Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries: Cocaine Blues (Tony Tilse, 2012)

So, it's February 2020 and the motion picture Miss Fisher and the Crypt of Tears (Tony Tilse, 2020) is soon to "drop" in the parlance of youth, and my rising excitement at the glorious return of one of the most glorious of heroines has bidden me to go back and revisit the place where both the saga and my infatuation began.

The first instalment of ABC's (that's the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, rather than the US TV network or the sadly defunct UK television company of Lew Grade fame) adaptations of Kerry Greenwood's series of novels revolving around the Honourable Phryne Fisher (Essie Davis, Sweeney Todd [David Moore, 2006], Game of Thrones [Jack Bender & Mark Mylod, 2016], Mindhorn [Sean Foley, 2016]), a flappin' 1920s detective with the inherited title of real-life Romana II Lalla Ward and the striking looks of the BBC Eighth Doctor Adventures novels' Romana III (based upon 1920s movie star Louise Brooks of Pandora's Box and Diary of a Lost Girl [both helmed by GW Pabst, 1929]).

Making her first appearance in Kerry Greenwood's novel Cocaine Blues in 1989 (the live-action series, unlike EON Productions' James Bond series or ITV's David Suchet-led Agatha Christie's Poirot adaptations, actually starting off with the first published story to feature the character), Phryne - her unusual name the result of her father confusing her originally selected name of Psyche (the beloved of Eros from Apuleius' Metamorphoses) with that of a famous 4th century BC Greek courtesan (a much more apposite moniker for the beguiling and sexually-liberated Miss Fisher, even if the name does unfortunately translate as "toad") - is a thoroughly forward-thinking and free 1920s lady, eschewing the patriarchal sexual politics of the era to be a thoroughly modern crimefighter (and accomplished aviatrix, as we see in the third adventure, The Green Mill Murder) solving mysteries with her trusty pearl-handled gold-plated revolver; the Lady with the Golden Gun proving a far more interesting, intriguing and alluring character than the titular triple-nippled Man...

Arriving aboard ship back home in Melbourne, Miss Fisher is met by her equally modern trouser-suit wearing friend Dr Elizabeth Macmillan (known as "Dr Mac", played by Tammy Macintosh - Jool of Antipodean sci-fi adventure series Farscape), before booking in the swanky Hotel Windsor in the knowledge that Edmond Hogan, Premier of the state of Victoria (chronologically pinning the story down to between 1927 and 1929) is also staying at this upmarket establishment.  The wily Phryne has every intention of engineering an audience with Hogan (he's no Bogan), in order to block the release from prison of Murdoch Foyle, the man who murdered her sister, Janey.  In the meantime, she finds herself invited - along with her stuffy aunt Prudence Stanley (the always fabulous Miriam Margolyes) - to a soiree at the home of Lydia Andrews (Miranda Otto, the horse-joy Eowyn of Peter Jackson's 2001-2003 Lord of the Rings saga and currently rocking Aunt Zelda in the Netflix Chilling Adventures of Sabrina), only to discover that Lydia's husband John has been discovered dead on their bathroom floor.  Obviously wary of the methods and competence of the local police - including Detective Jack Robinson (Nathan Page) and his right-hand man Constable Hugh Collins (Hugo Johnstone-Burt) - she decides to investigate the matter herself.

Soon hooking up with her own personal Watson, Dot (Ashleigh Cummings) to investigate a web of mayhem, intrigue, cocaine smuggling and illicit backstreet abortions ('20s 'Stralia apparently having he same attitudes of modern day Norn Iron.  Backstreet's back, alright?), the Honourable Miss Fisher (pron: "Mees Feesher") soon seals herself a place in the great canon of iconic iconoclasts of the crime-fighting persuasion and setting the scenario for thirty three more episodic adventures and now a major motion picture.

I urge all to investigate.  Vital and charming, with a hint of Roaring Twenties art deco decadence.  Yes, this.  This, yes.

Don't Talk to Strange Men (Pat Jackson, 1962)

All alone, at the end of the lane...

By 1962, the UK's Bryanston Films consortium - founded by a post-Gainsborough, Gaumont and Ealing Sir Michael Balcon in partnership with other such luminaries as Tony Richardson, Julian Wintle and Maxwell Setton - was in the full flush of success, having released such cinematic classics as The Entertainer (1960) and A Taste of Honey (1961) from director Richardson's own Woodfall Films as well as Karel Reisz' seminal 1960 Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.  By 1962, the same year they would launch Arthur Dreifuss' adaptation of Brendan Behan's The Quare Fellow as well as Richardson's filmisation of Alan Sillitoe's script of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, they were presiding over an impressive roster of searing monochrome depictions of 1950s and early '60s life.

It was into this arena that they followed in the chilling footsteps of Hammer Productions' 1960 Cyril Frankel-helmed tale of rastopaedic impulses Never Take Sweets from a Stranger (for more on which, see here: http://psychtronickinematograph.blogspot.com/2015/09/never-take-sweets-from-stranger-1960.html ) with Don't Talk to Strange Men.

Packing its story into a brisk 65 minutes, the film has the feel of the similarly-lengthed Edgar Wallace Mystery Theatre quota-filling B-pictures of the era, and tells the tale of the teenage Jean Painter (played by the then 23 year old actress and model Christina Gregg) and her accidental entanglement in the web of grooming of an unseen sexual predator.

Opening on a storm-lashed night on a darkened lane, where a young blonde woman (Bernadette Woodman) is offered a lift from an unseen driver as thunder crashes in the heavens above with pathetic fallacy, and her corpse is discovered post-credits amid the hay of a barn by a group of children.  It is amid this febrile atmosphere of rural menace that we are introduced to young Jean, babysitting for her overworked publican brother in law Ron (Conrad Phillips) and looking after nephew little Timmy whilst her elder sister Marjorie is in hospital bearing their second spawn,  Jean's routine is like a well-oiled machine, helping out at the Chequers pub until 9 PM each evening, then walking to the bus stop on Harper's Lane to board the omnibus and deal with the plain-talking simplicity of gruff ticket inspector Molly (Dandy Nichols in a series of constantly amusing cameos) on the way home to her parents (Cyril Raymond and Gillian Lind) and spirited younger sister Ann (Janina Faye).  Already a veteran of this kind of material after Never Take Sweets from a Stranger, Faye had also made appearances in a number of other pioneering Hammer Horror classics, such as 1958's (Horror of) Dracula and 1960's The Two Faces of Dr Jekyll, and would feature in Steve Sekely's cinematic vandalism of John Wynham's classic The Day of the Triffids the following year.  As Ann, she gives a tremendous performance of precocious pomposity, chiding her countryman father as an "Assassin!" for bringing home a hare that he's shot with his rife ("Polishing that murder weapon!") and declaring that she has become a Buddhist and shall be writing a stern open letter to the master of the local foxhunting fraternity.

It is into this routine that the faceless killer (there's an episode of Wallander in that, i'm certain) inserts himself when one evening waiting for her bus Jean answers the ringing telephone in the public call box and finds herself speaking with a beguiling and wheedling male voice that compliments her lovely voice, insists that their connection was some caprice of destiny rather than random chance and asks if she'll be by the phone box tomorrow, same time again (and now I have the lyrics for 'I'll Keep it with Mine' stuck in my head...).  As the romantic and naive Jean returns home that evening full of strange feelings, her little sister guesses that some kind of tryst has taken place, but assumes it to have been with one of the patrons of Ron's pub, prompting this bit of conversation:

"But there were men, weren't there?"
"Yes, a few old corpses."
"How far gone?"
"About forty or so."

Now, an amusing bit of character work between two young girls it may be, but as someone who turns 41 the month after next I feel the need to resort to emojis and register my strongest 💀

Jean then confides in Ann about her assignation of the following evening with her unseen admirer, and paints an imagined image of a man with the hair of Cliff Richard, the clothing of Frank Sinatra and an E-type Jaguar.  As the intelligent Ann begins to grow concerned about her airy older sister's ethereal infatuation - and the body count of young women in the area, like entropy, increases - Jean continues to lurk by the phone box each night to receive his calls, even adopting the alias of Samantha as a name by which the oh so wrong Mr Right should call her as a kind of dual identity.

"I don't like to think of you all on your own in that lonely lane, being talked to by strange men."

As 'Samantha with the sexy voice' is enticed to meet up with this charming man in person the following night, the perilous clandestine assignation is put at risk when Mr Painter declares that recent events of a nocturnal nature mean that neither of his younger daughters are to go out on an evening (foiling not only Jean/Samantha's necromantic rendezvous, but also little Ann's aspirations of attending the local dance), the sisters conspire to pretend to go to the cinema together (in a sequence that gives us a nice glimpse of Beaconsfield high street by the famous studios) so they can both attend their desired destinations - a plan that pitches both girls into a terrifying and life-endangering evening (an ending which I shan't spoil for once, for anyone who may wish to seek it out) and a gut-punch of a final line.

A neat little exercise in unease, well directed by Jackson, this is a curio i'd recommend people seek out if they can.  But you probably shouldn't be guided by voices such as mine: I am a very strange man.

The Most Dangerous Game ([aka: The Hounds of Zaroff] Irving Pichel, Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1932)

They're coming!  They're in the trees!  The Hounds of Zaroff are hunting me...

Richard Connell's short story - known variously as both 'The Hounds of Zaroff' and 'The Most Dangerous Game' - has undergone a variety of permutations and adaptations over the years since it was published in Collier's magazine in 1924.  First produced in 1932 by the son-to-be King Kong combo of Ernest Schoedsack and Merian C. Cooper and co-directed by Schoedsack alongside Irving Pichel (in his directorial debut), it would be successively remade as A Game of Death by Robert Wise in 1945 (with the mad hunter Zaroff updated for the age as the Nazi Erich Kreiger), as Kill Or Be Killed in 1950 by Max Nosseck, and again in 1956 as Roy Boulting's Run for the Sun before being twisted into such shapes as the pseudonymous Arthur Byrd's The Suckers, Eddie Romero's The Woman Hunt, and George Schenck's Superbeast (all 1972).  The format of the hunter in search of human prey would find ample grounds for recycling in such pulp action/exploitation fare as Brian Trenchard-Smith's infamous Turkey Shoot (aka Blood Camp Thatcher, 1982), David A. Prior's Deadly Prey (1987) and John Woo's 1993 Jean-Claude Van Damme wham-bam Hard Target as well as being a pliable enough plot to metamorphose into howling lupine form for Paul Annett's (yes, Kochanski from Red Dwarf's dad) 1974 Amicus werewolf whodunnit The Beast Must Die.

As is often the case, however, the original stands above the later generations as the best version - and when that includes a Robert Wise movie then in the words of Bananarama we're really saying something.

We open to meet big game hunter Bob Rainsford (Joel McCrea in an early lead role, just after playing another stranded mariner alongside Dolres del Rio in King Vidor's Bird of Paradise) aboard his ship as they navigate dangerous and shark-infested waters around the coast of South America.  Discussing the photographs of his latest safari-style expeditions (much in the mode of the real life Schoedsack and Cooper, who had shot many pseudo-documentary films involving tropical wildlife such as 1927's Chang: A Story of the Wilderness), Rainsford's co-passenger Doc (Landers Stevens) questions the morality of the 'sport' of hunting live animals.

"I asked you if there would be as much sport in the game if you were the tiger instead of the hunter."

"Well, that's something i'll never have to decide.  Listen here you fellas - the world's divided into two kinds of people: the hunter and the hunted.  Luckily, i'm a hunter.  Nothing'll ever change that."

And so the fickle finger of fate descends to tap Rainsford hard upon his hubristic shoulder, as suddenly the ship develops that sinking feeling and capsizing all hands into the lonely sea.  As passengers and crew either drown or are picked off by selachian predators, it is Rainsford alone who manages to make his way to the shore of the nearest island - a forsaken jungle hell with only one mighty erection: a Spanish conquistador fortress occupied by the Russian exile Count Zaroff (Leslie Banks giving a barnstorming turn in his US film debut).

Zaroff courteously welcomes Rainsford as his guest, introducing him to fellow shipwreck survivors Martin and Eve Trowbridge (Robert Armstrong and Fay Wray, both soon to be reunited in the more iconic roles of Carl "'Twas beauty killed the beast" Denham and Ann Darrow in King Kong).  While Martin is a jovial - if slightly annoying - drunkard happy to take advantage of the Count's hospitality (especially his extensive drinks cabinet), Eve is more suspicious of Zaroff and his claims that he will soon have his only launch repaired and be able to convey the trio to the mainland, warning Rainsford in hushed tones that their fellow sailors have not been seen for days after being shown the Count's mysterious iron-doored Trophy Room.

Zaroff is delighted to have a fellow mighty hunter as his 'guest' of honour, Rainsford's reputation having preceded him even in this remote and wild locale.  The Count, saturnine, suave and Satanic, praises Rainsford's writings on the art of the hunt but confesses that over the years he had become disillusioned with the stalking of animals until his ennui was dispelled by arriving on this island and discovering "the most dangerous game".  The somewhat sinister undertones of this great house are reinforced by the silent but deadly presence of the Count's brutish and hulking henchman - the mute Cossack Ivan (the pioneering black actor Noble Johnson, who would play the role of Imhotep's Nubian servant in the same year's The Mummy as well as the tribal chief of Skull island in both King Kong and Son of Kong the following year).  Like an erect Ygor (now there's an image!) from Son of Frankenstein crossed with Morgan from The Old Dark House, Ivan radiates menace as he conveys the strandees to their rooms.  The atmosphere of dread as accentuated by the tapestry hanging above the staircase - a menacing satyr struck Saint Sebastian-style with arrows, carrying a half naked woman like a premonition of Walerian Borowczyk's The Beast (and though the lady in question was covered-up in the 1945 remake, we're gleefully pre-Hays Code here).

After Martin drunkenly demands the privilege of seeing Zaroff's sanctum sanctorum (the aforesaid Trophy Room) and disappears, Eve begs Bob to help her search for him - leading them to venture beyond the iron door to find a mounted display of severed human heads: the spoils of Zaroff's mad man hunts.  "Humans are such easy prey", as the daemonic Praetorius of From Beyond so wisely said.  Captured by the Count, Rainsford finds himself prepared to be the latest quarry in this game of death -

"I give them every consideration - good food, exercise - everything to get them in splendid shape... I give them hunting clothes, a woodsman's knife and a full day's start.  Why, I even wait until midnight to give them the full advantage of the dark.  And if one of them eludes me only 'til sunrise, he wins the game!"

Released into the jungle along with Eve to be the pawns in this "outdoor chess" match armed only with a single knife ("Your fangs and claws!"), Rainsford finds that this is no garden of Eden as Zaroff pursues the pair with his pack of gigantic baying hunting hounds (Great Danes dyed black and mostly shot from below to appear more colossal and menacing).  Darting across very familiar foliage (the jungle sets being the same as Kong's Skull Island, this film being shot contemporaneously, mostly at night Spanish Dracula style) the duo must become deadly prey and turn the tables upon their relentless and lethal opponent, who aims to satiate his post-killing of Bob arousal by taking Eve like a pack alpha taking a mate.

The best screen version of a classic story, The Most Dangerous Game is one of pre-Code talking cinema's oft-overlooked gems and comes highly recommended to any film fan who has not yet had the thrill of experiencing it.  Remember though, "The thrill is in the chase, never the capture!"

"Those animals I hunted - now I know how they felt!"