JFK NOIR?........BERNEY'S DARK JOURNEY ON "NOVEMBER ROAD"

November Road by Lou Berney (2018)   BQ is way late catching up with superior mystery novelist Lou Berney........and on the basis of this one, can't wait to dive into more Berney......

                 So much more than a crime novel.......it functions on multiple levels......60's Americana, JFK's assassination, signaling the end of innocence and the beginning of nihilistic violence and paranoia in everyone's lives.......and the first glimmer of women demanding freedom and independence in a male dominated society......

                  Anything I left out?  Oh right.......a slow burn, touching love story.on top of everything just mentioned.

                    If you think Lou Berney can't keep all these balls in the air simultaneously, read it. He does. And then some.

                    His principal character, Frank Guidry, barely qualifies as a hero. A dutiful foot soldier for his boss, New Orleans mafioso Carlos Marcello, Frank's due for extermination..........for disposing of a getaway car used in Marcello's successful plot to murder John F. Kennedy.  IYes, it's fiction, but that's as good a theory as any of the others floating around....)

                    Marcello's tying up all loose ends before the Warren Commission comes sniffing around and Frank's gotta go......

                      Pursued by his boss's relentless hitmen, Frank goes on the run in plain sight by befriending Charlotte, a bright young woman who's fled her empty unhappy marriage, taking her two small daughters with her.  No longer a lone wolf, his pursuers are slow to find out he's now travelling with an instantly found family.......

                     What Frank doesn't count on (but we all can see this coming).......falling in love with Charlotte and her children........and desperately trying to engineer an escape for all four of them.

                      BQ will say no more.......other than READ IT!  Very much like the last book I posted about, Larry Watson's "Let Him Go", here's another thriller that'll keep you pinned to your easy chair and break you heart at the same time......

                      And that kind of book always, always gets no less than 4 stars here (****)

                 

HELLO DARE!.......GOODBYE DARE TO "THE LAST OF THE SECRET AGENTS?"

The Last Of The Secret Agents? (1966)     You can always sense when a once white-hot genre starts to burn out........

                 In come the comedians......armed with jokes and dangerous......

                 The James Bond/Secret Agent craze burned like a Supernova around the world for a couple of years......(I'd put its Golden Years from about '64 to '67)......

                  But spoofing the genre seemed like a waste of time and effort.......the Bond films themselves maintained a healthy tongue-in-cheek attitude and their many imitators already careened closer and closer to outright mockery.......

                   Not that it didn't stop anyone from trying........which brings us to this woeful little footnote of a movie.......

                The so-called comedy of team of Steve Rossi and Marty Allen was kind of an exhausted carbon copy of the Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis pairing......with Rossi being the tall handsome Italian crooner and the short pudgy Allen, with his helmet of tangled black curls, serving clown duty.

                As the supposed funny half of the duo, Marty Allen's complete comic repertoire consisted of bugging his eyes out as if undergoing a perpetual prostate exam and shouting out "Hello Dare!" to one and all........so if you watched him for 30 seconds, you'd seen everything he had to offer.......

                 .......uh....this movie runs almost 90 minutes, which gives you an idea of what a punishment it is........

               A few nice surprises though.......the opening minutes have some sick fun at the expense of that well-worn secret agent movie trope......agents murderously turning on each other after passing along their secrets......(the sound crew goes crazy here dubbing in their agonized death screams....)

               And all along the way, the writers take some early stabs at self-referential meta spoofery....the kind of wink-wink gags that would come to full flowering in the "Airplane" and "Naked Gun" movies......

                  But BQ wouldn't want to give anyone the impression that this movie's really funny......or even barely watchable.  For the most part, it's neither.

                  1 star (*).....strictly for secret agent completists and any surviving members of Allen & Rossi's immediate families. Also starring Nancy Sinatra as the requisite sex object.....she applies her monotone, barely-in-tune singing voice to the bouncy title song here......and irony of ironies, one year later would equally gasp her way through the title song of "You Only Live Twice".......hey, Nancy, Hello and Goodbye Dare.......

               

BADASSES IN THE BADLANDS...........THE UNFORGIVING FOLKS OF "LET HIM GO"

Let Him Go by Larry Watson (2013)     Would've missed this altogether if I hadn't caught the news that Kevin Costner and Diane Lane were starring in a film version.........

                    And what a beautifully crafted little gut-punch of a book this is.........

                    An irresistible plot:  In 1951 North Dakota, an elderly couple, George and Margaret Blackledge, still grieve over the accidental death of their son, thrown from a horse. The son left behind a young wife, Lorna and little Jimmy, George and Margaret's beloved 4 year old grandson.

                    But their daughter-in-law, a weak-willed airhead, quickly found a new husband in the worthless, abusive Donnie Weboy........and Donnie's taken his new wife and stepson to live with his fierce, fearsome Weboy family clan in the Montana badlands.

                     Mean-spirited and violent, the Weboys are straight out of a horror movie.........but force-of-nature Margaret, with a weary, wary George in tow, travels to Montana in the wild hope of somehow retrieving and rescuing her only grandson from the clutches of this dangerous collection of creeps.

                     The vile, vengeful Weboys, true to their nature, make George and Margaret suffer dearly for their quest........but between these two polar opposite families, the flawed but loving Blackledges and the evil Weboys, , there's a final reckoning still to come......

                    And that's as far as I go with the plot (way more than I usually give out in a book review).......except to say that story's conclusion will shatter you in all sorts of ways......

                    Watson's prose manages to be both spare, incisive and luminous.......and you'll never find a more painful, humorous and truer portrait  of a lifelong marriage in his creation of George and Margaret Blackledge. (Finish the book and you'll see why Costner and Lane leaped at a chance to film it....)

                    BQ can only pray the film comes close to equaling the book........regardless, put it on your summer reading list right now.  5 stars (*****), a FIND OF FINDS.   And beware those Weboys........

OUCH!........THE INCREDIBLE STABBING MAN GETS OFF "THE COUCH"......

The Couch (1962)     Worth talking about if only to remember and praise Grant Williams.......a long lost forgotten actor to everyone except hardcore Sci-Fi movie buffs........

                 He looked like all the other studio-processed Slabs-'O-Beef' that rolled off the Hollywood assembly line in the 50's and 60's......impossibly blonde and impossibly good looking.

                  But with a huge difference. This was no dead-eyed monotone hunk like Troy Donahue and his ilk........believe it or not, this guy was an actor........the real deal.......a pretty boy, yes, but with the chops to equal any big male star of the day......

                   He was given a few shots to break through......this movie and the role of Scott Carey in what became a classic of 1950's science fiction cinema,  Jack Arnold's "The Incredible Shrinking Man"........

                   And you'd better believe he was up to the task. Tragically, neither film jump-started his career. As good as "Shrinking Man" was, science fiction and horror still remained parked in the low budget ghetto of studio offerings.

                   Williams went back to strictly jouneyman TV work in the Warner Brothers private-eye show factory...("Hawaiian Eye", etc, etc.....) He died of peritonitis at 53, with his last film credit in 1972......

                     But given the opportunity, Williams left us with a bravura piece of work in "The Couch", playing a murderous psychiatric patient who bedevils the police by sneaking up on random strangers with an ice pick.......only after announcing his coming murders in advance on the phone.

                    The movie itself, written by Robert ("Psycho") Bloch, is no great shakes........it's ultra low-budgeted, backlot, black-and-white Warner Brothers.........probably meant to support one of their top-of-the-line movies in double-feature theaters and drive-ins.

                       But Williams hurls himself into it, delivering a multi-layered, sympathetic yet scary performance as a young man whose mind's been fractured by horrific childhood abuse at the hands of his father. If he'd gotten to strut his stuff like this in a major film, it would have made him a star.

                     You will enjoy some amount of creepy suspense in the film's extended climax, when Williams stalks a hospital, masquerading as a surgeon to finish off one of this victims...........but the film doesn't do all that much to take advantage of its terrifying central idea......a killer with no real motive for his murders......he's literally the Grim Reaper come to life and you die at his hands...only by random chance, like a lightning strike.

                     But BQ remembers you, Grant. And for your frightening, skilled work as The Incredible Stabbing Man, 3 ice picks (***). Check out his actor who could have done far, far more than flee from giant cats and tarantulas.......he may have been the Shrinking Man, but his talent was giant-sized.

AT DAY'S END..............REMEMBERING DORIS DAY

Doris Day (1922-2019)     It seems fitting that one of BQ's most visited posts is the one about 1963's "Move Over, Darling"..........in which Marilyn Monroe's star-crossed, aborted vehicle "Something's Gotta Give" was re-invented as a frothy farce for Doris Day.........

                ..........which found America's Sex Goddess replaced by America's  Girl Next Door........

               The deep irony here:  Day, a national symbol of cheerful virginity and eternal optimism led a personal life every bit as deeply troubled, turbulent and tragic as Monroe's.......

                 Day's married life consisted of a woeful rogue's gallery of horrific husbands......men who physically abused her, left her and in the case of husband-producer Martin Melcher, looted the fortune she earned as the country's most popular movie star, leaving her widowed and broke.......

                  Add to that the cancer death of her only son and you have a life far different than the one unfolding in her many musicals and comedies.......

                   Though routinely mocked and derided by cynics, you'll notice nobody makes fun of Day's rare but stunning forays into dramatic roles.......the abused singer tormented by James Cagney in "Love Me Or Leave Me", the distraught mother of a kidnapped child in Hitchcock's "The Man Who Knew Too Much".........or even her work in the admittedly cheesy thriller "Midnight Lace" where Day threw herself into the role of a woman terrified into hysteria......

                     Like Frank Sinatra, she did it all and she did it her way.........making virtually every film role iconic and using her formidable vocal talent to become America's Official Songstress......even today, children of multiple generations can hum "Que Sera, Sera"........

                     If you grew up with her films and recordings, like the BQ, then you understand how her very name evoked  not only her persona but how we saw ourselves as a country........bright, happy and basked in sunshine........

                     I think it's safe to say that in this cyber-era of instant fame, instant notoriety and the instant disposable nature of pop culture in general, you'll never see the likes of her again......

                     And that's something to forever mourn.

                     Neither the Motion Picture Academy nor any other cinema organization ever got around to bestowing a Lifetime Achievement award to Day.........which says more about them then her.

                     Rest In Peace, Doris Day.

MGM UN-HITCHED..........."THE WRECK OF MARY DEARE"..........

The Wreck Of The Mary Deare  (1959)     BQ can't read the minds of long dead and forgotten MGM executives...........

               So I can only make guesses as to how in hell they thought this project was a good fit for Alfred Hitchcock and his gifted screenwriter of choice, Ernest Lehman........

                A man falsely accused?   A hidden dead body?  Mysterious deaths at sea?   A conspiracy to expose?   A nasty villain thwarted?     Who knows......maybe?

               An odd duck, the story was a lumpy combo of two-fisted sea-going adventure and talky courtroom melodrama.  Lehman couldn't organize the material into anything either he or Hitchcock cared for or wanted to film........

                 So without mentioning it to the MGM brass, they tossed away the Hammond Innes novel and instead created "North By Northwest" from scratch...

                  The rest, as they say, is history........except for the rarely thought-of, rarely seen "The Wreck Of The Mary Deare", which the studio went ahead and made anyway with director Michael Anderson, releasing it the same year as the Hitchcock film.......(guess which movie everyone remembers the most?)

                  And "Mary Deare"?   A sturdy little drama with a whole lot to recommend it........top-notch (for the era) special effects of storm-tossed ships and a memorable clash of carved-in-granite movie icons......Gary Cooper and Charlton Heston.

                  Cooper's an angry, disgraced Merchant Marine captain accused in the suspicious, disastrous sinking of a freighter and Heston's a salvage captain who gets sucked into the mystery.  Skulking on the sidelines, practically wearing an "I'm The Villain!" placard around his neck:  no less than a young Richard Harris......

                  Coop 'n Chuck gnash their jaws at each other........the lone female (Virginia Makenna) is a worthless, throwaway supporting role......(no doubt one of the factors that soured Hitchcock and Lehman on trying to adapt the novel....)

                  But the film's swift and muscular, the two stars superb in their stoic macho poses and it's damned entertaining to watch.  The big climactic wrap-up's a bit rushed and abrupt, as if affected by time, budget and Cooper's rapidly failing health.......but BQ still says it's worth a watch at least once........and you gotta love those churning studio tub seas and nifty miniature boats. 3 stars (***)

                 

               

THEY SAY THIS CAT SHAFT IS A BAD MOTHER-(SHUT YOUR MOUTH).......PLUNGING DOWN "SHAFT"

Shaft (1971)  Some film historians cite this one as the kickoff movie for the 'blaxploitation' genre that flourished throughout the 70's.........

              You could spend endless hours weighing the pros and cons of these films........on the plus side - the host of black performers and filmmakers who got their foot in the door with these movies.......

               On the down side.........the raggedy, slapdash cheapjack nature of the films,,,,,,and the brutal irony that a majority of them were produced and directed by bottom-feeding white guys, chasing after a fast exploitation buck......

                 One thing's for sure, the movies stood in stark contrast to the dignified, saintly roles played by Hollywood's one and only officially anointed movie star, Sidney Poitier.

                  But at the end of the day, junk was junk.......no matter what color it was. And after all memories of the genre faded away,  Quentin Tarantino was the only one left to remember and celebrate it......

                  BQ thinks "Shaft" stands proudly apart from any of the those films that it supposedly inspired. Directed with streetwise grit by acclaimed photo-journalist Gordon Parks, it's far more a perfect example of the 'New-York-City-As-Hell-On-Earth' movies that ruled the early 70's......(as in "The French Connection", "The Seven Ups" and "The Taking Of Pelham One Two Three", etc, etc)

                  No Hollywood high gloss in such movies........"Shaft" looks like the raw footage was dropped off for processing at one of the rundown Times Square shops that Richard Roundtree strolls past in the opening credits.

                  For all his visual prowess, Gordon Parks wasn't much of an action director.......the fights and shootouts are quick and the staging of them clumsy and offhand. But the film drew its life and energy from the raw power of its lead character.........nobody, but nobody had ever seen a black hero like John Shaft before. And you could sense that Roundtree was having the time of his life playing him......

                   I don't know if it's valid to opine that "Shaft" jump-started 'blaxploitation'.  What it definitely got going was a whole new era of  muscular in-your-face cinema.......a universe away from the sparkle and sheen of typical studio product......(which was starting to fray at the seams anyway....)

                   And damn if it still doesn't hold up. 3 stars (***)