I ran an episode of an interesting 1950’s private-eye series alternately known as Follow That Man and Man Against Crime, which according to imdb.com ran from 1949 to 1954 — though only fourth- and fifth-season episodes survive and I suspect that’s due to the fact that they were actually shot on film instead of being broadcast live. Directed by Edward J. Montagne and photographed by Don Malkames (both names I’ve seen before on particularly nervy low-budget noirs filmed on location in New York City), this show — at least if this episode is representative — seems to have proceeded from the idea that we would be shown the crime as it occurred at the outset of the show, so we’d know all along who the criminal was, but the trick would be how the police and the lead character, private detective Mike Barnett (Ralph Bellamy, who as Charles noted used the same trick as Frank Sinatra in his tough-guy roles, speaking in a lower and more gravelly voice than usual to be more credible in this sort of part) find out. In this case the victim is Griffith Jackson (Bradford Hunt), and his killer is his son “Abel” (a marvelously understated performance by Alan Shayne) — the script is full of Biblical references; the episode title is “Paradise Lost,” after John Milton’s retelling of Genesis, and at one point Bellamy’s narration references Judas as well as Cain — who comes on his dad as he’s sitting at his work desk reading Paradise Lost and knifes him to death, then fakes it to look like a suicide. This being a TV mystery, the cops are fooled at first but Mike Barnett realizes it was murder — and so does Abel’s wife Julia (Beverly Dennis), whom he tries to run down after she finds a scrap of paper in dad’s copy of Milton that leads her to the conclusion that her brother did in their father. For her pains she’s run over by a car driven by Abel and nearly killed, but she lasts long enough to finger him to Barnett, who escapes Abel’s knife attack when the knife lodges in the copy of Paradise Lost from Griffith Jackson’s desk that Barnett was holding over his heart on his way to turning it into the police as evidence. It’s no great shakes as a show but it’s certainly well made, and as the imdb.com page on it noted it’s a surprisingly violent show for the early 1950’s — the show opens with an on-screen machine-gun murder that’s just the backdrop for the credits sequence! It’s tightly directed by Montagne and well scripted by Chestley Ellis (Lawrence Klee also gets credit as the show’s creator), though the final explanation of Abel’s motive (he was going through dad’s old P.I. files and using the info contained therein to blackmail his clients, and dad caught him at it when the clients started calling him to ask what was up) is a bit hard to believe. — 1/26/14
•••••••••••
Charles and I had a DVD nightcap when we watched the next
episode in sequence of the Ralph Bellamy TV detective show variously known as Follow
That Man and Man Against Crime, “Get
Out of Town,” in which a mysterious criminal sends two thugs to intimidate
private eye Mike Barnett (Ralph Bellamy) into taking a one-year vacation in
Mexico. The thugs are wiry little Sammy (Abe Simon) and huge but slow-witted
Stanley (Fred Lightner, whose scratchy voice I remembered vaguely from 1940’s
movies) and it turns out they’re working for Alberto Tanzi (Henry Lascoe),
who’s just been released from prison after doing five years and is determined
to kill Barnett for having developed the case that sent him there in the first
place. Among the participants in Tanzi’s plot is Le Clerc (Jean Bradley), who
shows up at his apartment to announce that she’s agreed with the landlord to
sublet it for the year he’s going to be gone. She slips him a note on the back
of a business card warning him not to take the trip the baddies have booked for
him — “It means MURDER,” her note warns — which is no particular surprise to
us, but soon it develops that the main reason Tanzi wanted Mike to relocate
(and went so far as to book his plane tickets, pack his bags and send someone
to take over his apartment) was that he could be killed far more
inconspicuously in Mexico than in New York City (where this series both was set
and is shot — the director of both episodes we’ve seen so far was Edward J.
Montagne, who in 1950 produced and directed the low-budget, edgy, New York-set noir
The Tattooed Stranger which RKO picked up
for release; and the cinematographer was Don Malkames, a go-to guy for people
shooting noir stories in New
York). It also develops that Le Clerc is an innocent victim, a young woman who
came to New York hoping to make it (presumably in some branch of the
entertainment industry), got a secretarial job to make ends meet, and kept
working as a secretary until she ended up employed by some seedy characters,
then by some seedier characters, and ultimately by Tanzi. (She seems like the
male lead of John Grisham’s The Firm
about 30 years early.) This isn’t much plot-wise but it’s quite impressively
scripted and produced; by this time the producers of this show were shooting it
on film instead of live in a studio (a holdover from radio that lasted far
longer than it should have in TV — the obvious future in TV was doing it all on film, but aside
from a few visionaries like Ralph Edwards and Desi Arnaz, almost all the
new-show producers of the 1950’s went with live telecasting despite the obvious
technical problems), and as a result they were able to do spectacular action
scenes, including the final shootout of this one, which takes place on a boat
Tanzi and his men were supposedly escaping on, only Barnett got hold of a gun
and was trying to hold them off and protect Le Clerc until the harbor police
chased them and ultimately captured whichever bad guys were left alive at the
end. Man Against Crime a.k.a. Follow
That Man is actually quite a nice crime
show, well done and comparing favorably with anything on the air today even
though this is one half-hour crime drama where the half-hour format does seem rushed (unlike, say, the original Dragnet, where the half-hour time slot at least kept their
writers focused on crimes one could readily imagine actually happening instead
of elaborate schemes made more elaborate by the need to fill the longer running
time of an hour-long slot). — 2/3/14
••••••••••
I just re-watched an interesting episode of the 1952 TV
detective series Follow That Man,
“Fuller’s Folly,” which Charles and I had watched previously but I can’t seem
to find any notes I made on it in a previous journal entry. That seems odd
because the show was quite good, beginning with a wordless sequence marvelously
staged by producer-director Edward J. Montagne, in which a woman runs in terror
from an old, dowdy-looking mansion in a remote corner of upstate New York and
the series star, Mike Barnett (Ralph Bellamy), happens to run into her when
he’s driving through, she flags down his car and he picks her up. She explains
that she’s Ann (Diana Herbert), an agent for an attorney who’s supposed to meet
a man named Charles Fuller with legal papers to sign so he can collect an
inheritance from his grandfather, stock swindler Horace Fuller, who died in
1919 in a train wreck in Switzerland but whose estate has been locked in
litigation with his victims for 33 years. Barnett drives Ann back to the house
and breaks in through the basement, but is confronted by a cadaverous-looking
man, Dobson (Jim Boles) — who seems to have been picked for his role because of
his resemblance to Boris Karloff, heightened by makeup and voice coaching. He
says he’s the butler of Horace Fuller (Fred Tozere) and his wife Hortense
(Muriel Kirkland), who survived the train crash, came back to the U.S. once the
heat was off and have been living in the old Fuller home for at least five
years. Horace explains that Hortense’s brain was damaged in the accident and
her consciousness has frozen in 1919 — sort of like Miss Havisham in Charles
Dickens’ Great Expectations — but
she makes anachronistic little slips in her dialogue: she says that now that
women have the vote she’s going to vote for Warren G. Harding (who didn’t
emerge as a Presidential candidate until the Republican convention of 1920),
she says the family has a bootlegger who drives illegal booze to them in “a big
black motorcar” (Prohibition didn’t come into effect until 1920), and she says
she hasn’t yet seen that “exciting new movie actor” Rudolph Valentino but is
looking forward to doing so (Valentino’s star-making film, The Four
Horsemen of the Apocalypse, wasn’t made
until 1921). We’ve suffered through so many historical anachronisms in films
supposedly set in the recent past it’s nice for once to see one in which the
anachronisms are part of the plot! Barnett realizes what’s going on (as do we):
the “Fullers” are impostors who ambushed the real Charles Fuller and murdered
him, then planned to meet Ann alone, give her the good news that Horace Fuller was
still alive, and collect the inheritance. Dobson locks both Barnett and Ann
into separate bedrooms in the mansion — he and the fake Barnetts have basically
ordered them to spend the night — intending to kill them and bury them under
concrete in the cellar the way they did with the real Fuller heir, only he
forgets to lock the connecting door between Barnett’s and Ann’s rooms, the two
get together and go out the window to escape. They’re confronted by the
Barnetts and Dobson (who holds a pick, intending to bash their heads in with
it, in an oddly crucifix-like shape — was Montagne influenced by the famous
shot of the Frankenstein Monster being virtually crucified in The
Bride of Frankenstein?) but get the better
of them, though oddly Barnett doesn’t tie them up once he’s subdued them, and
in the end he turns the impostors over to the (real) police.
I was re-watching this one this morning because last night
Charles and I ran the next extant episode — the show actually ran for five
years, 1949 to 1953, but only 17 episodes still exist — “Killer Cat,”
originally aired December 10, 1952 (two weeks after “Fuller’s Folly”), which
was entertaining but nowhere near as good as “Fuller’s Folly.” Once again it
transported Mike Barnett to a remote location — the Canadian Northwest — where
he’s been summoned by textile magnate Charles Roberts (Calvin Thomas), who
begins their meeting in a remote cabin (the Canadian Northwest is “played” by
upstate New York, a reversal from all the recent TV-movies from Lifetime and
other cable channels that use Canada to “play” various U.S. locations) by
holding a gun on Barnett and forcing him to prove his identity. It seems that
Roberts is in fear for his life, and his fears turn out to be amply justified
when he’s shot at and nearly killed by a rifle whose shooter has equipped it
with a telescopic sight. Though the location is supposed to be remote and the
only people there are supposed to be Roberts, his much-younger trophy wife
Kathy (Mary K. Wells) and his secretary, Larry Gerald (Frank Marth), they’re
also confronted by Towne (Ed Kogan), a business rival of Roberts’, as well as
Le Gros (Tony Rivers), who seems to be some sort of “enforcer” for Towne and
who’s deliberately scarred his fingertips in an effort to eliminate
fingerprints. Writer William L. Stewart seems to have ripped off this character
from the James Stewart and George Regas characters in the 1936 film Rose
Marie. Anyway, as one suspects well before
the end, Le Gros is simply a red herring, and I was betting that the secretary
and the wife were having an affair and had plotted to do in Roberts — only
writer Stuart threw us a curve ball and had the secretary killed at the end of
the first act, ostensibly by a cougar (annoyingly, the actors pronounce it
“Coo-GARR” rather than the usual “COO-grrr,” and I couldn’t help but joke that
after the coo-GARR was killed it would be autopsied by Lionel Atwill using a
scal-PEL) but actually by a human using a claw-like metal tool (supposedly a
device for pulling caught fish out of the water) to make it look like the work of a “killer cat.” Barnett sees
through this almost immediately, saying that cougars could kill humans but in
fact never do (how would he
know?), and so do we, especially if we’ve seen the 1944 Basil Rathbone Sherlock
Holmes film The Scarlet Claw,
likewise a movie about a human murderer using a tool (in that case a
five-pronged garden weeder) to make it look like a wild animal killed his
victim. Eventually, to no particular surprise, Mrs. Roberts turns out to be the
killer, and Barnett has himself and Roberts switch coats and hats so Mrs.
Roberts will attack him with the
metal claw instead of her husband (Charles had a problem with this because he
didn’t think the crude disguise would fool anybody, especially someone who’d lived with her victim in an intimate
relationship), and there’s a long tracking scene in which director Montagne
keeps us in suspense as to the gender of the killer by shooting her exclusively
from the waist down, but it’s really not too difficult to guess, especially
since the secretary’s death and Le Gros’ capture (he turns out to be a
fugitive, wanted for manslaughter, and Barnett captures him and turns him over
to the Canadian authorities) considerably narrows the suspect pool — and at the
end Roberts and Towne are best buddies and seem to be planning a merger. Though
this episode wasn’t as good as some of the ones we’ve seen before, it was
certainly well-made and benefited not only from the narrative economy of the
half-hour format (half-hour crime shows seem to have gone out with the second
iteration of Dragnet in the late
1960’s) but from Montagne’s engagingly and refreshingly naturalistic direction.
He seems to have been one of the first pioneers in doing TV shows on film
instead of trying to stage them live — which made them subject to all sorts of
mishaps as well as severely limiting the scope of stories they could tell — and
though I believe this series started
as a live telecast, by the time they reached the seasons from which any shows
survive they were being shot on film and immensely benefiting from the fact
that they could use outdoor locations and weren’t confined to a few
tacky-looking sets on a small stage. — 3/29/14
••••••••••
I ran us the next episode in sequence of the Follow That
Man series, “Ferry Boat” (spelled as two
words, by the way), which had a charmingly witty opening in which private
detective Mike Barnett (Ralph Bellamy, the series’ star) gets a phone call from
someone asking for the New York Hospital and saying he wants to know whether
the baby his wife just gave birth to was a boy or a girl. (As I’ve noted
earlier in these pages, later viewers are going to be totally baffled by the
idea that there was a time when you couldn’t find out that information while the fetus was still in
the womb.) Thinking he’s talking to a crank, Mike puts down the receiver but
without hanging it up — a lucky thing, too, because he gets to hear the faint
voice of the man telling him he knows full well he’s calling Mike Barnett. He
wants to report information on a Communist spy ring operating in New York City
but doesn’t dare go to the FBI because “I’m being watched.” He says he’ll meet
Barnett on the 6 a.m. ferry to Staten Island, which is nearly deserted — at
that hour of the morning virtually all the traffic between Staten Island and
the rest of New York is going the other way — which leaves Barnett with no idea
what the person he’s supposed to meet looks like or how they can recognize each
other. Needless to say, though the boat is nearly empty there are a handful of typically quirky “New York characters”
on it, some of whom Barnett encounters, including a philosophical bartender
(though at 6 a.m. about all he’s serving is hot dogs, both with and without
buns — “Want a weenie?” he asks Barnett, a line that plays quite differently
now than it no doubt did in 1953), a Jewish toy salesman (Barnett buys one of
his wares and gives it to a boy, played by Joseph Fallon), the boat’s janitor
and a deckhand played by an unrecognizable Jack Warden. He also meets a twitchy
fat man (Jacques Aubuchon) who turns out to be part of the Communist spy ring;
the fat man has already murdered the man Barnett was supposed to meet and
stuffed him in the trunk of Barnett’s own car (this was one of those ferries
that had room to drive your car onto it so you could have it when you got to
the destination). The information is a list of names of Commie spies hidden in
a Thermos bottle in a lunch pail, but it got confused with an identical-looking
pail being carried by the boy’s mother (the whole existence of lunch pails, as
Charles noted, really dates this episode!) and Barnett recovers the list before
the fat man has the chance to get it. The fat man tries to get it back by
holding Barnett hostage — he rather reduces the likelihood of Barnett’s
cooperation by telling him he’s going to kill him whether he goes along or not
— but of course, being the show’s hero and doing his patriotic duty (Charles
wondered why Barnett took a chancy case with no promise of remuneration, but I
said in the early 1950’s it would have been considered a U.S. citizen’s
obligation to grab any attempt to fight the evil Communists no matter how
risky, and for little or no material reward), he overpowers the baddie, gets
the list to the authorities and turns over the bad guy alive. After the quality
of some of the other episodes we’ve seen, “Ferry Boat” was pretty much a
letdown — too few characters, too little suspense — and though Edward J.
Montagne was listed on the credits as producer he did not direct this episode himself: Paul Alter (“Montagne’s
Alter ego,” I couldn’t help but joke) did. Then again writer Vin Bogert didn’t
give Alter that much to work with; it’s an all too predictable story without
enough suspects to keep it interesting (a recurring problem with half-hour
crime shows; sometimes, as with the original 1950’s Dragnet, they used the brevity of the format to good effect,
concentrating on crimes one could actually envision happening and resisting the
temptation of the people writing crime shows today to pad out the hour-long
running time with too many red herrings and absurd complications; other times,
as here, the shows ended up with too few characters and story points to be
interesting), though after the NCIS
rerun we recently watched on the USA Network it was a fascinating contrast
between a Cold War story made when the Cold War itself was at its height and
one made recently, with writers resorting to the Cubans as villains just to
stir up those old Cold War embers and try to get them to burn again! — 4/1/14
••••••••••
When Charles got home it was already so late we didn’t have
much time for anything other than a TV short, so I ran the next episode in
sequence of the 16 surviving ones of Follow That Man, a.k.a. Man Against Crime, the quite interesting 1949-1953 TV series starring
Ralph Bellamy as tough-guy private investigator Mike Barnett. Like Robert
Taylor, Bellamy actually seemed to gain authority as an actor once he lost his
boyish good looks; by the time he did this show his face had got wrinkled and
craggy enough to make him credible as a film noir — or, in this case, at least a film gris — hero. This episode, “The Silken Touch,” reaches
even farther back in movie history than most of the shows did — all the way
back to the gangster movies of the 1930’s, in particular the ones about the
gangsters preying on legitimate businesspeople and putting ex-con employees on
the spot. The business this time is the Perkins trucking company (which
actually existed, and I think still does), whose owner hires Barnett to work as
a truckdriver and try to find out who’s hijacking his shipments and who inside
his operation is tipping off the crooks about particularly valuable cargoes.
Barnett and a surprisingly boyish, wimpy FBI agent join forces and identify the
tipster as George (Lee Krieger) — who’s never done it before but who’s been
intimidated into it by Victor (Don DeLeo), the contact between the ring’s
mysterious boss and the people actually pulling the hijackings, though Barnett
and the FBI guy promise him leniency if he leaks the criminals’ plans to them, which he does — and Barnett and the FBI guy go out
on a run shipping 25 bolts of silk (which are flown into New York on a plane
from — I’m not making this up — “Slick Airways”!). The actual hijacking occurs
while the truck is being shipped across the river on the Staten Island ferry —
what was this between the Follow
That Man writers (Stanley Niss got the
credit here) and the Staten Island ferry? Did they have a special deal with the
ferry authorities to promote their service in exchange for free location work
on the boats? — and Barnett and the FBI guy are put in a car and taken out to
an isolated hideout in the middle of nowhere, after first being given
blacked-out glasses so they can’t see where they’re being taken. Nonetheless,
the cops are able to find out the plans of the crooks when they arrange to sell
the stolen silk to the ultimate buyer — and director Paul Alter at least
selected an engaging location for the final confrontation and shoot-out: a drive-in
movie theatre that’s closed for remodeling. Like “Ferry Boat,” this episode
suffered from Edward J. Montagne’s decision merely to produce but not direct —
the photography this time (as with “Ferry Boat”) was surprisingly bland,
especially for a series whose producers were going to the added expense and
trouble to shoot on film instead of airing it live precisely so they could get
more cinematic effects and write stories that didn’t take place entirely in
little rooms — but it was still a crackerjack crime thriller, and Bellamy
proved surprisingly credible as a proletarian (most of his movie roles cast him
as either middle- or upper-class). — 4/2/14
••••••••••
I ran the next-in-sequence episode of Follow That Man, a.k.a. Man Against Crime, “Death Takes a Partner,” which after the previous
two disappointments turned out to be quite good. I suspect that had something
to do with Edward J. Montagne returning to the directorial chair as well as
producing, and also that the writer, Don Sanford, picked an intrinsically
exciting background for his story: a six-day bicycle race. It’s likely the
producers only chose this background because they got a pile of stock footage
of bicycle racing they could use, but it was worth it; though it’s hard to tell
just watching a bit of such a race who’s winning (a problem I had with some of
the longer-distance speed-skating events at the Winter Olympics as well), the
event provided a backdrop of suspense against which Sanford constructed a
concise and effective plot line. Barron (Boris Aplon), a Mob-connected gambler,
has placed $300,000 worth of bets on the race favorites, a Dutch team, who are
sure to win unless the two French
riders, Jean (a young and almost unrecognizable Martin Balsam) and Marcel
(Steve Gravers) Pinay — who won the race the previous years — get to dump their
current partners and ride with each other. The six-day bicycle race seems to
have been a combination of a 24-hour auto race like the famous one at Le Mans
(where each car has two drivers, who alternate in three-hour shifts) and a
marathon dance (one particularly cruel wrinkle are the periodic “sprints,” in
which to speed up the action the promoter offers a special prize in addition to
the purse for winning the race as a whole), and one of the roles that Sanford
makes a key point of his plot is that if you’re half of a team and your partner
is either injured or killed, you can hook up with another partner if his original partner has also been injured or killed.
So, in order to engineer a re-teaming of the French riders (who speak in lousy
French accents that suggest Balsam and Gravers learned them by watching Maurice
Chevalier’s movies), Bluey (Don Hanmer), a mousy little guy trying to horn in
on the Mob’s territory and make money off them by betting against Barron, sabotages one of the bikes so its rider will
be injured and then murders another rider, Knobby Clark (Gwilym Williams), by
spiking his rubbing alcohol with acid. “Death Takes a Partner” is exciting and
well-staged, and it put Charles in mind of mystery writer Abigail Padgett and
her remark that one of the reasons people are drawn to crime fiction is that
the best mystery writers reproduce worlds of existence their readers can
experience vicariously even while they’re being entertained by the main story.
I certainly learned a lot more
about six-day bicycle races from watching this than I knew before! And once
again, Ralph Bellamy is so good in the leading role of private detective Mike
Barnett (called in by the race’s promoter to make sure it is fair and Bluey’s
attempts to fix it fail) it’s a pity he didn’t get to do more parts like this
in movies: judging from these episodes, when he lost his boyish good looks he
actually gained definition and credibility as a screen personality, and one can
readily imagine him transitioning from romantic loser to noir leading man the way Dick Powell made a similar
transition from musicals into films noir. — 4/3/14
••••••••••
Charles and I watched the next episode in sequence of Man
Against Crime, a.k.a. Follow That
Man, an engaging story called “Sic Transit
Gloria,” all about private detective Mike Barnett (Ralph Bellamy, the series’
star) being set up by gangster Manny (Jack Warden, who’d played an uncredited
bit in the previous “Ferry Boat” episode but here got billing), who murdered a
rival and was witnessed doing so by Gloria (Nita Talbot). Barnett has no idea
what’s going on when a girl named Marlene (Rita Colton in a ridiculous attempt
at an accent, though one could assume the accent is supposed to be ridiculous because the character is an
American girl adopting a foreign name and faking an accent to go with it)
accosts him outside the elevator of his building, invites him to her apartment
(she’s posing as another resident of the building), then he’s trapped inside
the elevator by two of Marty’s goons, one of whom holds a knife on him while
the other gives him a karate chop that puts him under for several minutes.
Marlene is a stripper (back when strippers performed in burlesque theatres
under a proscenium that put considerable distance between them and their
horndog straight-male audiences, not in a nightclub doing pole and table
dances) and Manny’s girlfriend, but the person who’s really got Barnett in this
pickle is Gloria, who throws herself at him sexually a couple of times (their
relationship, such as it is — criminally calculating on her part and
dick-driven on his — is shown surprisingly explicitly for early-1950’s
television) and eventually tells him that she witnessed Manny commit a murder, but in order to
keep him from eliminating her told Manny that Barnett was the witness instead.
At the end Barnett overpowers Manny and turns him over to the police, but
Gloria — the key witness against him in the murder the cops just arrested him
for — disappears (“sic transit,” you know?). It was a nice episode, not
particularly atmospheric or noir
despite producer Edward J. Montagne directing it personally (the shows Montagne
directed tend to be richer and more atmospheric than the ones he farmed out)
but fun in a way that evokes memories of the 1930’s gangster films even though
Bellamy, a star in the actual 1930’s, had generally played romantic-comedy
roles instead and was usually cast as the odd man out in the romantic triangle
(though his 1936 film The Man Who Lived Twice is excellent, a grim “B” melodrama with a
surprisingly ambiguous role for someone who was generally considered a
lightweight actor). — 4/9/14
••••••••••
Two nights ago Charles and I watched a quite interesting
episode of Man Against Crime, a.k.a. Follow
That Man, which may be the best of the ones
we’ve seen so far: “A Family Affair,” a quite chilling story that has what most
of these shows have lacked: a truly interesting, compelling villain(ess). She
is Ella Hummel Weaver (Gloria McGhee), who comes across Mike Barnett’s (Ralph
Bellamy) path when he is hired by a factory owner to solve a payroll robbery at
his plant in which his security guard and the man responsible for delivering
the payroll money to him are both killed. The factory’s owner, Fenway (George
Douglas), is convinced the robbers had inside help — which they did; the
supposedly “innocent” man who got killed in the course of the robbery, shot by
the thief, was the thief’s brother, and both of them were watched during the
crime by Ella and her husband Bill (Alan Shayne). Ella is the sister of thief
Valentine Hummel (Carl Benson) and the murdered man was another brother of
hers, only Valentine was wounded by the security guard, who got off two shots
with his own gun before Valentine’s bullets killed both him and Valentine’s own
brother. Ella sends her wounded brother into hiding — where, in order to avoid
calling a legitimate doctor and therefore falling under the legal requirement
that bullet wounds be reported to the police, has got a book called Fundamentals
of Surgery and is trying to do a D.I.Y.
operation to remove the bullet himself. Barnett comes to investigate and
Valentine and Ella both hold guns on him — while Bill Weaver, noticing how
cavalierly Ella sacrificed the life of one of her brothers for the loot and the
well-being of the other, gets antsy because he thinks he may be next on her hit
list — and eventually Barnett tricks the crooks into calling in Dr. Russo
(Albert Ottenheimer), who’s supposedly one of those shady semi-legal docs that
abounded in 1930’s gangster movies (especially ones from Warner Bros.) but is
in fact a police doctor who brings two cops with him, and the cops manage to
overpower the crooks, arrest them and get Barnett off the hook. What makes this
one special is the hard-edged noir
portrayal of Ella — she comes off as a femme fatale even though the plot doesn’t give her much of a
chance to flaunt her sexuality — and producer/director Edward J. Montagne’s
superb command of atmospherics and his ability to direct his actors ably to
play the amoral but not entirely un-decent people they’re supposed to be
portraying. In general Follow That Man is a surprisingly good crime series, and like the original Dragnet it’s helped by its half-hour running time to stay
within the bounds of credibility: these are real crimes committed by believable
people for comprehensible motives, not the baroque conspiracies and corkscrew
reversals often indulged in by the writers of Law and Order: Special
Victims Unit and other modern-day crime
shows. It was also nice to see Margaret Hamilton (the Wicked Witch of the
West!) in a short but showy role as the landlady of the hotel where the
murderous woman and her husband are living. — 4/18/14
••••••••••
Charles and I watched the next episode
in sequence (at least of the ones we have as downloads) of Follow That Man, a.k.a. Man Against Crime, “The Day Man,” which began with a woman stopping at
the home of a rich family in Lannville, a small town in upstate New York,
pretending to be collecting for a local charity but actually casing the place
for a burglary. The town’s police chief, lamenting that the ultra-rich people
who live there and run the town council don’t allocate enough money for an
adequate number of officers or crime-fighting resources (plus ça
change, plus ça même chose — though today a
town like that would probably have a private security force paid for by the rich people
voluntarily, so they would be
protected while Lannville’s lesser residents would be fair game), gets a $300 allocation
to stop future burglaries and arrest the crooks in the two that have already
occurred with this modus operandi:
the woman comes to the door, chats up either the wife or the maid (or, in one
case, a Black butler), worms out the information of when the occupants will be
out of town, and then her male accomplice strikes and actually commits the
crimes. The chief, Kaley (Wallace Rooney), uses the $300 to hire Mike Barnett,
but two more burglaries occur even under Mike’s watch before the woman “accomplice”
is finally arrested — and “she” and the burglar, Eddie Pink (Kit Russell), turn
out to be the same person: he did the casing in drag and then committed the
crimes dressed as a man. Charles “read” the character as a man in drag before I
did, though the reveal didn’t come until the very end — when Pink’s wig was
taken off while in custody and therefore “she” was shown to be really a he.
Obviously the show’s creators, writer Paul Alter and director William Berke (an
old Hollywood hand who had done the later Falcon mysteries and after this did the first two films of
Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct novels, and did them in an edgy
semi-documentary, semi-noir style
that showed independence from the studio system was actually doing him good —
alas, he died relatively young in 1958), had in mind this being a much bigger surprise than it in fact is, at least to a
modern audience; later the original Dragnet did a somewhat similar story, “The Big Girl,” only
that one was easier to figure out because the “woman” criminal was nearly six
feet tall and, instead of a burglar, was a street robber and car-jacker who
overpowered “her” male victims with physical force. Still, it’s an interesting
(albeit malevolent) early example of a Transgender (sort of) character on
American TV, and Berke’s direction made this the best show in the series of the
ones we’ve seen before that the producer, Edward J. Montagne (another filmmaker
with independent noirs on his
résumé), didn’t direct himself. Follow That Man is a quite interesting series overall and laments
that Ralph Bellamy didn’t pull off the sort of image transformation Dick Powell
and (to a lesser extent) Robert Taylor did, adapting to noir as they got older and craggier and revealing acting
chops they hadn’t shown before. — 4/20/14
••••••••••
Charles and I ran the latest episode
in sequence of Follow That Man, a TV
detective series that apparently ran for five years (and was originally called Man
Against Crime, its title on imdb.com) and
starred Ralph Bellamy (surprisingly effectively) as a hard-boiled private eye
named Mike Barnett who gets involved in cases ranging from classic gangster
stories to more noir-type
adventures. This particular episode, “Hot Fur,” originally aired on May 27,
1953 (which makes it older than I am!), centers around a fur retailer called
Soukon and Son. Soukon père is on
vacation when the action occurs, having left Soukon fils (John Devereux) in charge of the company — and left
him terrified that he’ll make a mistake, get in trouble, and the old man will
bawl him out and maybe even fire and disinherit him. We see Soukon’s secretary,
Miss Mangram (the appropriately named Marion Brash), going through the office
files with particular interest in the documents showing the locations of the
warehouses that store the furs the company has for sale and the combinations of
the locks thereto. Given that John Devereux has all the markings of a seedy
movie villain — including a “roo” moustache — it’s not entirely clear at first
whether he is plotting to rob his
own company and Miss Mangram has stumbled onto the secret and is preparing to
blow the whistle on him, but it soon turns out it’s the latter when Miss
Mangram uncovers the crucial combination information in an envelope taped to
the bottom of a desk drawer (“Oh, no,” I joked, “not the old envelope taped to
the bottom of a desk drawer bit,” but it turns out the obviousness of that
hiding place and the ease with which the crooks’ agent has discovered it are
part of the plot) and then takes copies of it and the other security documents
she’s duplicated to a restaurant to meet her crook boyfriend Tony (Martin
Balsam, uncredited), who’s planned to use the information to rob at least one
of the 10 warehouses and has hired burglary specialist Johnny Stack (Lewis
Charles) to do the actual job in exchange for 40 percent of the proceeds.
Stack’s general modus operandi is
to create a front business and rent a space next door to the one he has to rob
so he can simply cut his way through the walls separating one from the other
(had screenwriter Paul Alter read Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Red-Headed
League”?) and commit the burglary under the guise of shipping out merchandise
produced by his own company. Alas, in the process of committing their crime the
burglars encounter a night watchman and club him, sticking him in the vault
from which they stole the furs (and which they opened by simply smashing in its
lock with a sledgehammer, since no one there had safecracking skills — which
made me wonder just why Miss Mangram was so careful to steal them the
combinations if they weren’t going to use them anyway). What they hadn’t
reckoned with was that Philip Soukon had been worried about the possibility of
theft and to forestall it had hired Mike Barnett — in a twist that’s a bit of a
surprise from writer Alter and director Frank McDonald, it turns out that
rather than the scapegrace son of a responsible business owner, he’s actually more attuned to security needs than his dad; he tells
Barnett he wanted to change the
combinations to the vaults but his dad vetoed it on the ground that it would
cost money. (That’s why the
crooks had to break into the vault by force; with Barnett’s support Philip
actually did change the
combination of the relevant lock.) The crooks duly steal 300 valuable furs from
the warehouse, but Barnett traces them, and when they meet the prospective
buyers of the hot furs inside the truck containing them — it’s parked at the
waterfront — the cops, alerted by Barnett, surround the truck and arrest both
burglars and fences. It’s a pretty straightforward story, well done with a sort
of cool efficiency, and while other Follow That Man episodes have come closer to classic noir this one is at least entertaining and blessedly free
of the plot holes that sometimes marred this otherwise quite interesting
series. — 5/9/14
••••••••••
Two nights ago Charles and I watched the next episode in
sequence of our 16 downloads of the interesting detective show with Ralph
Bellamy as Mike Barnett, Follow That Man
a.k.a. Man Against Crime, which was
often on the cusp between old-time gangster melodrama and film noir. This one, written by Vincent Bogert and directed by
old RKO hand William Berke, was called “Doll Bandit” and dealt with a quartet
of bank robbers — Little Sam (Rock Rogers), Harry (Paul Genge), Marc (Steve
Gethers) and Marc’s girlfriend Jenny (a very good hard-boiled performance by Dorothy Hart),
who’ve worked out a gimmick for their bank holdups. Jenny, naturally blonde,
puts on a black wig (actually a pretty tacky-looking one) and holds a baby —
actually a doll, hence the episode title — and while the other three pull guns
and hold up the bank, she distracts the bank staff and customers by bitching
about the fear she’s in that her child will be hurt in the crossfire if there’s
a shoot-out. Later the crooks ditch the baby carriage Jenny had had with her,
the cops realize that the “baby” was just a doll, and therefore instead of a
victim Jenny was one of the gang. Jenny actually meets Mike Barnett before we
know she’s a crook — though we have a pretty good idea — when she pretends to
need rescuing from the unwelcome attentions of Little Sam (a known crook
Barnett had been following) and Harry, and Barnett drives her home and actually
tries to get her in bed with him. Then we see Jenny meet Marc and the other
crooks, and we realize what she really is — though, in an odd hole in Bogert’s
script, they don’t seem to have any intent of suckering Barnett into playing an
unwitting role in their crime. The robbery goes down but then Marc decides that
he and Jenny are going to take all the money themselves — the actual “take” was
$75,000 but the officially released figure was $15,000 (Barnett explains
they’ve low-balled the story released to the media so the insurance company
won’t be too embarrassed) — and they flee to North Dakota, where Jenny is
understandably restless that they’re living in cheap motels and aren’t spending
any of the loot because Marc is savvy enough to sit on it until the heat dies
down. Eventually Jenny kills Marc in a motel room — she wears the black wig and
makes sure the motel manager sees her so the authorities will be looking for a
dark-haired woman instead of a blonde — and returns to New York, where she
hijacks Barnett’s car and forces him to flee with her. Only he alerts the cops
by tracing a message for the gas-station attendant (Robert Carson) in the dust
on his car’s door, the cops are called and they duly run Jenny down. “Doll
Bandit” is one of the better Follow That Mans, powered by a marvelously amoral performance by
Dorothy Hart which ranks alongside some of the greatest femme fatale parts in classic noir features (Barbara Stanwyck in Double
Indemnity, Mary Beth Hughes in The
Great Flamarion, Ann Savage in Detour). Her part is strongly reminiscent of the character
Dashiell Hammett created in two of his lesser-known stores, “The House on Turk
Street” and its sequel, the marvelous “The Girl with the Silver Eyes” — a
female psychopath, airily uninterested in the welfare of anyone except herself — and Hart plays it to the nines. She
deserved major stardom — she had the talent for it but didn’t land the big
roles that would have lifted out of the rut — so she quit. In an interview
quoted on imdb.com she said, “Acting wasn’t enough. I felt some of the movies
were mediocre. I wanted to do something important with my life, so I began
working with the American Association for the United Nations. It was very, very
fulfilling. I’ll never regret having given up Hollywood for it.” — 5/14/14
••••••••••
Charles and I ended the evening by watching a quite good
episode of Man Against Crime a.k.a. Follow
That Man: “Missing Cadet,” originally aired
August 28, 1953 (which makes this show just one week older than I am!) and
directed as well as produced by Edward J. Montagne. It’s a show that gets us
into the outdoors — most of it takes place at the Tri-State Military Academy —
and featured a numbers racketeer named William Kane (who has a prominent part
but is uncredited, though as a “type” he’s quite similar to Sheldon Leonard),
who as embarrassed as he is about his own criminal career is proud of his son
Willie, Jr. (Don Grusso), who has got himself into Tri-State, made it to the
head of his class, and is seemingly poised for a brilliant military career that
will erase the blot on the family name when he suddenly disappears from classes
and his room two days before both Kanes are scheduled to testify before a
committee investigating organized crime. Willie, Sr. hires Mike Barnett (the
recurring character played by series star Ralph Bellamy, who had got
seedy-looking enough that, much like Robert Taylor, he had become credible as a
noir lead) to find Willie, Jr.
and get him back into good standing at the academy. Barnett says he won’t
accept pay for the job because he doesn’t want Willie, Sr.’s dirty money, so
he’ll work the case for free (that’s
the spirit!). He quickly deduces that since the academy is basically locked
down, it’s full of sentries and whatnot to prevent any of the kids from
leaving, and as a further
protection the cadets’ civilian clothes are locked up in the basement and
inaccessible to them without permission, Willie, Jr. must still be on the
academy grounds. He finds much of this out by interviewing Willie, Jr.’s
roommate, Cadet Roberts (Sandy Campbell), who turns up AWOL himself at a hotel
that Barnett went to because he got a tip that Willie, Jr. might be there. What
actually happened was that Willie, Jr. got into an enlisted man’s uniform and
joined a company doing a war-games exercise at the military base next door — to
do this he had to blacken his face with shoe polish for camouflage purposes
(when Barnett first encounters a member of the company that’s done this he
asks, “Where’s the rest of the minstrel show?”) — only Barnett, claiming to be
a military journalist, crashes the exercise and traces Willie, Jr. — only to
lose him again when he flees from the truck carrying him into his mock battle.
It turns out the real villain
here is Willie, Sr.’s bodyguard and factotum, Augie (Jac Aubuchon), a big and
stupid-looking lunk of a guy who wants to eliminate both the senior and junior
Kanes so he can take over the
numbers racket as soon as that bothersome little hearing is over — and he comes
close to doing so when he, Barnett and Willie, Jr. all end up in a shack on the
war-games battleground that’s supposed to be the principal target of the other
side’s artillery. Augie holds both Barnett and Willie, Jr. at gunpoint, but
with the house being shelled by artillery Barnett is able to trick Augie into
firing his gun at the oncoming “troops,” thereby wasting all his bullets so
Barnett can capture him easily and both Kanes can testify at the hearings, even though it means the senior
Kane will be imprisoned for his role in the rackets and the junior one will
have a lot to live down once he
returns to school. After the relatively disappointing episodes of Follow
That Man we’d been watching lately this was
a welcome return to form for the series, intelligently plotted by Betty Loring
(though the idea of having the climax take place on an artillery range with
heroes and villains alike fired on by the U.S. military seemed just a wee bit
over-the-top), vividly directed by Montagne (the best Follow That Man episodes pretty consistently turn out to be the ones
he directed personally as well as being credited as producer) and well acted by
a surprisingly assorted cast. Though the actor playing Willie, Sr. is
uncredited (and as a “type” he comes off much like Sheldon Leonard in his gangster roles before he switched careers and
focused on producing) he manages a certain pathos in his (albeit rather
clichéd) description of his child as the one good thing about his life, the one
element of it that hasn’t got dragged through the mud of his career; and Don
Grusso as Willie, Jr. isn’t the gooder-than-good innocent kid you’d
expect but an edgy, almost hostile young man with a definite chip on his
shoulder over anything to do about his background, while Jac Aubuchon makes a
good bad-bad gangster even though just about anyone who’s seen more than three movies
in his life would guess the big reveal easily. — 5/20/14
••••••••••
Charles and I watched the next-to-last episode on our
16-show cycle of Man Against Crime,
a.k.a. Follow That Man — with
some fascinating footage on the trailer making us wish we had all the extant
shows in the collection! This one was called “Murder in the Rough” — “Rough” in
this case meaning the sides of a golf course, specifically a country club at
which Victor Barstow (Fred Hillebrand) is a member. Victor is fiercely
protective of his niece Ellen (Sally Parrish), to keep her from marrying a
gold-digger in general and the country club’s golf pro, Ted Boardman (Marc
Cramer), in particular. During a round of golf being played by Victor, Ted and
series lead Mike Barnett (Ralph Bellamy) — who once had lessons with Ted in
another venue and wants a couple of make-up classes with him to correct a nasty
slice he’s developed — Victor is found murdered midway through the course. Ted
is arrested and put on trial for the crime, but ballistics expert Havemeyer
(Walter Klavun) comes in as a surprise witness for the defense and testifies
that the gun in evidence in the case, even though Ted was holding it when he
was arrested, he was its licensed owner (back when gun licensing laws actually
meant something!) and it was the right caliber, did not fire the fatal bullet. Mike makes the interesting
deduction that Ted actually did
kill Victor with a different gun of the same caliber, then hid the real murder
weapon on the golf course so he’d be arrested with the phony one and then
exonerated. With just one night to go before the prosecutor (Victor Thorley)
drops the case, he and Barnett go onto the course, reproduce the fatal game and
find the gun buried under a divot Ted, who deliberately played badly to give
himself a chance to hide in the rough and kill Victor, had kicked up with one
of his shots. Charles criticized the story because it provided so few suspects,
but I liked the touch of writer Bill Deming to lead us up the garden path in
act one and make us believe that Barnett was going to exonerate Ted, then do
the switcheroo in act two and have him turn out to be the killer after all.
Still, the Follow That Man
episodes that stayed in the city and reproduced the world of urban noir seem to me generally stronger than the ones that
went to the country and depicted murder in the open air. — 6/3/14
••••••••••
I screened the last of the 16 episodes of Follow That Man, a.k.a. Man Against Crime, that we’d downloaded from archive.org. This was a
crime series that ran for five years and starred Ralph Bellamy as private
detective Mike Barnett (and for someone with the lounge-lizard reputation he
got in his movie roles he proved a surprisingly good noir tough guy — had he got the chance to he could have
made a similar career transformation in films to Dick Powell’s and Robert
Taylor’s), and this show, “Murder Mountain,” proved to be surprisingly good
even though it took place in the country (a virtually forgotten resort in the
Adirondacks whose proprietors were still calling it “tourist cabins,” the
typical designation in the 1930’s, though by the time this show took place they
were generally called motels). Mike Barnett is driving through the Northeast on
a fishing trip when his car runs out of gas, and he uses what’s left in his
tank to pull up to the tourist cabins — only to be greeted by Curt (Logan
Ramsey), who’s waving a shotgun in his face and telling him his business isn’t
wanted and he needs to get going … now. Curt is overruled by his mother (Anne Seymour), who owns the place,
and she tells him to offer him a room for $10 (which must have been quite a
steep charge then given how Mike reacts to it) and to let him siphon some gas
from her car (gouging him on that, too) so he can leave first thing in the morning.
Mike is in his room trying to get some sleep when a man named Leon (Don Hanmer,
bearing an odd resemblance to Mel Tormé) lets himself into the room, saying
it’s his room and asking Mike
where his wife is. Writer Betty Loring leads us up the garden path twice, first hinting that Leon and his wife Ethel (Lous
Nettleton) are being held hostage by Curt and his mom for sinister purposes,
then doing a reversal and having Leon and Ethel turn out to be jewel thieves.
The show turns into an odd mixture of The Old Dark House and Psycho as Curt turns up murdered — stabbed to death by a scythe — and of
course mom thinks Mike did it, though the true culprit is Leon, and Mike
manages to sneak to the establishment’s one telephone (an old-time model, the
kind that was mounted on the wall and had to be hand-cranked to charge it
enough to work) and call the police, who arrive just in the nick of time to
apprehend Leon and Ethel and spare Mike and Curt’s mom from their wrath. The
show was well done and played fair with the viewer — it was obvious there were
only two ways it could turn out (like “Murder in the Rough” it suffered from an
isolated setting and a resulting paucity of suspects) and the one wasn’t
entirely unexpected but was still legitimately surprising — and though there
were a few other episodes after this (of which only one, “Petite Larceny,” has
a plot summary listed on imdb.com), this made a fitting conclusion to the cycle
we got from archive.org. — 6/5/14
