It is ALWAYS Hammer Time

One would expect that the appeal of popular novels aimed at a 1950s audience would fade over time, that you’d spot the weakness in the prose and the characterization would appear less sophisticated than modern books.

I get that feeling that there’s something missing when reading the Golden Age of Science Fiction. The stories are still good, the ideas are still wonderful, but the optimism and the fact that the good guys are all noble has somehow become too naive to countenance. We live in a cynical era in which the very worst of our population are our opinion leaders.

But cynicism isn’t new, and the idea of a white knight in tarnished armor still fits–and I suspect it always will.

Enter Mike Hammer.

Actually, there is no need for him to enter. You see, he never left. He’s been in print since first publication, and there are countless reasons for it.

The first reason is that the plot of a vigilante hellbent on righting the world’s wrongs through the unscientific application of violent mayhem appeals to many people. It used to be that people felt powerless in the face of criminals who couldn’t be touched, but now it’s even worse: people feel that doing ANYTHING at all puts you in the crosshairs of a society that values safety over everything else, and at any price. Which is why Mitch Rapp is so popular–he’s just Mike Hammer let loose among the timorous, sanctimonious and annoying people of the 21st century.

So Mike Hammer not only never left, he has spawned a legion of imitators and offspring.

More unexpected is how the writing accompanies the archetype. This isn’t hackwork by any means. There is some serious artistry in the creation of these stories, even if the plot–in its day–was aimed squarely at the kind of public that had a hard time reading at a level beyond comic books. Perhaps that’s why Spillane paints such vivid word pictures. He knew his audience would appreciate the visual cues.

So Spillane was a good, probably great, writer.

And that talent, instead of being squandered into a navel-gazing philosophical treatise or endless description of the angst of a factory worker (no matter how talented he was, I doubt Spillane could ever write that ultimate symbol of literary pointlessness: the unsatisfied housewife story), was channeled into plots that actually keep people awake. More than awake, in fact, these are unputdownable stories.

And the women… Let’s just say that Spillane was unchallenged as the master of femmes fatale.

This volume contains three classics: One Lonely Night, The Big Kill and Kiss Me, Deadly.

The first is notable because of the description of the communists who play the antagonists. Small-minded people led by cynical power-hungry bastards are beautifully portrayed as such, and it would work with any political organization on the extremes of the spectrum today, whether that’s the woke loony left or the fundamentalist loony right. The same kind of dead-enders and irrelevant people trying to feel important because they support some weaponized cause…

When writing is that timeless, it is great.

Kiss Me Deadly was interesting because I’d seen the film in my journey through the 1001 movies. Unlike the movie, the book takes place in New York which isn’t necessarily better, but it does completely change the feel of the movie. I find New York to be a grittier city in general than Los Angeles. And denser. All of that makes anything set there feel more claustrophobic… which is a great quality for a thriller. Also interesting to see that the film actually made the McGuffin around which the plot revolves a lot splashier, which I guess is just Hollywood being Hollywood.

If you haven’t read Spillane, do yourself a favor and pick up one of his books. You should enjoy them because they take us back to a time when life was a little less controlled by the health and safety mob.

Gustavo Bondoni is a novelist and short story writer whose thriller Timeless tosses East-European drug smugglers, a bestselling book and a determined reporter into a blender and turns it on. You can check it out here.

Night of the Hunter: All that was missing was a Dali Dream Sequence

Night of the Hunter is another strange film. Directors were, in 1955, probably quite convinced that the noir genre was done to death, so if you wanted to make a splash with a film there, you had to work outside of the usual. The Phenix City Story was an attempt at going the true-crime route, while Night of the Hunter Adopted a kitchen sink approach.

So, in the first place, the bad guy is a bizarre figure. A serial killer who is a preacher. Not a cult leader, either, but just a wandering, earnest fire-and-brimstone type with a beautiful bass singing voice. Then you’ve got the very non-noir trope of children being the endangered parties.

“What else?” the producer probably asked, fearful of not getting back the investment.

They also tossed in a vision-like trip down a river in which the two children were allegorically delivered to a saint (or something along those lines, mid-century symbolism isn’t my strongest suit). Whatever the deeper meaning of it all the film is also filled with religious allegory. It’s not quite the Dali dream sequence… but we’re close.

“Not enough!” the producers screamed.

So they brought back Lillian Gish. Yes, the same actress who thrilled silent-film audiences with classics like Way Down South, Broken Blossoms or Birth of a Nation (you’ll have to go back to LiveJournal to see my thoughts on those!).

I, for one, am glad they did. She proves to be a brilliant talkie actress as well… and she was utterly convincing as a kind-hearted, soft-singing matron. Beautiful.

In summary, this one is a valiant effort to stand out. The results are somewhat mixed, with some beautiful moments and strong tension slightly let down by the sense that the film was trying to do too much, and the weird moments. It’s memorable without being, in my opinion, good.

And perhaps that was the whole point.

Gustavo Bondoni is a novelist and short story writer whose latest book is a science fiction thriller entitled Colony. You can check it out here.

Noir Fatale, A Selection of SF and F Noir

Noir Fatale is one of those books in my TBR pile that I’d been looking forward to for a long time. As long-time readers of this blog are probably aware, I like noir, and if you combine (or combine) noir with speculative fiction, I like it even more. So I had high expectations for this one.

I will admit that the first part of the book didn’t quite meet those lofty standards. The stories, while technically competent and written by some of the best in the business didn’t quite have that spark I expected. They were good, but didn’t quite manage to bring me into the noir mood the way I wanted them to.

Three stories from the end, I thought the book would be just another book, entertaining but not memorable, when I encountered Patrick M. Tracy’s “Worth the Scars of Dying”. While I’d argue that it wasn’t really noir, this story was amazing. It was then followed by two more really strong ones: “The Frost Queen” by Robert Buettner and “Bombshell” by Larry Correia.

A side note for the Buettner tale here: if anyone had told me the plot of this one, I would have rolled my eyes and given it a miss… but I really, really liked it. Execution, in this case really was everything, turning a plot that I’m not the target for into a powerful story indeed.

So the final three tales picked up so much that this one rises above average. I’m sure other readers will find different favorites, and there really isn’t a bad story in the lot.

Perhaps the most interesting of them all, even if I didn’t quite enjoy it as much as my favorites, it Laurel K. Hamilton’s “Sweet Seduction”. It’s the subversive story in the lot… but I won’t spoil it by telling you why.

A solid antho here.

Gustavo Bondoni’s latest book is a humorous, non-politically-correct romp through Ancient Greece (which is fortunate, because none of the ancient Greeks depicted in the story are alive to attack him on Twitter for his views). It’s called The Malakiad, and you can check it out here.

Mickey Spillane, Unpredictable Even on the Big Screen

Mickey Spillane was a wonderful writer, the original page-turner whose books hit you over the head with something major on the very last page, something he did intentionally. Apparently, when his work was adapted to the big screen, the same rules applied.

Kiss Me Deadly has all the elements of film noir. And by all of them, I mean ALL of them. Every last thing you can cram into a detective story has been crammed into this one. Fistfights for no reason? Check. Brutalizing of witnesses? Check. Shadowy government agents warning him off? Check. Powerful criminals in the way? Check. Dangerous women? Check, check, check. Detective’s friend brutally murdered? Check.

It’s the kind of thing that works really well in a book, even a short one, because the author can take a sentence or two to explain what Hammer is thinking or why he feels justified in breaking the old opera singer’s records. He can even share his suspicions about who sent the knifeman after him and why. Also some of the omissions could be explained as well, specifically why Hammer, having a witness in front of him, doesn’t ask more and deeper questions.

Which is all a roundabout way of saying that what works beautifully in prose feels rushed and unbelievable in film. You really need to turn your mind off for this one.

But one thing you can’t fault it for pacing and fun factor. Like one of Spillane’s novels, this one keeps you hooked from the first second until the end. You won’t be reaching for the remote to watch something else, and it’s so rapid-fire that even the enormous plot holes zoom by.

So, did I enjoy it? Yes, enormously.

Is it a good film? It succeeds at what it aims to do very well. But it’s tough to sit down and analyze it without being critical of the stuff you noticed failing about the film as you were wooshed along in its wake.

Recommended for those who enjoy being entertained.

Gustavo Bondoni is a novelist and short story writer whose latest novel is a humorous fantasy romp through Ancient Greece… with monsters. It’s called The Malakiad, and you can check it out on Amazon, here.

In Bob Le Flambeur, Montmartre is the Main Character

When i think of 1950s nostalgia, I think of drive-in restaurants, waitresses on roller skates, neon, chrome and tailfins. But Bob Le Flambeur is a wonderful evocation of another lost era: the 1950s in Montmartre. Now this region of Paris has been a place for people of different classes to get together at least since the time of the impressionists, but what makes its appearance in this film amazing is how it combines the modern look of the bars (along with a huge number of dudes on either xylophones or glockenspiels) with the older look and feel of both the buildings around them and the plot of the movie.

The plot is kind of a 1930s noir / gangster flick / heist movie (and no one will be able to convince me that it didn’t inspire Ocean’s Eleven) with a plot that isn’t original — the one I think of is The Asphalt Jungle. But it’s so much better than that one.

Bob is a retired criminal and now a gambler who is still well-respected and well-connected in the underworld, played in an understated way by Roger Duchesne. He has a young sidekick, of course, and a crew straight out of central casting.

Except the girl. This girl makes the bombshells of the noir era look unsophisticated and boring. There’s just something about Isabelle Corey in this one that makes her one of the most alluring and dangerous female leads I can remember seeing. And though she’s pretty, this comes mostly from how she plays the role, without, seemingly, a care in the world.

This is a good film all around.

But it’s that walk along a Montmartre poised between the old world and the modern which really elevated it into the realm of greatness, and the reason I just immersed myself in it without a care in the world. Highly recommended.

Gustavo Bondoni is an Argentine novelist and short story writer whose latest book is a comic novel of Heroic-era Greece called The Malakiad. You can check it out here.

Westerns Can Be Noir, Too

Sure, only Spencer Tracy was a major star when they filmed Bad Day at Black Rock… but the casting director had a great eye for future megastardom. Cast in supporting roles in this one were Anne Francis (she became Honey West), Ernest Borgnine, and Lee Marvin (to my mind, these two will always be linked together by the masterpiece that was The Dirty Dozen).

Bad Day is a great film. It shares the Western setting and the tension with High Noon, but this one isn’t a western, despite its setting. This one is pure noir… but in bright badlands sunlight.

The tension builds slowly, starting with a train that stops at an unaccustomed place and the hostility of the townsfolk towards the only man who gets off at that particular stop.

Slowly, we come to understand what’s going on (the only clumsy part of this movie is how it reveals the crime at the center of the tale – what happened is way too obvious almost from the tenth minute of the movie). This doesn’t take away from the enjoyment of the film, however. It’s still extremely entertaining to watch.

The setup is pretty much all I can tell about this film without spoiling the whole thing, so I’ll limit myself to recommending you watch the movie if you can, since this fusion of Western and Noir is unusual. Noir supposedly takes place at night, in neon-illuminated cityscapes, while throwing the shadow of blinds against the wall of the detective’s lonely room. But you get the sense anyway, even in the bright daylight of the town of Black Rock.

But the sensibilities are all there. The single tarnished champion fighting not only the bad guys, but the way the world is, too. In this case, the message is about racism, 1940s style, but that’s just an excuse to get the quest going and, fortunately, doesn’t interfere with the story. This is a well-balanced, non-preachy film.

Recommended for lovers of Noir and people who enjoy seeing stories that take place in the west.

Gustavo Bondoni’s latest book is Desert Base Strike. It’s about the fight against people turning genetically modified dinosaurs into weapons… and you can check it out here.

A Last Gasp of Noir Air: The Big Heat

I think of the original film noir era reaching its pinnacle in the forties, getting less and less subtle and losing a little bit of quality as everyone jumped on the bandwagon late in the decade and in the fifties. They are still more interesting to me than, say, Westerns, but they aren’t up to the standards of the great early efforts. I didn’t even like Double Indemnity or Mildred Pierce that much.

Every so often, however, a later film struck gold. Whether through genius or coincidence, they managed to bring back some of the freshness (albeit none of that classic Bogart-noir feeling) of the early noir era. The Big Heat is one of those films.

Now, today, we’re inundated with revenge films in which a man (or Uma Thurman) goes out on a binge killing the people who’ve wronged her. Interestingly, that made the pivotal scene, the one that changes this one from a police film to a revenge film, seem inevitable… but audiences in the 1950s would not have seen it coming, and the shock value lifts this one out of the crowd.

It’s a Hays-era film, of course, which mans that the good guy doesn’t just gun down the bad guys, but other than that, it establishes the template for the “cop gives up his badge and takes down the mean people” film for decades to come.

Fast-paced, well-written and well-directed (by Fritz Lang, no less) The Big Heat holds up well even today. It’s a definite keeper, and should be watched whenever the opportunity arises.

Having said that, the feel of it is just so different from classic noir. I suppose my problem is that, to me, classic noir is the Maltese Falcon, and the aesthetic should always be that of the final scene of Casablanca, so I’m hard to please. This film might be just a few years removed from those classics, but it feels decades away. The vibe of the older films was somewhere in the prewar decades, while The Big Heat is firmly grounded in the 1950s.

It also has one foot in the 1970s. Why? Lee Marvin, that’s why. He’s one of the major antagonists in the flick, but he will always be part of The Dirty Dozen in my mind. So yeah, I could never quite put this one in that “classic noir” basket which holds space in my head that can never cross over with the seventies. Your mileage, of course, may vary, but watch it anyway.

Gustavo Bondoni is a novelist and short story writer whose own thriller, Timeless, takes the genre into the modern age. Fast-paced, sexy and set in the world of international smuggling as seen from southern Europe, it will keep you turning pages. You can check it out here.

Pickup on South Street… Doing Message Right

When I reviewed Adam’s Rib, I pointed out how a film–even one with a glorious cast–can be utterly ruined when the message gets in the way of the story. Now let’s have a look at one that sends a message but is still amazing.

Pickup on South Street is a film I’d never heard of until I got my copy of the 1001 films book. And if I tell you the way it works out, you’ll think it was a McCarthy-era, commie-scare piece of political propaganda with zero redeeming traits. So here goes: it’s basically about a pickpocket who redeems himself by breaking up a communist spy ring in New York.

Pure cold-war jingoism, right?

Wrong. It’s a fun spy flick in an unforgettable 1950s New York setting, where the communists are, while watching, incidental in the plot. The plot needed some spies, and the spies in the post-Nazi era were communists.

Yes, I agree that the impact of the message might have been blunted by the fact that communists, like Nazis, make for excellent bad guys. Totalitarian regimes which hate any sort of individuality are always nice to make fun of. But the film rises above that, not breaking stride to moralize about the evils of the reds… it tells the story in much the same way a crime movie would, without stopping to preach.

And that’s what makes this movie. Its message is powerfully delivered precisely because it doesn’t beat you over the head with it… and it makes you wonder: how the hell did the people making The Last Jedi and other modern preach-fests forget this lesson? I suspect the arrogance of the modern political elites makes them think that they can preach at the audience without having their films lambasted as imbecilic. They are wrong, and at least part of Hollywood knew it in the 50s.

And just how huge is the message they managed to hide in this one?

It’s enormous, but you need to know a little about Hollywood back then to grasp it. In the 50s, the Hays Code was still going strong, which meant that you couldn’t have a happy ending for a criminal. Well, in this one, the protagonist robs a purse, beats a woman, lies to the cops and tries to extort a bunch of money from the communist gang… and in the end, walks free (and gets the girl–the same one he spent half the film slapping around).

So WHY does he get a happy ending? Because all of his crimes are offset by the glory of having destroyed a communist spy ring. It’s really that simple.

But despite the utter lack of subtlety of the political message it never, not once, gets in the way of the storytelling and the art of this film.

And that, my friends, is how it’s done. Highly recommended.

Gustavo Bondoni in a novelist and short story writer own version of an edgy, modern thriller is entitled Timeless. You can check it out here.

The Bigamist was a Great Film… Except for the Title

I suppose the fact that the title spoils one of the ‘Aha!’ moments of the 1953 film The Bigamist, should bother me less than it does. But even though this reveal comes early in the film, audiences already knew it was coming… and it would have been a wonderful moment.

I suspect that this bad decision was caused by either the marketing folk sacrificing a delightful moment for a lot of box-office prurient interest (the film was on shaky financial footing pre-release) or the director wanting to stop the shock of the reveal from becoming the most important part of the film so audiences could focus on the human interest story behind it. Whatever the reason, it led to my main disappointment with this one. I would have loved to be shocked by the discovery that the main character was a bigamist instead of knowing exactly why he was worried in the first scene before it was revealed.

The other disappointment was knowing it would end badly. The Hays Code (which we hate) meant there could be no unambiguous (miraculous, seeing the mess this dude was in) happy ending allowing people to leave theaters uplifted. I don’t mind unhappy endings, but I prefer not to know it’s coming from the off. When that happens, it weighs on me all the way through the movie, the dread of bad news to come.

And the prophecy comes to pass, even if the ending isn’t as awful as some of the crime movies where everyone ends up dead.

Joan Fontaine is utterly charming in this one–an actress in her mid-thirties who was much more attractive than she herself was in her twenties, unusual as that may sound.

Anyway, you already know what the guy’s crime is, and you know it won’t end all that well… but watch it anyway. It’s a good psychological study which goes right to the heart of human emotion and is just as relevant today (perhaps more in our alienated world) as it was in 1953.

Gustavo Bondoni is a novelist and short story writer whose own look at human emotion is a book entitled Love and Death, a novel told in short story form following a cast of characters whose lives, unknowingly intertwined, form a single coherent narrative. I won’t tell you whether it has a happy ending, but you can check it out here.

Angel Face Would Have Been Treated Much Differently Today

Angel Face, for those who haven’t seen it (a group that included me until last week) is a clear descendent of the noir films of the classic era. Jean Simmons plays a classic femme fatale in the most literal sense of the word, and Robert Mitchum’s character is ripe for falling into her web.

It’s another of those unflinching noirs from the fifties–entertaining but without the possibility of redemption that tipified the true greats in the genre.

But the fact that noir had completely lost its way in the fifties is, in this particular case, not the point. What jumped out at me from this movie is that it would never be made with the same focus today.

The plot is driven by an obsession–the femme fatale, in this case, is compulsively in love with the guy, and this drive eventually, as in all fifties noir, ends badly.

So far, so good, but I got to thinking: would this film ever be made today?

And the answer appears to be “no way”. In fact, if this one was filmed in 2020, it would either be a horror film in which we focus closely on the disturbed, deranged character of Simmons’ character, moving through the evolution of her obsession while she wreaks tragic havoc on those around her. A psychological thriller could work, too, but a harsh one.

The other possible take would be to look at the woman as a victim. Undiagnosed mental illness leading to awful, tear-jerking events and, eventually, to her doom. All very touching and sad.

In a nutshell, this is why we’re still watching movies from the 1950s. It’s much more fun to watch the femme fatale doing her thing for no reason except that that is what femmes fatale do. And the plot built around that is much better than what would transpire viewed through a “modern” lens.

In fact, this overly indulgent attitude towards people who create serious problems is probably the reason Hollywood has moved to the science fiction blockbuster: having caricatured bad guys is much more entertaining than a politically correct view of mad criminals. People want to be entertained, so anything that doesn’t preach at them is appreciated.

And that makes Angel Face, a film made in 1952, refreshing.

Gustavo Bondoni is a novelist and short story writer whose book Outside gives a nice mad bad guy to go with a well-thought-out science fiction setting. If you enjoy Loki in the MCU, you should love Graham. You can check the book out here.