Movies I've Missed Until Now: D-Day, the Sixth of June (1956)

Regular readers of this blog may recall that I like war movies, and I watched a lot of them on TV when I was a kid. But somehow, I never saw D-DAY, THE SIXTH OF JUNE. Now that I’ve watched it, I can kind of understand that. The title should have drawn my attention, but maybe I sensed that this film is only indirectly about D-Day and is barely a war movie at all.

What it is, in fact, is a romance movie told mainly in flashback. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, so I was certainly willing to give it a try. The story opens on a ship the night of June 5, 1944, as a combined special force of American, British, and Canadian troops are headed for Normandy to carry out a commando raid in the hope of knocking out a big gun overlooking the beaches where the regular troops will land a few hours later. Commanding the force is a British officer played by Richard Todd. One of the American officers is played by Robert Taylor. And there’s a connection between them because, you see, they’re both in love with the same girl they met, at separate times, a couple of years earlier in London. Cue the flashbacks.

The movie spends a lot more time on the relationship between Taylor and Dana Wynter, who plays the young English woman, than it does on Wynter’s romance with Todd. We also get a couple of subplots about Wynter’s father, a brigadier general who was wounded at Dunkirk but wants to get back into action, and Taylor’s commanding officer, who’s also gung-ho to the point of recklessness because he wants a promotion. Wynter’s father is played by the great British character actor John Williams, and Taylor’s commanding officer is played by the always top-notch Edmond O’Brien.

After a lot of well-done romance and British homefront scenes, we finally shift back to Todd, Taylor, and the rest of the commandos landing and going after the German gun emplacement, and for ten or fifteen minutes, D-DAY, THE SIXTH OF JUNE actually is a war movie, and decently done, too, although the filming is staged on a very small scale so we can’t see how few people are actually involved. This isn’t a cast of thousands, by any means. But it’s an exciting and satisfying battle.

Followed by a terrible and unsatisfying ending. No spoilers here, but I didn’t like it.

The movie looks good, in a mid-Fifties, major studio way, and the cast is also a good one. That said, I’ve never been a big fan of Robert Taylor. He’s one of the most dour-looking leading men I’ve ever seen. That works okay when he’s playing, say, a world-weary gunfighter in a Western, but it’s hard to like him in this move. It doesn’t help that he’s playing a character who’s basically a heel all the way through. I like Richard Todd and he’s plenty stalwart when he has to do something, which isn’t often enough. And Dana Wynter, good grief, she was a beautiful woman! And she turns in a decent performance, too, in a role where it would be easy to be too overwrought. The supporting cast features Jerry Paris in a fairly meaty role, and if you look quick, you can spot Dabbs Greer and Parley Baer, too.

It's probably a good thing I never tried to watch this when I was a kid. All the smooching and violin music would have had me switching the channel or heading outside to play. Watching it now, I thought D-DAY, THE SIXTH OF JUNE was a somewhat okay movie for what it is, but for war movie fans, it’s probably best for completists.

Review: Three Must Die! - Dan Gregory (Lorenz Heller)

Dinny Powell, the narrator/protagonist of Lorenz Heller’s novel THREE MUST DIE!, is a former journalist who’s living a quiet life as the publisher of a shopping guide in the small city of Rocky Hill, New Jersey. One peaceful Sunday afternoon, he’s out fishing in a creek with a couple of buddies of his, one a lawyer and the other a banker, when they hear a terrible car crash nearby and hurry to investigate. When they arrive on the scene, they find that the richest man in the county has been killed in the wreck, and the man’s lawyer is wandering around in a daze. A few minutes later, the members of a teenage motorcycle gang show up, too, and Dinny gets in a little scrap with one of them.

The wreck turns out to cause serious problems for Dinny, because a briefcase belonging to the rich guy’s lawyer should have been in the car but is missing, and in that briefcase is the brand-new will made by the tycoon. The cops think Dinny has the will, everybody affected by it thinks Dinny has the will, and so does a mysterious blackmailer who’s willing to kill to get what he wants.

THREE MUST DIE! is an excellent medium-boiled mystery that was published as a paperback original by Graphic Books in 1956 under the pseudonym Dan Gregory, the only time Heller used that name. The cover art is by Roy Lance. There are enough twists in the plot to keep things interesting, but Heller’s strong suit was his characters, and they’re all well-rounded and compelling, especially Dinny. His on-again, off-again romance with the girl who works on the shopping paper with him and wants to become a famous reporter is really well-handled. As a mystery, the clues are all there and I figured out who the killer was before I got to the end, but that didn’t take away from my enjoyment of the very suspenseful climax.

THREE MUST DIE! has just been reprinted by Stark House in a very nice double volume with another of Heller’s novels, NIGHT NEVER ENDS. It’s available in e-book and paperback, and I give it a high recommendation. Lorenz Heller is just a thoroughly entertaining writer of crime and mystery fiction.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Short Stories, December 25, 1933

That's a nice evocative cover by Frederick Witton, an artist whose work I'm not familiar with, on this issue of SHORT STORIES. It's dated December 25, and Christmas Day was on Monday in 1933 (yes, I looked it up), so the unsold copies of this one were probably pulled off the stands on Tuesday that week. Although who wouldn't want a pulp with stories by H. Bedford-Jones, James B. Hendryx (a Corporal Downey yarn), William Merriam Rouse, George Allan England, Hapsburg Liebe, Clifford Knight, and Berton E. Cook? Well, it was the depths of the depression, after all, so I'm sure there were a lot of people who didn't have a quarter to spare, but enough people kept buying SHORT STORIES to keep it in business for a couple of decades and more after this.

A Middle of the Night Music Post: End of the Line - The Traveling Wilburys

They played some snippets from this song on a recent episode of THE SIMPSONS. Yes, I still watch THE SIMPSONS. I liked it, didn't recognize it at all, and so I had to look it up. I'd heard of The Traveling Wilburys, of course, but I'm not sure I ever heard any of their music. But after listening to this one all the way through, I love it. Some of the lyrics speak to me, as they say. The ones about being old, of course, but how you should keep going to the end of the line. That's my plan.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Wild West Weekly, November 28, 1936

I came across this issue of WILD WEST WEEKLY, one of my favorite Western pulps, on the Internet Archive, and since the lead novella is a Thanksgiving-themed story, I read it immediately so I could post about it on Thanksgiving Day. You can read my thoughts about it here. Now I’ve read the rest of the issue, or most of it, anyway. The cover is by R.G. Harris, who did a lot of excellent covers for WILD WEST WEEKLY. I don’t think this is one of his better ones, but it’s okay.

George C. Henderson is almost completely forgotten today, but I’ve read several of his stories and think he was a good Western pulpster. “Double Cross at the Double Crescent” uses the old plot of the protagonist, in this case a drifting cowboy, being mistaken for someone else, leading to a bunch of action including an attempted lynching. It’s a well-written story and Henderson includes a nice twist in the plot, so I enjoyed this one quite a bit.

Allan R. Bosworth was an even better writer. For WILD WEST WEEKLY, he did a long-running series about muleskinner Shorty Masters and his sidekick, a gunfighter known as the Sonora Kid. In “Mix-Up in Mescalero”, Shorty’s freight outfit gets drafted into an effort to move a gold shipment in secret so that outlaws won’t be able to steal it, but of course, things go wrong and Shorty and the Kid have to burn plenty of powder to set things right. One nice touch about this series is that Shorty is a fan of classical music and has named his mules after famous composers. I’ve read a couple of stories in this series and liked them.

The stories about good-guy outlaw Sonny Tabor, written by Paul S. Powers under the name Ward M. Stevens, were some of the most popular in WILD WEST WEEKLY and numbered among their fans none other than Elmer Kelton. In “Sonny Tabor at Broken Gun Ranch”, Sonny protects a ranching family from rustlers and discovers who’s really behind all the trouble. That’s it as far as the plot goes, but Powers provides plenty of well-written action scenes and Sonny Tabor is a very likable protagonist. I can see why it was a popular series. I’ve read two of the stories and enjoyed both of them.

Claude Rister wrote a lot for the Western pulps under his own name and was also one of several authors to use the pseudonym Buck Billings from time to time. I haven’t read much by him, but I’ve liked what I’ve read. His short story in this issue, “Dynamite and Water”, has two young cattlemen trying to keep the local range hog from running them off. Rister writes well and this is a pretty good yarn, but it suffers from a rather limp ending that could have been a lot more dramatic. Still good enough that I’d be happy to give anything else by Claude Rister a try.

This issue wraps up with the novelette “Texas Triggers Sling Lead” by Walker A. Tompkins. Tompkins was the most prolific contributor of linked novelettes that could then be fixed up into novels. I’m pretty sure he did that with the Texas Triggers stories, but at this point, I don’t know which novel they became. And since this story falls right in the middle of the series, I decided not to read it. I figure that sooner or later I’ll come across the whole thing in novel form. If any of you know the title of the book cobbled together from the Texas Triggers stories, please let me know.

Overall, this is a good solid issue of WILD WEST WEEKLY. Not what I would consider above average, but entertaining and easy to read. The stories are action-packed and full of colorful “yuh mangy polecat” dialogue, and sometimes that’s just what a dagnabbed ol’ pelican like me wants to pass the time.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: The Rat Patrol: Desert Masquerade - David King (Howard Pehrson)

When I mentioned the novels based on the Rat Patrol TV series a while back, I said that there were five of them. Well, I was wrong. There were actually six Rat Patrol novels, and I’ve now read that elusive sixth one, DESERT MASQUERADE.

Those of you old enough to remember the TV show probably recall the set-up as well. Four commandos (three Americans and a Brit) run around North Africa in a couple of jeeps equipped with .50 caliber machine guns, harassing Rommel’s Afrika Corps in general and one officer, Captain Hans Dietrich, in particular. DESERT MASQUERADE varies quite a bit from that typical scenario and is more of an espionage yarn, with the four members of the Rat Patrol operating in disguise behind enemy lines as they try to obtain some vital information that will allow the Americans to break a stand-off with a German armored column commanded by Captain Dietrich.

For the most part this novel is a comedy of errors as the author cuts back and forth between the Rat Patrol, the rest of the American force, and the Germans under Dietrich. Everybody thinks they know things they really don’t. Most of the mistakes result from false information being sold to both sides by a group of Arab spies. Everything finally works out so that the Rat Patrol emerges triumphant, but hey, you knew that going in.

I don’t know much about the author, David King, except that his real name was Howard Pehrson and that in addition to five Rat Patrol novels, he wrote a few other war novels and some Westerns as King and also contributed a couple of early books to the long-running adult Western series Slocum, as by Jake Logan, including the first book in the series. DESERT MASQUERADE kind of pokes along in places but ultimately is pretty entertaining if you’re a fan of the TV series, as I was -- and am, since I’ve watched a few episodes from the DVD set Livia gave me for our anniversary last month and so far they hold up pretty well. The music cues seem a little too dramatic and overdone now, but that’s Sixties TV for you. The location filming, with Spain standing in for North Africa, is spectacular. I’m enjoying the show so far and expect to continue doing so.

(This post originally appeared on September 14, 2007. I lost those DVDs I mentioned a few months later in the Fire of '08, but I've since picked up the entire series on DVD. Haven't watched a one of them, though. Not sure what's wrong with me.)

Review: The Daughter of Genghis Khan - John York Cabot (David Wright O'Brien)

The narrator/protagonist of David Wright O’Brien’s novella “The Daughter of Genghis Khan” is Dr. Cliff Saunders, an American physician who is part of a humanitarian mission aiding the Nationalist Chinese during their war against the Japanese. Since the January 1942 issue of FANTASTIC ADVENTURES, the pulp in which this yarn originally appeared as the subject of H.W. MacCauley's dramatic cover, was actually on the newsstands during December 1941, that means the story was written well before the attack on Pearl Harbor during the period in which the United States was technically a neutral nation.

But neutrality doesn’t mean much during the chaos of war, so when Japanese forces overrun the field hospital in which Saunders and beautiful redheaded nurse Linda Barret are working, they’re both taken prisoner. At least they’re not executed outright. In fact, the Japanese officer in charges wants to deliver them to a neutral area where they’ll be safe. However, before that can happen, a group of Mongol bandits counterattack, and Saunders and Linda find themselves taken to an isolated village in the mountains that’s ruled by a beautiful young woman who claims to be the daughter of Genghis Khan. Not a descendant, mind you, but the actual daughter of the great Mongol conqueror.

That claim is part of the slight fantasy element in this story. It had to have some sort of off-trail bent to the plot, since this was FANTASTIC ADVENTURES, after all, but for the most part, “The Daughter of Genghis Khan” is a pretty straightforward World War II yarn, as Saunders and Linda are forced to choose a side in the bloody conflict between the Japanese and the Mongol bandits. It’s pretty easy to figure out which side they’ll wind up on, of course, but that doesn’t detract from the breakneck action and the colorful characters and setting. This story reminded me a little of Milton Caniff’s immortal TERRY AND THE PIRATES comic strip, and that’s a good thing.

David Wright O’Brien’s writing career was a short one. His first story was published early in 1940, and he was killed while serving in the Army Air Force in 1944 when the bomber he was in was shot down over Berlin. But he published dozens of stories during that handful of years, most of them in the Ziff-Davis pulps AMAZING STORIES and FANTASTIC ADVENTURES. I think it’s safe to say he was a rising star in the science fiction and fantasy fields. “The Daughter of Genghis Khan” was published under his pseudonym John York Cabot because there were two more stories by him in that issue of FANTASTIC ADVENTURES, one under his real name and one under his other pseudonym Duncan Farnsworth. (O’Brien was the nephew of Farnsworth Wright, the legendary editor of WEIRD TALES.) I’ve read several of his stories and really enjoyed all of them so far. His prose is clean and fast-moving with a very nice touch for action.

You can find the issue of FANTASTIC ADVENTURES containing this story here, and it’s available in other places on the Internet, as well. I need to read more by O’Brien, and I hope I manage to do so soon.

Review: One For My Dame - Jack Webb

ONE FOR MY DAME was published originally in hardcover by Holt, Rinehart & Winston in 1961 and reprinted in paperback by Avon (with a truly terrible cover) in 1964. It’s is the second novel in the recent double volume of Jack Webb’s stand-alone mystery and suspense yarns published by Stark House. I really enjoyed the first half of this book, THE DEADLY COMBO, so I had high hopes for ONE FOR MY DAME, and I wasn’t disappointed.

Rick Jackson is the owner of a pet shop in Los Angeles and leads a peaceful life with his pets, a goofy Great Dane, a hyperactive spider monkey, and a foul-mouthed mynah bird. However, Rick’s life takes a decidedly non-peaceful turn when he stops in a local watering hole one evening for a drink and finds himself sitting next to a very beautiful but very drunk redhead. He takes her back to his apartment over the pet store, but Rick is a fundamentally decent guy and doesn’t take advantage of her condition. He lets her sleep it off instead, and the next morning he puts her in a cab. He figures that’s the last he’ll see of her.

But it may be the last anybody sees of her, because she goes missing, and as it turns out, she’s the daughter of a prominent politician who’s been investigating the Mob. And Rick, as one of the last people to see her, suddenly has cops and gangsters both on his tail, as everybody wants to get their hands on something important the girl had in her possession. Rick’s problem is that he doesn’t know what it is or where it might be, but that’s not going to stop people from trying to kill him.

Hey, I can think of at least two series about hardboiled, two-fisted accountants, so why not a hardboiled, two-fisted pet store owner? Especially considering the fact that Rick has some pretty dark stuff in his background, as we find out while events unfold in this novel. ONE FOR MY DAME is one of those books that goes along in a pretty breezy, light-hearted fashion—until suddenly it doesn’t. And it’s a testament to Webb’s ability as a writer that both elements work extremely well. This is a fast-moving, very entertaining novel that I really enjoyed. THE DEADLY COMBO/ONE FOR MY DAME is available in e-book and paperback editions, and if you like smart, well-written crime fiction, I give it a high recommendation.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Black Mask, September 1933

What would 20 cents buy in 1933? Well, it would buy a lot of things I suppose, but one possible answer is that it would buy an issue of BLACK MASK with stories by Erle Stanley Gardner, Frederick Nebel, Raoul Whitfield, W.T. Ballard, Roger Torrey, and Eugene Cunningham. That's just a spectacular group of authors. Cunningham is best remembered as a Western author, but he wrote quite a few hardboiled yarns, too. His story in this issue is the first in a series about hotel detective Cleve Corby. Nebel's story is part of his Kennedy and McBride series, Gardner's features the phantom crook Ed Jenkins, Ballard writes about Hollywood troubleshooter Bill Lennox, Torrey's story is about policeman Dal Prentice, and Whitfield's is the first of two about private eye Dion Davies. Several of the stories from this issue have been reprinted, and I'm sure they're well worth seeking out. By the way, the cover of this issue is by J.W. Schlaikjer, who did quite a few covers for BLACK MASK during this era.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Exciting Western, January 1948

It’s been too long since I’ve read an issue of EXCITING WESTERN. This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy. I think the cover is by A. Leslie Ross, but it also looks to me like it might be by H.W. Scott. So I’m hesitant to identify it as the work of either artist. I’m hoping some of you may be able to provide a definitive answer. Whoever painted it, it’s a pretty good cover.

I’ve enjoyed W.C. Tuttle’s Tombstone and Speedy series ever since I started reading it. The novella in this issue, “Strangers in El Segundo”, finds our eccentric range detective duo in the cowtown of the title, and once again, they’ve been fired by their exasperated boss at the Cattleman’s Association. That unfortunate circumstance doesn’t last long, however, as it just so happens the owner of the local bank has written to the Association asking for help, and Tombstone and Speedy are rehired. But wouldn’t you know it, the banker is murdered before they can talk to him and find out why he needed a pair of detectives. That sets off an apparently unrelated chain of events including a stagecoach holdup, an explosion, a kidnapping, and more murders. Tuttle was great at packing these yarns with plot despite their relatively short length. Tombstone and Speedy unravel everything and bring the villains to justice, of course, after some excellent action scenes and plenty of amusing dialogue. This is one of the few comedy Western series I like, because it’s not all comedy. The stories always feature action and mystery and colorful characters, and “Strangers in El Segundo” is no exception.

Hal White is a forgotten author these days, although he turned out dozens of stories for the Western, detective, and air war pulps. I’d read one story by him before and didn’t like it, but his novelette in this issue, “Powder on the Pecos” is very good. It starts out with a stagecoach robbery and moves on to be a story about a young rancher being framed as a rustler by the local cattle baron. The plot is very traditional, but White supplies a mildly entertaining plot twist and has a nice touch with the plentiful action scenes. I was pleasantly surprised by this one.

Johnston McCulley is always a dependable author, of course. This January 1948 issue was on the newsstands during December 1947, so McCulley’s story “Undercover Santa Claus” is very appropriate. It’s a heartwarming tale in which an outlaw risks his life to help out the children of an old friend. Most readers will have a pretty good idea what’s going to happen in this one, but that doesn’t make it any less enjoyable.

I’ve always enjoyed T.W. Ford’s stories (he wrote hundreds of ’em for the Western, sports, and detective pulps), and his novelette in this issue, “Man-Bait for a Gun Trap” is no exception. In this yarn, a former deputy goes undercover to infiltrate an outlaw town and rescue the brother of the girl he loves. This story is almost all hardboiled, well-written action, but Ford also manages to make the characters interesting, especially the protagonist, who gave up packing a badge and has to learn how to handle a gun left-handed since his right arm got shot up and crippled. The boss of the outlaw town, who seems to have been modeled on Lionel Barrymore, is pretty good, too. This is just an excellent story all the way around, and I really enjoyed it.

Chuck Martin’s short story “Tanglefoot” is almost as good. This is the first in a short, three-story series about Jim “Tanglefoot” Bowen, another former deputy who has to learn how to cope with a handicap, in his case a leg that never healed right after bullets broke a couple of bones in it. Bowen has retired from being a lawman and makes his living as a cobbler and range detective, but he also helps out the local sheriff from time to time, a situation complicated by the fact that the sheriff is in love with the same girl as Bowen. The two of them team up to solve a mystery and round up some outlaws, including some of the men responsible for crippling Bowen, and Martin spins the yarn in his usual straightforward, fast-paced prose. He even throws in some frontier forensics! Bowen would have made a great character for novels, and I’m sorry there are only three stories about him. I think I have the other two, so I’m looking forward to reading them.

Tex Mumford was a house-name, so there’s no telling who wrote the short story “Powerful Hombre” in this issue, but it’s another good one. It’s a lighthearted tale but not an outright comedy about a cowboy who’s too big and strong for his own good. He doesn’t know his own strength, as the old saying goes, and that gets into trouble, as when he encounters a bank robber in this yarn. This is a minor story, but it’s well-written, moves right along, and I found reading it to be a pleasant experience.

I don’t know anything about Leo Charles except that he published four stories in the late Forties, three of them in Columbia Western pulps. “Remember the Knife” in this issue is his own credit in a Thrilling Group pulp. It’s the third story in this issue with a protagonist who’s handicapped. I doubt if this was an intentional theme, but who knows. In this case, the fellow has a bad leg because a horse fell on him when, as a young outlaw, he was trying to make a getaway. He’s gone straight, and nobody in the town where he runs a stable knows about his past. He has an adopted son who also has a crippled leg and needs an operation, so he tries to get the money for it by using his uncanny skill with a knife. Unfortunately, some of his old outlaw compadres show up, and so does a U.S. Marshal. I wasn’t sure I was going to like this one at first. The writing isn’t as good as in the other stories in this issue. But the author won me over with his characters and the genuine suspense the story generates. This is another good one.

And this is a fine issue of EXCITING WESTERN overall, with a solid Tombstone and Speedy yarn and great yarns from Ford and Martin. I was a little disappointed when I realized this issue didn’t have a Navajo Tom Raine story in it, since I really like that series, too, but I wound up thinking it’s one of the best issues of this pulp that I’ve read. If you have a copy, it’s well worth your reading time.