When Legendary Bank Robber Pretty James Preston Made The Bankers Squeal-And All The Women Sweat-With Bruce Willis, Billy Bob Thornton And Cate Blanchett’s “Bandits” (2001) In Mind-A Special Guest Commentary

When Legendary Bank Robber Pretty James Preston Made The Bankers Squeal-And All The Women Sweat-With Bruce Willis, Billy Bob Thornton And Cate Blanchett’s “Bandits” (2001) In Mind-A Special Guest Commentary   

By Special Guest Scott Allen, contributing editor North Adamsville Ledger

Bandits, starring Cate Blanchett, Billy Bob Thornton, Bruce Willis, 2001  

The legendary Pretty James Preston, bank robber, solo bank robber, would have had the so-called “Sleep-over bandits,” Terry and Joe, a couple of cons, a couple of holy goofs really, masquerading as bank robbers in the film Bandits, for lunch and had time for a nap. And I am just the guy who knows that hard fact for after all I was the guy who put together the legend, wrote up Pretty James’ exploits right up until the end. See I was nothing but a young cub reporter, a clog in the back- room police beat death march for the heralded North Adamsville Ledger in the 1970s when Pretty James was robbing, arms in hand, every bank and department store not entombed in concrete around Eastern Massachusetts when I saw my chance for a by-line in maybe the Boston Globe, maybe television. anything but that stinking police backroom that smelled of stale coffee and staler donuts. My “in” was that I knew Pretty James in high school and once I connected with him, once he knew he could trust me as far as he could trust anybody I became essentially his publicity flak, his press agent to make that legend that he always craved deep down inside. Don’t get me wrong Pretty James wanted the dough, and plenty of it fast and easy but that legend business was never far below the surface when we would meet in downtown Boston across from the JFK Federal Building which he insisted on to put a thumb in the government’s eye just for kicks, because he could do the deed.   

(By the way Pretty James’ mode of operation, modus operandi okay, was always to show plenty of firepower when on a job. One night over beers at Shacky’s he told me that was the only thing, other than surprise, that will keep everybody afraid to breathe, including bank guards and department store security. Somehow he got some M-16s, AR-15s which are semi-automatic assault rifles they used in Vietnam where they were not worth crap, would jam up in the mud, and would go into with one in every hand. Although people still don’t believe it thinking I made it up as part of the Pretty James legend on an early job he did actually fire the guns, in the air, after he left the building just to prove that he was willing to do what was necessary to get the dough-easy or hard. For a long time, almost ten years he never had to do any more shooting, so he probably was right to “show the colors” early on. All I did was verify with a witness on the street that he had fired the weapons when I did my report on the action, nothing more.)              

In lots of ways touting Pretty James was a piece of cake, easy once he started consulting me, always theoretically to be sure, about what actions would draw some attention to him, what the world wanted from a lone gunman essentially in the days when bank robbing still had some cache. Pretty James had plenty of advantages-one being that he was a stone-cold bank robber whose instincts until the end were unerring, knew what would draw and what would not. Big granite-etched banks which in those days of symbolic show were pictures of safe harbors for a depositor’s money were prime targets. As the banking industry went suburban, went to cheapjack trailers and small storefronts they were not although as Pretty, lets’ just call him Pretty from here on in to save space since you know who I am talking about, kept telling me even I could stick-up, his term, half of them. When he decided to vary up his game and hit department stores he avoided the ones that had kids’ clothes and toys as too dangerous while, as will become apparent in a minute a women’s clothing store was the cat’s meow. Hell, some women, and I still have my notes and still have my disbelief would go shopping just to see if Pretty was going to hit their shopping spree place that day. As already noted, better unlike Terry and Joe who were something out of the late Jimmy Breslin’s The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight worked alone, didn’t have to deal with informers who got caught, sharing plans that might go awry-or the dough. Even better, from a commercial legend point of view and a newspaper’s as well Pretty went into the bank or store in broad daylight with no ruse just plenty of nerve and firepower. He could lead off the late edition or the 6 o’clock news and jump ratings. Best of all he really was “pretty” a wiry good- looking guy in the mold of the bad-ass biker criminal that Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy chased in 48 Hours so all the women would sweat over him, and in the real contact cases cover him and hide him out. I remember in high school girls who were supposed to be social butterflies, who were on the top of the totem pole, who wouldn’t dream of even noticing a low-rent biker were known to show up at Pretty house and get taken whatever way they wanted. You didn’t go to Pretty’s at midnight for anything else but to curl his toes. Sweet.

          

Sure, I will get to the two deadbeat amateur bank robbers Terry and Joe, along with their collective squeeze, their so-called hostage, Kate and how they took a page from the late George V. Higgins’ The Friends of Eddie Coyle caper that Jimmy Skaggs started way back when grabbing the bank manager and holding his or her family hostage while they brought the manager to his little bank and grabbed the cash-no sweat. The only thing they did, a variation if you will, was grab the bank personnel the night before. Big deal. But first let me explain how I worked my Pretty legend magic once I got his go ahead.

Every reporter, hell, maybe everybody who can write more than a sentence or two knows that half, maybe more, of what you put out in print, in behalf of making a legend is pure bullshit, crap. Here is what most of those who can write don’t know though people, the great unwashed masses, lead such dull existences that they will believe almost all of what they read or heard about-if it makes them feel good, if they connect. Like I said I already had a running start with the women, young and old as it turned out because of Pretty’s looks to make the clincher though I needed the guys. I will say that Pretty, determined, single-minded Pretty, was hard on his women, those who protected him, and those who wanted to. I won’t say at this late date he was a “love them and leave them” guy but he surely was no hearts and flowers to the ladies guy, except that last gal, that Sally something and here I will be on safe ground not giving a last name because even a “simp” knows that once she blew town she changed that moniker more than once. Toward the end I would get letters from some disheartened women who tried to protect Pretty, hide him out and while none of them finked on him to the coppers they also didn’t think he was that great in the sack, seemed preoccupied with the next hit, the next target, what it would take to keep the trail hot. That is when I knew I would have to double-down on his reputation, advise him a little to get even more daring with his exploits.       

I played the old Robin Hood gag that writers have been using forever-taking from the rich and giving to the poor. What a laugh if you knew Pretty. Maybe he left a fifty- cent tip for some diner waitress he was looking to screw, looking to have play his flute as he called it, but the guy was nothing but a self-indulgent fool, would go through the dough living high off the hog at the Ritz for months at a time with a different woman, maybe two, every night, stuff like that. But giving dough away was not his thing, he told me so flat-out and I kind of knew from my own family that he hungered for a lot of things he didn’t have as kid. I made his giving a hundred here, two hundred there to his women like charity with a little twist of paying off the whole of Babylon thrown in. Pretty never paid for his women, never paid for sex and you can believe than, huh, take it to the bank. I had him giving dough to the families of those in “the projects” over in Adamsville where he grew up and also to the Sacred Heart Church where he went once, maybe twice as a kid. Pure gold, although don’t go to either location looking for examples of how much he gave to anybody. Zilch. Still an easy sell especially once he branched out into an occasional department store heist and people would be waiting in line, especially older women, older meaning then in their thirties, maybe with a couple of kids, a tired ass of a husband and a bleak future to see if he was going to show up and rob that place that day and maybe they would get some of his largesse.           

That is the public bullshit, the crap for public consumption but go back a bit to where I described Pretty as a stone-cold bank robber, a guy who robbed whatever he robbed in broad daylight, armed to the teeth and taking no prisoners as the saying goes. I don’t know if Pretty knew about Willie Sutton, an early famous bank robber who was credited with the observation when asked later about why he robbed banks-that is where the money is.  I never mentioned Willie or his observation you don’t crowd one legend with tales of another, especially if you are tasked with making the new guy’s up but Pretty went after the dough with something like that kind of concentration to get the dough. A few people, a few heroes who tried to stop him took the fall and early on I used the old gag that being a hero was for cops and professionals leave Pretty alone, get out alive. In the end though I couldn’t save him “rep” when on that last caper, the big Granite National Bank job over in Braintree he wasted four customers who tried to rush him after a silly bank guard who thought the bank’s money was his or something took a shot at him and Pretty unloaded. Ran into the streets, they say he was looking down the block, looking for that Sally who had his ride, or maybe that is the way I wrote it was gunned down in a hail of bullets. That Sally never did surface, never contacted me in any way to give her side of the story but I like to think for one fucking time in his too short life Pretty tried to protect somebody by taking those slugs without a murmur. Maybe that is why she never peeped to me. Never did get that Globe job though. Yeah, Pretty was a piece of work while he lasted.

Now to the holy goofs, the Sleepy Hollow Bandits or whatever they called themselves who have given me something to whale on courtesy of site manager Greg Green who took Seth Garth’s advice and hired me to do this one-shot special guest reviewer job. I didn’t know Seth then back when Pretty was tearing up the place but met him later when he mentioned that he had read everything I had written about Pretty being a hometown North Adamsville boy. He is the one who encouraged me to tell the tale about a real bank robber not some misplaced schoolboy antics which went out with Bonnie and Clyde. And I have but part of the deal was to tell what was seriously wrong with the legend these dopes Terry and Joe were trying to put together.

You already know about their stealing Jimmy Skaggs’ playbook move to ease the way on getting into the bank. That though was old even back in the 1970s because the coppers through an informer, the guy who sold Jimmy’s guys the guns, were able to wrap that caper up without a muss or fuss. The worst thing though was maybe the guys had heard of Willie Sutton, its hard to say because their first freaking bank robbery was done without plan, without thinking things through and Pretty would tell you, Willie too, you need a plan, plan, plan plan, especially if you are going to last for ten years like Pretty did without catching day one of jailtime. I won’t even go into the double-dipping, actually triple-dipping since they had a third guy as a driver to split the dough with. Pretty would have freaked big time on that shares stuff. He told me once he actually took a cab from a bank robbery scene in Stoughton, the car was across from the bank, he got in, where to and that was it. Gave the cabbie ten bucks and thought he was a great guy for doing so. His haul one hundred thou not bad for a day’s work minus that ten bucks. (I was always careful about how much the bank takes were since it was in the coppers and banks’ interest to jack up the take to make the “perp” look harder than he was and for the bank to grab some easy fed insurance money. I also took a skeptical eye to whatever Pretty said his haul was since in the interest of his legend he might jack up the heist price. On the Stoughton caper, for example, the take was fifty thou not one hundred so maybe that ten bucks to the cabbie really was big to Pretty)       

You know how hard Pretty was on his women, except maybe that last one, mainly us them to hide him out, fuck them and then move on, no strings around him, no revealing plans or ideas. The cardinal sin of these holy goofs, this Terry and Joe comedy act if you think about it was grabbing that weirdo Kate, not because she wasn’t a good-looking little redhead but because when you throw a woman in the mix you get nothing but trouble with a capital “T.” You know this Kate stirred both men, and she played them on that seesaw. Got them crazy for no good reason. Let me tell you what Pretty told me about the one time he thought about taking a woman along, some twist he met at a gin mill in New York while he was on “vacation.” She was maybe nineteen and build for trouble, big trouble if a guy let himself get involved with her. Well Pretty did for a while. Got hot as nails for her. Decided that he needed a look-out (probably what he expected Sally to do on that last doomed caper I don’t know since the last time I saw him was in a morgue) and so he brought the twist along. When showtime came she vanished, went long gone and the caper depended on that look-out job she was supposed to perform since this bank was across from a police station. He barely got out alive with twenty-five thou (actually ten and some change) and never went that route again. You know I could go on and on about these goofs, about Pretty but you can see by now that Pretty would have had them for lunch. Maybe dinner too.     

Our Lady Of The Mountain-With Hazel Dickens In Mind

Our Lady Of The Mountain-With Hazel Dickens In Mind    

By Zack James

Jack Callahan caught the folk minute bug when he was in high school in his hometown of Carver back in maybe 1961, 1962 he was not sure now exactly which with the elapse of almost sixty years and his memory not what it once had been. Knew it could not be before that since Jack Kennedy, of his own clan and brethren was President then so 1961 would be the earliest. Caught that bug after having heard some songs that held him in thrall over a fugitive radio station from Rhode Island, a college station, that every Sunday night would have a two hour show called Bill Marlowe’s Hootenanny where he, Bill Marlowe, would play all kinds of songs. Songs from the latest protest songs of the likes of then somewhat unknown but soon to explode onto scene as the media-ordained king of folk Bob Dylan and sullen severe Phil Ochs to old country blues, you know, Son House, Skip James, Bukka White, and above all Mississippi John Hurt who were “discovered” and feted by adoring mostly white urban college students who had a famous “king of the blues’ shoot-out one year down at the Newport Folk Festival to Bob   Wills and Milton Brown Western Swing and everything in between. A fast paced glance at a very different part of the American songbook from which he knew either from his parent’s dreary (his term) 1940s Frank Sinatra-Andrews Sisters-Inkspots material to budding rock and roll. What got to Jack, what caused him to pay attention though was the mountain music that he heard, things like East Virginia, Pretty Polly and his favorite the mournful Come All You Fair And Tender Ladies sung by Linda Lane, a now forgotten treasure of a singer from deep in the Tennessee hills somewhere whose voice can still haunt his dreams.     

Now this adhesion to folk minute was quite by accident since most Sunday nights if Jack was listening to anything it was Be-Bop Benny’s Blues Hour out of WNAC in Chicago where the fix was on for the electric blues and rhythm and blues that were the precursors of that rock which would be the staple of his early musical tastes (and reaction to that parent’s dreary 1940s music but that story has been told elsewhere and this is about mountain music so forward). Usually in those days something had gone awry or some ghost was in the air in radio wave land, classmate Irwin Silver the science wiz of his school tried to explain it one day but he never really caught the drift of the science behind it,   and he had caught that station and then the Rhode Island Station, WAFJ. Although he was becoming something of an aficionado of blues just then and would become something of a folk one as well his real love then was the be-bop classic rock and roll music that was the signature genre for his generation (and again for those who missed the point the bane of his parents). He never lost the love of rock or the blues but he never went all out to discover material he had never heard before like he did with mountain music. 

One summer, this was 1964 he thought, while he was in college in Boston, he had decided rather than a summer job he would head south down to mountain country, you know West Virginia, Kentucky maybe rural Virginia and see if he could find some tunes that he had not heard before. (That “no job” decision did not set well with his parents, his poor parents who both worked in the local industry, the cranberry bogs, when that staple was the town’s claim to fame so he could go to college but that is a story for another day). Now it was not strange in those days for all kinds of people, mostly college students with time on their hands, archivists, or musicians to travel down to the southern mountains and elsewhere in search of authentic American music by the “folk.” Not professional archivists like Pete Seeger’s father, Charles, or the Lomaxes, father and son, or inspired amateurs like Harry Smith from earlier times but young people looking for roots which was a great occupation of the generation that came of age in the 1960s in reaction to their parents’ generation trying might and main to favor vanilla Americanization, golden age modernization and forget the hunky, dusty, dirty immigrant pasts. (A sad admission in an immigrant country except for those indigenous peoples who ground we stand on today making no discrimination between sacred or profane land, or mocking those distinctions. Sadder today when vast tracts of people are being denied access to their sacred and profane lands down along the gringo-imposed southern American border and working the northern ones now too. But that story too is for another day.)      

A lot of the young, and that included Jack who read the book in high school, had first been tuned into Appalachia through Michael Harrington’s The Other America which prompted them to volunteer to help their poor brethren. Jack was somewhat animated by that desire to help but his real purpose was to be a gadfly who found some hidden trove of music that others had not found. In this he was following the trail started by the Lally Brothers, a local Boston folk group who were dedicated to the preservation of mountain music and having headed south had “discovered” Buell Hobart, the lonesome fiddler and had brought him north to do shows and be acclaimed as the “max daddy” of the mountain world.    

Jack had spent a couple of weeks down in Kentucky after having spent a couple of weeks striking out in West Virginia where, for a fact, most of the rural folk were either rude or suspicious of his motives when he inquired about the whereabouts of some old-time red barn musicians he had read about from outside Wheeling. Then one night, one Saturday night he found himself in Prestonsburg, down in southeast Kentucky, down in coal country where the hills and hollows extent for miles around. He had been brought to that town by a girl, a cousin of his high school friend Jimmy Jenkins who was later killed in hellhole Vietnam on his father’s side from back home in Carver. Jimmy had told Jack to look her up if he ever got to Hazard where his father had hailed from and had lived before World War II had driven him to the Marines and later to love of his mother from Carver.  

This girl, a pretty girl to boot, Nadine, had told Jack that mountain music had been played out in Hazard, that whatever legends about the coal wars and about the music had long gone from that town. She suggested that he accompany her to an old-fashioned red barn dance that was being held weekly at Fred Brown’s place on Saturday nights on the outskirts of Prestonsburg if he wanted to hear the “real deal” (Jack’s term). That night when they arrived and paid their dollar apiece jack saw a motley crew of fiddlers, guitar player, and a few of what Nadine called mountain harps.

The first half of the dance went uneventfully enough but the second half, after he had been fortified with what the locals called “white lightning,” illegal whiskey, this woman came up to the stage after being introduced although he did not for some reason remember her name at first, maybe the sting of the booze and began to play the mountain harp and sing a song, The Hills of Home, that had everybody mesmerized. She sang a few other songs that night and Jack marveled at her style. When Jack asked Nadine who that woman singer was she told him a gal from “around those parts” (her expression) Hazel Dickens and wasn’t she good. When Jack got back to Boston a few weeks later (after spending more time with friendly Nadine in that searching for mountain music) he contacted the Lally Brothers to see if they could coax her north for college audiences to hear. They did so although Hazel initially was fearful of coming north to what she thought was a crime-ridden black plague city but which turned out since she was to play at Harvard’s Memorial Hall an ivy-covered sanctuary which she would visit several times later in her career and recognize as the start of her break-out from the hills and hollows of home to a candid world.  That was Jack Callahan’s small proudly boasted contribution to keeping the mountain music tradition alive. For her part Hazel Dickens did before she dies several years ago much, much more to keep the flame burning.            

Once Again On The - 75th Anniversary Of Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman’s “Casablanca” -

Once Again On The - 75^th Anniversary Of Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman’s “Casablanca” -

By Bart Webber (October 2017)

I have spent much ink this year starting almost at the beginning of the year writing about the classic black and white film Casablanca a staple at every retro-film locale including the Brattle Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts where I first saw it with a “hot date” back in the late 1960s. “Hot date” in those days for those not around then or who have forgotten (shame on you) in the female department being a gal who wore short dresses (mini-skirts being a heavy fashion sea-change brought over I think by the English rock invasion which in any case replaced the severe stiff collared shirt and long flouncy, I guess that is the right word, skirt of earlier high school times) and long hair. Long hair also something of a sea-change brought not from over the ocean deeps but locally by imitation of folk-singing icon Joan Baez among the folk set which I was hung up on. (Many a young woman with less than candid straight hair had told me that she spent not a few hours “ironing” her hair to perdition to get that cool “look”)      

More important than the skirt-hair combo attached to the folk scene aficionado-hood a date who did not mind going on a cheap date (hell the theater admission was about a dollar maybe two so there was something left over for the obligatory popcorn) when I told her what film we would be seeing. (That cheap movie date acceptance usually having already having been charted by a first or second date Harvard Square coffeehouse date where for the price of two long sipped cups of coffee and a shared pastry you could sit and talk to while away the night, sometimes depending on the night accompanied by some rising folk singer working out his or her performance kinks playing for the “basket” passed through the audience.)    

Now I am talking about Casablanca but when the Brattle did a retro usually there were twelve to twenty films in the repertoire almost all of which I would have either seen in my youth with my old friend Sam Lowell, who later became a film critic for a bunch of alternative newspapers like back in the day like The Rolling Stone, or by myself on Saturday afternoon double feature days at the Strand Theater in North Adamsville where we grew up. The young woman in this Casablanca scenarios and maybe others as well somehow had asked her mother who had been there on the first run about the film and so was intrigued about this hot on-screen romance during wartime between Rick and Ilsa. I am sure the mother young and in love with some departed soldier boy ready to go to Europe or the Pacific to do battle against that age’s night-takers filled her head with all the classic expressions and all the intimate moments when the two wartime star-crossed lovers had to go their separate ways reflecting just a bit her own concerns. Maybe she couldn’t explain the twenty some years after tear in her eye when reciting the plotline to that young daughter but she must have reflected on that line “We’ll always have Paris” dovetailing with her own broody thoughts back then.    

Here’s what was really nice about that particular date and I may have owed it all to the film (and a mother’s reflections too not recognized at the time.  That movie coupled with a quick after film stop at equally cheap Harvard Square Hayes Bickford for coffee (always an iffy proposition depending on when the stuff was brewed also iffy) and some kind of pastry that had been sitting on the stainless steel dessert shelves for who knows how long got me away without having to call “Dutch treat.” (Of course going to a local coffeehouse for coffee and pastry was out of the question once the gold bars had been spent on the movie and that mandatory popcorn.) The Hayes in those days not only a waystation for winos, the homeless and friendless and con artists but a place where rising folk-singers and their hangers-on hung out on the cheap.

Got me as well another six months of very nice dates so my memories of that gorgeous film with the six million quotable and unforgettable lines from “play it again, Sam” (Ingrid Bergman as Ilsa request to Humphrey Bogart  Rick’s main entertainment provider Dooley Wilson to play the sentimental As Time Goes By) to that “We will always have Paris” (when Rick responds to Ilsa’s bewilderment that he is letting her take that last plane to Lisbon with those wicked blood-stained letters of transit provided by him to her husband Czech liberation leader Victor Laszlo so he  can continue to do his work against the night-takers running the world in those days) are still pristine.              

As we commemorate the 75^th anniversary of that premier of that film I am not the only one who is crazy for this movie since I am enclosing a link to an interview done by Terry Gross on her Fresh Air show on NPR with film historian Noah Isenberg on  the making of the classic Hollywood film in his new book, We'll Always Have Casablanca. "  Needless to say when I get my greedy little hands on that item I will be reviewing it in this space. This guy has me and even know it all Sam Lowell who knows a lot about all the characters particularly the fate of Paul Henreid l beaten six ways to Sunday with what he knows about that film. Kudos.  

http://www.npr.org/2017/10/11/557101633/75-years-later-a-look-at-the-life-legend-and-afterlife-of-casablanca

All The Liquor In Costa Ricah-With The Max Daddy Blues Guitarist Taj Majal In Mind

All The Liquor In Costa Ricah-With The Max Daddy Blues Guitarist Taj Majal In Mind

By Zack James 

Seth Garth the old time music critic for the now long gone alternative newspaper The Eye who had followed all the trends in the folk world in the old days once his friend from high school, Jack Callahan, had turned him on to the genre after having heard some mountain music coming on high via the airwaves from a fugitive radio station one summer Sunday night still was interested in what was left of that world. More importantly who was still left still standing from that rough-hewn folk minute of the early 1960s. An important part of that interest centered on who still “had it” from among those who were still standing.

That was no mere academic question but had risen quite sharply in the early part of 2002 when Seth, Jack and their then respective wives had attended a Bob Dylan concert up in Augusta Maine and had come away disappointed, no, more than disappointed, shocked that Dylan had lost whatever voice he had had and depended increasingly on his backup singers and musicians. Dylan no longer “had it.” Both agreed that they would have to be satisfied with listening to the old records, tapes, CDs, and YouTube on sullen nights when they wanted to hear what it was like when men and women played folk music, protest and meaningful existence folk music, for keeps.

That single shocking event led subsequently to an earnest attempt to attend concerts and performances of as many of the old-time folkies as they could find helter-skelter before they passed on. The pair have documented elsewhere some of those others some who have like Utah Phillips and Dave Van Ronk have subsequently passed on. But one night recently, a few months ago now, they were discussing one Taj Majal (stage name not the famous wonder of the world mansion, building, shrine, mausoleum whatever it is in India) and how they had first heard him back in the day in anticipation of seeing him in person up at the great concert hall overlooking the harbor at Rockport.     

Naturally enough if you knew Seth and Jack they disagreed on exactly where they had first seen him after Jack had hear him do a cover of the old country blues classic Corrina, Corrina on that fugitive folk program out of Rhode Island, WAFJ. Seth said it was the Club 47 over in Harvard Square in Cambridge and Jack said they had gone underground to the Unicorn over on Boylston Street in Boston. Of course those disputes never got resolved, never got final resolution. What was not disputed was that they had both been blown away by the performance of Taj and his small backup band that night. His blues mastery proved to them that someone from the younger generation was ready to keep the old time blues tradition alive, including playing the old National Steel guitar that the likes of Son House and Bukka White created such great blues classics on. The highlight that night had been The Sky Is Crying which has been covered by many others since but not equaled.     

The track record of old time folkies had been mixed as one would expect as the shocking Dylan experiences pointed out. Utah Phillips by the time they got to see him at the Club Passim in Cambridge had lost it, David Bromberg still had it for two examples. The night they were discussing and disputing the merit of Taj’s case both agreed that he probably had lost it since that rough-hewn gravelly voice of his had like Dylan’s and Willie Nelson’s taken a beating with time and many performances. Needless to say they should not have worried (although they did when old be-hatted Taj came out and immediately sat down not a good sign for prior experiences with other old time performers) since Taj was smokin’ that night. Played the old Elmore James Television Blues on the National Steel like he was about twenty years old. Did his old version of Corrina proud and his version of CC Rider as well. Yeah, Taj still had it. But if you don’t believe a couple of old folkies and don’t get a chance to see him in person out your way then grab this album Shoutin’ In Key from the old days and see what they meant. Got it.

Mix and Mingle Among The Mayfair Swells-Jane Austen’s “Love and Friendship” (2016)-A Film Review

Mix and Mingle Among The Mayfair Swells-Jane Austen’s “Love and Friendship” (2016)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Senior Film Critic Sandy Salmon

Love And Friendship, starring Kate Beckindale, Xavier Samuel, based on the novella Lady Susan by Jane Austen, 2016

Damn my old friend and former colleague at American Film Gazette Sam Lowell whom I replaced as film critic at this site although occasionally writes some “think” pieces now that he is no longer under any deadline. His damnation centers on the tendency that he had when he got interested in a type of film or an author/writer and do a “run” based on that interest (still does so when writing about film noir which he been doing a slow moving “run” B-grade noirs on recently). Over the many years I have known him I also seemed to have picked up the habit. The habit in the present case being taking a “run” at various films based on Jane Austen’s novels and other works after having viewed the film The Jane Austen Book Club. Well we are going down that trail once again with the film adaptation of her early work Lady Susan using the title of another Austen work Love and Friendship.     

The scheme in Book Club was to take a modern book club membership and develop the plot of the film around the similarity of relationships among them to those in Austen’s six major novels. No question that one Jane Austen was an astute observer of the social mores and ethos of the later 18^th century, early 19^th century English country gentry, a strata of society which if it didn’t have the prestige of the upper nobility nevertheless owned the vast tracts of land and controlled the doings of the Parliament in those days that made the kingdom work. Here dear Jane looks at the mating rituals of that country gentry whose members were always in the end driven by the need to avoid dropping down the social ladder. That is most definitely the concern of the lead character Lady Susan, played by Kate Beckindale, whose aim is just that desire to avoid dropping down in her circumstances-and because inheritance is everything just look at the obtuse Common Law provisions that of her daughter.      

    

Let the games begin. Bring a scorecard. Lady Susan is on the rebound having been tossed out of one manor for going toe to toe with the lord of said manor. So off she goes to the country estate of her brother-in law and wife with her lady companion to see what she can dig up to restore her diminished sources. Before long she has that brother-in-law’s wife’s brother, Reginald played by Xavier Samuel, eating out of her hand despite himself (despite knowing that she is in modern language a “tramp”). But his/their father said no way, forget it. Still that brother is not so easy to convince of milady’s sullen sooty character and things look like he will be snagged.

Then all hell breaks loose Lady Susan as it turned out was still going toe to toe with that randy lord and his wife found out about it through a letter delivered by Reginald. The long and short of it is that Lady Susan was forced to call off her relationship with promising Reginald although that is not the last we will see of him. Enter Lady Susan’s daughter Frederica along with a goof companion Sir James Martin. Once Reginald sees Frederica they quickly become an item and goof Sir James is left empty-handed. Well not quite since on the rebound and fiercely committed to her own cozy future she picks up Sir James. All’s well that ends well. With this scenario it is a wonder that Britain was able to rule the world for as long as it did. Hey, what do you think maybe it was because of it.           

Tales Of The Lakota Queen-The Time Navajo Jack Caught The Westbound Freight

Tales Of The Lakota Queen-The Time Navajo Jack Caught The Westbound Freight   

By Seth Garth

Hi, Ace of Diamonds here, my on the bum moniker, real name Jim Mahoney. I just got the word a few days ago that the near-legendary master hobo Navajo Jack (sorry, never knew his last name, or his real last name the reason which will become obvious below) had caught the West-bound train. That is hobo-bum-tramp speak for passing away, dying. How I know that expression I gathered from first- hand experience when I was on the bum back in the 1970s after my first divorce which got  a big hand from my  drug and money problems which the “ex” couldn’t deal with any longer after I spent the mortgage payment one month on an few ounces of nose candy, of sweet cousin cocaine and she threw me out or I took off depending at this far remove on whose story you want to believe. At the time we were living in Oakland out in California (funny to say these days because we couldn’t afford upscale San Francisco and now Oakland is getting beyond reach for the same kind of people as us back then). I was also in hock to about fifteen other people so I decided to scram, to head out on the road, to go underground really, to go to a place where repo men, dunners and a couple of guys with turned up out of joint noses who worked from a drug dealer I was in hock to big time, and the United States Post Office couldn’t find me with the three dollars in my pocket and a green small backpack with all my worldly possessions in it.

Yeah, the big idea was to go to a place where nobody cared about I.D, about what your past was about or your last address. Of course never having been on the bum before I wasn’t sure where to go. That is not exactly right I had been thrown out of the family house a few times as a young kid when my mother couldn’t handle what she called “one more disgrace” but that was kid’s stuff. Then I would go to the church for refuge but having lost the faith, having lapsed as they say in the Catholic Church that was the last place I wanted to go, especially in unknown California. I headed to the Sallies, to the Salvation Army where if you gave them a “story” they would put you up for a few days. That is exactly what I did once I saw that almost any hard luck story would do. They just wanted a story to cover themselves that you would go the straight and narrow, be contrite. At least while you were under their protection. So I headed to the Mission District, told my story and got my three days and three squares.

That is where I first met Boston Brownie whose first name I do know but will keep quiet about just in case anybody is looking for him for any reason. Still despite time and sunnier days I still remember the rules. Most of which he taught me that first Sally experience. Brownie had confused me when he introduced himself since I thought he was from Boston although he was really from Albany and was using Boston as a cover. I had told him that I was from Riverdale not far from Boston and he told he had slept near the Sudbury River not far from my growing up home one time when he was East. That was the night he told me never tell to say where you were really from, or your name, since you never knew who might cut your throat for that information, meaning if somebody was looking for you they would have a source to go to. I went by the moniker Vegas Vick until one night out in a jungle camp south of Westminster in Southern California while playing five-card stud with Saw Mill Jefferson I kept drawing the Ace of Diamonds and thereafter was christened Ace of Diamonds.  

In any case after our stay, my stay was up at the Sallies me and Brownie decided or rather he decided and I went along to hit the road. By the way it was Brownie who clued me in to the fact that at the Sallies as long as you were sober, or appeared sober, could get extensions of your stay especially if you had an earnest story and demeanor. (When I found those “later and sunnier times” anytime, now even, the Sallies sent a request for donations I would ante up so there is some kind of equity in this transaction between us even if they are unaware of the connection.) I wound up staying about two week, kept sober, got some day labor money and paid close attention when Brownie would tell me various hustles like where to get free lunches on the church soup line circuit, some clothes beyond my crusted old stuff and how to hit the church social welfare circuit to get five, ten, twenty dollars to “get on your feet” with a half decent sob story. 

I didn’t have to embellish mine much since that divorce, the drugs and a general line of patter about a new start got me over the line. The only thing that Brownie yelled at me about was that day labor work which he said was beneath his dignity, his dignity as a hobo. That was when he gave me the word on the differences, recognized differences among the road brethren, between the low-level bum who basically refused to work living almost exclusively on hand-outs, the tramp who would work any kind of job from dishwasher to fruit-picker mainly to keep himself in wine and cigarettes and the kings of the hill, the hoboes who kept the hobo jungles in order and who only worked when there was some worthwhile job, not cheapjack day labor. Anybody, or almost anybody, was welcome at least for a while in any hobo camp but that hierarchy as I would come to see definitely existed.     

I had read Jack Kerouac’s On The Road as a younger man and so I was kind of thrilled that we would be heading out on what I thought was the hitchhike road. Maybe meet some females looking for male companionship, maybe not. (The curse of the hitchhike road then whenever I chanced to travel that way when too far from the freight tracks was not the later mass murderer roaming the highways looking for easy victims but what we called the “perverts” guys who were cruising looking for other guys, homosexuals, who if you said no would dump you off the side of the road like I was one time out in Winnemucca in the Nevadas.) That hitchhike stuff was crazy Brownie laughed the only way to travel was on the freights where you could make better time avoid lots of road hassle and local on the look-out cops (although overall the railroad bulls, cops were more of a hassle than any civilian cops except when trying to sleep in their parks or places like that.) Brownie’s plan was to head south since this was late September when we started and as you headed East if you went through the Rockies you could run into snow and cold weather trouble as early as early October.  We went south to L.A. on a Union Pacific spur then headed East on the grand old Southern Pacific. That first trip out I would have bet everything I had that hitchhiking was better but I will admit Brownie was right that to get where you are going that freight system is the way to go.

As I have already mentioned along the various railroad tracks that crisscross the country there are hobo camps, jungles, where the brethren can find kindred, a safe flop and a not fit for everybody meal at least. The camp at Gallup, New Mexico was where I met the legendary Navajo Jack who Brownie kept telling me about and hoped would be at Gallup when we arrived. Naturally the stories about so-called legendary guys on the road center on survival prowess, beating back the bulls and cops and the ability to jump any freight that comes your way. Nothing big by real world standards but big in that world. Navajo had that reputation but also one as a guy who would not think twice about cutting another guy if he crossed him or crossed some young kid (more likely tried to rape the kid) or crossed some friend. But mainly the legend was about his ability to run the rails, to see that mystical starlight on the rails. When I did get to meet him I was all ears to what he had to say. (Brownie and he had traveled together when both were younger, when Navajo was working the freights trying to get out of the fucking Dakotas and that reservation life.)

But enough about me and my travels which in the hobo-tramp-bum road book were rather short (even including the hitchhike trail) since once I headed East that last time and settled in Boston for real and opened up a small print shop, got remarried and took on those sunnier days I went off the road. Navajo never did as I would hear occasionally from Brownie (when he finally went off the road after almost getting a leg severed trying to jump a freight that was moving too fast for him).          

This time that I found out about Navajo Jack’s demise  I had run into Boston Brownie in the Boston Common as I occasionally do when I am downtown for some reason and noticed that he was sitting on a bench that I have seen him sit on a million times over the years. Since the days when he stopped trying to catch freight trains because he just couldn’t do it anymore. (I had given up that mode of transportation many years before that and had gone back to the nine to five grind which proved easier than being on the bum-most hobos, bums, tramps would disagree and who is to fault them.) Sometimes I would stop and give him a ten-er or whatever I had in my pocket and talk for a while. Sometime not either because I was in that nine to five rush or because he was in his cups, his high wino heaven moment.

That day though Brownie was coherent, and I had money in my pocket, so I sat down next to him and talked a bit. That is when he mentioned that he had heard from somebody else that Navajo had passed away, hell, some things, some terms die hard, had caught that West-bound train. Brownie didn’t know exactly how Jack ended although it was on the bum, on the road since the party who informed Brownie said Navajo had passed some place in Illinois on the Lakota Queen and had been found one morning face down a short distance from the tracks near a hobo “jungle” and somebody had called the coppers to get him out of there. (“Hobo jungle” a place usually a short distance from the side of a railroad track, or under a bridge, along a river bank if there no train tracks where the travelling people as they say in Ireland can find kindred, find some food, some hellbroth stew usually no culinary expert could cook up,  some warmth of the eternal fire some protection of sorts from railroad “bull,” railroad cops, or local cops as long as they decided  not to bust the operation up and, maybe, some camaraderie although that sometimes could be iffy as I knew from first-hand experience when old-timers did not welcome young guys into their club.)    

Well at least Navajo didn’t die in his bed, didn’t die in his native South Dakota a place from which he was always running away from. Died running the Lakota Queen which is the name Navajo gave to every train he ever hopped a ride whether it was the Washington and Ohio, Union Pacific or Southern Pacific. Needless to say it was never an Amtrak passenger train every true hobo scorned out of hand. That running away something that I could relate too then, maybe now too on full moon nights when I get a craving for being on the road, for being free from the nine to five drag that I would bitch and moan to Brownie about when he was not in his cups. The times I talked to Navajo we would always start with -where you running away from this time. Funny Navajo didn’t even want to carry his name, his traditions at a time when I knew him American Indians were becoming “Native Americans” and later “Indigenous peoples” for despite his moniker he was half Lakota, half white if you can fathom that.  

Yeah Navajo Jack was Lakota Sioux and I think he said Welsh, but he hated that former fact, hated that he had grown up on a dingy South Dakota reservation just as I had grown up in that Riverdale mill town about forty miles west of Boston. Told me he had tried out various names Hopi Hank, Raging Apache and the like but after going through Navajo country somebody had tagged him with the name and it stuck. Funny though from the first day, or rather night I met him out in Gallup, New Mexico, out at the hobo jungle right outside of town not far from the Southern Pacific tracks he called every train the Lakota Queen, so who knows what was going through his mind at any given time about running away from his past. A lot of guys had names for the freights, usually after some love that had faded long ago or had been run away from and regretted. I always thought Navajo was running the same thoughts in his head when he rode every train west or east. Some squaw his term, some Phoebe Snow we called it around some flame-flickered campfire.     

Navajo was maybe ten, fifteen years older than I was. Had been on the bum, been on the road for maybe ten years then, had been on that road every since he got out of the service, out of the Army after hell-hole duty in Vietnam which he said he would never get over, not about the killing but about the lies the government, the white man’s government had told him via the recruiting sergeant about what was going on over there. Made sure he didn’t put down roots anywhere, left no forwarding address for nothing nowhere the way he said it. I always liked being around Navajo, he got me out of a few jams, kicked my ass a few times when he let the whiskey get to him, but always will be in my book one of the royalty of the road, of the hobo kingdom.

Funny, as I left Brownie that forlorn day when I found out about Navajo I almost said that he had “cashed his check.” I stopped myself when Brownie gave me a   wicked look and then said, “sorry Navajo that you wound up catching that West-bound freight.” Brownie smiled as if to say that he now knew that I would always remember the rules of the road. 

The Golden Age Of The B-Film Noir- Paul Henreid And Lizabeth Scott’s “Stolen Face” (1952)

The Golden Age Of The B-Film Noir- Paul Henreid And Lizabeth Scott’s “Stolen Face” (1952)

DVD Review

By Film Editor Emeritus Sam Lowell

Stolen Face, starring Paul Henreid, Lizabeth Scott, Hammer Productions, 1952

I am now deep into my retro-reviews of the classic Hammer Productions film noir in which an American producer contracted with that organization to do a series of such efforts using known, although maybe fading, film stars backed by English character actors to do the whole thing on the cheap. My whole operation started with a review of the film Terror Street (distributed in Britain as 36 Hours) and subsequently another entry The Black Glove (distributed in Britain as Face The Music probably a better title since the plot involved a well-known trumpet player turning from searching for that high white note everybody in his profession is looking for to amateur private detective once a lady friend is murdered and he looked for all the world like the natural fall guy to take the big step-off for it) I noted that long time readers of this space know, or should be presumed to know, of my long-standing love affair with film noir. Since any attentive reader will note this is my fifth such review of B-film noirs and hence proof positive that I am now in deep and that I still have the bug.

I mentioned in that review some of the details of my introduction to the classic age of film noir in this country in the age of black and white film in the 1940s and 1950s when I would sneak over to the now long gone and replaced by condos Strand Theater in growing up town North Adamsville and spent a long double feature Saturday afternoon watching complete with a stretched out bag of popcorn (or I think it is safe to say it now since the statute of limitation on the “crime” must surely have passed snuck in candy bars bought at Harold’s Variety Store on the way to the theater). I would watch some then current production from Hollywood or some throwback from the 1940s which Mister Cadger, the affable owner who readily saw that I was an aficionado who would pepper him with questions about when such and such a noir was to be featured would let me sneak in for kid’s ticket prices long after I reached the adult price stage at twelve I think it was, would show in retrospective to cut down on expenses in tough times by avoiding having to pay for first –run movies all the time. (And once told me to my embarrassment that he made more money on the re-runs than first runs and even more money on the captive audience buying popcorn and candy bars-I wonder if he knew my candy bar scam.)

That is where the bulk of my noir experiences were formed but I should mention in passing as well that on infrequent occasions I would attend a nighttime showing (paying full price after age twelve since parents were presumed to have the money to spring  for full prices) with my parents if my strict Irish Catholic mother (strict on the mortal sin punishment for what turned out to have been minor or venial sins after letting my older brothers, four, count them four, get away with murder and assorted acts of mayhem) thought the film passed the Legion of Decency standard that we had to stand up and take a yearly vow to uphold in church led by the priest exhorting to sin no more and I could under the plotline without fainting (or getting “aroused” by the fetching femmes).

Readers should be aware from prior series that when I found some run of films that had a similar background I would “run the table” on the efforts. Say a run of Raymond Chandler film adaptations of his Phillip Marlowe crime novels or Dashiell Hammett’s seemingly endless The Thin Man series. That “run the table” idea is the case with a recently obtained cache of British-centered 1950s film noirs put out by the Hammer Production Company as they tried to cash in on the popularity of the genre for the British market  That Terror Street mentioned at the beginning had been the first review in this series (each DVD by the way contains two films the second film Danger On The Wings in that DVD not worthy of review) and now the film under review under review the overblown if ominously titled Stolen Face  (distributed in England, Britain, Great Britain, United Kingdom or whatever that isle calls itself these Brexit days as unlike others in the series by the same title) is the fifth such effort. On the basis of these six viewings (remember one didn’t make the film noir aficionado cut so that tells you something right away) I will have to admit they are clearly B-productions none of them would make anything but a second or third tier rating.        

After all as mentioned before in that first review look what they were up against. For example who could forget up on that big screen for all the candid world to see a sadder but wiser seen it all, heard it all Humphrey Bogart at the end of The Maltese Falcon telling all who would listen that he, he Sam Spade, no stranger to the seamy side and cutting corners life, had had to send femme fatale Mary Astor his snow white flame over, sent her to the big step-off once she spilled too much blood, left too long a trail of corpses, for the stuff of dreams over some damn bird. Or cleft-chinned barrel-chested Robert Mitchum keeping himself out of trouble in some dink town as a respectable citizen including snagging a girl next door sweetie but knowing he was doomed, out of luck, and had had to cash his check for his seedy past taking a few odd bullets from his former femme fatale trigger-happy girlfriend Jane Greer once she knew he had double-crossed her to the coppers in Out Of The Past.

Ditto watching the horror on smart guy gangster Eddie Mars face after being outsmarted because he had sent a small time grafter to his doom when prime private detective Phillip Marlowe, spending the whole film trying to do the right thing for an old man with a couple of wild daughters, ordered him out the door to face the rooty-toot-toot of his own gunsels who expected Marlowe to be coming out in The Big Sleep. How about song and dance man Dick Powell turning Raymond Chandler private eye helping big galoot Moose Malone trying to find his Velma and getting nothing but grief and a few stray conks on the head chasing Claire Trevor down when she didn’t want to be found having moved uptown with the swells in Murder, My Sweet. Or finally, tall lanky and deceptive private eye Dane Jones chasing an elusive black box ready to explode the world being transported across Europe by evil incarnate if gorgeous Marla Sands in European Express. Those were some of the beautiful and still beautiful classics whose lines you can almost hear anytime you mention the words film noir. The entries in this series are definitively not ones with memorable lines or plots.  

In the old days before I retired I always liked to sketch out a film’s plotline to give the reader the “skinny” on what the action was so that he or she could see where I was leading them. I will continue that old tradition here to make my point about the lesser production values of the Hammer products. Doctor Ritter, played by Paul Henreid last seen in this space leaving on the last plane to Lisbon as the Czech liberation fighter Victor Lazlo with wife Ilsa on his arm to fight the night-takers another day after going mano a mano for her affections with Rick of Rick’s Café Amercian in the classic Casablanca, is a highly-skilled high end if worn out plastic surgeon who meets Alice, played by Lizabeth Scott last seen in this space as the mysterious girlfriend of an AWOL that Humphrey Bogart is looking for in Dead Reckoning, is a worn out concert pianist on holiday as they say in Merry Olde England. The pair had a short tempestuous affair and made big future plans until Alice blew out of town leaving no forwarding address.          

That abandonment by sweet smoky-voiced Alice kind of made the good doctor lose his moorings, go off the deep end once she informed him by phone that she was engaged to be married and had been when they had that tempestuous affair. Heartbroken the good doctor carried on but anyone could see he was off his game. No question. In a crazy minute he decided that we would “help” a young woman criminal, Lily, whose face had been disfigured during the war by giving her a make-over (and assuming against all reason that such a change would change this tramp’s whoring, thieving, conning ways). And guess what the change-over turned that dead-beat criminal into the spitting image of, ah, Alice, dear sweet Alice. Not only did he do that but the lonely doctor married the wench.            

Wrong, way wrong since no sooner had she gotten her new sexy 1940s glamour face ala Lizabeth Scott but that tramp went back to her whoring, thieving, conning ways. The doctor tried to bail out but after confessing to Alice his dirty deed, no soap, our little crook knew the gravy train she had grabbed onto and was not letting go. But you know since time immemorial, at least cinema time immemorial- crime does not pay- that the bad must take that big step-off. Here’s how it played out and you had better bring a scorecard. The good doctor tired of the craziness with Lilly/Lizabeth Scott blew town, London town, okay. This Lilly/Lizabeth Scott followed him on said train getting drunk and crazy along the way. Meanwhile Alice/Lizabeth Scott fearing the worse heads for that same show-down train. Doc and Lilly/ Lizabeth Scott have a falling out in which dear sweet Lilly accidently falls off the train. Leaving Doc and Alice/Lizabeth Scott to walk off together and a happy future.        

This one almost got that Wings of Danger treatment mentioned above, a non-review, but with actors like Paul Henreid and two, count them, two Lizabeth Scotts and a scorecard I figured what the hell.      

Won’t You Come See Me Plain Jane-William Hurt’s “Jane Eyre” (1996)-A Film Review

Won’t You Come See Me Plain Jane-William Hurt’s “Jane Eyre” (1996)-A Film Review    

DVD Review

By Film Critic Sandy Salmon

Jane Eyre, starring William Hurt, Charlotte Gainsbourg, based on the novel by Charlotte Bronte, 1996   

I have already gone through the genesis of how I came to review a now growing bunch of films based on that early 19^th century English author Jane Austen’s works having viewed a film titled The Jane Austen Book Club whose theme was based on the plots of her six major novels. I don’t have to now go into the details of the Jane Austen experience except to cite the obligatory mention that in my young adulthood back down in New Jersey reading Ms. Austen’s books or watching a film adaptation was strictly “girls” stuff. (Except of course an also mandatory mention if you were interested in a girl and she either wanted to rattle on and on about some old time romantic theme from those books or wanted you to take her to a movie which if you expected to get anywhere, and usually it was not anywhere with Austen devotees so don’t lie guys, you were obliged to sit through.) That same youthful standard (including exceptions to the “girls” book aversion) applies to the other big 19^th century English romantic novelist Charlotte Bronte of the infamous Bronte sisters.        

This is where for once the aging process actually produces a positive result. Sitting through this film adaptation of Ms. Bronte’s Jane Eyre starring William Hurt as the brisk Edward Rochester and Charlotte Gainsbourg as why don’t you come see me plain Jane (Rochester’s continued plaintive plea toward her throughout the film) showed me why the Austen/Bronte combination was so strong not only as great literature but as something that would appeal to the hearts of all but the most hardened of young women. That I sat through it with my wife who was in suspense about the fate of her poor Jane added to the pleasure when despite every possible obstacle she gets her man, gets the slippery slope Rochester.        

This is the point where my old friend and fellow film critic here, Sam Lowell, before his recent retirement from the day to day film review work would begin to outline the plot and I have increasingly attempted to follow in his footsteps when reviewing older films. With this important caveat from him since he unlike myself (yet) has actually read the book (and Austen’s as well) so knew that the director here Franco Zeffirelli had eliminated much of the last part of the book when attempting to be true to the author’s plotline the thing became too long for the screen. Still the film adaptation is faithful to the key element of what drove the young girls to distraction and my wife recently plain Jane gets her man. 

Like I said not without a ton of work and a fistful of trials and tribulations along the way starting when Jane’s bitch aunt pawned her off on a hellish orphanage to break her willfulness. Somehow she survived that institutional experience (having actually taught there a couple of years as well as eight years as an inmate) and since she needed to poor and plain fend for herself in this wicked old world sought gainful employment in her chosen profession. That necessity led her to Thornhill Castle and the mysterious and secretive Rochester when she was hired as a governess for his charge/illegitimate daughter. From the beginning when they met by chance on the estate there was no question that the thoughtful and intelligent Jane whatever her plain looks (as opposed to the one Mayfair swell upper-class gold-digger on his trail) and the troubled but ultimately good-hearted and able Rochester were if not a match made in heaven (or “society” earth since as the household administrator said a landlord and governess don’t mesh in that world) then drawn together by some passion not related to looks, class, money or previous experiences.                

Still the road was tough since whatever attraction there was between them there was that little quirky secretive side of Rochester who was vague about his daughter’s mother and the way she was brought to him and more importantly as her world came crashing down on her on her wedding day that he had a mad hatter of a wife living up the penthouse (okay, okay not penthouse but maybe attic). There would be as Sam Lowell suggested more trials and tribulations after that fiasco but a romance novel as great literature or as a Harlequin dime store novel needs to in the end proclaim victory for love-and it does here as well.  

When Women And Men Made Horror Movies For Keeps-Vincent Price’s “House On The Haunted Hill” (1959)-A Film Review

When Women And Men Made Horror Movies For Keeps-Vincent Price’s “House On Haunted Hill” (1959)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Film Critic Emeritus Sam Lowell

House On Haunted Hill, starring Vincent Price, Elisha Cook directed by wild man horror film icon Billy Castle, 1959       

Sometimes Sandy Salmon the recently hired day to day film critic in this space throws me a “no-brainer” like the film under review mad monk Vincent Price’s Billy Castle-directed horror film House on Haunted Hill. Reason: when I was a kid I spent many, my mother might say too many, Saturday afternoons in the darks of the Strand Theater in downtown North Adamsville watching black and white double feature films to die for in the late 1950s, early 1960s. Mostly I was interested in film noir from the 1940s which Mr. Cadger the affable owner would play to cut down on overhead on first-run expenses and ran what today would be called retrospectives or even film festivals. But whenever a new horror movie was up he was on top of that knowing that kids “liked” to get scared out of their wits and would fill the seats to capacity (and buy gads of popcorn and candy which he told me one time was really how he made money on that now long gone but not forgotten theater turned to condos). So something like the film under review legitimate scary guy Vincent Price’s House on Haunted Hill would be like catnip to kids, including me.

Now everybody knows today, especially the kids who still make up the key demographic for horror films, that these films are driven by max daddy technological thrills and spills, a mile a minute, the more the better. And maybe today’s kids like them. But back in what was the golden age of horror films, the black and white film age where the shadows mean as much as what was shown the thing was driven by plot and not as much by gismos. And this film is a classic example which when I checked with a few guys from the old neighborhood recently scared the “Bejesus” out of them to quote one old friend. So what seems kind of hokey today was the cat’s meow back in the day.         

Here’s the play. This rich decadent playboy type guy Loren, Price’s role, and his youngish fourth wife are ready to party down in a house rented by Loren. (That house according to the blurb a Frank Lloyd Wright creation which now looked fairly modern compared to the usual Victorian house filled with odd spaces and menacing from the outside no question. The poster for the film shows such a Victorian-style house which is a little disingenuous. Worse though were the posters back then showing seemingly half-naked girls being exploited and yet no such thing happened in the film to the chagrin of teenage boyhood.) The game to be played was simple-five unrelated guests who needed dough badly for various reasons including just having that amount would each receive ten K if they made it through the night in the locked house. Fair enough.         

What the collective guest list did not know, would not find out until the end when it too late is that one of the five was a “ringer” had some other additional motive. Once everybody was “in” and locked down the games began. First Loren’s good-looking if diabolical blonde wife was killed which set the place in an uproar. Then one young woman was harassed enough that she would wind up killing the nefarious and weird Loren. Again fair enough. If you play with fire you are sure to get burned at some point. The thing of it was though this whole scene was a house of mirrors despite all the screams and odd occurrences. The wife had not been killed for she was part of a plot to kill her husband for his fortune along with her boyfriend, that Trojan horse on the guest list. And Loren was not killed either because he was on to the plot to kill him by his wife and her lover. In the end that wife and lover took the fall, went down the bloody road. In the end too between the screams and shadows (and even the hokey lover’s skeleton controlled by Loren to scare his wife to perdition) I, and my friends, were scared like crazy. Enough said.