Monday, February 20, 2017

Heavens, Philippa Bevans! The Notorious Landlady (1962)

The Notorious Landlady is a 1962 romantic comedy thriller starring Kim Novak (she got top billing) and Jack Lemmon, with supporting performances from Fred Astaire (in a role that originally was to have gone to Ernie Kovacs), Estelle Winwood and Philippa Bevans.

Philippa who, you say?  I'm probably the only film fan who has ever watched this flick primarily to see the foursquare Philippa Bevans in action. Happily I can report that both the film and the seventh-billed member of the cast are good.  The script, which was co-written by future comedy stalwarts Blake Edwards and Larry Gelbart, was nominated by the WGA for the best written American film comedy of 1962.

trust but verify

Set in England (primarily London), The Notorious Landlady concerns the notorious "Carly" Hardwicke (Kim Novak), whose husband has disappeared under mysterious and sinister circumstances, leading her neighbors, like the wheelchair-bound nosy old biddy Mrs. Dunhill (Estelle Winwood) and her faithful nurse, Mrs. Agatha Brown (Philippa Bevans), to think that he was murdered by Carly, obviously some sort of insidious femme fatale.  (Maybe they saw Vertigo.)

tale of the tub
Not knowing about Carly's "notorious" background, ingenuous Bill Gridley (Jack Lemmon), a young, newly-posted American diplomat, takes rooms in Carly's elegant Regency townhouse, though his superior at the embassy, Franklyn Armbruster (Fred Astaire), has sternly warned him of the utmost need of avoiding scandal.

Naturally, Carly and Bill fall in love. But what exactly did happen to Carly's mysterious husband?

This film recalled to me other, better-known light romantic thrillers like To Catch a Thief, Charade, Arabesque and How to Steal a Million, starring such cinema luminaries as Cary Grant, Grace Kelly, Audrey Hepburn, Gregory Peck, Sophia Loren and Peter O'Toole.

The first half of the film emphasizes romance, with the mystery placed on the slow burner; but then there's a shooting and a trial and a flight and pursuit finale at a Dartmouth convalescent home that involves the sort of manic slapstick that became a Blake Edwards trademark. Mark ye, my mystery fan friends, Mrs. Dunhill and her nurse, who suddenly loom large in the story line.

shadow of a doubt
I enjoyed this film.  Kim Novak is certainly alluring (the credits announce that she designed her own wardrobe) and Jack Lemmon is perfect for this sort of film, with his patented anxiety, double takes and slow burns.  Fred Astaire is as ever charm incorporated, though I did want him to glide his heels just a bit.

I don't know about you, but I have long adored that wonderfully eccentric Victorian/Edwardian relic, the English actress Estelle Winwood (1883-1984), who played drolly batty old biddies on television and in the films for three decades, from 1950 to 1980. 

She pops up in a series of genre films including, besides The Notorious Landlady, Dead Ringer, Games and Murder by Death, where she played Miss Marbles' (aka Miss Marple's) extremely aged nurse (she was 92 at the time), who loves nothing more than solving a good "murderpoo."  I was ten when I saw this film and I remember Miss Winwood in it well. Elsa Lanchester played Miss Marbles and the two women made a delightfully wacky comedy pair.

in hot pursuit
Miss Dunhill's nurse, Mrs. Agatha Brown, is played, as mentioned above, by Philippa Bevans, who, as I explained in an earlier blog post, was married for eight years to John M. O'Connor, a fellow stage actor and the author of a single mystery novel, Anonymous Footsteps (1932), now reprinted by Coachwhip, with an introduction by me.

O'Connor  dedicated his novel "To Philippa," whom he wed the next year.  Bevans went on to appear on Broadway in seventeen plays, most famously with Julie Andrews and Rex Harrison as Henry Higgins' landlady in My Fair Lady.

Bevans, Novak
Like Andrews she did not appear in the film version of the play, though in the 1960s she was a player in some other films, including, besides The Notorious Landlady, The World of Henry Orient, The Group and Madigan, as well as episodes of the classic television anthologies The Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents.  She specialized in the matron type, her figure having significantly broadened in her middle years.

Bevans has all of one line in Madigan, but in The Notorious Landlady her role is an important one, including a sort of wrestling match with Kim Novak, which you shouldn't forget any time soon. Also, if you have the original cast recording of My Fair Lady, you can hear her, albeit briefly, on "I Could Have Danced All Night"--a tune you may have heard on occasion!

he should have danced all night

Saturday, February 18, 2017

Lipstick Vogue: The Lipstick Killer, The Bloody Spur (1953) and While the City Sleeps (1956)



"Turn off the television and tell me all about it."
"Don't you like this program?"
She made a face.  "It started out all right, but I was beginning to get tired of it.  They're all the same, these mysteries."


....Lamin...had sent a reporter to cover the burial of Judith Felton, a young lady who, only recently, been murdered.  It was a good story, especially with the killer as yet uncaught: it had captured the imagination of newspaper readers not only in New York but out along the line, for in addition to such standardized ingredients as a knife, a rape and a nude body, the killer had added a grotesque touch. He had taken the dead girl's lipstick, and with it scrawled a plea for help on the bathroom wall.

One murder's bad.  Two are wonderful.  Two murders can sell papers all day long.

Apparently he gave her the business after she was already dead."
Walter Kyne shuddered. "Imagine," he said.

"I have," John Day Griffith said.

"This guy, see, he's a pervert.  Both times, you know what he did?"  Something told him the presence of a woman in the room, even his wife, called for moderation of expression.  He lowered his voice. "He moved his bowels on the floor."

"Two babes were killed and now a little girl's been kidnapped and they found an axe and a lot of blood in the basement and maybe she's been murdered too."

Across the newsroom, another copy boy was handing Joe Levine...a copy of the rival INS bulletin on the same subject.
Levine read it, exclaimed in a guttural voice, and strode into Lamin's office.  "Arn," he said, "INS has a leg missing, too."
"What have we got, just two arms?"
"That's all."
"Damn that Collier," Lamin said.  "I always said he took dope."
"Maybe INS is wrong," Levine said.
"Yes," Lamin said, "and maybe I'll be working for INS in the morning."

"If you became suddenly very sure of something," Jon Day Griffith said, "and there was one other thing you could do in another direction to make you even more sure, but that something else was--well, say it was unethical--what would you do?"
Healey looked at him.  "It would depend on how much I wanted whatever it was I wanted."
Griffith grinned.  "You're a moralistic son of a bitch."
"Anybody who's moralistic around here," Healey said, "is crazy."

"She's sleeping around....My God, Friday night Mobley, last night Meedy, tonight who knows?"

"That's what I like to hear," Mobley said.  "Get tough with me.  Call me names."
"I think you have a fetish or two of your own," Nancy said.
"Agreed," Mobley said.  "Would you care for details?"

"Weren't there any honest men working for Kyne?"
"Damn few," Mobley said.  "Certainly nobody that mattered."
"Were you one of them?"
"Maybe in a way."  He kissed her hair. "But I was getting polluted."

When you worked for Kyne, a certain amount of plotting was necessary.


                              --All quotations from The Bloody Spur (1953), by Charles Einstein


A series of three brutal murders of females, two women and a young child, struck Chicago in 1945-46.  All of them were linked to one of the century's most notorious alleged serial murderers, the so-called "lipstick killer."

William Heirens (1928-2012)
aka the "lipstick killer" (?)
On June 5, 1945, Josephine Ross was discovered dead, savagely stabbed, in her Chicago apartment. Seven months later, on December 10, Frances Brown was discovered dead, savagely stabbed, in her Chicago apartment.  This time a message was left scrawled in lipstick on a wall in Brown's apartment:

For heavens
sake catch me
Before I kill more
I cannot control myself


The killer of Frances Brown from this point on became known, not surprisingly, as the "Lipstick Killer."

On January 7, 1946, six-year-old Suzanne Degnan was discovered missing from her home; her dismembered body parts soon were discovered in several nearby storm drains. Chicago's finest arrested a 65-year-old janitor, Hector Verbergh, in the building where Degnan lived and subjected him, Verbergh alleged, to severe beatings with the aim of extracting a confession from him. 

Despite the beatings and other abuse at the hands of the police, Verbergh never confessed to any crime and he was released. He and his wife later sued the Chicago Police Department, and they were awarded in damages a total of nearly $250, 000 (in modern dollars), more than they had originally requested.

On June 26, 1946, 17-year-old William Heirens was arrested for attempted burglary. (This was not his first burglary.) Heirens later asserted that he too was beaten while in police custody. Additionally sodium pentothal (so-called "truth serum") was administered to him without his or his parents' consent. Those were the days!

Police began to believe they might have their "man" in the lipstick killer case.  The press had a field day, publishing photos of Heirens as a Jekyll and Hyde killer and stories about a supposed Heirens confession to all three of the above murders, a confession which in fact had never been made.

Eventually, however, Heirens did plead guilty to the killings, urged on by his lawyers, who thought he was guilty and wanted to save him from the death penalty.  Heirens retracted his confession within days, but to no avail: he was sentenced to three consecutive life terms.

Hereins, who died in 2012, maintained his innocence to his death, but he was never released from jail (where he proved a model prisoner). Many people have long argued that the case against him, in which his "confession" was supplemented by disputed handwriting and fingerprint evidence, is unpersuasive. Certainly police conduct in the case left a great deal to to be desired, as it often did in those days when states allowed their law enforcement apparatus such a free hand in criminal investigations.

Whatever the truth about Heirens' guilt or innocence, the "lipstick killer" case unquestionably served as an inspiration for Charles Einstein's fascinating 1953 paperback original crime novel, The Bloody Spur, filmed three years later with an all-star cast by director Fritz Lang as While the City Sleeps.

Einstein accepts Heirens guilt in the novel, unambiguously portraying his murderer character, Robert Manners, based on Heirens, as a criminal lunatic and a sexual psychopath: He has "mama issues"; is maniacally obsessed with the Bible; steals women's underwear, which he keeps in a locked suitcase under his bed; defecates at the crime scenes; and performs necrophilia on one of his murder victims. (Thankfully, we are only told about these last two things obliquely, and at second hand.)

1956 reprint of the novel
using the film title
Einstein handles these chapters concerning the killer well, but what is really interesting about The Bloody Spur is the author's portrayal of the ruthless world of the news media.  Essentially Einstein used the lipstick killer case as his occasion to study the Machiavellian machinations of a great syndicated newspaper chain.

The novel opens with twin burials at a cemetery: that of Judith Felton, victim of the latest brutal murder, and that of Cyrus McCrady, executive director of the Kyne publishing empire, consisting of

a chain of newspapers only slightly smaller than Scripps-Howard and Hearst, bulwarked by KPS (Kyne Press Service, a national newswire network), KWF (Kyne World Features, a feature story syndicate), and Kynpix (a national picture service).

Walter Kyne, successor to his father, must now choose a successor to the great McCrady, upon whom he relied to run his empire for him. The candidates for the succession to executive power at Kyne are Arnold Lamin, editor-in-chief of the Kyne news-wire service, John Day Griffith, editor of the Sentinel, the key Kyne paper in New York, and advisory editor to the nine other papers in the chain; Harry Kritzer, chief of the Kyne picture service; and Mark Loving, head of features.

the original paperback edition
As the "Lipstick Killer" case snowballs into a morbid city sensation, Kyne conceives the idea of handing the big job at Kyne to the man who cracks the murder case. His executives get the message and act accordingly (i.e., they feel the pricks of Shakespeare's "Bloody Spur")--often in ethically dubious ways.

This is a suspense novel and a crime novel, but the suspense lies more in the battle for supremacy at Kyne, and the most interesting crimes detailed are the ethical ones committed by white-collared pillars of society. I'm reminded of some of the sardonic corporate crime novels from this period by the English crime writers Andrew Garve and Michael Gilbert.

Women play a notable role in the novel as well. Besides the unfortunate women in the killer's life, there are Nancy Liggett, Lamin's secretary and girlfriend of Edward Mobley, the star reporter on the Sentinel, and Mildred Donner, the women's features editor who is free with her amors, as well as the executive's assorted wives, one of whom vigorously pursues sexual agendas of her own.

The author adheres to a realistic, "warts-and-all" presentation of his characters--so much so, indeed, that a common criticism of the book is the classic complaint that the characters aren't "nice."  I don't entirely agree with that assessment--Nancy and Ed provide a moral center for the novel, though even that relationship is "nuanced," shall we say--but the novel is, to be sure, quite a cynical and satirical one.  It's a long way away from the Fifties family sitcom world of Father Knows Best and its ilk!

John Barrymore, Jr. as the lipstick killer in While the City Sleeps
You'd never suspect this guy, would you?

The 1956 Fritz Lang film version of The Bloody Spur, generically titled While the City Sleeps (the title seemingly taking issue with a brilliant earlier film, City That Never Sleeps), has its fans, but was somewhat disappointing to me.  Admittedly, the cast of the book is huge (I haven't even mentioned some of the key characters from the book), but I think the film treatment loses a lot of the novel's fascinating detail and sheer potency.

John Barrymore, Jr.'s performance as the killer seems more a thing of older, expressionist film--Mmm, what Might Lang have had in Mind?  In an unsubtle alteration concerning the killer's Freudian motivations, the lipstick message in the film is a terse and blunt "Ask mother."  Another change, a huge one, is that the child murder is deleted, cutting a lot of the horror and satirical force from the book.

Vincent Price is a good choice for Kyne--and it was nice to see him briefly reunited in antagonism, after the great film Laura, with Dana Andrews--but he is reduced to a feckless playboy, a crude simplification of the book character.  In a streamlining move Kyne's executives are reduced to three (Lamin having been written out of the film), one of whom is played by George Sanders, who seems rather listless here, though Thomas Mitchell, as the voluble Jon Day Griffith, provides some journalistic gusto.

Dana Andrews plays the key role of Ed Mobley and he is good in the role (you might be reminded of Edward R. Murrow), but he was more than ten years older than the book character and he is made a Pulitzer prize winner and a television commentator to boot, which lends this character a stature he simply didn't have in the book, as respected as he was for his reporting skills.

Sometimes You want to go where everybody knows your name:
Andrews, Forrest, Mitchell, Lupino
up to no good
Lupino and Sanders drink and scheme

Conversely Nancy Liggett is played in Fifties ingenue fashion by Sally Forrest (in her penultimate film performance). Forrest was twenty years younger than Andrews and in this film seemingly was instructed by Fritz Lang to ask herself "What would Doris (Day) do?"  In other words, for me she's too prim and perky for the character portrayed by Einstein in the book (who, for example, pronounces unblushingly that she likes her men to be sexually experienced). 

On the other hand, the role of seductress Mildred Donner fits Ida Lupino like a fine glove, and Rhonda Fleming makes a bold and brassy impression as Kyne's unfaithful wife, Dorothy.  I should mention the reliable Howard Duff appears as Andrew's helpful cop friend--Just how many film cops did Duff play in the Fifties, anyway?

"They'd sell out their own mothers!"  

Certainly While the City Sleeps is well worth watching--but I say read the book first! Charles Einstein knew his stuff when it came to big city journalism, and in the Fifties paperback original medium he found a forum to express it. Don't let the surface pulp trappings of the lurid paperback covers dissuade you, this is one sophisticated and smart novel, one from which I couldn't resist, as you will have seen, quoting extensively at the beginning of this piece. 

Happily the novel is available in a modern edition, both in paper and eBook versions.  In closing I'll leave you with the wise words of Anthony Boucher, taken from his contemporary review of The Bloody Spur:

....it's an unusually long but tightly knit suspense novel, with an ambitious and well-handled problem in construction....the detailed examination of the sexual and professional lives of a group of highly talented heels is objectively fascinating, and the obsessed murder is as believable as the protagonist of a Notable Trial.

Friday, February 10, 2017

John Marshall O'Connor (1909-1975), Author of Anonymous Footsteps (1932)

John Marshall O'Connor (1909-1975) published a single known detective novel, Anonymous Footsteps, called "an entertaining and absorbing yarn" by the New York Times Book Review, with his friend and recent Dartmouth classmate Walter P. Chrysler, Jr.'s short-lived publishing firm, Cheshire House, in 1932, when O'Connor was just 23 years old.  Three years earlier, when O'Connor was a student at Dartmouth, an earlier Dartmouth alumnus, Clifford Orr, had scored a hit with his detective novel, The Dartmouth Murders (reprinted by Coachwhip), reviewed here, which won attention at the time as an early college mystery.  (It was later filmed as well.)

Both Orr and O'Connor had been extremely active in the staging of plays at Dartmouth, Orr as a writer and O'Connor as an actor, and both had served as presidents of the the college's theatrical troupe, the Dartmouth Players.  O'Connor's father, a doctor who died when John was twelve years old, had played football at Dartmouth and later served, before embarking on a medical career, as Dartmouth's football coach.  O'Connor's mother was a daughter of a former mayor of Salem, Massachusetts, where she returned from Manchester, New Hampshire to raise her two boys, John and Raymond, after her husband died.

Cheshire House went defunct after the publisher's father, the great auto magnate Walter P. Chrysler, Sr., withdrew his support from the firm over his outrage that his son had commissioned a book on a scandalous, then current criminal case in Hawaii, the vigilante murder of Joseph Kahahawai, who had been accused of participation in the rape of a Hawaiian socialite.

John M. O'Connor as Dickon Sowerby
in children's theater adaptation
of The Secret Garden
In addition to writing a detective novel, however, O'Connor had taken up acting in children's theater, performing in such plays as Alice in Wonderland, The Secret Garden, Huckleberry Finn and Aladdin. There he met and married actress Philippa Bevans (1913-1968), to whom he had dedicated Anonymous Footsteps.

The couple would divorce in 1941, with Bevans going on to establish a successful career in film, stage and television.  She was best known for playing Henry Higgins' landlady in the original stage production of My Fair Lady, launching a long line of "matron" roles in her middle age. (More on Bevans and genre work is coming soon.)

O'Connor's acting career never really took off after children's theater, though he did appear, in small parts, on Broadway in two plays. After serving in the Second World War, O'Connor got an MA and PhD at Columbia University and taught for eleven years at Rockland Community College in New York.  His health having drastically declined in his sixties, O'connor died in 1975, at the age of 65.

My copy of Anonymous Footsteps has notes and memorabilia about the author collected by a woman who grew up with him in Salem and in Andover, Massachusetts, where she attended Abbot Academy and he Phillips Academy.  It's a interesting little personal story that I discuss in greater detail in the introduction to the novel.

Miscellany at the Passing Tramp: Rumbles, Footsteps, Closets and Elizabeth Gill

As promised here are some maps and floor plans from The Rumble Murders and Anonymous Footsteps, first the endpaper map of Randall Green and Hangman's Hill from The Rumble Murders and next three stories of the imposing and isolated Lanard mansion from Anonymous Footsteps.




Next up, a better copy of the photo of Elizabeth Gill, author of The Crime CoastWhat Dread Hand? and Crime De Luxe, reissued by Dean Street Press.

In addition to writing detective fiction, Gill painted, like her husband Colin Gill, and she also dabbled in fashion design.  She appears to have been a stylish woman, judging from this photo.

More reprint news coming soon, plus covers for the new editions.

Finally, a nice review of Murder in the Closet by Kevin Killian at Lambda Literary.

Wednesday, February 8, 2017

Snowbound! Anonymous Footsteps (1932), by John M. O'Connor

Last week this blog announced the reprinting this month of The Rumble Murders (1932), an energetic, amusing and erudite detective novel by the elder brother of T. S. EliotHenry Ware Eliot, Jr. (1879-1947), that is written something in the manner of British authors A. A. Milne (The Red House Mystery), Ronald Knox and Michael Innes.

This week this blog takes a look at another American mystery to be reissued this month, likewise with an introduction by me, this one also originally published in 1932: Anonymous Footsteps, by John Marshall O'Connor (1909-1975).

John M. O'Connor's novel is written in a different style from Rumble, darker and more dramatic, more in the manner of the popular and influential American mystery writers John Dickson Carr and Mignon Eberhart.  The basic setup of Footsteps also will be familiar to the many fans of the very dark and all-time bestselling mystery novel: Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None (1939).

There are, you see, these people stranded on an island, getting bumped off one by one....

The island this time is located somewhere in the Adirondacks in New York state, where at the isolated Lanard mansion ten ill-fated people have gathered: the dying Henry Lanard and his wife, son, brother, sister, doctor, nurse, cook, butler (the latter two a married couple) and chauffeur-handyman.

Even though Lanard is dying, someone murders him in his bed, launching a deluge of death that will claim four additional lives by the end of the novel.  S. S. Van Dine fans will also be reminded of the bestselling author's classic family elimination mystery, The Greene Murder Case (1928). However, here the family members are, as in And Then There Were None, literally stranded on the island, a murderer among them, for a winter storm cuts them off from civilization.

season of snows and sins

As one contemporary reviewer put it:

No matter whom you may suspect of the murder with which this story opens, the odds are that he or she will be dead before the end of the book.  One after another the members of the Lanard household die violent deaths in their island home in the Adirondacks.  No police are at hand to ferret out the murderer, for a wintry gale has cut off all communication with the mainland.  

Anonymous Footsteps is notable as the only mystery to be published by Walter P. Chrysler, Jr.'s short-lived but high-toned publishing firm Cheshire House.  The author of the novel and the son of the great auto magnate were classmates at Dartmouth, where the pair had co-edited the cultural magazine The Arts Quarterly. Both young men evinced great interest in the fine arts.  In addition to his short-lived publishing venture, young Chrysler was a lifelong arts patron, while John M. O'Connor....

Well, that will be the subject of the next post at The Passing Tramp!

Incidentally, both of the detective novels being reissued this month have some great maps and floor plans, something all vintage mystery fans love, I think; and I will be sharing pics of these soon on the blog.