One Last Song

Read/Watch 'em In Order #41

There's no denying it: Song of the Thin Man (1947) is the weakest entry in the series. It has several problems, the primary one being that the mystery is just a so-so one that progresses in an often heavy-handed manner, then resolved when Nick sets up an equally heavy-handed deus ex machina to trick the killer into giving himself/herself away.

The plot is potentially good. A band leader is murdered aboard a gambling ship. He was a ladies man with an eye for women both married and unmarried AND he owed a gambler $12,000 dollars, so there's plenty of motive to go around. Nick and Nora become involved when the main suspect asks for their help. All perfectly good stuff with an interesting setting. But the script feels as if it needed one or two more re-writes to polish it up--events play out in a contrived manner rather than flow naturally.

Also, Nick Jr. (played by a young Dean Stockwell) hampers the Charles' style. With a growing son, the couple is more domesticated than ever. In real life, of course, this would have been admirable and appropriate. But in a universe in which married couples frequently stumble over corpses and then try to solve the crime, domestication is never a good thing. We don't want to see them raising a kid and--even though those scenes are done with a fair level of humor--they are disconnected from the murder mystery plot and add nothing to the overall film.

But the movie still manages to be entertaining. This is due in part to the fact that its impossible to watch William Powell and Myrna Loy play off each other and not have enjoy yourself. The supporting cast, including Keenan Wynn as a band member who gets roped into helping the

Charles', is excellent. (Gloria Graham as a singer and Leon Ames as a sleezy promoter are also quite good.) Everyone on screen manages to give the film a lot more class than it might have otherwise had.

Individual scenes stand out as well, such as Nick and Nora trying to grasp the meaning of Keenan Wynn's hep slang. Or the scene I've included here in which the Charles' get an awful lot of information out of a hotel clerk who claims he never snoops on his guests. Also, one character's reaction when the killer is revealed adds a sudden dose of effective drama.

My understanding is that William Powell felt he was getting too old for the role of Nick and wanted to end with series after this film. Perhaps he was right--as Nick and Nora got older, the feel of the movies would have inevitably changed. (Though Myrna Loy was still as much of a goddess as always in the looks department.)

On the other hand, had Song of the Thin Man had a better script (and if Nick Jr. were shipped off to military school), perhaps they could have continued the series longer without a loss of quality.

We'll never know. But at least we got to spend six movies with Nick and Nora. They were indeed a fun couple. If more married couples regularly discovered dead bodies and solved murders, the real world would be an infinitely more interesting place.




So that's it for the Thin Man films. Next, we're going to stick with unusual detectives and look at the first three Hildegard Withers films from 1932 to 1935 (the three that star Edna May Oliver as Hildegard). Hildegard was a spinster school teacher with a knack for solving crimes, so she can't help but be interesting.

Clones, Kidnappings and a Museum Tour

To celebrate the 500th issue of Action Comics (cover dated October 1979), DC opted to do the obvious--recounting the life story of Superman. To their credit, though, they did the obvious in a very entertaining manner, merging the biographical information together with an evil plot involving clones and hidden explosives.

Metropolis is opening a Superman Museum. Because a huge amount of the proceeds are going to charities, Superman agrees to be there and take a group through a guided tour, recounted important parts of his life as they pass by various exhibits. Of course, most of his closest friends--Lois, Lana, Perry, Clark (or a robot Clark, at least) are there with him.

The biographical part is done very well. Its fun to see all the key moments in Kal-el's life all presented in Curt Swan's always nifty art work. Everything important (from Krypto to the various forms of Kryptonite to the origin of his costume to the bottle city of Kandor, etc.) is there--Superman even mentally muses about aspects of his life involving his secret identity, so we readers get to see all the stuff he's not sharing with the museum visitors. If you knew nothing about Supes

going into this issue, you'd be reasonably well-read on the subject by the time you finished this 64-page story.

But while Superman is giving his tour, Lex Luthor is up to no good as usual. His plan involves a clever way of actually getting a cell sample from Superman, growing a clone, replacing Supes with the clone and blowing up the museum.

Of course, his plan is foiled. Superman ends up in a cell lit by a red-sun lamp that renders him powerless, but he depends on his brains rather than his powers to escape and get the upper hand on Lex. The finale is a one-on-one fight with the Superman clone.

Writer Martin Pasko ends the story with a nice bit of narration, explaining that it's not Superman's planet of origin that makes him who he is (after all, the pre-crisis DC universe had quite a few survivors of Krypton's destruction running around), nor his powers, nor his intelligence. But rather it's "the ability to use all that God-given power and long-nurtured wisdom in the name of kindness... ethics... morality.. the things men call good... to wield that power in the pursuit of justice and in that pursuit, to vanquish evil."

Cover Cavalcade

Here's another great Michael Whelan cover.

The Problem of Picking a Movie

Just to be able to say that I've done it, I want to record a fan commentary for a movie or a TV episode. But--since this isn't something I'll have the time or desire to do on a regular basis--I'm being very indecisive about which movie/episode to do.

At first, I thought about doing the original King Kong, talking about it as if it were based on a true story and referencing other dinosaur movies (like The Lost World and Valley of Gwangi) as being true stories as well. So I'd be comparing scenes in the movie to what actually happened in "real life." But this really isn't a strong enough joke to run for a 100 minute movie.

I don't have the talent to do a good Mystery Science Theater-style commentary and, besides, I do want to actually comment on the storytelling effectiveness or general coolness of whatever movie I pick.

But which movie? Which one? It's driving me nuts trying to pick one.

Here's my unrehearsed and stream-of-consciousness commentary of one scene from Tarzan and the Slave Girl (1950). Gee whiz, is it really a good idea to make people listen to that voice for 90 minutes? Maybe I should rethink this:

Friday's Favorite OTR

Escape: "The Notebook"  7/26/53

A grim and gripping Western about two men trying to get back to civilization to file a claim on a gold strike. But someone else wants the gold and is stalking them relentlessly.

Click HERE to listen or download.

Submarines and Starships

The 1957 war movie The Enemy Below is essentially proof that a good cliché or trope can be used again and again as the basis for good storytelling—as long as the story is skillfully told.

The movie used what even by 1957 was indeed a cliché—the story of a submarine and a surface vessel stalking one another. And it definitely is done skillfully.

The surface vessel is the destroyer escort USS Haynes, which is tracking a German U-boat. The crew of the Haynes is eager to do their jobs, but they’re nervous about their new captain. Captain Murrell (played with quiet intelligence by Robert Mitchum) just transferred into the Navy from the merchant service after spending nearly a month on a raft after his last ship was sunk. His current crew harbors some doubts about him.

But he soon wins their confidence when he proves himself capable of out-thinking his opponent. But Mitchum doesn’t out-think him every time. The German captain makes some clever moves of his own.

The German is played by Curt Jurgens. In real life, the German-born actor spent some time in a concentration camp for his anti-Nazi sentiments, so it’s ironic that many of his best-known roles after the war were playing soldiers or sailors in the German military. Here he plays a determined professional who simply wants to get his boat and his crew home alive.

Much of the movie counterpoints Mitchum and Jurgens as the two men strive to kill each other while simultaneously developing a mutual respect for one another’s abilities. Both the cast and the effective plot construction are combined to make a tense and entertaining movie.

Mitchum’s executive officer in the movie is played by David Hedison (billed as Al Hedison in this early part of his career). Seven years later, Hedison would transfer from surface ships to submarines when he played Captain Lee Crane in the television version of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.

In the January 2, 1966 episode titled “Killers of the Deep,” Hedison got to relive the events of The Enemy Below. A sub belonging to a small nation is stealing nukes from underwater missile silos because (as the sub captain explains): “A very small country with a few nuclear missiles suddenly becomes a very large country.”

Crane and Admiral Nelson (Richard Basehart) scout for the enemy in the Flying Sub, but are shot down. Crane ends up a prisoner on the enemy sub, while Basehart is picked up by an American destroyer and leads the effort to destroy the sub.

The episode uses a lot of stock footage from The Enemy Below, but manages to weave this fairly seamlessly into the episode. Though “Killers from the Deep" is a little shameless in how closely it follows the plot of the film (including having Basehart twice use the exact same chains of logic Mitchum uses to predict the sub’s actions), it’s a very entertaining episode. It leaves out the Enemies Gaining Mutual Respect trope, but the villain is played by Michael Ansara, who is always fun to watch as a bad guy.

Of course, the episode adds Captain Crane’s adventures as a prisoner aboard the enemy sub to the overall plot, where he eventually gets loose and leads the enemy a merry chase through the air vents. (Submarines in the Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea universe had absurdly large air vents.)

There’s one interesting side effect to using footage from The Enemy Below. Voyage was made in the 1960s, but set in the far future decade of the 1970s. But even by the '60s, the World War II-era depth charging techniques being used by Nelson were long out-of-date. Modern warships could fire ASROCS (anti-submarine rockets) from miles away to take out enemy subs. But the stock footage shows depth charges, so Nelson is stuck with that tactic and ASROCS aren’t even mentioned.

By the way, if you watch the clip below, you may notice the ensign being given orders by Admiral Nelson in John Wayne’s son Patrick. In 1977, Patrick would earn major geek cred by starring in both The People That Time Forgot and Ray Harryhausen’s Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger.

Anyway, the year 1966 was not yet done with The Enemy Below. On December 15, the starship Enterprise went up against the Romulans for the first time. When a Romulan ship equipped with a cloaking device destroys some Federation outposts, it’s Captain Kirk’s job to track the ship down and destroy it.

“Balance of Terror” does a great job of translating the ship vs. sub situation into an outer space setting and (with Mark Leonard doing an excellent job as the Romulan captain) it pulls off the Enemies Gaining Mutual Respect vibe quite nicely. It is one of the strongest episodes of the original Star Trek series.

So The Enemy Below was based on a clichéd idea, but used that idea so effectively that its plot bled over into at least two television episodes and still remained a strong story. It’s not an inherently bad thing to reuse an old story idea. The only question is simply whether you tell that story well.

Conning the Bad Guys

A couple of weeks ago, I reviewed a Superman story in which the Man of Steel ran a complex con on Lex Luthor. It reminded me of the TV show Mission: Impossible, a series created by Bruce Geller specifically because he enjoyed complex bank heist movies and wanted a format in which the good guys could justifiably be doing the same sort of thing.

It's a great conceit and, like many other tropes of fiction, it's something that can be done over and over again in an infinite number of variations.

It's an idea that writer Larry Hama ran with during the 1980s in Marvel's G.I. Joe Special Missions. This was a spin-off of the main G.I. Joe title, showcasing side missions that the Joe Team might be running at any one time. Often, the villains were still the international terrorist group known as Cobra (their main enemies in the regular Joe book). But Special Missions gave Hama an opportunity to pit the Joes against other bad guys as well. And he often used the "running a con" plot to great effect.

The very first issue (October 1986), in fact, had the Joes running a con right out the gate.

A supposedly Swedish trawler is sailing in the Baltic Sea. Except it's not really Swedish--it's packed full of Joes. Their mission? Well, both the elite Russian commando team known as the Oktober Guard and Cobra think they are trying to recover classified equipment from a sunken American sub.

Both the Russians and Cobra are determined to get to the sub first. This leads to a helicopter dogfight, then expands into the Baroness (Cobra's beautiful but ruthless assassin) leading a boarding party aboard the Russian ship. But while Cobra and the Oktober Guard are trying to kill each other, two Joe frogmen also sneak aboard the Russian vessel. Because the sunken sub doesn't really exist and all this is really part of a plan to carry out another mission entirely...

It's a fun story. Herb Trimpe, the usual G.I. Joe artist from that era, does his typically strong job of presenting the action. And I've always enjoyed Hama's ability to merge complex plot twists together with cool battle scenes.

And it's always fun watching the bad guys get fooled. When that sort of plot is done well and shows real cleverness and imagination... well, as I said--it's a trope that simply doesn't get old.

Cover Cavalcade

There's no doubt that Barry Windsor-Smith is a superb artist who helped make Conan's first comic book series successful, but to this day fans still argue about that darn horned helmet.

An honored spot indeed!

One of my books on the shelf of the Ringling College of Art and Design library. It's sandwiched between The Encyclopedia of Monsters on one side and Tarzan: The Centennial Celebration on the other. Definitely an honored spot.

Friday's Favorite OTR

The Whistler: "The Strange Sisters" 1/28/46

It's not easy being a middle child. Especially when your domineering older sister convinces your weak-willed younger sister that they ought to kill you.

Click HERE to listen or download.