THE FRONT (1976)

“They’re selling the Cold War, Howard. And they use the Blacklist for anyone who isn’t buying.”

“I have here in my hand a list of 205,” said Joseph McCarthy, the Junior Senator from Wisconcin. “A list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.” The day was Lincoln Day, February 9, 1950. Senator McCarthy was speaking to the Republican Women’s Club of Wheeling, WV. “The State Department is infested with Communists.”

By the end of the year, McCarthy had America convinced that there was a Communist under every bed. Every neighbor, even family members, could be covert Communist agents working to subvert the American way of life. Even if they’d done nothing more than marched in a Pro-Union parade or attended a single Socialist meeting as early as 1920, they were suspect. Commies wanted nothing more than to take down Capitalism, the Free Market, America. FDR’s “New Deal”, which helped get America’s poor and unemployed back on its feet, was the insidious plot that started it all, straight out of Karl Marx’s handbook.

And anyone who disagreed with the above was also, clearly, a Communist. That was why we had to hold the ideals of Soviet Russia, of Red China, with deep contempt. And there was no worse an agent of those countries and their twisted policies than Hollywood. Motion Pictures and television were battling each other for dominance in the ‘50s. And do you know why? It had nothing to do with entertainment. It had nothing to do with the new technology’s captivation of the American family. The two mediums were fighting each other to the top in order to establish the best position to pervert American minds. Hollywood was rife with Commies, Dupes, Sympathisers and Pinkos. Just look at all those Unions! What need did actors have of Unions except to subvert the American Free Market? The Reds were slipping their subliminal message into otherwise normal, decent motion pictures and television shows. These treasonous men and women had to be rooted out. They had to be stopped!

It was time to move forward with the greatest tool in the United States arsenal, the Dies Act of 1938, better-known as the House Un-American Committee or HUAC. It was time that Americans stand up and turn in anyone they might think was a Red, before Congress and they eyes of God. It had been effective in the past. In October 1947, the Committee had successfully subpoenaed hundreds of professionals in the entertainment industry and nailed many with the “$64 Dollar Question”: “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party of the United States.”

Being a member was not illegal. Not then, not before, not now. Still, the first victims, the ones who saw real jail time for “Contempt of Congress” by exercising their First Amendment rights and not answering such a question, came to be known as The Hollywood Ten and included such luminaries as Ring Lardner, Jr., Dalton Trumbo, Lester Cole and Edward Dmytyrk. Playright and screenwriter Berthold Brecht escaped prosecution by “naming names” of other former members of the Party. A few months after their conviction, Dmytyrk apologized as well, named names and saw his career recover. The rest remained silent and served the full year of their term, only to find every door slammed shut upon their release. The studios took HUAC seriously, refused to hire anyone “unfit”, though not officially. Officially, there was no blacklist. Congress had no right to tell anyone who they could or could not hire. But they could make suggestions. They could “suggest” that it might not be, for instance, in RKO’s best interest for Floyd Odium to remain the owner of the studio. It would be in better hands if Howard Hughes, industrialist and engineer, took over.

This continued throughout the ‘50s. Some professionals like Elia Kazan and Lee J. Cobb stepped right up, eager to co-operate with HUAC and named names like auctioneers. Kazan would even make a pro-snitching film, On the Waterfront (co-starring Cobb), which raked in the Academy Awards. Even those who initially stood up to the Committee, particularly Humphrey Bogart, who had formed of the Committee for the First Amendment with John Huston and Lauren Bacall, saw his own career and standing jeopardized and felt compelled to announce publically that he was in no way a Communist sympathizer in an article for Photoplay Magazine. Walt Disney, certainly no Union man, had already cofounded the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (MPA), a political action group cofounded by Walt Disney, that declared prerogatives for a “real” American movie: "Don't smear the free-enterprise system ... Don't smear industrialists ... Don't smear wealth ... Don't smear the profit motive ... Don't deify the 'common man' ... Don't glorify the collective".

Screenwriters held the only ace when it came to the blacklist. While the studios saw through attempts to simply apply pseudonyms to their scripts, they found it useful to employ “fronts”—men and women, ostensibly (and preferably) non-writers who had no political blackmarks to their names, who could submit scripts for the blacklisted under their own identities. This allowed the writers to do what they did to make a living, namely writing. It wasn’t a safe solution—J. Edgar Hoover’s had FBI agents around every corner—but it was all they had.

In 1976, former blacklisted director Martin Ritt and writer Walter Bernstein sculpted a movie around this very scenario and called it, logically, The Front. A young Woody Allen plays Howard Prince, part-time bookie, part time diner cashier, full-time loser and deadbeat, is approached by his friend, a blacklisted writer named Alfred Miller (Michael Murphy, never better), to apply his clean name to Alfred’s scripts. Howard would get a commission of 10%— “I’d be paying an agent that anyway,” says Miller—to turn in the scripts and pose as the real writer to directors and producers. Out of the goodness of his heart and the emptiness of his wallet, Howard shows his loyalty to Miller and agrees.

Miller had previously worked for a weekly dramatic television series called Grand Central, narrated by famous funnyman Hecky Brown (Zero Mostel, blacklisted 1951). Producer Phil Susssman (Herschel Bernardi, blacklisted 1952) is happy to have good scripts pouring in again. Idealistic script editor Florence Barrett (Andrea Marcovicci) falls in love with Howard through his scripts, believing him to be the real author of such touching, dramatic, substantive stories. Howard takes advantage of her mistaken feelings, hoping to find an angle that will allow him to keep Miller’s secret and still have Florence. He does this, mostly, by avoiding any conversation regarding his process or his work. Which leads him into dangerous waters whenever a rush script-change is required. He can’t write, so what the hell is he supposed to do when Sussman has him virtually locked in an office?

Through Miller’s work, Howard’s star begins to rise, hobnobbing with industry stars, finally able to afford to pay back those he owes. He finds that being a famous writer really suits him. So he takes on a couple more “clients”, fronting for other blacklisted writers. Before long, he’s giving them notes. “I can’t turn this one in. I just didn’t feel it was ready. Hey, it’s my name going on these scripts. They’re expecting my best work.” With evasion his best defense, Howard’s greed starts to get to him further, wanting to front for even more. “I want good guys, Alfie. Just being blacklisted isn’t enough.”

Inevitably, the dishonesty catches up to him. Hecky Brown comes under investigation by the film’s version of the Grim Reaper, Mr. Hennessey of the “Freedom Information Services”. Even though he writes what he is “suggested” to write, to apologize for his activities in the Party—“there was this girl—with a big ass.”—he still winds up on the blacklist and Sussman is forced to let him go. “They’re taking the part in a new direction,” says Sussman. “Besides, you’re too big for the show. You should have your own show. Call me in a couple of weeks. We’ll, uh, we’ll have dinner and talk about it. I, uh, I already have something in mind that’d be great for you.”

Devastated by Hecky’s firing and Sussman’s caving in to what she sees as immoral government demands, she quits and asks Howard to help her publish a pamphlet speaking out against the blacklist. When Howard refuses, advising her to return to Sussman and beg for her job back, he shows his true colors and breaks her heart.

During their split, he accompanies Hecky to the Hamptons, where a former venue has agreed to hire him for a lounge show. Howard doesn’t realize that Hecky has been instructed to find out more about Howard for a chance to have his name removed from the list. “They” want to know who Howard’s friends are, where he goes, what he does in his personal life. 

“So,” Hecky says in the car along the way. “Where’d you go last weekend?”

“Oh, you know. Out. Here and there.”

“What do you do in your personal life?”

“You know, the usual.”

“The usual,” sighs Hecky. “I used to love the usual.”

But even these low-payng gigs aren’t what they used to be. The hotel manager and former friend stiffs Hecky for half of what he was offered and the comedian responds violently. “You’ll never work in this town again, you Commie sonofabitch!” Hecky hears as he’s dragged off of the manager and through the back door. The word has gotten around already that he was blacklisted. And being on the blacklist must mean that you’re a Communist, otherwise, why would you be on the blacklist? Not that there is a blacklist.

“All it takes is one man to stand up to these bastards,” Miller tells Howard. “One man to say that he’s not putting up with this. It’s illegal what they’re doing. It’s wrong.”

Eventually, HUAC comes for Howard. But all he has to do is play ball, read a prepared statement, and apologize for any wrongdoing. Then he’s in the clear. The night before his informal hearing, tragedy strikes, and Howard decides that maybe evasion isn’t enough of a tactic. He might not be that “one man” of Miller’s, but he’s all they had.

As subtle as HUAC itself, The Front is bitterly hilarious and really nails home the despair Congress left in its midst with its Red Scare. Like every domestic hysteria, HUAC was merely keeping the engine running with its campfire stories of the invisible enemy. It was something for the “little” people to focus on while corporate rights and interests were maintained and increased. It would justify the Korean War and give the military something to do. WWII was so last-decade. Screaming “Commie” would get the people to fall in line, vote for whoever would make them “feel safe”, namely those who served the best interest of Joe McCarthy, J. Edgar Hoover, Roy Cohn, etc. Those already in power. Before long, even those in power bought their own bullshit, because that’s what always happens.

Communists (terrorists, gay marriage, abortion, Al Qaida, whoever, whatever) will destroy our Great Nation. When the “little people” are fighting amongst themselves, they forget all about revolution.

While Woody Allen is fine as Howard—he gets the most satisfying and cheer-worthy line in the movie—it’s Zero Mostel who steals the movie. Hecky’s story mirrors that of comedian Philip Loeb, who committed suicide after losing his career to the blacklist and Mostel’s performance is bombastic and devastating.

Officially, the blacklist came to an end in 1960, when Otto Preminger announced publically that he’d hired Dalton Trumbo to write the screenplay for Exodus. Small victories over the years—Hitchcock’s hiring of Norman Lloyd as associate producer on Alfred Hitchcock Presents; Betty Hutton’s insistence of Jerry Fielding for musical director on her own self-titled CBS show—had chipped away at Congresses non-existent life-killer throughout the late ‘50s. But HUAC still had piles of bodies in its wake. Lee J. Cobb and Sterling Hayden were haunted until their deaths at their betrayal of friends and co-workers, while Kazan insisted until his death that he did the right thing and even won an honorary Academy Award for his overappreciated body of work.

But Miller had it right. It did only take one man to stand up, and then others followed. In real life, the “one man” could be considered to be Edward R. Murrow, the respected journalist who called HUAC on the carpet with an episode of his show See It Now titled "A Report on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy". But the “one man” may also have been John Henry Faulk, the host of a CBS radio comedy show, fired for his left leanings. He turned around and sued CBS for wrongful termination. While the case dragged on for years, it kept HUAC’s unconstitutional activity in the public eye. In 1962, Faulk won his suit and the decision meant that those behind the blacklist were legally liable for all professional and financial damages to those they had harmed. Suddenly, the “real Americans” were the ones crying, that they’d been “duped” by Congress. But there was little mercy for the “Congressional Sympathizers.”

Thirteen years of government running roughshod over the country before the people had had enough. Before allowing it to happen again, with the Viet Nam War. And again with Iran/Contra Scandal. And again. And again.

Who will be our “one man” today? Matt Damon? Right now, he’s all we have.

BREAKOUT (1975)

In August, 1971, a helicopter touched down inside the yard of Mexico City's Santa Maria Acatitla prison for just ten seconds. It took off with two men: Carlos Antonio Contreras Castro, a counterfeiter from Venezuela, and Joel David Kaplan, a 44-year-old businessman from New York. Kaplan, a former courier for Fidel Castro and the nephew of molasses baron, Jacob M. Kaplan, had been convicted of the murder of his business partner, Louis Vidal, Jr., in 1962. Despite serious doubts that the body found was that of Vidal’s, despite Vidal’s association with drug dealers and gunsmugglers, who, Kaplan insisted, had orchestrated an elaborate plot to fake his own death and disappear, Kaplan was sentenced to 28 years in the Mexican prison. (Time Magazine)

With his uncle’s J.M. Kaplan Fund under a 1964 congressional investigation under suspicion of acting as a money laundering conduit between Latin America and the CIA, the younger Kaplan had very few people to turn to in either country. Were it not for his sister, Judith Kaplan Dowis, and a rock star lawyer from San Francisco named Vasilios Basil Choulos, Kaplan may very well have died inside the prison. Instead, Choulos enlisted the help of pilot Roger Hershner, who painted a bell helicopter to look like that of Mexico’s attorney general’s. One hundred-and-thirty-six guards were interrogated for complicity but no inside man had been employed. In point of fact, nearly the entire population of the prison, employees and convicts alike, had been inside watching the first recreational movie shown in more than two years. Attorney General Julio Sanchez Vargas resigned in disgrace.

Once in the U.S., Kaplan was granted immunity—Choulos told the Mexican government that his client was a CIA operative, though that really didn’t satisfy anyone and was unlikely to be true anyway. Kaplan, Choulos and Hershner sat down with writers Warren Hinckle, William Turner and Eliot Asinof and the sextet released a book, The Ten-Second Jailbreak: The Helicopter Escape Of Joel David Kaplan. The book was excerpted in Playboy and immediately optioned by Hollywood producers Robert Chartoff and Irwin “I love disaster!” Winkler, to be directed by Mike Ritchie and to star Kris Kristoferson.

The story was eventually filmed and released in 1975 as Breakout, directed by Tom Gries and starring Charles Bronson, Robert Duvall, Jill Ireland, Sherree North, Randy Quaid, Paul Mantee, John Huston and Emilio “El Indio” Fernadez. The bizarre and exciting story of both Kaplan and Choulos and the ten-second rescue had been boiled down to the finest of all formulas, released with the taglines, “Sentenced to 28 years in prison for a crime he never committed. Only two things can get him out—a lot of money and Charles Bronson!” and more confusing, “No prison can hold…Charles Bronson!”

If you take the facts into consideration, which one should never do apparently, Bronson plays neither Choulos nor Hershner, but an amalgam named Nick Colton, a border country bush pilot and occasional con-artist. He owns a Cessna and a fishery in a partnership with Randy Quaid (as ‘Hawkins’) and is approached one hot afternoon by Ann Wagner, wife of wrongly-imprisoned Jay Wagner. She employs Colton to fly her into Mexico but doesn’t tell him why. She does pay his price, “Twelve hundred…and thirty-nine dollars. And fifty-two cents.”

In Breakout’s scenario, Jay is the grandson of a fruit magnate with CIA ties played by John Huston, turning in his usual solid worn-out criminal mastermind character. Harris Wagner makes some vague reference to Jay’s free-spiritedness proving to be a detriment to both the company’s stockholders and the interest of the Central Intelligence Agency, and therefore has a slick lawyerly-looking op named Cable (Paul Mantee) to frame Jay for a random murder. Despite Jay being in Chile and the murder taking place in Mexico, holds no sway over the judge, who pronounces swift and lengthy sentence.

Jay’s first attempt at escape goes badly. After paying some trustees to smuggle him out in a sealed coffin, laying bent-backed on top of the box’s other occupant. Because the warden and General is played by “El Indio”—better known to audiences as the ruthless Mapache in The Wild Bunch—he lets the prisoners simply bury Jay alive for a while. Jay then falls prey to choppy editing because the next time we see him, he’s back inside the prison looking only slightly worse for wear.

Colton and Ann have barely touched down near the prison when they come under fire and are forced to leave a running Jay behind. Presumably, Colton yells at Ann the entire way back to his airfield, because he emerges with a sentence starting with “And—!” But Ann sweetens the deal with some more money, getting Colton to thinking, which also doesn’t turn out well. Attempting to use Myrna (North), an old girlfriend and current worn-down wife of the Deputy Sheriff, as misdirection for the horny guards, she refuses and he’s forced to put Hawk in drag instead. “With enough make-up, anyone can look like a whore,” says Myrna philosophically. Except, of course, for Randy Quaid, who makes a less-convincing female than Bugs Bunny. He’s beaten up by the guards (taking an extremely painful and realistic blow to the head from a rifle butt) and thus the situation becomes, for Colton, personal. Even though it wasn’t his ass thoroughly kicked.

Meanwhile, Jay’s health is deteriorating inside the cell and unbeknownst to him (but not us, since we saw the violent and Peckinpah-ish slow-mo opening) his new cellmate is the actual triggerman in Jay’s frame-up, forced at gunpoint to shoot who seems to be someone quite close to him. Either that or Sosa (Jorge Moreno) bawls at the drop of a bullet. How unmanly. Jay’s unhappy at being incarcerated, he takes it out on Ann during one of their conjugal visits, which becomes extremely non-conjugal, lessening our sympathy for him a bit, but because Jill Ireland plays the rape scene with the same distracted indifference that she uses throughout the film, it isn’t really that affecting.

Eventually, Colton gets around to taking some helicopter piloting lessons but proves to be terrible—until it counts, of course. By the third act, his convoluted-yet-simplistic escape plan involves a still-broken Hawk, Myrna (“Keep poppin’ up to ‘borrow’ my wife? She ain’t a lawnmower!” exclaims Deputy/Hubby Spencer) and his soon-to-be-married flight instructor. As we know from the real-life story, Colton successfully liberates Jay, but since this is a Bronson movie and he hasn’t gotten to punch anyone for over an hour, the suspense is continued at the customs department in Mexico City, where everyone finally confronts the slick, sleazy CIA fellow.

I don’t mean to be harsh towards Breakout in pointing out its silly beats. The movie is actually extremely watchable and a good deal of fun. Jill “Mrs. Bronson” Ireland is a real drawback, with her dull accent, glassy eyes and implausible wigs. Duvall is mostly wasted, spending his time in the dark or in hospital beds, leaving one with the suspicion that most of his story was left on the cutting room floor in favor of more Bronson. Huston’s two scenes with Mantee seem to be from a different movie and he pretty much vanishes by Act II.

So what we’re left with is a surprisingly-relaxed and easy-going Bronson. In his fifties by this point, his squinty eyes and weathered skin makes his face resemble a catcher’s mitt, but he’s obviously having a good time playing the gutsy make-it-up-as-he-goes hero. Breakout must have been a relief for him after playing all of his famed anti-hero roles in The Mechanic, Mr. Majestyk and Death Wish. Gries direction is almost absent, but there is some magnificent photography courtesy of DP Lucien Ballard and 2^nd Unit Director Bob Bender, including a real hero shot of the rescue’s commencement featuring Colton’s convertible, the Cessna and the helicopter all framed against the desert backdrop. North and Quaid are both solid—North’s trampy character and yen for Colton are real low comedy highlights—and both the escape and the climax are tense and well-staged.

There’s even a surprising death for one villain where we see his entire body shredded by a plane propeller, rivaling Hungry Joe’s death in Catch-22. It’s an obvious effect today, as many IMDb reviewers point out, but in the ‘70s it had to have been quite shocking. Hell, it still packs a jolt at the moment.

But the film’s loss is not including the real-life hero Vasilios “Bill” Choulos. A fascinating character in and of himself, Choulos made a name for himself in San Francisco as a crusader for the common man in fhe face of government, corporations and industry. One of the first attorneys to ever file a lawsuit against the tobacco industry, a man who traveled all over the world to represent the families of pilots killed in crashes of the faulty F-104 Starfighter “widow maker” jets, he also represented members of Sonny Barger’s Hell’s Angels in a high profile murder case and served on the defense team for Jack Ruby. His clients included Lenny Bruce, Timothy Leary and Abby Hoffman and was one of the few men to correspond directly with the Zodiac Killer. He opened his home to his counter-culture clients and over time it became a kind of artist community.

In his obituary in the SF Chronicle in 2003, his partner, Claude Wyle, said of Choulos, “A lot of the work he did in products liability paved the way for lawyers in this country today. He was a brilliant negotiator whose brutal honesty could get under people's skin, but somehow also endeared him to others. Anything that's timely today, he's already done it, and he was probably the first to do it.” (Peter Fimrite, Chronicle Staff Writer)

Honestly, it might not have been too much of a stretch to turn Bronson into this brilliant crime-fighting legal mind. He certainly demonstraits in Breakout that he possessed a rarely-employed mischievous sense of humor. Rather than the down-and-out everyman tough guy that he delivered time and time again, the movie really could have benefited for another touch or two of the outrageous to throw off the beats and numbers just a little. But that’s just hindsight. You want Bronson, in Breakout you get Bronson, albeit just a little more relaxed and less murdery.

THE GIRL HUNTERS (1962)

There’s little poetry in a Mike Hammer novel. Creator Frank Morrison “Mickey” Spillane never allowed it in; for in with it may come sentimentality and that didn’t fit in Spillane’s world-view. The world was a hard, sharp-edged thing that both slices and bludgeons. It’s a Burmese tiger-trap. It’s a beach in Guadalcanal, “[T]here in the muck and the slime of the jungle, there in the stink that hung over the beaches rising from the bodies of the dead”. What poetry that does exist has the same flint edge. Take this from the same passage in One Lonely Night: “…there in the half-light of too many dusks and dawns laced together with the crosscrossed patterns of bullets, I had gotten a taste of death and found it palatable to the extent that I could never again eat the fruits of a normal civilization.”

Hammer is far and away removed from Chandler’s knight-errant or Hammett’s cynical but upright detective. He’s an embittered, battered ex-soldier with wide streaks of racism, misogyny and extreme rage, which he acts out with either his hard-man’s fists or his .45 “Betsy”. His only guidance through this corpse-stench world is his own sense of justice, which can be summed up but the title of his debut, I, The Jury. He hides no secrets, doesn’t ask for understanding, knows that he can only trust his secretary and long-time fiancée, Velda. He has one friend in the police force he left behind, Pat Chambers, and even that relationship is tenuous.

Portrayed on screens both big and small (though doing much better on television) by Biff Elliot, Stacy Keach, Darren McGavin (in a popular show TV Guide itself called “the worst thing on TV”), Ralph Meeker and Armand Assante, perhaps only one man could ever really do the character justice. For Spillane, it was the man upon whom he based the character, a Newburgh, NY, police officer and fellow vet of the pacific theater, Jack Stang.

While Stang had appeared with Spillane in the 1954 thriller Ring of Fear and had even filmed a screen test for a version of Kiss Me Deadly, his turn as Hammer was never meant to be. So for The Girl Hunters, Spillane turned to a logical second-choice, himself. In one of the only occasions where the writer played his creation in a film, as the credits announce with bold intensity: “Mike Hammer IS Mickey Spillane.”

Spillane is completely appropriate to play the mean-willed side-of-beef with a carry permit. Looking like a particularly weary William Bendix when we first meet him, lying face-down, drunk in the gutter. Seems Hammer has been on a seven-year bender after the apparent death of his beloved Velda. He blames himself and so does Pat Chambers, who fishes him out of the drain to beat him up some more. Pat stops short of killing Mike because a fatally-wounded dock worker named Cole is asking for Hammer specifically. The slug they dug out of Cole matches the gun that was used to murder a senator years ago.

Dying in an oxygen tent, Ritchie Cole reveals that his killer was a top-level Soviet assassin nicknamed “the Dragon”. “Tooth and nail,” Ritchie says. Then reveals the Dragon’s next target: Velda. She’s still alive and Hammer is her only hope to remain so.

Seven-year drunk, nothin’—Hammer’s sober as a judge in seconds, hot on the Dragon’s trail. “Dragon’s have teeth and nails. Now I’m St. George.”

Pat wants nothing to do with his old friend, but the heat comes on from a fed named Rickerby, who tells Mike that Cole was a field agent. The fed can get Hammer anything he needs, so long as he leaves the Dragon alive for Rickerby.

Mike starts at what he thinks might be the beginning, at the dead senator’s mansion. There he meets the no-longer grieving widow, Laura Knapp (Goldfinger’s Shirley Eaton), sunbathing in her pool. The details of her husband’s murder don’t add up. It was staged to look like a robbery, but all that was taken were piles of paste jewelry. Senator Knapp had moved all of his secret papers to a safety deposit box the previous week.

The always-bikini-clad Laura comes on strong, eager to help Hammer in solving her husband’s murder, to help him find “that girl” he’s looking for. If Velda was just some girl, he wouldn’t be looking so hard. But seven years is a long time and with Laura’s bikinis come smoldering glances and thick eyelashes. For the next two acts, Mike runs back and forth across the city, into seedy bars and ritzy estates. Occasionally, he runs into television star Hy Gardner, playing himself, and the two go off for an investigation. Nearly every scene ends with a threat, a sap to the head or a stitch of bullets across the wall. But each scene also brings Mike closer to The Dragon. And Velda.

Spillane was never one for subtlety in his writing and that carries over into his acting. Though he is surprisingly (or not) good as Mike Hammer, his characterization is a lot like the detective’s surname. He’s blunt, he’s hard and he packs a wallop. His Hammer isn’t the narcissistic psychotic Robert Aldritch turned Ralph Meeker into in Kiss Me Deadly, but he’s hardly a soft-touch, though he does let his grief over Velda out in both small and large ways. Sometimes it’s a sad look, but more often it’s a fist to the furniture. But you don’t doubt Spillane’s Hammer. When he’s threatened in a skuzzy bar by a Cuban pimp with an ice-pick, Mike/Mickey stares at the man hard, then rolls a bullet down the length of the bar. Sliding a hand inside his jacket, his eyes never leave the pimp’s. “Eat it,” he orders. Choosing his life over his reputation, the pimp leaves the icepick imbedded in the bar and swallows the bullet. There is no misunderstanding in that scene. Maybe Hammer started out as a drunk and a punching bag at the beginning but make no mistake, if you’re in his way or even mildly annoying him, he’ll kill you, with his bare hands, and he will not be sobbing in church come Sunday.

Hammer talks plain too. He notices that Laura has a shotgun shoved barrel-down in a flowerpot inside the door, so he tells her exactly what would happen if she tried to fire that blocked barrel. “Won’t be nothin’ left above the neck. The coronor’ll be picking bits of skull out of that wall with a pair of needle-nosed pliers.” After cleaning the clay out of the gun, he hands it back to her and leaves. Laura responds with a firey glance, lowering the barrel out of frame as the camera dollies into the most suggestive scene in the film. And you just know that blocked barrel is going to come back into play.

The Girl Hunters also contains one of the most brutal fights ever staged. Hammer catches up to a bad guy and the two of them beat the living hell out of each other in a tool-laden basement. A buzz saw goes on, but there’s no false suspense involving the spinning blade. It’s just there to make noise and drown out the punching. In the end, both men are bleeding and exhausted, panting and unable to throw or take another punch. Hammer leaves the man on the ground and, for just a second, considers burying an axe in the man’s chest, even toeing open his ripped shirt for a better target. But instead, he keeps the man alive for later. Without a rope to secure the villain, he makes due with a mallet and a long iron spike, nailing the man’s hand to the floor. This isn’t the way Mike Hammer “rolls”; it’s how he looks at life. He may live in the gray, but he sees it as black and white. What does a guy have to do so he can move forward? Does he go over, around or, more often, through? Ironically, after he finally reaches his goal, his Velda, she’s only seen from the back, unconscious. His denoument is with Laura Knapp, not with his gal, not with Pat. In this case, Velda is Mike’s Maltese Falcon, she’s the stuff his dreams are made of. Rather than to cynically assume that her part was cut due to budget or time, it might make the world a better place to think that she’s someone private for Mike. We get to see the rough and the brutal, but not the man that Velda loves.

After The Girl Hunters, Mickey went on and Mike Hammer went on, sometimes together, sometimes separately, but never again would they be one and the same on the screen. Spillane popped up in guest star appearances on television; Mike Hammer went on to other adventures in filmmaking. Spillane wrote Mike until he died, then Max Allan Collins helped pick up the pieces where Mickey left off, most recently with a novel entitled The Goliath Bone, in which Hammer goes up against the Taliban. And he still hasn’t married Velda.

DR. COOK’S GARDEN (1971)

By many accounts, Bing Crosby was a bit of a prick. According to half his kids, he was an abusive father, both physically and emotionally; to the other half, he was an adoring father and the living embodiment of Father Chuck O’Malley, his iconic character from Going My Way and The Belles of Saint Mary’s. A recovered alcoholic, devout pot enthusiast, former part-owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates, Crosby had many facets beyond crooner and “that guy in those road movies with that other guy”. Depending on who you talk to, or which ever-reliable Internet source you visit, Crosby’s last performance was either as himself in That’s Entertainment in 1974 or a brief and uncredited cameo in the Bob Hope vehicle, Cancel My Reservation in 1972. But do some original research and you’ll uncover the news that his last major role in a feature film was in a TV-movie in 1971, Dr. Cook’s Garden.

The movie was an adaptation of a disastrous Ira Levin (Rosemary’s Baby) Broadway play, directed by George C. Scott and starring Burl Ives. Seen as superficial, standard and convoluted without being interesting, the show closed after less than a week. Fingers were pointed. People fought. Lives and civilizations were ruined.

Of course, ABC thought it would make a terrific movie. Adapted by Art Wallace and directed by Ted Post, Dr. Cook’s Garden was tailored for the eternal, fatherly Crosby. The titular Dr. Leonard Cook is a kindly doctor in small-town Greenfield, an idyllic paradise that he had a hand in creating. Everyone is happy, healthy, free of crime, litter, hooligans, any and all minorities… The good doctor loves his patients, his town and, especially, his beautiful garden, right outside of his home office, which he tends to lovingly every day.

Hometown boy Dr. Jimmy Tennyson (Frank Converse) returns and becomes Dr. Cook’s assistant. After about nine minutes in his mentor’s presence he begins to notice something peculiar. Some—not all, mind you—of Dr. Cook’s patients start to, well, die. Of little things like colds and dandruff. But all of these former patients are the usual horrible little monsters of small townery: the alcolholics, the abusive husbands, guys with bad tempers who kick dogs (really). So when they die, the rest of the town goes “Enh” and returns to their normal activities of porch-sitting.

So it would seem that the good doctor is playing god (which brings to mind Dr. Hfuhruhurr in The Man With Two Brains, when he replied, “Somebody has to!”) But, like all men of conscience, Tennyson can’t abide by such a breach of the Hippocratic Oath, no matter how mildly-annoying these dead people are. Increasing his tension is the fact that his girlfriend, Janey, is played by Blythe Danner, and that can’t be healthy for anyone.

Originally broadcast as an ABC Movie of the Week in 1971, Dr. Cook’s Garden has been seen only rarely since. It wasn’t rebroadcast after its initial airing and it was many years before it showed up on late-night cable. It’s also mysteriously absent from Bing’s Wikipedia page and numerous biographies. Which is odd. Despite the turgid pace (particularly for a movie lasting barely over an hour) and one of the most beloved actors appearing as a serial killer, there’s little offensive about the movie. Quite the opposite, as the central message is quite intriguing.

What horrifies Jimmy is the central moral argument. Unlike the late Dr. Jack Kevorkian, Bing’s Dr. Cook isn’t helping his patients to die so much as choosing who gets to live. As he sees it, it’s his moral duty to the potential utopia of the town. His decisions of who to “put to sleep” are never rash, but are considered with great care. Where Jimmy disconnects is at the idea of how far will Dr. Cook go to keep Greenfield so idyllic. What if the kindly madman decides that litterbugs are the next line of offense? Or people who speak loudly at the movies? (Which, of course, most people would support 100%, but that’s hardly a moral choice as much as justifiable homicide.) 

It’s this central theme that over-rides Post’s sluggish directing. There’s zero suspense nor even the attempt of casting doubt’s shadow over Dr. Cook’s complicity in the sudden deaths. After Cook suffers a brief cardiac episode minutes following the opening credits, anyone who has ever seen a movie before will anticipate the ending. It all leads up to the young doctor placed in his mentor’s position. 

Predictable, sure, but still effective as far as discussion topics go. In the end, it’s the film’s rarity, the bizarro casting, and an excellent glimpse into Crosby’s dark side that make this movie worth hunting down.

Good luck with that. (Okay, the whole darned thing is on YouTube.)

For an even better analysis of Dr. Cook’s Garden, may I refer you to Amanda Reyes’ excellent essay here.

THE FINAL TERROR (1983)

Say, did you ever see that movie where a bunch of attractive young people go on a camping trip and are picked off one-by-one by a shadowy, inbred maniac? No, not that one.

Not that one either.

The movie I’m referring to is 1983’s The Final Terror. Which was originally shot in 1981 and then finally released under the various titles of Three Blind Mice, The Creeper, The Campsite Murders and The Forest Primeval. It wasn’t shelved because it was bad, per ce, but because of the ‘80s slasher movie glut and the studios thought it might be best if they sat on it until some of its young stars got famous. Yes, okay, Mark Metcalf was already a beloved figure thanks to 1978’s Animal House, but it would be a few more years until his turn in that Twisted Sister video. But Sam Arkoff and Joe Roth were prescient; they just knew that within a year or two, Darryl Hannah, Rachel Ward, Joe Pantoliano, hell, even Adrian Zmed—would all be super respected, bankable and literally household names (except for Pantoliano, because to this day no one can pronounce his name correctly and refer to him as “Joey Pants”. True.).

Until then, their literally and figuratively dark morality tale of the forestry industry would just have to wait. And wait it did.

But even then, from the time of its conception and release, The Final Terror’s story about sex and slaughter in the forest was nothing really new. It certainly wasn’t the “final” anything, given the success-range of countless others before and after. It doesn’t even corner the market on the upcoming-stars cast list (that honor may have to go to The Burning, featuring performances by Holly Hunter, Jason Alexander, Fisher Stevens, etc.). In point of fact, exchange “young forest rangers in training” with “camp counselors”, “spelunkers”, “smoke jumpers” or even “horny botanists”, and you have roughly the same movie as every other ‘80s gorefest.

But there’s something about The Final Terror that makes it stand out from the crowd. Maybe it’s the direction by future Under Seige and The Fugitive helmer Andrew Davis. Perhaps it’s the naturalistic lighting, making the beautiful California forest deceptively safe during the day and claustrophobic and foreboding during the very dark night scenes. Certainly, the cast helps, though Pantoliano has the best lines as the creepy driver Eggar, while Ward and Hannah barely have a dozen lines between them. Zmed is given far too much screentime, but that can be said about any movie he’s in, really.

It’s not that The Final Terror feels slicker or smarter than it’s ‘80s hack-em-up brethren. Heck, it isn’t even all that gory. So what is it about the sum of its meager parts makes it so enjoyable?

The MacGuffin of getting the characters out into nowhere is literally that. A routine work detail brings rangers-in-training to the forest, after a brief stop to pick up their girlfriends en route. After some character-defining bickering and the establishment that driver/mechanic Eggar is a by-the-numbers-weaselly-asshole, they finally make camp. The game plan is to reblaze a trail and then raft downriver where Eggar will retrieve them via his bus. Around the campfire, they talk about the local legend of a crazy woodswoman who raised a wilderness child and sent him off to live among people while she stayed amongst nature and killed hikers. Something about this pisses Eggar off so he climbs into the bus and into the night.

The story somehow manifests the legend to life, because before too long, an unseen force begins picking them off. We the audience see the killer in brief glimpses—a shape covered in fur and foliage, able to blend into the background, appearing as a mound of moss on a river stone, a clump of leaves on the forest bed. It springs to murder with sudden viciousness as its victims usually sit down right by it.

After two of their friends are slaughtered and one goes missing (for a time, he’s actually harvesting wild marijuana), the group becomes convinced that Eggar is behind it all, his brain finally snapped. From then on, the remaining most malcontent of the bunch, Zorich, puts himself in charge. A survivalist, he leads them to their final stand in a natural gully, where they woodland combat perfected by picts and ewoks—swinging logs, spear-pits, survival knives, etc.

And then suddenly, their hopes and dreams are destroyed when they discover it’s not really Eggar behind it, but someone very else. Maybe even crazier than either Eggar or Zorich or Zmed’s agent.

Davis uses the scenery to his advantage and minimizes the clichés when possible. Where many of its fellows go for the pile of mutilated bodies, The Final Terror keeps the body-count to the minimum. After the first couple of victims, the group opts for not splitting up to cover more ground. The unseen killer is used to great effect—it is not an unkillable invisible force, but could literally be anywhere as it stalks the rangers. The device makes every footstep beside every rock a moment of tension. Davis’ direction and the script by Jon George, Neill D. Hicks and Ronald Shusett refuses to play the clichés that we’re used to. Even in 1983, audiences were savvy to the fake scare-then-real scare formula, the creepy point-of-view, the sudden jump, all leading up to a single survivor girl. But The Final Terror frequently tosses that all on its ear. For some viewers, IMDb critics, for instance, this all adds up to “boring”, a movie where “nothing really happens”, “with almost no gore”. For the rest of us, this recipe results in a welcome and unexpected nail-biter.

Granted, The Final Terror is no masterpiece and it’s nearly forgotten today by all but the most encyclopedic of horror fans. The official DVD came and went in 2005 and fetches upwards of $40 through the official channels. The original VHS often runs just as high. (Althought you can watch it in parts or in whole online at places like YouTube and Dailymotion, if that's good enough for you.) I suppose the name Adrien Zmed just doesn’t carry the weight it used to. But it’s a taut, worthy thriller that has earned its place in horror history and deserves a reissue, if only for the day-for-night siege on the bus that had me, at least, on the edge of my seat. Like the rest of the film, even though I had seen that sequence in countless other movies, because of the way it zigged and zagged, I really hadn’t seen it before. That’s the best part of The Final Terror: you have no idea where the old and overgrown trail is going to lead. 

BURKE AND HARE (2010)

Up the close and down the stair,
In the house with Burke and Hare.
Burke’s the butcher, Hare’s the thief,
Knox, the boy who buys the beef.

Burke and Hare,
Fell down the stair,
With a body in a box,
Going to Dr. Knox.

 —19th-century Edinburgh jumping-rope rhyme

Between November 1827 to 31 October 1828, a pair of Irish immigrants named William Burke and William Hare, murdered seventeen people and sold their bodies to Doctor Robert Knox. An anatomy instructor to students of Edinburgh Medical College, Knox needed cadavers for his “hands-on” lectures, but was hobbled by a silly little law that limited the supply of medical cadavers to that of executed criminals. Tragically, Scotland was experiencing a severe reduction in executions due to the scaling back of “The Bloody Code” (aka The Death Penalty) in favor of transporting criminals to Australia. As a result, less than six corpses were available to the growing rate of medical students. This gave rise to the carreer of “resurrectionist” (grave robbers, body snatchers) and, very quickly, “anatomy murder”. Which brings us back around to our heroes, Williams Burke and Hare.

With the assistance of Hare’s wife Margaret “Lucky” Laird and Burke’s lady-friend, “actress” Helen McDougal, the Williams became quite skilled in keeping Dr. Knox’s lectures going. They even developed a method of murder wherein they would sit on their drunk or drugged victims and crush their chests, while also smothering them. It was quick and clean, did no damage to the body beyond, you know, death. It came to be called “burking” (a term still used in the United Kingdom today, though it’s applied more to the peaceful or quiet suppression of dissent).

Because neither of the Williams or their ladyfriends could keep their bloody mouths shut, particularly when they were drunk—which, being Irish, was most of the time—they were eventually caught after a certain night when Burke “casually”—as casually as one known for a “ferocious and malignant disposition” [Newry Telegraph, 31 March 1829—Correspondence from the Northern Whig] can be—asked about the health of every single family member of a local business owner. Oh, and when most of Knox’s students recognized the fresh body of a local boy nicknamed “Daft Johnny”. (Knox dismissed this as nonsense and hurriedly removed the face, hands and feet of the corpse.)

Soon, the perpetrators of the “Westport Murders” were arrested (on admittedly thin evidence, according to the local constabulary). The ladies were acquitted due to lack of evidence; Hare struck a deal and pinned then entire mess on Burke, who was then hanged on January 28, 1829. Dr. Knox was never implicated in the affair but lost his standing at Edinburgh and by 1842 had taken a position at the London Free Cancer Hospital. He died quietly in 1862, was buried and was not resurrected. As a direct result of the actions of these villains, The Anatomy Act 1832 passed, increasing the methods of legal means for acquiring medical corpses and putting a kibosh on the incentive for grave robbing and anatomy murder. Little is known of Hare’s post-burking career, but the remains of both Williams ended up at the Edinburgh College, where they can be seen today.

In 1884, the pair were immortalized in Robert Louis Stevenson’s story “The Body Snatcher", which was made into a film starring Boris Karloff and produced by Val Lewton n 1945. In 1953, Dylan Thomas wrote a play inspired by them called The Doctor and the Devils, which was made into a 1985 film directed by Freddie Francis, who had previously directed an adaptation of the story, The Flesh and the Fiends, in 1960 starring Peter Cushing as Dr. Knox. The pair has shown up in one form or another in episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Dr. Who, countless short stories, novels and, as seen at the beginning of this piece, children’s jump-rope chants. Which just goes to show that body snatching takes many, many forms.

Burke and Hare, the latest telling of the exploits of this wacky duo showed up in the U.K., starring your favorite and mine, Simon Pegg as Burke, Andy Serkis as “Hare” (and not a motion-captured creature for a change), Tom Wilkinson as Knox and Tim Curry as Knox’s nemesis, Dr. Monro (who loves nothing more than to carry around new pairs of “display feet” to show to the upper crust). Directing this bloody, nasty, dark and brutal tale is none-other than John Landis. The film also features cameos by Jenny Augutter, Ronnie Corbett, Bill Bailey and a surprise visit from Sir Christopher Lee. Actually, this go-around isn’t dark, or nasty or very brutal. In fact, Landis has described it as a romantic comedy and the titular characters are really the heroes of this film! …Kinda. Depending on your definition of “hero”, I suppose. At the very least, they’re the most loveable serial murderers you’ve seen in a long time.

The lovable, hapless rogues are at the end of their rope (although not yet, literally), failing at numerous con-schemes and snake oil sales, and just when it seems all is lost, they hear about the plight of the anatomy professor. Seeing a hole in the supply end of this particular economics, they ponder the potential when Hare’s wife, Lucky (Jessica Hynes), declares that one of their upstairs tenants has passed on. And needs gotten-rid-of. Stuffing the poor gent into a barrel, the pair roll the fresh body (albeit, one snapped in half in order to fit into said barrel) over to Knox’s castle. Upon inspection, the corpse-poor anatomist offers them a large sum of money to bring him two bodies per week, no questions asked.

Elated at the prospect but unsure how to go about achieving their weekly goal, the Williams stop off for a pint and it’s there that Willie Burke meets and falls in love with Helen McDougal (Isla Fisher). The former prostitute is currently pursuing a career in acting, hoping to some day produce an all-female version of MacBeth. If only she could find a financier...

Returning home, joy-upon-joys, a drunken Lucky declares that their last tenant is so close to death he just needs to be reminded to shove-off. And that’s when the duo sits down (upon dying Joseph) and invent “burking”. Out of tenants but not ideas, our heroes set out to ply their new trade to greater or lesser success. Soon the money is rolling in. Hare begins saving up for his own funeral parlor, while Burke fancies himself as Helen’s future backer (and fronter, if he plays his cards right and you get my meaning).

Landis’ Burke and Hare follows the timeline and methods, more or less, of the real duo’s history, but plays around with the rest of the details for additional fun. For instance, while it’s true that Charles Darwin was a student of Dr. Monro’s for a time, rather than assisting in acquiring legal corpses for the obsequious surgeon, he was so disgusted by the man’s attitudes toward dissection—including showing up for business meetings still covered in the red of his trade—that it turned Darwin off medicine entirely, switching his attention to Naturalism and Natural History. (So you creationists out there should focus a little more of your bitterness onto Monro.) There is no evidence to support the film’s depiction of Monro’s literal foot fetish, and even less evidence to support that Hare did anything with his life following his betrayal of Burke, let alone establish a thriving funeral parlor. And the idea that Willie Burke was just a sweet, lonely lad with flexible scruples may well be the biggest fabrication of them all. But none of that should bother you unless you’re one of those anal compulsive experts on resurrectionists. And if you are, you undoubtedly have much bigger things to worry about.

Much has been made about Burke and Hare being John Landis’ first feature film in over ten years, but while that’s true, it isn’t like the famed director has been treading water all these years, what with his work on documentaries, episodes of The Masters of Horror, etc., so don’t call this a “comeback”. At least not to his face. Burke and Hare is a far cry from the chaos of The Blues Brothers and An American Werewolf in London. Instead, it has the restrained absurdity and dignified slapstick of the classic Ealing Studios like The Lavender Hill Mob. 

In fact, Ealing has had a bit of a resurgence in the last decade, thanks to the remake of the mysteriously-popular “St. Trinian’s Girls” movies. For further connection, “St. Trinian's” writers Piers Ashworth and Nick Moorcroft penned the B&H screenplay, Pegg’s (and Wright’s) landmark Shaun of the Dead and Neal Marshall’s The Descent were shot on the Ealing lots. By Landis’ own admission, “This is very much my attempt to make an Ealing comedy, in the very black tradition of Kind Hearts and Coronets and The Ladykillers, where the whole cast murders one another.” (“Burke and Hare behind the scenes”, The Telegraph, Horatia Harrod 04 Oct 2010) According to Serkis (in the same article), Landis wanted the Burke and Hare dynamic to be “like an evil Laurel and Hardy”, and since the actors are getting along so well, we, as an audience, can forgive the nasty murder and corpse-abuse.

One final bit of geekery before we move on: most of the gory body parts were supplied by none-other than friend-of-Landis-and-horror-fans-all, Greg Nicotero. “You gotta pull favours in this industry, there’s no money”, said Pegg (same piece).

Like the majority of the Ealing Studios’ films, Burke and Hare is amusing but not hilarious, romantic but not saccharine, and has a slower pace than our modern deficient attention spans are used to without being boring. Sometimes the European and American sensibilities clash—we’re much more appreciative of the emptying of bed pans onto characters, moreso when the gag is repeated. We also appreciate it when our anti-heroes drop the “anti” in the third act, so that instead of one William betraying the other, the latter makes a noble sacrifice for the former. Whether or not we Yankees get the cameo by William Wordsworth or the numerous anachronisms is really beside the point. So, too, is the film’s message “who’s more evil, the killers or the doctors?” It’s not like those things will stifle enjoyment.

What will stifle enjoyment, or even the opportunity to decide, is the fact that Burke and Hare has come and gone in the United Kingdom, available on PAL DVD and Blu-Ray, the closest we here in the states can come to the film is to stream it on Amazon On-Demand. No formal DVD release date has been announced, let alone a theatrical screening. We, as a nation should protest. May I recommend petitioning the holders of the U.S. rights, IFC Films? We should all send them a fresh corpse to make our point.

THE LIST OF ADRIAN MESSENGER (1963)

In 1963, larger-than-life-in-a-Hemingway-er-way director John Huston perpetrated a hoax on audiences far and farther. Not a huge hoax; actually more like a dirty trick. Thankfully, it was concealed inside a terrific movie.

A soft-spoken little thriller set amongst the near-royalty of the British top-most crust. After we witness a night-time murder and a name scratched from a list, we meet first Anthony Gethryn (George C. Scott), formerly of British Intelligence MI5, then unassuming writer Adrian Messenger (John Merivale). Messenger believes that a series of accidental deaths weren’t so accidental and that the men were likely murdered. He asks Gethryn to look into these seemingly unrelated events, then promptly meets his doom when his plane inexplicably (to everyone who is in the movie and not the audience) explodes. Before dying, Messenger manages to croak out a few disjointed sentences to the plane’s only survivor, Raoul Le Borg. Le Borg, as it turns out, was Gethryn’s Great War ally in the French Resistance, and he joins the former agent in his quest, now that it’s become personal. The main clue in Messenger’s utterings is the word “broom”, which Le Borg misremembers as “brush”. But who is giving the brush to whom?

Gethryn and Le Borg investigate Messenger’s list and their hunt takes them all over England, bringing them into contact with a crippled Cockney soldier (“Lost me barrel and keg [in Burma]”), a mysterious gypsy, an Italian food-cart vendor, and fox hunt protestors (“It’s the unspeakable after the uneatable!”), not to mention joining a couple of fox hunts themselves upon the Bruttenholm estate. All the while, the mysterious killer remains one step ahead of them, donning a series of disguises before revealing himself to be Kirk Douglas—er, George Brougham.

Incidentally, “Brougham” and “Bruttenholm” are both pronounced “broom”. And once we discover that old George is not only a distant heir to the Bruttenholm legacy but was also a prisoner of war in Burma with the entirety of the dead men on the list, it’s not too hard to place the rest of the pieces in the puzzle, especially when the corners are so well-defined and the size of dinner plates.

Ultimately, there’s not a lot of mystery in The List of Adrian Messenger, but there is an awful lot of fun. With Scott as our guide through the foggy underbelly of England to the magnificent grounds of the Bruttenholm estate, we meet a wonderful assortment of characters and red herrings. The opening credits boast a lot of names—Frank Sinatra, Tony Curtis, Burt Lancaster, Robert Mitchum—and they’re present in the film in disguises, just like Douglas’ Brougham. In the film’s post-script coda, all the disguised cameo characters unmask themselves and reveal their famous faces. And we all laugh and delight in the trickery.

To modern eyes, the made-up characters are extremely easy to spot. Douglas’ first quick-change in a rest room, slipping out sclera contacts and replacing a bald cap, is still a marvelously-staged sequence, and was likely quite a shock to ‘60s audiences. Now that every film fan is world-weary, delighting in proclaiming “that’s so fake!” at every movie’s slight-of-hand, the masquerades designed by Bud Westmore in Messenger will be unlikely to impress. But if you’re heart isn’t two-sizes too-small, you’ll let it go and just have a good time.

But here’s where Huston’s hoax really comes into play. As it turns out, his trickery was not in the disguises but the disguised. With the sole exception of Robert Mitchum playing a sinister soldier, none of the famous actors are in the movie. They’re only in the unmasking sequence! Accounts differ as to who played whom and to what extent, but character actor Dave Willock definitely doubled for Douglas during some of the lengthier disguise sequences while the rest were likely portrayed by Space Patrol’s Jan Merlin. In fact, Merlin’s novel, Shooting Montezuma, involves the making of a movie where disguise and deception plays a key role. To add insult to injury, the legendary Paul Frees provided the voices for Sinatra, Curtis and Lancaster.

In the end, Huston makes monkeys out of us all twice. It’s up to the deceived to decide if it was a low-down rotten trick or a mastery of public relations. After all, he didn’t have to pay exorbitant fees for his cameo-ees, outside of a couple hours’ worth of scratch for the masking and reveal, and he still got some glamorous mugs for the curtain call and the advertising. You can’t say that Sinatra or Lancaster aren’t in the movie, just not in the way you expect. Not a rare rug-pull then and it’s still used today. The “Famous Face on the Box” Deception.

But that doesn’t make The List of Adrian Messenger any less a joy to watch than do the visible wires attached to the actors during the climactic fox hunt. It’s all Hollywood magic trickery, from the exciting but predictable plot (based on the 1961 book by Philip MacDonald) to the bombastic acting to Scott’s amused grin permanently-affixed beneath his impressive moustache. It’s a Golden Age film for an audience growing more and more sophisticated with each release.

Now, the usual sturm and drang: The List of Adrian Messenger can only be found on the Warner Brothers Collection DVD-R-on-Demand service, unless you want to try and catch it on cable (TCM runs it frequently). It might be one movie where the remastering is to its detriment. The clarity of the wires and seams (both in terms of make-up and plot threads) are made too visible by technology.