argus Firm wouldn’t cut off his family jewels.

About what you would expect from a 1934 magazine called Spicy Adventure Stories.

Post-Post:

  • [1] A quote, hence the quotes.
  • [2] This is ironic as he was earlier in Chai-town . . . OK, Chai is a word for tea derived from the Mandarin word chá (茶).  And the Chinese dialect spoken in the titular Shanghai:  Mandarin.  Now that’s weak tea.
  • First published in Spicy Adventure Stories, July 1934.
  • Also that month:  Dillinger shot.  I guess the cops won again.
  • Also, FDR is the “1st sitting president to visit South America.”  What the — is that a wheelchair joke?
  • Robert Leslie Bellem was previously heard from in Blood for the Vampire Dead.
  • Bellem is apparently best known for his creation of detective Dan Turner.  Good article here that makes me want to read more by him.

Fear Itself – Spooked (06/12/08)

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Police Officer Harry Siegel is appropriately interrogating a low-life about a missing boy. And by “appropriately,” I mean he ties him up, pounds him in the face and threatens to cut out an eyeball if he doesn’t talk.  The scumbag gives up the boy’s location — uh, upstairs. Really, you couldn’t even search the house before going all Jack Bauer on him? The pervert plans on inflicting a little off-book punishment of his own. Just before saving the taxpayers a million bucks, he tells Siegel that he will never let him forget this night.

After the perp, Rory Bemell, croaks from natural causes (being beat to death after abducting a child), Internal Affairs hauls Siegel in and goes through a stack of suspects Siegel has worked over.  The IAD suit gets a big smile from telling Siegel to turn in his badge.

Fifteen years later, Siegel is working as a private dick staking out a philandering husband.  He gets no pleasure from playing tapes he made for the man’s distraught wife.  He does, however, get pleasure from playing another tape for the woman — one of her banging her husband’s brother, which is worth tripling his fee.

The next day, he meets with Meredith Kane.  She is another woman suspecting her husband of having an affair.  She wants Siegel to get the evidence “to make him pay.” She says there is a run-down house conveniently across the street from their home where Siegel can set up his surveillance equipment.

Neither Siegel nor Mr. Kane get lucky the first night.  Siegel does, however, pick up some strange voices from the Kane house.  The voices and a light in the window suddenly go respectively silent and dark.  The voices start up again and he determines that they are coming from inside the house he is using. He looks around and finds a pentagram drawn on the floor of the basement. He catches some kids who snuck in on a dare.  One of them tells Siegel that some kids had once been killed in this house.

Finally at 3:06 am, he hears a man and woman and sees their silhouettes in a window of the house across the street.  The woman says she was burned with cigars . . . by a cop named Siegel.  He meets with Ms. Kane again to quit the case, but she won’t let him.

The next night, through a large widow he sees two young kids in the house watching TV downstairs.  In an upstairs window, he sees a man with a knife.  Then through yet another window, he sees the man coming down the stairs with the knife raised.  Christ, this greenhouse ain’t the place to conduct a clandestine affair.  Siegel runs across the street and busts down the door only to find the house deserted, not even any furniture. Looking back across the street at the hovel he was perched in, he sees a face in window over there.  So he runs back to that house and hears a swirl of voices that talk about being stabbed, burned, beaten.

He sees a lot of other crazy shit in the house.  Finding himself locked in, he turns and sees dead Rory Bemell standing there with a knife.  He says, “I didn’t deserve this, Harry.” He tells Siegel that a girl Siegel burned was innocent and now lives in pain.  And a kid he kicked senseless turned out to be a witness.

In the house, Siegel experiences a flashback to an incident when he was a kid.  After his older brother pulls their father’s pistol out of the closet, Siegel accidentally fatally shoots him. Siegel’s father tells him that this must remain secret and they secretly bury the kid.  OK, I guess Siegel’s mother was already dead.  But what did they plan on telling the school and the neighbors?  That his brother went to live on a farm?

Blah, blah, blah, Siegel realizes Meredith Kane set him up to be killed by the haunted house.  He heads over to her real home to mete out some of the justice he was used to as a cop.  Then there is a twist that left me a little cold.  I know it is bizarre, but I think the problem is that the twist is too good for the show.  Meredith suddenly has a back story that was a complete void.  Even the haunted house has a history that is too-briefly summed up in one sentence.

This is the first episode on the disc, but the second episode to air.  It makes me suspect that this was to be the premiere, but The Sacrifice just worked better so they went with that. Not that this is a bad episode at all — the performances were good, the visuals were interesting, it just seemed that there was too much story to fit into one hour.  To be honest, it might not even be possible to tell this complete story and keep the current structure.  It was probably as good as it could have been.

Post-Post:

  • Harry Siegel changed his name to Bender after he was fired from the force.  On the wall of his detective office, he has clippings from his career.  I guess he counts on no one reading them and asking who this Harry Siegel was and why he looks identical to Harry Bender.
  • Second consecutive show where IMDb got a name wrong.  Yesterday, Joanne was credited, but she was always called Joanna.  Today, Eric Roberts’ character is credited as Siegel, but a police name tag says Siegal.
  • I’d love to say Harry Siegel’s name was a Dirty Harry homage — Harry Callahan’s first name and the last name of that film’s director Don Siegel.  But who knows?

Tales of Tomorrow – The Dark Angel (09/28/51)

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ttdarkangel1Tim Hathaway is knocking back the hooch.  This show is so old, you could only get 3-year old scotch back then.  Heyoooo, I’ll be here all weekend!  I mean right here, on the couch.

The doorbell rings and he gets a visit from Det. Will Jethroe of the 24th Precinct Jethroes.  There has been a shooting and eyewitnesses described a man looking just like Hathaway.  Without the benefit of counsel, he blurts out, “The woman I shot was my wife.”  I feel a flashback coming on.

Five years earlier:  Joanne Hathaway is struggling with some buttons on the back of her blouse and calls Jim up to help.  Dr. Farleigh drops by with x-rays he took of Joanne a few days earlier when she broke a rib.  Realizing she had additional insurance, he took additional x-rays on Monday, and discovered the injury had completely healed.

After Joanne goes up to bed, Farleigh shows the x-rays to Tim.  Farleigh recalls that in her previous check-up, Joanne had a healthy heart and now it is only half the normal size.  Her appendix has vanished completely.

ttdarkangel4Tim confronts Joanne about the mysteries and she admits that she has changed.  She has also discovered that she can control objects with her mind.  As proof she makes a statue topple over and shatter — pretty racy for 1951 TV, the statue was topless.  She believes she is evolving to “a brand new kind of human being.”  Her night table now groans under the weight of thick books on physics.  Say, a woman reading science books — that is crazy!

She worries that she is outgrowing her husband and that soon her love for for him will be like the love she has for “a lower species” like their dog; or veal.

Commercial Break:  The episode is once again sponsored by Kreisler Watchbands.

The next morning, Joanne is gone.  Jim scours the papers day after day searching for her. She finally appears in the paper for discovering a new radiation process.  The picture is blurry, the name is slightly different, and the article says she was 15 years younger than Joanne.  Jim gets on a plane to California to reunite with his wife, or at least hook-up with this younger look-alike hottie.

ttdarkangel5In the Berkeley Electronic Lab, Tim begs her to come back to him.  She says she is the first of a new race, a new kind of being.  In a nifty scene, she goes through a door to get her coat.  A few seconds later, Jim checks the door and sees that it is just a broom closet and Joanne has disappeared.

She did not reappear, but over the next 4 years he would see reports of her discoveries in newspapers and scientific journals.  Finally, tonight Tim sees Joanne again in their old hang-out.  He puts his arms around her, but she says Tim means nothing to her anymore, that she is waiting for someone else. She ominously says, “Our time to rule is coming soon.”

The bartender overhears this and drops a glass.  Joanne induces a heart attack in him and feels nothing at his death.  Tim sees that she has too much power, has become “ruthless, hard, cold” and will destroy anyone who stands in her way.  Continuing that she is “a menace, a terror, Godless” he puts four slugs in her.  He then runs home and is soon-after visited by the detective.

Tim defends his actions saying that she would have made the world unfit to live in. Jethroe tells him that the bullets could not harm Joanne.  Not only that, but Jethroe is also one of the new race.  Proving that Joanne really was too smart for him, Jim stupidly pulls a gun on Jethroe.  He suffers the same fate as the bartender.

ttdarkangel6A great deal of potential was squandered in this episode.  The idea of the woman evolving was a great concept.  In fact, it was so great that they used it again in another episode in the same season. However, they could have made it the basis for apocalyptic story, an alien invasion, or an allegory for women’s post-war liberation from the kitchen. Sadly, it just became a cog in the wheel of a murder mystery.

On the plus side, Ms. Hathaway finally hooked up with Jethroe.

Post-Post:

  • Title Analysis: The title reminds me of a TV-movie called Dark Angel which aired in the previous millennium.  Not otherwise relevant here, it just always amused me that Roberts’ character was named D’Arcangelo.  On the tortured scale, that is somewhere between water-boarding and the SHIELD acronym.
  • The title was recycled 4 years later for a short-lived series starring Jessica Alba.
  • Dark Angel is used in the title of several other productions.  My favorite usage has to be as the name of an actor in Barely Legal Lesbian Vampires: The Curse of Ed Wood.