Tuesday's Overlooked Movies: Firecreek

FIRECREEK is another of those James Stewart Westerns I somehow never saw. That's even more surprising when you consider that Henry Fonda, another favorite, is also in it.

Stewart plays a farmer who is also the part-time sheriff of the little town of Firecreek. Fonda is the leader of a group of hired guns who stop over in the town on their way from one range war to another. Their horses need rest, and Fonda has a bullet hole in him that needs tending to. We never really find out how he got shot, but it doesn't matter. The implication is that it happened in one of those range wars. Fonda and his men aren't outlaws, and that distinction is important in his mind. They are, however, brutal, ruthless, and accustomed to taking whatever they want. Slowly but surely, they begin to terrorize the town. Stewart tries to keep a lid on things in hopes that the hired guns will just move on before any real trouble breaks out, but you just know that's not going to happen.

There's not really a lot of action in FIRECREEK until the latter part of the movie. There's plenty of slow-burn tension, though, and that leisurely build-up just makes the final eruption of violence that much more effective. The cast is great. Fonda's fellow gunmen are played by Gary Lockwood, Jack Elam, Morgan Woodward, and James Best. The townspeople include Dean Jagger, Jay C. Flippen, and John Qualen. Inger Stevens plays the hotelkeeper's granddaughter who develops a tentative romance with Fonda when she tends to his bullet wound.

Stewart is good, but it's a role he could have played in his sleep. Fonda's character is more intriguing. He's not completely evil, like his character in ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST, but he's certainly not the flawed but still stalwart hero he is in so many of his movies. Watching these two iconic actors work together is a real joy, as you'd probably expect.

Not surprisingly, in many ways FIRECREEK plays like a big-budget episode of GUNSMOKE. It was written by Calvin Clements and directed by Vincent McEveety, who worked on many episodes of that TV series. You've also got Morgan Woodward and Louise Latham in the cast, and sometimes it seemed like they were in GUNSMOKE almost as much as James Arness. I can easily see Matt Dillon riding into Firecreek on his way back to Dodge City from somewhere and helping the local lawman put a stop to the hired guns' reign of terror. But then it wouldn't have been a movie, would it?

FIRECREEK's a good one. I enjoyed it a lot.

Starless Midnight - Wayne D. Dundee

On a stormy night in Nebraska, a beautiful young woman in a nightgown runs out in front of a pickup driven by ex-cop and current bar owner Chance Smith, and that sets in motion an action-packed series of events in Wayne D. Dundee's new e-book STARLESS MIDNIGHT. Throw in a couple of troubled marriages, a wealthy older man feuding with his son, an outburst of violence, some sultry sex, and you've got a novelette that reads like a vintage Gold Medal novel in miniature. This is an excellent hardboiled yarn and definitely a one-sitting read because of Dundee's sure hand in pacing the action. Great fun, and highly recommended. You can buy it on Amazon here.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Thrilling Wonder Stories, April 1940

A story about a giant alien dinosaur rampaging through Washington D.C.? I'd read that. I don't know if that's actually one of the stories in this issue, but if it's not, it should have been. What I do know is that inside there are stories by Henry Kuttner (two, in fact, one of them in collaboration with Arthur K. Barnes), Oscar J. Friend, Ward Hawkins, Robert Moore Williams, Don Tracy, and Stanton A. Coblentz. Familiar names to me, but with the exception of Kuttner and to a lesser extent Friend and Williams, I haven't really read much by any of them.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Western Story, January 7, 1939

I like these offbeat covers that show up from time to time on WESTERN STORY. I don't know who painted this one. It's signed, but I can't make out the name. Inside we have a couple of big names in Luke Short and Tom Roan, along with lesser-known authors Jay Lucas, Crawford Sullivan, and Howard J. Perry. Plus a poem by S. Omar Barker. Probably an entertaining issue.

Forgotten Books: Pleasure Ground - Orrie Hitt

It had been a while since I'd read anything by our old pal Orrie Hitt, so I figured it was time. PLEASURE GROUND was published originally by Kozy Books in 1961. It's not one of the novels that's been reprinted in recent years, although it seems to me to be a good candidate.

Hitt wrote a number of books set on farms, including this one. Bert Forbes is a typical Hitt narrator/protagonist: a big galoot, not overly bright, not burdened with an excess of morals, but deep down a fairly decent guy. He's been hired by farmer Flint Collins to paint Collins's house and barn. Collins is a brutal skinflint who pays all his help cheaply and treats them badly, including his teenage daughter Norma. He's maybe the most despicable villain I've run across so far in Hitt's work.

Things seem to look up a bit for Bert when he meets beautiful Lucy Martin, who owns the farm next to the Collins place, and in true soft-core fashion he first encounters her when she's sunbathing nude next to a swimming hole in the local creek. But then Bert's sleazy ex-wife Emily shows up with a tragic story, and Collins, a widower, brings home a new wife, a beautiful, amoral bitch named Sharon, and things start to get very complicated and messy, including an unwanted pregnancy (a staple in Hitt's books), blackmail, and finally murder.

Read enough of Hitt's books and the nuts and bolts of his various formulas really start to show, and I've reached that point. However, even when you know what he's doing, he has a way of dragging you in and making you care what's going to happen to his characters. I think it's the sheer passion that he brought to his work. He believed in it, so the reader does, too. Although by all accounts he had a happy home life and a reasonably successful career, he knew the desperation of people pushed to the brink, sometimes by their own choices and sometimes by a cruel fate they can't control, and he conveyed those emotions with a lot of power.

PLEASURE GROUND is a good example of that. It's not without its flaws—it seems to me to go on a little too long, stretching out not quite enough plot for its wordage—but I certainly enjoyed it, all the way to the seemingly tacked-on happy ending that Hitt employed in most of his books. People have speculated that such endings were an editorial requirement, but I'm not so sure. I think Hitt believed in them, as much as in all the angst that comes before them. If you're a fan of his work, this one is well worth reading.

As a side note, another Hitt novel called PLEASURE GROUND was published two years earlier by Bedside Books, but I don't think it's the same novel. The description of it given by an Internet bookseller doesn't match the plot of the one I read except in its rural setting. But I've never seen a copy of the earlier book, only a scan of its cover, so I don't really know.

Big Boys Don't Cry - Tom Kratman

Tom Kratman is another contemporary science fiction author whose work I've been wanting to try. I have several of his novels on my shelves. But they're all so long I haven't been able to work up the mental energy to dive into them. That's why I was glad to see this new e-book novella. Stories like this are perfect for trying new authors.

Kratman is known for his military SF, and BIG BOYS DON'T CRY is solidly in that sub-genre. It's the story of a battle tank operated by a sentient AI known as Magnolia, or Maggie for short. Huge, heavily armored, and sporting dozens of weapons, Maggie fights alongside other sentient war machines in battles across the galaxy against a number of different alien races. She's badly damaged in one of them, and while she's waiting to be "salvaged" by her human masters, Kratman uses a series of flashbacks to cover her career as a Ratha fighting machine, including her initial programming.

It's while this is going on that the reader begins to realize not everything is what it appears to be. The story actually becomes pretty poignant and packed with a lot more emotion than you might expect a tale about a mechanized, computerized killer to be. It all leads up to a dark but very effective ending.

I didn't know if I was going to like this one at first. It seemed a little heavy on mindless action to me. However, that was just Kratman fooling me, gradually drawing me into the yarn he was spinning. I wound up thinking that BIG BOYS DON'T CRY is an excellent SF novella. I still want to read Kratman's novels, but who knows when I'll have a big enough block of time to do that.

BIG BOYS DON'T CRY on Amazon.

Tuesday's Overlooked TV: The Bible

This ten-hour miniseries aired on the History Channel a couple of years ago and got high ratings, but we didn't see it until now, qualifying it—sort of—as overlooked, I suppose. I grew up in a family of staunch Baptists and went to Sunday school nearly every week for years and years, so I was curious to see how much I remembered. Turns out, nearly everything in the series was familiar to me.

The first half covers the Old Testament, starting with Noah, and since there's a lot of ground to cover the pace moves pretty fast through Abraham, Sodom and Gomorrah, Moses and the flight from Egypt, Joshua and the battle of Jericho, Samson and Delilah, David and Bathsheba, Solomon, and so on. One of the complaints about the series that I read on-line is that too much was left out. I'd say maybe too much was left in for the time that was allotted, because it seemed that no sooner did one storyline get started good than there would be a graphic on the screen reading "40 Years Later". Still, there's some good stuff here, mostly notably for me some sword-fightin' ninja angels in the Sodom and Gomorrah section. In fact, all the angels in this series are pretty much badasses, which I like. (Something else that was roundly criticized on-line, by the way.)

The second half deals with the New Testament and focuses primarily on Jesus's life, and I think it was a little better because of that ability to delve more deeply into one story. A Portuguese actor named Diogo Morgado plays Jesus and does a fine job, I thought. (There are no actors in this mini-series you've ever heard of with the exception of Roma Downey, who was also one of the producers with her husband Mark Burnett, the SURVIVOR guy.)

The production values are pretty high throughout. Everything looks right. The special effects aren't spectacular, but they work. Despite all that time spent in Sunday school, I'm no theologian, so arguing about what got put in, what got left out, and how this particular event was interpreted doesn't mean a whole lot to me. I thought that overall THE BIBLE was both entertaining and moving, although I wouldn't put it in the top rank of Biblical movies. In fact, I'm not sure what films actually are in the top rank of Biblical movies. THE TEN COMMANDMENTS? THE ROBE? It's been too long since I've seen any. I don't have any idea how they'd hold up.

Monday Morning Digest Magazine: Michael Shayne Mystery Magazine, September 1956

I'm trying in this series to concentrate on issues that have some personal meaning to me. In this case, MSMM was certainly important to me, although about twenty years later. But this is the first issue, and as it happens, I once had a copy of this one. Notice that it's called MICHAEL SHAYNE MYSTERY MAGAZINE, rather than the tougher and more laconic MIKE SHAYNE MYSTERY MAGAZINE. The first six issues carried that title before it was shortened. Sam Merwin Jr., not that far removed from his pulp editing and writing days, was the editor, as he would be again years later when he started buying stories from me, and he also wrote the Shayne novelette in this issue under the Brett Halliday house-name. MSMM was a fine magazine, and I'm sure you'll be seeing more covers from it in this series.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Adventure, September 3, 1921

ADVENTURE's covers during this era tended to be simple but pretty effective. That's certainly the case here. We don't know where those Viking ships are going, but there'll be blood spilled when they get there. In the meantime, the authors in this issue include W.C. Tuttle, Rafael Sabatini, Arthur D. Howden-Smith, Captain Dingle, Thomson Burtis, and Stephen Chalmers. Hard to beat a line-up like that.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Blue Ribbon Western, October 1937

Yet another appearance by a trio we've seen before: the Cowboy, the Geezer, and the Gun-Totin' Redhead. She doesn't look quite as angry in this painting as she does in some. The contents look pretty good, with stories by Eugene Cunningham, J.E. Grinstead, Oscar Schisgall, and Jack Bertin, who if I recall correctly was related to Peter Germano, better known under the pseudonym Barry Cord.