Out In The Be-Bop 1950s Night- The Time Of Motorcycle Bill-An Encore

Out In The Be-Bop 1950s Night- The Time Of Motorcycle Bill-An Encore

 

 

 

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin

There was a scourge in the land, in the 1950s American land. No, not the dreaded but fatalistically expected BIG ONE that would send old mother earth back to square one, or worst, coming from the Russkies. Sure that was in the air and every school boy and girl had their giggling tales of having to hide, hide ass up, under some desk or other useless defense in air raid drill preparations for that eventually. Sure, as well, the air stunk of red scare, military build-up cold war “your mommy is a commie turns her in.” But that was not the day to day scare for every self-respecting parent from Portland to the Pacific. That was reserved for the deadly dreaded motorcycle scare that had every father telling his son to beware of falling under the Marlon Brando sway and spiraling down to a life, a low life of crime and debauchery (of course said son not knowing of the word, the meaning of debauchery, until much later just shrugged his innocent shoulders). More importantly every mother, every blessed mother, self-respecting or not (with a gentle nod from Dad) warned off their daughters against this madness and perversity.

Of course that did not stop the sons from mooning over every Harley that rode the ride down Main Street, Olde Saco (really U.S. Route One but everybody called it Main Street and it was) or the daughters from mooning (and maybe more) over the low- riders churning the metal on those bad ass machines. Even prime and proper Lily Dumont, the queen of Saint Brigitte’s Catholic Church rectitude on Sunday and wanna-be “mama” every other waking minute of late. And the object of her desire? One “Motorcycle Bill,” the baddest low- rider in all of Olde Saco.

Now baddest in Olde Saco (that’s up in ocean edge Maine for the heathens and others not in the know) was not exactly baddest in the whole wide world, nowhere as near as bad as say Sonny Barger and his henchmen outlaws- for- real bikers out in Hell’s Angels Oakland as chronicled by Doctor Gonzo (before he was Gonzo), Hunter S. Thompson in his saga of murder and mayhem sociological- literary study Hell’s Angels. But as much is in life one must accept the context. And the context here is that in sleepy dying mill town Olde Saco mere ownership, hell maybe mere desire for ownership, of a bike was prima facie evidence of badness. So every precious daughter was specifically warned away from Motorcycle Bill and his Vincent Black Lightning 1952 (although no mother, and maybe no daughter either, could probably tell the difference between that sleek English bike and a big pig Harley). But Madame Dumont felt no need to do so with her sweet sixteen Lily who, maybe, pretty please maybe was going to be one of god’s women, maybe enter the convent over in Cedars Of Lebanon Springs in a couple of years after she graduated from Olde Saco High along with her Class of 1960.

 

But that was before, walking home to Olde Saco’s French- Canadian (F-C) quarter, the Acre, on Atlantic Avenue with classmate and best friend Clara Dubois, Lily heard the thunder of Bill’s bike coming up behind them, stopping, Bill giving Lily a bow, and them revving the machine up and doing a couple of circle cuts within a hair’s breathe of the girls. Then just a suddenly he was off, and Lily, well, Lily was hooked, hooked on Motorcycle Bill, although she did not know it, know it for certain until that night in her room when she tossed and turned all night and did not ask god, or any of his associates, to guide her in this matter.

One thing about living in a sleepy old town, a sleepy old dying mill town, is that everybody knows everybody’s business at least as far as any person wants that information out on the public square. Two things are important before we go on. One is that everybody in town that counted which meant every junior and senior class high schooler in Olde Saco knew that Bill had made a “play” for Lily. And the buzz got its start from none other than Clara Dubois who had her own hankerings after the motorcycle man (her source of wonder though was more, well lets’ call it crass than Lily’s, Clara wanted to know if Bill was build, build with sexual power like his motorcycle. She had innocently, perhaps, understood the Marlon mystique). The second was that Bill, other than his bike, was not a low life low- rider but just a guy who liked to ride the roads free and easy. See Bill was a freshman over at Bowdoin and he used the bike as much to get back and forth as to do wheelies in front of impressionable teenage girls from the Acre.

One day, a few days after their Motorcycle Bill “introduction,” when Lily and Clara were over at Seal Rock at the end of Olde Saco Beach (not its real name but given it because it was the local lovers’ lane and many things had been sealed there including a fair share of “doing the do”) Bill came up behind them sans his bike. Now not on his bike, without a helmet, and carrying books, books of all things, he looked like any student except maybe a little bolder and a little less reserved. He started talking to Lily and something in his demeanor attracted her to him. (Clara swore, swore on seven bibles, that Lily was kind of stand-offish at first but Lily says no.) They talked for a while and then Bill asked Lily if she wanted a ride home. She hemmed and hawed but there was just something about him that spoke of mystery (who knows what Clara thought). She agreed and they walked a couple of blocks to where he was parked. And there Lily saw that Vincent Black Lightning 1952 of her dreams. Without a word, without anything done except to tie her hair back she climbed on the back of the bike at Bill’s beckon. And that is how one Lily Dumont became William Kelly’s motorcycle “mama.”

 

 

 

ARTIST: Richard Thompson
TITLE: 1952 Vincent Black Lightning
Lyrics and Chords

Said Red Molly to James that's a fine motorbike

A girl could feel special on any such like

Said James to Red Molly, well my hat's off to you

It's a Vincent Black Lightning, 1952

And I've seen you at the corners and cafes it seems

Red hair and black leather, my favorite color scheme

And he pulled her on behind

And down to Box Hill they did ride

/ A - - - D - / - - - - A - / : / E - D A /

/ E - D A - / Bm - D - / - - - - A - - - /

Said James to Red Molly, here's a ring for your right hand

But I'll tell you in earnest I'm a dangerous man

I've fought with the law since I was seventeen

I robbed many a man to get my Vincent machine

Now I'm 21 years, I might make 22

And I don't mind dying, but for the love of you

And if fate should break my stride

Then I'll give you my Vincent to ride

Come down, come down, Red Molly, called Sergeant McRae

For they've taken young James Adie for armed robbery

Shotgun blast hit his chest, left nothing inside

Oh, come down, Red Molly to his dying bedside

When she came to the hospital, there wasn't much left

He was running out of road, he was running out of breath

But he smiled to see her cry

And said I'll give you my Vincent to ride

Says James, in my opinion, there's nothing in this world

Beats a 52 Vincent and a red headed girl

Now Nortons and Indians and Greeveses won't do

They don't have a soul like a Vincent 52

He reached for her hand and he slipped her the keys

He said I've got no further use for these

I see angels on Ariels in leather and chrome

Swooping down from heaven to carry me home

And he gave her one last kiss and died

I’ll Get By- George Raft’s I’ll Get You A Film Review

I’ll Get By- George Raft’s I’ll Get You A Film Review

 

 

 

DVD Review

From The Pen Of Sam Lowell

I’ll Get You, starring George Raft, Sally Gray, 1952

 

I have been running the rack on the old black and white film noir genre the past several years mainly grabbing stuff from the Netflix archives (“running the rack” a term learned in my pool hall days when I hung around with corner boys who hung around pool halls although I was never much of a player, mainly a hanger-on and bettor, a bettor against a guy like Red Radley who lost me more money than I could shake a stick at-not realizing until much later that Red was cheating, was threating murder and mayhem against whoever he was playing against and he was big enough to enforce his edicts). At this point since I have been pretty steady in my attempts to see plenty of them I have moved down, or been forced by Hollywood’s tastes to move down, the A classics like The Postman Always Rings Twice,  The Big Sleep, Out Of The Past and a few others and hit the B-films of late. Maybe B minus as is the case here in this police procedural out of London town I’ll Get You starring old time 1930s heavy gangster George Raft.

This time out Raft plays an undercover FBI guy working on an international kidnapping case in London. And if you are talking about FBI guys working on anything in the 1940s and 1950s then you are talking about something related to the red menace, the Cold War, the Soviet Union and its nefarious plans for world conquest (according to the Washington propaganda campaign and what did we know about such plans and if there such plans when it came right down to it) as the Cold War got icier as the decade after World War II went on. Here Raft, posing as a scientist after giving the Brits the slip entering London finally winds up working along with a fetching woman British agent (okay, okay, MI5) played by Sally Gray to find out what the hell happened to a few nuclear scientists who were abducted and sent behind the Iron Curtain. Sent there obviously to be grilled, and maybe more, by the bad guys who wanted to get the latest up-to-date information on whatever level the Americans had worked out making nuclear weapons even more deadly.    

Naturally the hook here has to be a sinister Mister Blank, Grand in the story line but everybody over the age of twelve knows that is strictly a front, an alias, who is manipulating the action behind the scenes and trying to keep the Anglo-American attempts to get the scientists back from succeeding. The whole story line is run as a bunch of cover plays and ploys with one side leading the other on wild goose chases until Raft pulls the hammer down. Naturally as well when there is a female agent involved whether here on in a James Bond vehicle there is romance in the air. Despite that slight diversion Raft and the boys grab the bad guys and all is well for a while-until the next turn in the Cold War battles. So you can see now why this one is a strictly B effort, not more. Got it.   

*****The Latest From The Partisan Defense Committee Website- Free All Class-War Prisoners

*****The Latest From The Partisan Defense Committee Website- Free All Class-War Prisoners

 

James P.Cannon (center)-Founding leader of The International Labor Defense- a model for labor defense work in the 1920s and 1930s.

Click below to link to the Partisan Defense Committee website.

http://www.partisandefense.org/

Reposted from the American Left History blog, dated December 1, 2010, updated December 2014.

Markin comment:

I like to think of myself as a long-time fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, an organization committed to social and political defense cases and causes in the interests of the international working class. Cases from early on in the 1970s when the organization was founded and the committee defended the Black Panthers who were being targeted by every police agency that had an say in the matter, the almost abandoned by the left Weather Underground (in its various incantations) and Chilean miners in the wake of the Pinochet coup there in 1973 up to more recent times with the Mumia death penalty case, defense of the Occupy movement and the NATO three, and defense of the heroic Wiki-leaks whistle-blower Chelsea Manning (formerly Bradley).

Moreover the PDC is an organization committed, at this time of the year, to raising funds to support the class-war prisoners’ stipend program through the annual Holiday Appeal drive. Unfortunately having to raise these funds in support of political prisoners for many years now, too many years, as the American and international capitalist class and their hangers-on have declared relentless war, recently a very one-sided war, against those who would cry out against the monster. Attempting to silence voices from zealous lawyers like Lynne Stewart, articulate death-row prisoners like Mumia and the late Tookie Williams, anti-fascist street fighters like the Tingsley Five to black liberation fighters like the Assata Shakur, the Omaha Three and the Angola Three and who ended up on the wrong side of a cop and state vendetta and anti-imperialist fighters like the working-class based Ohio Seven and student-based Weather Underground who took Che Guevara’s admonition to wage battle inside the “belly of the beast” seriously. Others, other militant labor and social liberation fighters as well, too numerous to mention here but remembered.

Normally I do not need any prompting in the matter. This year tough I read the 25th Anniversary Appeal article in Workers Vanguard No. 969 where I was startled to note how many of the names, organizations, and political philosophies mentioned there hark back to my own radical coming of age, and the need for class-struggle defense of all our political prisoners in the late 1960s (although I may not have used that exact term at the time).

That recognition included names like black liberation fighter George Jackson’s now deceased after a brutal prison murder class-war prisoner Hugo Pinell’s San Quentin Six comrade; the Black Panthers in their better days, the days when the American state really was out to kill or detain every last supporter, and in the days when we needed, desperately needed, to fight for their defense in places from Oakland to New Haven,  as represented by two of the Omaha Three (Poindexter and wa Langa), in their younger days; the struggle, the fierce struggle, against the death penalty as represented in Mumia’s case today (also Black Panther-connected); the Ohio 7 and the Weather Underground who, rightly or wrongly, were committed to building a second front against American imperialism, and who most of the left, the respectable left, abandoned; and, of course, Leonard Peltier and the Native American struggles from Pine Ridge to the Southwest. It has been a long time and victories few. I could go on but you get the point.

That point also includes the hard fact that we have paid a high price, a very high price, for not winning back in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we last had this capitalist imperialist society on the ropes. Maybe it was political immaturity, maybe it was cranky theory, maybe it was elitism, hell, maybe it was just old-fashioned hubris but we let them off the hook. And have had to fight forty years of rear-guard “culture wars” since just to keep from falling further behind.

And the class-war prisoners, our class-war prisoners, have had to face their “justice” and their prisons. Many, too many for most of that time. That lesson should be etched in the memory of every pro-working class militant today. And this, as well, as a quick glance at the news these days should make every liberation fighter realize; the difference between being on one side of that prison wall and the other is a very close thing when the bourgeois decides to pull the hammer down. The support of class-war prisoners is thus not charity, as International Labor Defense founder James P. Cannon noted back in the 1920s, but a duty of those fighters outside the walls. Today I do my duty, and gladly. I urge others to do the same now at the holidays and throughout the year. The class-war prisoners must not stand alone. 

*Free The Last of the Ohio Seven-They Must Not Die In Jail

COMMENTARY

ONE OF THE OHIO SEVEN -RICHARD WILLIAMS- RECENTLY DIED IN PRISON (2006). THAT LEAVES JAAN LAAMAN AND TOM MANNING STILL IN PRISON. IT IS AN URGENT DUTY FOR THE INTERNATIONAL LABOR MOVEMENT AND OTHERS TO RAISE THE CALL FOR THEIR FREEDOM. FREE ALL CLASS WAR PRISONERS.

Free the last of the Seven. Below is a commentary written in 2006 arguing for their freedom.

The Ohio Seven, like many other subjective revolutionaries, coming out of the turbulent anti-Vietnam War and anti-imperialist movements, were committed to social change. The different is that this organization included mainly working class militants, some of whose political consciousness was formed by participation as soldiers in the Vietnam War itself. Various members were convicted for carrying out robberies, apparently to raise money for their struggles, and bombings of imperialist targets. Without going into their particular personal and political biographies I note that these were the kind of subjective revolutionaries that must be recruited to a working class vanguard party if there ever is to be a chance of bringing off a socialist revolution. In the absence of a viable revolutionary labor party in the 1970’s and 1980’s the politics of the Ohio Seven, like the Black Panthers and the Weathermen, were borne of despair at the immensity of the task and also by desperation to do something concrete in aid of the Vietnamese Revolution and other Third World struggles . Their actions in trying to open up a second front militarily in the United States in aid of Third World struggles without a mass base proved to be mistaken but, as the Partisan Defense Committee which I support has noted, their actions were no crime in the eyes of the international working class.

The lack of a revolutionary vanguard to attract such working class elements away from adventurism is rendered even more tragic in the case of the Ohio Seven. Leon Trotsky, a leader with Lenin of the Russian Revolution of 1917, noted in a political obituary for his fallen comrade and fellow Left Oppositionist Kote Tsintadze that the West has not produced such fighters as Kote. Kote, who went through all the phases of struggle for the Russian Revolution, including imprisonment and exile under both the Czar and Stalin benefited from solidarity in a mass revolutionary vanguard party to sustain him through the hard times. What a revolutionary party could have done with the evident capacity and continuing commitment of subjective revolutionaries like the Ohio Seven poses that question point blank. This is the central problem and task of cadre development in the West in resolving the crisis of revolutionary leadership.

Finally, I would like to note that except for the Partisan Defense Committee and their own defense organizations – the Ohio 7 Defense Committee and the Jaan Laaman Defense Fund- the Ohio Seven have long ago been abandoned by those New Left elements and others, who as noted, at one time had very similar politics. At least part of this can be attributed to the rightward drift to liberal pacifist politics by many of them, but some must be attributed to class. Although the Ohio Seven were not our people- they are our people. All honor to them. As James P Cannon, a founding leader of the International Labor Defense, forerunner of the Partisan Defense Committee, pointed out long ago –Solidarity with class war prisoners is not charity- it is a duty. Their fight is our fight! LET US DO OUR DUTY HERE. RAISE THE CALL FOR THE FREEDOM OF LAAMAN AND MANNING. MAKE MOTIONS OF SOLIDARITY IN YOUR POLITICAL ORGANIZATION, SCHOOL OR UNION.

YOU CAN GOOGLE THE ORGANIZATIONS MENTIONED ABOVE- THE PARTISAN DEFENSE COMMITTEE- THE OHIO 7 DEFENSE COMMITTEE- THE JAAN LAAMAN DEFENSE FUND.

From The Archives-2014

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

*****In The Hills And Hollows Again- With Mountain Music Man Norman Blake In Mind

*****In The Hills And Hollows Again- With Mountain Music Man Norman Blake In Mind    

 

Recently in discussing Sam Lowell’s relationship with mountain music, the music from down in the hills and hollows of Kentucky where his father and his people before him had lived dirt poor, almost beyond dirt poor one they settled in and had forsaken any betterment by heading further west once the land gave out , land that they did not provide very good guardianship for since they made every mistake in the agricultural book before it turned to dust, for generations eking almost nothing out of the land that had been abandoned decades before by some going west driven spirits who played the land out and moved on, some moving on until they reached ocean edge California, Bart Webber noticed that he had concentrated a little too heavily on the music of Sam’ s father’s  Kentucky hills and hollows.

Sure a lot of the music came almost intact from the old country, old country here being some place in the British Isles, music that a guy like high Brattle Street Brahmin Francis Child collected and that if you give some serious attention to you will find that the core narratives presented there could be heard come any Saturday night Hazard red barn dance. But there were other places down south like in the Piedmont of North Carolina where a cleaner picking style had been developed by the likes of Etta Baker and exemplified more recently by Norman Blake who has revived the work of performers like Aunt Helen Alder and Pappy Sims by playing the old tunes. Some other places as well like down in the inner edges of Tennessee and Georgia where the kindred also dwelled, places as well where if the land had played out there they, the ones who stayed behind in there tacky cabins barely protected against the weathers, their lack of niceties of modern existence a result not because they distained such things but down in the hollows they did not know about them, did not seem to notice the bustling outside world.

They all, all the hills and hollows people, just kept plucking away barely making ends meet, usually not doing so in some periods, and once they had abandoned cultivating the land these sedentary heredity “master-less men” thrown out their old countries, like Bart mentioned mainly the British Isles, for any number of petty crimes, but crimes against property and so they had to go on their own or face involuntary transportation they went into the “black god” mines or sharecropping for some Mister to live short, nasty, brutish lives before the deluge.

But come Saturday night, come old Fred Brown’s worn out in need of paint red barn the hill people, the mountain people, the piedmont brethren, hell, maybe a few swamp-dwellers too, would gather up their instruments, their sweet liquor jugs, their un-scrubbed bare-foot children or their best guy or gal and play the night away as the winds came down the mountains. This DNA etched in his bones by his father and the kindred is what Sam had denied for much of his life.          

But like Bart had mentioned as well when discussing the matter with Sam one night sometimes “what goes around comes around” as the old-time expression had it. Take for example Sam Lowell’s youthful interest in folk music back in the early 1960s when it had crashed out of exotic haunts like Harvard Square, Ann Arbor, Old Town Chi Town and North Beach/Berkeley out in Frisco. Crashed out by word of mouth at first and ran into a lot of kids, a lot of kids like Sam, who got his word from Diana Nelson who got it from a cousin from North Adamsville nearer Boston who frequented the coffeehouses on Beacon Hill and Harvard Square, especially the famous "cheap date" Joy Street Club and Turk's Head on the hill and the equally "cheap date" Clue Blue and Club Nana in the Square after the Club 47 got too expensive once everybody and their brother and sister wanted to go there, who had “hipped” her to this new folk music program that he had found flipping the dial of his transistor radio one Sunday night.

See Sam and Diana were tucked away from the swirl down in Carver about thirty miles as the crow flies from Boston and Cambridge but maybe a million social miles from those locales and had picked up the thread somewhat belatedly. He, along with his corner boys, had lived in their little corner boy cocoon out in front of Jimmy Jack’s Diner figuring out ways to get next to girls like Diana but who were stuck, stuck like glue to listening to the “put to sleep” music that was finding its way to clog up Jimmy Jack’s’ hither-to-fore “boss” jukebox. Christ, stuff like Percy Faith’s Moon River that parents could swoon over, and dance to. Had picked the folk sound up belatedly when they were fed up with what was being presented on American Bandstand and WJDA the local rock station, while they were looking for something different, something that they were not sure of but that smelled, tasted, felt, and looked different from a kind of one-size-fits-all vanilla existence.

Oh sure, as Bart recognized once he thought about it for a while, every generation in their youth since the days when you could draw a distinction between youth and adulthood a century or so ago and have it count has tried to draw its own symbolic beat but this was different, this involved a big mix of things all jumbled together, political, social, economic, cultural, the whole bag of societal distinctions which would not be settled until the end of that decade, maybe the first part of the next. That big picture is what interested him. What had interested Sam then down there in in Podunk Carver about thirty miles south of Boston was the music, his interest in the other trends did not come until later, much later long after the whole thing had ebbed and they were fighting an unsuccessful rearguard action against the night-takers and he was forced to consider other issues. And Sam had been a fighter against what Che Guevara, a hero to Sam's generation and later ones too in desperate need of heroes when the night-takers went berserk, called the "the belly of the beast of the world's problems in America, ever after. 

The way Sam told it one night a few years back, according to Bart, some forty or so years after his ear changed forever that change had been a bumpy road. Sam had been at his bi-weekly book club in Plymouth where the topic selected for the next meeting was the musical influences, if any, that defined one’s tastes and he had volunteered to speak then since he had just read a book, The Mountain View, about the central place of mountain music, for lack of a better term, in the American songbook. He had along with Bart and Jack Dawson also had been around that time discussing how they had been looking for roots as kids. Musical roots which were a very big concern for a part of their  generation, a generation that was looking for roots, for rootedness not just in music but in literature, art, and even in the family tree.

Their parents’ generation no matter how long it had been since the first family immigration wave had spilled them onto these shores was in the red scare Cold War post-World War II period very consciously ignoring every trace of roots in order to be fully vanilla Americanized. So their generation had had to pick up the pieces not only of that very shaky family tree but everything else that had been downplayed during that period.

Since Sam had tired of the lazy hazy rock and roll that was being produced and which the local rock radio stations were force- feeding him and others like him looking to break out through their beloved transistor radios he had started looking elsewhere on the tiny dial for something different after Diana had clued him in about that folk music program. Although for a while he could not find that particular program or Carver was out of range for the airwaves. But like a lot of young people, as he would find out later when he would meet kindred in Harvard Square, the Village, Ann Arbor, Berkeley he fortunately had been looking for that something different at just that moment when something called folk music, roots music, actually was being played on select stations for short periods of time each week and so it was before long that he was tuned in.

His own lucky station had been a small station, an AM station, from Providence in Rhode Island which he would find out later had put the program on Monday nights from eight to eleven at the request of Brown and URI students who had picked up the folk music bug on trips to the Village (Monday a dead music night in advertising circles then, maybe now too, thus fine for talk shows, community service programs and odd-ball stuff like roots music to comply with whatever necessary FCC mandates went with the license.) That is where he first heard the likes of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Tom Paxton, Dave Von Ronk, a new guy named Tom Rush from Harvard whom he would hear in person many times over the years, and another guy, Eric Von Schmidt whom he would meet later in one of the Harvard Square coffeehouses that were proliferating to feed the demand to hear folk music. Those coffeehouses were manna from heaven, well, because they were cheap for guys with little money. Cheap alone or on a date, basically as Sam related to his book club listeners for a couple of bucks at most admission, the price of a cup of coffee to keep in front of you and thus your place, maybe a pastry if alone and just double that up for a date except share the pasty you had your date deal all set for the evening hearing performers perfecting their acts before hitting the A-list clubs.

He listened to it all, liked some of it, other stuff, the more protest stuff he could take or leave depending on the performer but what drew his attention, strangely then was when somebody on the radio or on stage performed mountain music, you know, the music of the hills and hollows that came out of Appalachia mainly down among the dust and weeds. Things like Bury Me Under The Weeping Willow, Gold Watch and Chain, Fair and Tender Ladies, Pretty Saro, and lots of instrumentals by guys like Buell Kazee, Hobart Smith, The Charles River Boys. Norman Blake just starting his rise along with various expert band members to bring bluegrass to the wider younger audience that did not relate to guys like Bill Monroe and his various band combinations, and some other bluegrass bands as well that had now escaped his memory.

This is where it all got jumbled up for him Sam said since he was strictly a city boy, made private fun of the farm boys, the cranberry boggers, who then made up a significant part of his high school. He furthermore had no interest in stuff like the Grand Ole Opry and that kind of thing, none. Still he always wondered about the source, about why he felt some kinship with the music of the Saturday night red barn, probably broken down, certainly in need of paint, and thus available for the dance complete with the full complement of guitars, fiddles, bass, mandolin and full complement too of Bobby Joe’s just made white lightening, playing plainsong for the folk down in the wind-swept hills and hollows.  

Then one night, a Sunday night after he had picked up the Boston folk program station on the family radio (apparently the weak transistor radio did not have the energy to pick up a Boston station) he was listening to the Carter Family’s Wildwood Flower when his father came in and began singing along. After asking Sam about whether he liked the song and Sam answered that he did but could not explain why his father told him a story that maybe put the whole thing in perspective. After Sam’s older brother, Lawrence, had been born and things looked pretty dicey for a guy from the South with no education and no skill except useless coal-mining his father decided that maybe they should go back to Kentucky and see if things were better for a guy like him there. No dice, after had been in the north, after seeing the same old tacky cabins, the played out land, the endless streams of a new generation of shoeless kids Sam’s father decided to head back north and try to eke something out in a better place. But get this while Sam’s parents were in Kentucky Sam had been conceived. Yeah, so maybe it was in the genes all along.          

Out In The 1950s L.A. Noir Night-Samuel Fuller’s The Crimson Kimono

Out In The 1950s L.A. Noir Night-Samuel Fuller’s The Crimson Kimono

 

 

 

DVD Review

From The Pen Of Zack James

The Crimson Kimono, starring Victoria Shaw, James Shigeta, Glenn Corbett

Sam Lowell, now that he had turned the day to day operations of his small law office to a younger associate, had during the previous couple of years been deep in the search for old time black and white films, mainly film noir, that he had seen as a kid growing up in Carver down in southeastern Massachusetts at the local Majestic Theater on Thornton Street. The main vehicle for igniting that interest had been through Netflix, either grabbing DVDs or by streaming, although many of the films that interested him were not available on that latter source. At some point he had run through what he called the primo classics, the ones that make the top one hundred Hollywood films of all time like Sunset Boulevard, Casablanca, To Have and Have Not, Double Indemnity,   The Big Sleep, Out Of The Past, The Maltese Falcon stuff like that. He then started going after what he, and Hollywood critics as well, would call B films, films made on a shoestring or which just didn’t have enough storyline, good acting or cinematography to make that primo list.

As usual there was plenty more B material around than classics especially from that black and white film era when the crush for double-feature films every week or so led to some cutting of corners. The film under review, Sam Fuller’s The Crimson Kimono, is just such a film although it does have a twist that you generally did not see in Hollywood films in the hard-boiled red scare Cold War 1950s night.

Usually Sam would just grab a DVD, look at it, maybe write a few hundred words about some aspect of the film that interested him, storyline, acting, camera work, or when he wanted up front and personal one and all to know he had panned had it. The Crimson Kimono though although thin on the acting by well-known B actors had a twist that he wanted his friend from high school days in Carver, Bart Webber, who also had some interest in those black and white films since he would when younger accompany Sam on Saturday afternoons to the double-feature at the Majestic. (Later, in high school, when going to the movies was the essence of a cheap “hot date” with some girl of interest each man had to fend for himself although they occasionally double-dated in the “pits,” the balconies at night so-called for obvious reasons.)

One night Bart went on one of his periodic visits from Carver where had had resided almost all of his life up to Cambridge where Sam lived to go to Jack’s and have a few drinks and talk about whatever there was to talk about. That night Sam was hot on the trail of discussing what he had thought of The Crimson Kimono. Here’ what Sam had to say when Bart told me about it later:         

How are you going to hate a movie, a film noir even, a police procedural, that was set in Los Angeles, not in the flamed out 1940s slumming streets of The Big Sleep and other Raymond Chandler classics but the 1950s when the place was starting to jump from a sleepy old town of the homegrown, Okies, Arkies and whoever else hightailed it out of wherever they were from to get to the “garden of Eden.” So you got the sprawl as backdrop but also since you were dealing with tinsel-town, Hollywood, you also got the refuge, the fates of those who did not make it up onto the big screen but still had nowhere else to go after they busted flat or else preferred to slum it than go back to Peoria or Lima, Ohio or wherever they hailed from. That too is the back-drop to the town’s seamy side. Here’s an add-on though and this is what will eventually separate this film out a bit from others for we get a look, a small but positive look, at L.A.s Japan Town. That in itself would be worthy of note because remember the Pacific War was still pretty fresh in everybody out on the West Coast’s mind and remember too most of those denizens of Japan Town also had etched into their brains that they were different-were different enough in World War II to wind up in the concentration camps set up in the West.       

Who knows where an urban ethnic enclave ends and where the low-life haunts begin. Remember when we used to come up to Boston to see the strip shows in what they rightly called the Combat Zone right next to the squabble of Chinatown. Well in L.A. the strip joints and “clip” joints, really the same thing as you know, were adjacent to Japan Town. One night one of the strippers, this Sugar Torch, a looker and with a bumps and curves shape that guys in the ‘50s were crazy for wound up, after fleeing for her life, dead, very dead, from a couple of slugs on the seamy streets of L.A.

Naturally the coppers, buddies who had been in Korea and now roomed together, in this case a white cop, played by Glenn Corbett, a good-looking guy who played cop and detective parts with a sneer, who you probably have seen in a few of these B films, and get this, a Japanese cop, played by Jimmy Shigeta, who are called on to investigate the murder ran into a few dead ends before they figured the thing out, or rather got the thing figured out for them. See this honey, this Sugar Torch, was looking for a new gimmick, a new tease to replace the one she had been doing which was getting old fast with the regular customers. So she planned to do some exotic Geisha girl strip. Of course she was clueless about anything Japanese so she went to the library where one of the librarians, a guy, Hansel, helped her get the details down right. That was our Sugar’s fatal mistake though. This Hansel’s girlfriend, a wigmaker, thought old Sugar was making a play for Hansel and got gun happy. No way but that was how the deal went down, how things played out for motive on this one.

Along the way the cops had brought in a student artist, Christine, played by Victoria Shaw who seemed too old and mature to be a student, but who knows, to make a sketch of the supposed murderer, who everybody thought was Hansel. No go-it was the girlfriend like I said. She got antsy about what Hansel might say once the cops grabbed him. She started firing away. Here’s a strange part after the Japanese cop gunned her down she laid on the seamy street just like the stripper-in a heap. I figure that was Sam Fuller going for effect.             

Here is where this one is a little different from most police procedurals, most noir too, since they usually want to hone in on the murder and mayhem part. In this though solving the murder is kind of backdrop to the main action-the triangle love affair business. See this student artist Christine was a looking, smart too, so first Glenn took a run at her, figured he had it made, then Jimmy took a run as well. That part, the racial part, which gets a big play when the two cops finally realize what was happening, is what separates this one out because in the end the Japanese guy wins the hand of the fair Wasp maiden. Go figure in the 1950s.  

*Murder, My Sweet Or Is It Murder My Sweet- "Dial M For Murder"-A Film Review

Click on the headline to link to a "YouTube" film clip of the movie trailer for "Dial M For Murder".

DVD Review

Dial M For Murder, directed by Sir Alfred Hitchcock, starring Ray Milland and Grace Kelly, 1956.

At one time the great mystery movie director, Sir Alfred Hitchcock, was one of my favorite directors. Not that I was ever a big fan of the whodunit, “puzzle it out”, Agatha Christie-influenced part of the genre that he tended to use in his film work. I was always more of a Raymond Chandler/ Phillip Marlowe swaggering detective “chasing after windmills” mystery guy. But visually, most of Alfred Hitchcock’s work always left me gasping for breath until the end, even in those productions like the one under review here, “Dial M For Murder", where the murder plot is laid out for you in advance and all you have to do is figure the key to the slip up that will bring the villain low.

The villain in this case is ne’er do well, man about town Ray, Milland who finds out, mistakenly, that his meal ticket trophy wife, Grace Kelly, is in love with another man. Well, to keep the gravy train going the suave Mr. Milland will do anything, literally anything, to keep his status intact. Naturally he decides, smart guy that he is, to commit the perfect murder, the murder of said beautiful wife. And the plot moves on from there, I need not tell more.

Except this. Why on this good, green earth would anyone other a stone crazy, craven maniac want to touch even one hair on the lovely Grace Kelly’s head? Whatever benighted justice falls on the head of this villainous sort is too good for them. And that is what this film really boils done to (other that the ordinary, every day propositions that “crime does not pay” and that there are no “perfect” crimes) for me. Now in this film Grace Kelly is not as fetching as in other Hitchcock vehicles like “Rear Window” and “To Catch A Thief” but I will not quibble over her stage presence on this one. I would just note here, as I have in reviewing other works in which Ms. Kelly starred, that according to the gossip her real life husband, Prince Rainer, a man not given to open displays of sentiment, wept openly at her death. And now I know why.
.

***Writer's Corner- The Making Of Raymond Chandler's Phillip Marlowe-The Collected Stories

***Writer's Corner- The Making Of Raymond Chandler's Phillip Marlowe-The Collected Stories

Book Review

Collected Stories, Raymond Chandler, Everyman’s Library, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2002

A couple of years ago when reviewing a 1940s film version of the Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely, re-titled Murder My Sweet, starring Dick Powell I mentioned that I had found an old dog-eared edition of Raymond Chandler’s other writings (other than the Marlowe seven novel series) and that I wondered if there was more. Well, there was and there is, and here it is in over 1200 pages of pure Chandler from when he was a pup (an older pup since he did not start writing until later in life)up to and including some things that turned out to be sketches for the Marlowe series.

As is the nature of such all-inclusive volumes the material is uneven. Some stories are forgettable, or mere fluff. Others, as I have mentioned seem eerily very familiar except for the names of the detective and some of the characters. This book is made up of several stories from a period when Chandler was just developing his prototypical hard-boiled detective that evolved into Phillip Marlowe. The composites eventually make up The Long Goodbye, Lady in the Lake  and The Big Sleep. Fascinating in their own right but also as harbingers of things to come.

The major drawback here is not the value of the work but the ungainliness of the one volume at 1200 pages. If you are a beach chair reader, this thing will cave in your chest. On the other hand this is a treasure trove of the work of one of the second- level masters in the American literary pantheon. Enough said. Read on.

*Labor's Untold Story-Labor Candidates in the 1886 Elections

Click on title to link to information about labor candidates in the 1886 American elections.

Every Month Is Labor History Month

This Commentary is part of a series under the following general title: Labor’s Untold Story- Reclaiming Our Labor History In Order To Fight Another Day-And Win!

As a first run through, and in some cases until I can get enough other sources in order to make a decent presentation, I will start with short entries on each topic that I will eventually go into greater detail about. Or, better yet, take my suggested topic and run with it yourself.

*Raymond Chandler's Phillip Marlowe- An Encore- "The High Window"

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for Raymond Chandler's The High Window.

Book Review

The High Window, Raymond Chandler, Random House, New York, 1992

Phillip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler's classic noir hard-boiled private detective, forever literarily associated with Los Angeles and its means streets, is right at home here in his search, at the request of a dipsy dowager looking for solutions on the cheap and with no questions asked , for the inevitable “missing” (person or thing, fill in the blank). In this case a missing thing, a coin, a rare gold doubloon that has been stolen by, she claims, her no good gold-digging, newly-minted daughter-in-law. Along the way to the “truth” old Phillip finds more "conveniently" dead bodies, which may or may not connect in with the case, more kooks and more smarmy police officers than one can shake a stick at. The only things missing in this one are that whiff of perfume from some remote icy dame that has Phillip in a dither and ready to "chase after windmills" for and he takes no saps to the head. He will thus live to fight another day. There is plenty of sparse but functional dialogue, physical action and a couple of plot twists, particularly around the identity of the killers of the various dead bodies.

Have no fear, however, the intrepid Marlowe will figure it out in the end and some kind of 'rough' justice will prevail. At this point in the Chandler Marlowe series our shamus has been around the block more than a few times but he still is punching away at the 'bad guys' and the absurdity of the modern world. How does this one compare with the other Marlowe volumes? Give me those background oil derricks churning out the wealth while looking for General Sternwood's Rusty Regan (and that whiff of perfume mentioned above from the dizzy Sternwood daughters) in The Big Sleep or the run down stucco flats in some shady places in pursuit of Moose's Velma (and her whiff od perfume too, come to think of it) in Farewell, My Lovely any day. There no one to really root for here (except, a little, the much put upon dowager's secretary/ “wounded sparrow”, Merle). Nevertheless, as always with Chandler, you get high literature in a plebeian package.

*It's The Jade, Stupid!-Raymond Chandler's" Farewell, My Lovely

Click On Title To Link To Raymond Chandler Web page.

DVD REVIEW

Murder My Sweet, Dick Powell, 1943

Not all of the classic detective novelist Raymond Chandler's Phillip Marlowes are born equal. The definitive screen role is that of Humphrey Bogart in the Big Sleep. Dick Powell, however, here keeps pretty good company with his interpretation of Marlowe as the world-weary private detective who sees things through to the end, especially when he screws up an assignment. It's professional ethics, you know. That characteristic helped define the noir detective. Here Powell adds a little off-hand humor and self-deprecation to the role as he fight for his concept of rough `justice'. But mainly he is intrepid and that carries him a long way in the role. And surprisingly, unlike in the book that the film is based on, he gets the "nice" girl in the end. Who would have thought.

Apparently not all classic Raymond Chandler novels are born equal either. The film here takes bits and pieces from various shorter stories written by Chandler earlier in his career as he was defining the Marlowe model to make the plot line run here. If you want to see a truer take on the original novel Farewell, My Lovely that this film is based on then you should see the remake from the 1980's starring Robert Mitchum.

In Murder, My Sweet the story line runs more around the question of some jade lost by or stolen from a wealthy younger woman with a aging husband, a familar plot, although not always with aging husbands, who actions are central to a murder that occurs along the way. She, as is the order of things in noir films, is a mantrap and classic femme fatale who will do whatever it takes to get what she wants. And will succeed to a point. But do not forget that Marlowe has his own sense of honor so do not cross that line, or else. See both films and judge for yourself.

***From The Be-Bop 1960s Archives-As Father's Day Approaches- Fritz John Taylor's Tribute- "I Hear My Father's Voice....I hear an early morning front door slam."

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the D-Day Campaign, a campaign Fritz’s father participated in, during World War II.

One of my old North Adamsville classmates, Fritz John Taylor, Class of 1961, had some things, some father’s day things that he wanted to get off his chest so he asked me to help him write this belated tribute to his late father, Earl Jubal Taylor. The words may have been jointly written but, believe me, the sentiments and emotions expressed are strictly those of Fritz John Taylor. I do know that it took a lot of work for him to transfer them into written form.
******
In honor of Earl Taylor, 1920-1990, Sergeant, United States Army, World War II, European Theater and, perhaps, other North Adamsville fathers.

Fritz turned red, turned bluster, fluster, embarrassed, internal red, red with shame, red as he always did this time of the year, this father’s day time of the year, when he thought about his own father, the late Earl Jubal Taylor. And through those shades of red he thought, sometimes hard, sometimes just a flicker thought passing, too close, too red close to continue on, he thought about the things that he never said to Earl, about what never could be said to him, and above all, because when it came right down to it they might have been on different planets, what could not be comprehended said. But although death now separated them by twenty years he still turned red, more internal red these days, when he thought about the slivers of talk that could have been said, usefully said. And he, Fritz John Taylor, would go to his own grave having that hang over his father’s day thoughts.

But just this minute, just this pre-father’s day minute, Fritz Taylor, Fritz John, for those North Adamsville brethren who insisted on calling him Fritz John when he preferred plain old Fritz in those old-time 1960s high school days, wanted to call a truce to his red-faced shame, internal or otherwise, and pay public tribute, pay belated public tribute to Earl Taylor, and maybe it would rub off on others too. And just maybe cut the pain of the thought of having those unsaid things hang over him until the grave.

See, here’s the funny part, the funny part now, about speaking, publicly or privately, about his father, at least when Fritz thought about the millions of children around who were, warm-heartedly, preparing to put some little gift together for the “greatest dad in the world.” And of other millions, who were preparing, or better, fortifying themselves in preparation for that same task for dear old dad, although with their teeth grinding. Fritz could not remember, or refused to remember, a time for eons when he, warm-heartedly or grinding his teeth, prepared anything for his father’s father’s day, except occasional grief that might have coincided with that day’s celebration. No preparation was necessary for that. That was all in a Fritz’s day’s work, his hellish corner boy day’s work or, rather, night’s work, the sneak thief in the night work, later turned into more serious criminal enterprises. But the really funny part, ironic maybe, is grief-giving, hellish corner boy sneak thief, or not, one Earl Taylor, deserves honor, no, requires honor today because by some mysterious process, by some mysterious transference Fritz John, in the end, was deeply formed, formed for the better by that man.

And you see, and it will perhaps come as no surprise that Fritz John, hell everybody called him Fritz John in the old days so just so nobody will be confused we will use that name here, was estranged from his family for many years, many teenage to adult years and so that his father’s influence, the “better angel of his nature,” influence had to have come very early on. Fritz, even now, maybe especially now, since he had climbed a few mountains of pain, of hard-wall time served, and addictions to get here, did not want to go into the details of that fact, just call them ugly, as this memorial is not about Fritz John’s trials and tribulations in the world, but Earl’s.

Here is what needs to be told though because something in that mix, that Earl gene mix, is where the earth’s salts mingled to spine Fritz against his own follies when things turned ugly later in his life. Earl Jubal Taylor, that middle name almost declaring that here was a southern man, as Fritz John’s name was a declaration that he was a son of a southern man, came out of the foothills of Kentucky, Appalachian Kentucky. The hills and hollows of Hazard, Kentucky to be exact, in the next county over from famed, bloody coal wars, class struggle, which-side-are-you-on Harlan County, but all still hard-scrabble coal-mining country famous in story and song- the poorest of the poor of white Appalachia-the “hillbillies.” And the poorest of the poor there, or very close to it, was Earl Taylor’s family, his seven brothers and four sisters, his elderly father and his too young step-mother. Needless to say, but needing to be said anyway, Earl went to the mines early, had little formal schooling and was slated, like generations of Taylors before him, to live a short, brutish, and nasty life, scrabbling hard, hard for the coal, hard for the table food, hard for the roof over his head, hard to keep the black lung away, and harder still to keep the company wolves away from his shack door. And then the Great Depression came and thing got harder still, harder than younger ears could understand today, or need to hear just now.

At the start of World War II Earl jumped, jumped with both feet running once he landed, at the opportunity to join the Army in the wake of Pearl Harbor, fought his fair share of battles in the European Theater, including D-Day, although he, like many men of his generation, was extremely reticent to talk about his war experiences. By the vagaries of fate in those up-ending times Earl eventually was stationed at the huge Clintondale Depot before being discharged, a make-shift transport army base about twenty miles from Adamsville.

Fritz John, interrupted his train of thought as chuckled to himself when he thought about his father’s military service, thought about one of the few times when he and Earl had had a laugh together. Earl often recounted that things were so tough in Hazard, in the mines of Hazard, in the slag heap existence of Hazard, that in a “choice” between continuing in the mines and daily facing death at Hitler’s hands he picked the latter, gladly, and never looked back. Part of that never looking back, of course, was the attraction of Maude Callahan (North Adamsville Class of 1941), Fritz’s mother whom Earl met while stationed at Clintondale where she worked in the civilian section. They married shortly thereafter, had three sons, Fritz’s late brother, Jubal, killed many years ago while engaged in an attempted armed robbery, Fritz John, ex-sneak thief, ex-dope-dealer, ex-addict, ex-Vietnam wounded Marine, ex-, well, enough of ex’s, and a younger brother, Prescott, now serving time at one of the Massachusetts state correctional institutions as a repeat offender, and the rest is history. Well, not quite, whatever Earl might have later thought about his decision to leave the hellhole of the Appalachian hills. He was also a man, as that just mentioned family resume hints at, who never drew a break, not at work, not through his sons, not in anything.

Fritz John, not quite sure how to put it in words that were anything but spilled ashes since it would be put differently, much differently in 2011 than in, let’s say, 1971, or 1961 thought of it this way:

“My father was a good man, he was a hard working man when he had work, and he was a devoted family man. But go back to that paragraph about where he was from. He was also an uneducated man with no skills for the Boston labor market. There was no call for a coal miner's skills in Boston after World War II so he was reduced to unskilled, last hired, first fired jobs. This was, and is, not a pretty fate for a man with hungry mouths to feed. And stuck in the old Adamsville Housing Authority apartments, come on now let’s call a thing by its real name, real recognizable name, “the projects,” the place for the poorest of the poor, Adamsville version, to boot. To get out from under a little and to share in the dream, the high heaven dream, working poor post-World War II dream, of a little house, no matter how little, of one’s own if only to keep the neighbor’s loud business from one’s door Maude, proud, stiffly Irish 1930s Depression stable working class proud Maude, worked. Maude worked mother’s night shifts at one of the first Adamsville Dunkin’ Donuts filling jelly donuts for hungry travelers in order to scrap a few pennies together to buy an old, small, rundown house, on the wrong side of the tracks, on Maple Street for those who remember that locale, literally right next to the old Bay Lines railroad tracks. So the circle turned and the Taylor family returned back to the North Adamsville of Maude’s youth.”

Fritz John grew pensive when he thought, or rather re-thought, about the toll that the inability to be the sole breadwinner (no big deal now with an almost mandatory two working-parents existence- but important for a man of his generation) took on the man's pride. A wife filling damn jelly donuts, jesus.

He continued:

“And it never really got better for Earl from there as his three boys grew to manhood, got into more trouble, got involved with more shady deals, acquired more addictions, and showered more shame on the Earl Taylor name than needs to be detailed here. Let’s just say it had to have caused him more than his fair share of heartache. He never said much about it though, in the days when Fritz John and he were still in touch. Never much about why three boys who had more food, more shelter, more education, more prospects, more everything that a Hazard po’ boy couldn’t see straight if their lives depended on it, who led the corner boy life for all it was worth and in the end had nothing but ashes, and a father’s broken heart to show for it. No, he never said much, and Fritz John hadn’t heard from other sources that he ever said much (Maude was a different story, but this is Earl’s story so enough of that). Why? Damn, they were his boys and although they broke his heart they were his boys. That is all that mattered to him and so that, in the end, is how Fritz John knew, whatever he would carry to his own grave, that Earl must have forgiven him.”

Fritz John, getting internal red again, decided that it was time to close this tribute. To go on in this vein would be rather maudlin. Although the old man was unlike Fritz John, never a Marine, he was closer to the old Marine Corps slogan than Fritz John, despite his fistful of medals, ever could be- Semper Fi- "always faithful." Yes, Fritz John thought, as if some historic justice had finally been done, that is a good way to end this. Except to say something that should have been shouted from the North Adamsville rooftops long ago- “Thanks Dad, you did the best you could.”

***Out In The Film Noir Night-With Robert Mitchum’s“Angel Face” In Mind

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

…hey, don’t believe everything you read in the newspapers about that Jeffers suicide/ murder, the one that happened a while back, the one where the wife, the one with the dough, big dough, backed up their Jaguar in the driveway of their country estate at about eighty miles an hour and had them tumble down the hilly embankment and done. They, the newspapers, or their reporters, or somebody got a lot of it all balled up, all balled up big time. I know, I sure in hell know, the real scoop, except the end which they, the newspapers got right. Dead right. See Frank Jeffers had been in my place, my little diner, Sammy’s, located just on the outskirts of Santa Barbara that morning when it happened.

He wanted to see what his old Bakersfield corner boy neighborhood and army buddy, me, Sam James, had to say about his predicament, about whether he should pull up stakes and leave her, leave Diane, leave Diane Tremont Jeffers and the dough and cars, or just go back and face some kind of life with her. I said from what I knew, from what I read, and from being at the trial every day until they were freed, that she was poison, poison worse than his old flame from the neighborhood, Mary, who almost got him killed when some bozo she was fresh interested in decided that he wanted her for his exclusive company and was ready to put Frank six feet under to enforce it. And Mary, well, Mary just laughed that blonde bimbo laugh of hers all thrilled and maybe turned on too that he-men were fighting over her. Naturally Frank being Frank, didn’t want to listen to my advice, a she could never stop chasing some skirt until he tumbled over, sorry Frank, but that was the deal. Let me tell you what he told me and then maybe you can see how he had to go back, go back and face the music.

He had been running, well half- running a garage, Jimmy’s Esso (his partner and a guy he also knew from the service although not a Bakersfield corner boy), just a few miles from Santa Barbra on the other side of town from here, near Route 101, when the call came in that one of the Tremont cars had blown a gasket or something and needed to be either fixed on the spot, or towed to Jimmy’s and worked on. So Frank, since he was the ace mechanic and the tow truck driver as well (Jimmy, was strictly a gas jockey, but a gas jockey who had the dough and was the brains of the operation), trudged up the hills to the Tremont Estate. A great big place, kind of secluded up a winding road, and like I said up in the hills. He got there, maybe spends an hour fixing this big old Bentley and was ready to leave when she, Diane she, came out of the house and started asking questions about cars, and stuff like that. Then she showed him her Jaguar and asked him if he could check something. Now this was no ordinary Jag, but a specially built job, build just for her. He was hooked, hooked not just on the car but her, something about her manner, her angel face manner, was intriguing , something a little different.

Maybe like with all women it was her scent, that jasmine stuff she wore, and maybe she was kind of young and fresh and naïve, see she was only twenty and that won him over. The car too, for sure. But mainly her, mainly that angel face. So he took the ticket and took the ride. He had had a tough stretch of luck with women since he got back from the service, a bunch of round heels and two, maybe three-timers, especially the last one, a blonde as usual, who took him for a ride, and then blew town with his dough, his car, and some guy named Marty. So maybe it was that Diane was a brunette and he was looking to change his luck. Maybe he should have stuck to blondes, harmless blondes who just took your dough and at least left you breathing.

This Tremont set-up by the way was all the step-mother’s dough, Dora, not hers, not hers directly. See her own mother had died young, and her father, a novelist, a big time British novelist, David Tremont, you might have read on of his books, Captain Smiley’s Revenge, or something like that, had married into the Moore fortune, stocks and bonds stuff. Diane was close, too close to the father if you know what I mean (she told Frank one night some intimate stuff about her and the father but he thought it was just so much trying to make him jealous or something, kid’s stuff) and hated the step-mother with a passion, a deadly passion as it turned out.

She kept needling Frank endlessly about how bad the step-mother was, and went on and on about it. About some wicked witch of the west idea until Frank started wising up that his sweet Diane, left to her own devices, was not above murdering old Dora. Frank, maybe a fool in love choices was no fool when it came to where he might fit in the set-up and so he decided a twenty- year old brunette was nice but not nice enough to take the big step for. And so he bowed out, or tried to, but before he could do so Diane carried out her little scheme, her little scheme of fooling around with Dora’s old Bentley steering wheel. What Diane didn’t know, couldn’t have figured on, was that the day Dora was to drive that beast, drive it accelerator pedal to the floor down that fateful embankment that her father would be in the car too.

Diane, Frank did say, was full of remorse after that happened, after the father took the big tumble and she even tried to take the rap alone for the murders. But see Frank, ace auto mechanic Frank, no dough Frank, plenty of dough Diane (left by that step-mother in her will since she didn’t trust old David to not run out and spend it foolishly), was custom-built to fit the frame for doing the deed, or helping. So Diane’s very expensive lawyer built the case to the cops, and later to the jury, that Frank was up to his neck in the thing. And the outward facts seemed to fit. The only way out as you know from the big newspaper splash at the time of those murders was that they got married, married enough, to make the whole set-up just some crime of passion, if anything. So, yah, they got off, runaway jury got off the big step-off, murder one.

Frank though had had enough; he didn’t want to be looking for angel faces behind his back for the rest of his life. He wanted to get to Mexico, get somewhere far from her. He went back to the Tremont place one night to pack his bags and give his leaving speech. Then she sprang the car, dough, and maybe sponsoring a racing team which he would lead on him (Frank was a very promising auto racer before we headed to those Pacific island s and atolls to wipe up the Japs). He said then, maybe jasmine scent said too, that he would think it over. That next morning is when he told me the skinny, and you already know my opinion. What you didn’t know, and it never came out, was that Frank bought my argument, or maybe he just added mine to his already made up mind, and was going back to tell Diane nix and he was heading south. According to Johnny, one of the house servants who overheard it all, and who told me the real story later when I went to check out what the hell happened, they had a row over him going. A big row, no holds barred. Then she offered him a ride to the bus station. The rest you do know. RIP Frank, RIP old buddy.