Note: For those of you who are new here, the “Not Quite Parker” category is where I look at pastiches of, homages to, references to, and rip-offs of the Parker novels.
Mild spoilers, but this is a pretty typical crime and blaxploitation flick, so nothing in it is all that unpredictable.
Robert Hooks plays a sort of fixer who goes by “Mr. T.” If you’re in a jam, you can give Mr. T some money, and he’ll get you out of it (he is somewhat similar to Lawrence Block’s Matthew Scudder in this regard, although he predates Scudder). He’s brilliant, he’s a badass, all women love him, and he’ll whip you at pool.
Chalky (Paul Winfield) and Pete (Ralph Waite) drop by the pool hall where Mr. T holds court. Chalky and Pete run dice games, Chalky on the black side of town, Pete on the white, and lately those games have been hit by a masked and armed gang. They need Mr. T to help put a stop to it.
But all is not as it seems. When Mr. T is performing reconnaissance at one of the dice games, the “gang,” which is really Chalky and Pete’s flunkies, hits it. Chalky and Pete frame Abbey Walsh (John Edwards) as a gang member, with Chalky killing Abbey in the process.
And here is the complication: Abbey is a loyal henchman of Mr. Big (a name spoofed in the blaxploitation parody I’m Gonna Git You Sucka), another L.A. crime kingpin, and wouldn’t make a move without Mr. Big’s permission, indicating that Mr. Big has broken an unwritten contract. In addition, someone is tipping off everyone he can, including both the cops and Mr. Big, that Mr. T greased Abbey.
So now this problem solver has problems of his own.
Trouble Man is a solid, better-than-average blaxploitation flick, primarily noted these days for its soundtrack by Marvin Gaye, his first release after the classic What’s Going On album. The movie is mildly recommended to fans of the genre.
While I was watching the film, I was struck by two similarities to The Hunter.
The first is the table-turning aspect. Like in The Hunter, Mr. T is shafted by the people he is working with (or, in this instance, for). The third act has him hunting down those who have betrayed him, with prejudice.
Of course, a plot like this is hardly original to The Hunter, and certainly could be just a coincidence. However, the feel of those scenes gave me that Parker vibe.
Still, that wouldn’t have been enough to prompt this writeup.
What prompted it is a scene in that third act that strongly suggests to me that writer John D.F. Black had read The Hunter.
Mr. T’s price for assisting Chalky and Pete in solving their fake problem was $10,000. Mr. T has cornered Chalky. Mr. T has a gun to him, and is having Chalky open a safe to get the money.
Chalky: I’ll give you thirty-thousand dollars, man!
Mr. T: Ten-thousand five-hundred* is what you owe me, pimp. That’s all I want.
Now that sounds too much like The Hunter for me to think it’s entirely coincidental.
Yesterday, Christopher Plummer, whose career spanned nearly 70 years and included films as diverse as The Sound of Music, Murder by Decree, An American Tail, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, and Knives Out, passed away at 91. In remembrance, here is a look at a film that you may not be familiar with that I think any fan of Donald Westlake would enjoy.
Miles Cullen (Elliott Gould) appears to be somewhat of an underachiever, or at minimum under-accomplished. He’s physically attractive and clearly intelligent, but he’s single, has a run-down car, and is a mere teller at the bank branch office in which he works. Perhaps some of this is due to his social awkwardness, which, while not crippling, is definitely there.
Miles figures out not only that his bank is about to be robbed, but how and by whom–a man dressed as Santa Claus who is posing as a bell-ringer at the shopping mall where Miles’ branch is located plans to pass him a note claiming to have a gun immediately after a customer who regularly makes large cash deposits goes to Miles’ window with the latest.
Armed with this knowledge, Miles takes the large cash deposit and puts it in his own briefcase, so that when Santa robs the bank, the conniving Kris Kringle doesn’t fill his bag with most of the money. Miles then takes the surplus home, with the police and the other bank employees none the wiser.
While not a bad plan on the surface, there are two problems that Miles had not anticipated. First, the local news reports how much money the robber was supposed to have gotten away with, so the robber quickly figures out that somehow Miles must have the rest of it. And second, the hood is Harry Riekle (Christopher Plummer), a psychopath who is quite willing to kill Miles to get the money, and probably willing to kill Miles as revenge even if he does get the money.
Miles becomes something of a local celebrity after being on the news, because women find him quite handsome (or “photogenic”) and drop by the bank just to see him. This, and pulling off such a clever scheme, cause him to gain a great deal of confidence. His boss’ wife flirts with him. His co-worker Julie (Susannah York), who he has been pining for and who had previously belittled him, is suddenly interested.
The side-effect of this newly-found confidence that will have the greatest impact on Miles’ life, however, isn’t the attention from women–it’s that he believes that he can outwit Riekle, and is determined to do so no matter what.
The Silent Partner, then, is the clash of two strong–perhaps even pigheaded–personalities. Miles may be the brains to Riekle’s brawn, but Rieckle is a lot of brawn (and hardly stupid himself). The two use the weapons at their disposal in a series of phone calls, feints, and dirty tricks in an effort to control the money and squelch the threat his opponent represents. Who will eventually emerge victorious? Or will neither of them?
The script for The Silent Partner is by Curtis Hanson, who would go on to Oscar gold as writer (a win) and director (a nomination) of L.A. Confidential. Relentlessly clever, it indicates a young talent well on his way to his multiple later triumphs.
The direction by Daryl Duke, while solid overall, isn’t quite as sure-footed. The original poster for The Silent Partner misleadingly emphasized the film’s comic elements, and while they are there, the comic moments are both of relative insignificance and by far the clumsiest portions of the film. (The exception, unsurprisingly, is a minor subplot involving the great John Candy, who plays one of Miles’ fellow employees.) But that’s a quibble. On the whole, The Silent Partner is well paced, suspenseful, and unpredictable.
All of this is anchored, of course, but its two ever-reliable leads, both completely convincing in making this battle both professional and personal.
While it has a cult audience, this relatively obscure crime thriller (perhaps due to its Canadian origin), while not a lost classic, deserves a significantly higher profile than it has. The Silent Partner is a gem that has been secreted in movie history’s safe-deposit box for far too long.
I wouldn’t fault anyone for thinking there is a Donald Westlake influence in this film. The plot is very much like something DEW would have constructed, and so are the characters. Had Westlake written The Silent Partner, I suspect he would have made it much more overtly comic (and would have been a lot more successful at it). Or perhaps he would have done a straight noir. The material could easily lend itself to either approach.
If such influence exists, it was likely smuggled in by scripter Curtis Hanson, who was almost certainly familiar with Westlake–I simply can’t imagine L.A. Confidential‘s impresario not being familiar with Westlake. But The Silent Partner comes from another literary source, the novel Think of a Number (Tænk på et tal) by Danish author Anders Bodelsen, which had been previously filmed under that title in 1969. I am curious about both the novel and the previous adaptation.
A well-to-do man is shot in the face while walking in Isola. The weapon is, of all things, a hunting rifle. An informant tells Bert Kling at the 87th precinct’s detective desk that Seymour Kramer, the victim, was an extortionist, giving the detectives a likely motive. Was Kramer killed by one of his victims? And who are his victims?
In his introduction to the edition of Killer’s Payoff that I read, Ed McBain expands upon previous remarks about the pressure, some of it ridiculous, placed on him by his publisher to put Cotton Hawes front and center. Series mainstay Steve Carella, you see, was married, and that just wouldn’t do.
McBain makes it clear that he disdained this pressure. For starters, the 87th Precinct series was envisioned as an ensemble, and he wanted to keep it that way. McBain gets some petty revenge by making Hawes a bit ridiculous and not terribly sympathetic. He turns him into an unmitigated horndog, albeit a quite successful one. But Hawes does get more page time, as well as the denouement. After all, McBain had a series to get renewed.
Killer’s Payoff is another fine entry in this series, but with a significant flaw–the reader will almost certainly think of an obvious possibility regarding one of the novel’s situations that the police detectives do not even consider. It would not have taken a lot to fix this, but I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that this was less important to McBain’s editors than Cotton Hawes being a ladies’ man was. But the rest of the novel is classic 87th, which more than makes up for its one problem, and McBain’s characters–cops, criminals, and civilians alike–shine.
Update: The drawing has been held and lucky reader Sean is the winner!
I haven’t been posting or updating as much I’d like lately, so to keep you on your toes so you’ll keep checking in, here’s a giveaway.
I’ve got a used DVD copy of the 2013 Jason Statham/Jennifer “J-Lo” Lopez movie, Parker, based on Flashfire. Flashfire is one of my favorites novels in the series, but, alas, I didn’t like the movie at all.
But what do I know? I was surprised by how many defenders it had. Several readers liked it. Max Allan Collins of the Parker-inspired Nolan series (and one jillion other books) even dropped by the comments with some praise.
If you would like to add this to your collection, now is your chance! E-mail me (contact link in the sidebar) and I’ll draw a lucky winner.
DVD is region 1. I’ll ship free within the US, but if you’re international, I may have to charge you a little something.
Note:I learned of the death of the legendary Sean Connery from my wife when I woke up this morning. In tribute to the great man, here is a review I wrote at another venue of The Untouchables, for which he won an Oscar for his portrayal of Jim Malone, an honest cop in a dirty town. Not too far off topic, I think–it is a crime film. Rest in Peace to a beloved icon.
I would hope no one takes The Untouchables seriously as history, even history graded on the Hollywood curve. Rather, the story of Eliot Ness and Al Capone is American mythology, and you’d do no better getting your facts about Al Capone from it as you would from “The Night Chicago Died.”
In a manner similar to any portrayal of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, The Untouchables seeks to both depict and add to that mythology, and at that it excels. This is most notable in the striking use of a baseball bat in a fashion not approved of by the makers of the Louisville Slugger, but the film also gave us, “They pull a knife, you pull a gun,” a line paraphrased by no less than a US president (also from Chicago).
The Untouchables mixes three kinds of filmed entertainment–it takes the mobster movies and television programs of previous generations (including, of course, “The Untouchables,”) and updates them by adding in the adventure of the summer blockbuster while imparting some gravitas via elements of The Godfather films’ mafia drama.
This is audacious–in hands lesser skilled than those of Brian De Palma and David Mamet (as well as Ennio Morricone and many others in a film brimming with top-notch talent), the blockbuster-style horseback raid in a film about mobsters would have been unintentionally hilarious. Instead, it’s thrilling, as Ness moves the battle out of Capone’s territory (Chicago) and into Our territory (the American heartland and its peaceful neighbor to the north). Advantage: Ness, and a turning point in his crusade.
It’s no slight on the film to say that the world of The Untouchables is black and white. Al Capone was not a cuddly fellow, and the only tender side we see in Robert De Niro’s portrayal is him weeping during an opera (where he also gets word of a successful hit on an enemy). Kevin Costner plays Ness as an attempted stoic, tightly controlled emotions belying that he is a big-hearted family man afraid that his rage at the violence consuming his community will spiral out of control. Ness’ only weaknesses are his addiction to his own newspaper headlines and his initial unwillingness to violate the law. Both are excusable. PR is an important front in any war, and breaking the law in pursuit of a perceived higher justice can cost you not just your soul, but your court case.
The film’s flaws are few. Some of the blockbuster motifs, particularly the comic relief, could be accused of adding an unwelcome element of triviality to the film. But in one instance, a moment of at-the-time goofy comic relief adds needed humanity to a walking stereotype, setting the viewer up for heartbreak later in the film.
My impression is that critical estimation of The Untouchables has declined since its release. If so, that’s a shame. It towers over most of the current era’s popular films like Al Capone on its striking poster.
We are mostly lucky to live in an era where self-publishing is easy. While I’ve read (or tried to read) some self-published titles that I wish I hadn’t, I’ve also read some that, while they certainly could have used an editor’s touch, were decent to quite good books that almost certainly wouldn’t have been published otherwise.
Lawrence Block, of course, is perfectly capable of writing a book to professional standards without the help of an editor, but why would he, the pen behind countless books, choose to self-publish his new novel, Dead Girl Blues? Surely someone would publish it otherwise?
Well, no. Block explains why at length in a post at Mystery Fanfare, but the short version is that no one wanted to touch it due to the book’s subject matter. That’s right–Getting Off wasn’t a bridge too far, but Dead Girl Blues is.
And what is that subject matter? There’s a scene in the fun Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle, The Running Man, where a supporting character tells the female lead regarding the innocent-but-framed Arnold, “You’re lucky he didn’t kill you, too. Or rape you, then kill you. Or kill you, then rape you.”
Dead Girl Blues is a first-person account of the life of someone who went with the third and final option.
The protagonist goes by three different names over the course of the novel, but I will call him John, the name he uses most often. The novel opens with John, at this point a gas station attendant, going to a bar and picking up a highly inebriated girl. He takes her to a remote location, where he proceeds with The Act. The rest of the novel, which is written as John’s memoir, details his life after this singular event.
The plot has two primary threads–will he get away with it, and will he do it again?
Getting away with it appears to be a done deal after the first few months or years. But as time marches on (the murder occurs in the late sixties), so does technology. Use of DNA as a crime-fighting tool becomes commonplace. People voluntary send their DNA in for testing and to fill out their family trees, helpfully filling in gaps for the authorities. Computer processing power increases astronomically. John watches stories about solving cold cases on the the news and true-crime TV shows and wonders, Will they find me?
As to the question of whether or not he’ll do it again: Lawrence Block has written extensively about alcoholism in his Matthew Scudder series and knows the subject well. A recovering or recovered alcoholic may have stopped drinking and may even have conquered his urge to drink, but he has not conquered alcohol. He knows, or should know, that if he drinks again, the odds of him ending up where he was once was, with the drinking problem and all of the destruction that comes with it, are so high as to almost be a certainty. John suspects that he is something akin to an alcoholic. If he kills again, it will likely lead to the destruction of all he holds dear, up to and including the loss of his life. This doesn’t always stop the man who struggles with alcohol. Will it stop John? While the parallel to alcoholism is never directly stated, it is likely not a coincidence that the night of John’s awful decision begins in a bar.
I finished Dead Girl Blues some time ago–before publication, in fact–but have had a deuce of a time writing about it. It’s a difficult book to discuss without spoiling, likely more suited to a book club discussion (if you’re in one of those book clubs where people are open to reading novels about necrophiliacs) than it is to a review, so I won’t write much more. Suffice it to say that it is extraordinarily rare for me to read a Block novel where I am not compelled to keep turning those pages, and Dead Girl Blues is not one of those rarities. I was wondering throughout what would happen and, in a most intended effect, wondering what I wanted to happen. Block forces the reader to grapple with this, and odds are the reader will not always be comfortable contemplating what he thinks and why.
What is quite enjoyable to contemplate is that in his ninth decade on this earth and nearly sixty years after the publication of his first novel under his own name, Block remains a startlingly original and compelling voice. If he’s not the greatest crime fiction writer of all time, he’s on the very short list of contenders for that title. Viva!
In February 2021, Hard Case Crime is re-releasing Castle in the Air, which has been out of print for forty years.
I’m excited about this one, as it’s eluded me at used book stores.
A DIRTY DOZEN.
WITH A FRENCH CONNECTION.
When four groups of international heist artists team up to pull off the theft of the century—stealing an entire castle, and the treasure hidden in its walls—what could possibly go wrong? Well, consider this: none of the master thieves speak each other’s languages…and no one knows precisely where the loot is stashed…and every one of them wants to steal it all for him or herself. It’s MWA Grand Master Donald E. Westlake at his wildest, a breathless slapstick chase through the streets of Paris only one step ahead of the law—and each other.
Note:This is the fourth of four posts on Donald Westlake’s 1977 collection of two novellas, Enough, reprinted by Hard Case Crime as Double Feature. The series covers the novellas and the movies based on them. Links to the other entries in the series are at the bottom of this post.
In 2004, a film adaptation of Donald Westlake’s novella, “Ordo,” was released. It was directed and co-written by Laurence Ferreira Barbosa. A French/Canadian co-production, Ordo was suitably released to DVD in France and Canada. (Note that if you decide to track this down, you will need to find the Canadian release unless you speak French, even if you have a player that can play Region 2 discs, as only the Canadian edition has English subtitles. I found out the hard way.)
The case for the DVD attempts, by its cover art and blurb (“A troubling game of seduction begins.”), to paint Ordo as a neo-noir. It’s not. Rather, it’s a reasonably faithful adaptation of the novella, updated and set in France. In this telling, Ordo is a member of the French Marines rather than an American sailor. Actress Dawn Devayne becomes Louise Sandoli, so while Ordo is still ordinary (“ordinaire,”), there is no obvious implication in the actress’ name as there is in the novella. (I will call Louise “Dawn” in these comments, after the novella.)
The plot is the same. Ordo is shocked to learn that a famous actress is the person he was married to briefly when both were very young. She is so different now, he doesn’t even recognize her in photographs. He sets out to meet her and does. As in the novella, the viewer, with Ordo, studies the character of Dawn–her words, what people say about and around her, her actions, and her environment–to gain an understanding of how the girl became this entirely different woman and to take whatever meaning one can from that.
These elements pulled straight from the novella work fairly well. Where the film occasionally gets off track is when it veers from its source in regards to Ordo’s interactions with Dawn’s world. In the novella, Ordo is intentionally constructed without much of a personality. He’s a working-class stiff. He doesn’t have big dreams, a creative streak, or much of anything else to distinguish him. There is a reason for this, and the film strays from this characterization to its detriment. When Ordinary Ordo begins actively engaging the people in Dawn’s social circle, it moves the focus from Dawn to him, where the focus should not be–the title may be Ordo, but this is a character study of Dawn. This also makes him less sympathetic, because when he does exhibit signs of a personality, he’s a jerk. (This is at its worst in his completely unnecessary second scene with Dawn’s mother.)
The film ultimately ends up in the same place as the novella. As a character study, Ordo is a limited, qualified success. But a character study is pretty much all Ordo is. The audience for such a thing is rather narrow, but if it sounds up your alley, it might be worth a shot–there is a decent chance you will like it, although I doubt you will love it.
Note:This is the third of four posts on Donald Westlake’s 1977 collection of two novellas, Enough, reprinted by Hard Case Crime as Double Feature. The series covers the novellas and the movies based on them. Links to the other entries in the series are at the bottom of this post.
“Ordo,” the second of two novellas in Double Feature (previously published as Enough), is an entirely different animal than opener, “A Travesty.” While “A Travesty” is nearly novel length, “Ordo” is only seventy pages or so, and while “A Travesty” fits neatly into the comic crime portion of the Westlake canon, “Ordo” is an outlier that doesn’t draw easy comparisons to his other works.
Ordo Tupikos is a sailor in the US Navy. One day, one of his fellow sailors says, “You never said you were married to Dawn Devayne.”
Dawn Devayne is a hugely popular and famous movie star, and according to the article in the magazine Ordo’s fellow shipman is reading, used to be named Estelle Anlic. Ordo was married very briefly to Estelle when he was twenty-one. Estelle had said she was nineteen, but was only sixteen. Estelle’s mother had found them, and had the marriage annulled.
Ordo is familiar with Dawn Devayne. He’s even seen a couple of her movies. But the woman on the screen was so different from the Estelle he was once married to that he drew no association.
This throws him into a state of mental turmoil, so he cashes out his leave and goes to Hollywood to visit Dawn Devayne. She is willing to see him.
To point out the obvious from the names of the characters, Ordo represents the ordinary–he has a career, he is working towards retirement, and then he’ll get his pension and either retire or do something else. If the “de” in “Devayne” is French, she’s “of vanity.” She represents the glamour and superficiality of Hollywood that Ordo, and most of the rest of us, know little about beyond what we see or read in the entertainment press. “Ordo” is the story of what happens when these two worlds collide, when regular-Joe Ordo begins mingling in her ritzy world, and movie star Dawn Devayne is drawn, at least partially, back into the world of the rest of us.
“Ordo” is at least as much a meditation on the Hollywood life as it is a plot-driven story, and while it would be easy to imagine the comic possibilities of this setup in Westlake’s hands, it’s dead serious. Tonally, the closest comparison I can come up with in the Westlake catalog is his posthumously published Memory (which I have not written a review of yet). It’s a sad, human tale, and it’s easy to see why it was packaged with something more typical of the Westlake brand, not to mention more lighthearted.
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