Tuesday's Overlooked Movies: The Last Wagon

I've mentioned before that I appreciate Richard Widmark as an actor more now than I did when I was a kid. He's the star of another of those Westerns that I missed somehow, THE LAST WAGON, and does a fine job in a pretty hardboiled role.

He plays an outlaw known as Comanche Todd, so called because he was raised by the Comanche after he was the only survivor from a massacre. As THE LAST WAGON opens, he's on the run from the law, charged with murder.

It's not long before he's captured by a brutal sheriff who plans to take him back to hang. There seems to be some personal history between the two of them, and that comes into play later on in the plot. The two of them encounter a wagon train that's on its way through Apache country, and sure enough the wagons are attacked. By a fluke, there are about half a dozen survivors, including Todd, and since he's the only one with any experience, it falls to him to get the others through to safety.

On that simple storyline hangs quite a bit of moral ambiguity and complexity. It's a bit of a "Grand Hotel" plot with an assortment of characters, each with his or her own back-story. There's some romance along the way, as Widmark's character falls for an immigrant woman played by Felicia Farr, and a lot more action including an encounter with the U.S. Cavalry and some big explosions before the true climax comes in a tense courtroom scene.

As I mentioned above, Widmark is excellent as Comanche Todd, and the rest of the cast, which includes Nick Adams from THE REBEL and Tommy Rettig from LASSIE, is pretty good, too. The movie looks great, with a lot of long shots of spectacular Arizona scenery. It was directed by Delmer Daves, never a particular favorite of mine but a director who made some pretty good films anyway, and co-written by James Edward Grant, who who scripted quite a few films for John Ford. THE LAST WAGON is a good film. I never quite got caught up in it the way I thought I might, but I still think it's worth watching.

It also serves as an example of how times have really changed. Talking about the Comanche girl he married when she was fifteen, Widmark says, "With girls and horses, the younger you break 'em in, the better." Any character with a line of dialogue like that in a movie these days would be a despicable villain instead of the hero.

Monday Morning Digest Magazine: Manhunt, January 1953

This is the first issue of the iconic crime fiction magazine, and it's also an issue I used to own. I read it about twenty years ago. And what an issue it is, with part one of a serial by Mickey Spillane and stories by William Irish (Cornell Woolrich), Kenneth Millar (better known as Ross Macdonald), a Shell Scott story by Richard S. Prather, Evan Hunter, and Frank Kane. Oddly enough, considering that all-star line-up, the story I remember liking the best was a novelette by the now largely forgotten Floyd Mahannah. But here's what really interests me about this issue now: there's another story, and it's by none other than Charles Beckman Jr., also known as Charles Boeckman, still alive, still writing, and a pulp legend I'm proud to call my friend, something that never would have entered my mind when I read this issue all those years ago.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Adventure, September 1940

Gorilla with a rifle! Paging Mark Finn! Behind that distinctive cover is what seems to be a good issue of one of the great pulps, with stories by Georges Surdez, Joel Townsley Rogers, Tom Roan, Dale Clark, and an installment of the serial by Luke Short that became the novel BARREN LAND SHOWDOWN (Mounties vs. Nazis, if I recall correctly; it's been a long time since I read it). I'm not familiar with Brian O'Brien, who wrote the lead novel, but I'm sure it's good, too. Not many bad stories got published in ADVENTURE.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Texas Rangers, August 1938

Not a great cover on this issue of TEXAS RANGERS, but the Jim Hatfield novel "Brand of the Lawless" is a good one. It's one of three Hatfield novels by J. Edward Leithead, who brings his own distinctive style to the series. For a long time I didn't know who wrote this novel, along with "Gun Harvest" and "Riders of the Shadows", but I knew they were all by the same person. I used to refer to him as "the Coltman author", because of his habit of using the word "Coltman" instead of "gunman". I believe it was Jim Griffin who came across that word in a story under Leithead's name and tipped me off to it, and then when I read several of Leithead's stories I knew he had to be "the Coltman author" because of a number of other phrases he used frequently that also cropped up in those three Hatfield novels. This sort of research fascinates me, although I understand why most people wouldn't care about such obscure stuff. This issue of TEXAS RANGERS also has a Long Sam Littlejohn story in it, a back-up series that I also enjoy.

Forgotten Books: Quest of the Golden Ape - Ivar Jorgensen and Adam Chase

There's some question as to who actually wrote this novel, which was originally published as a serial in the January, February, and March 1957 issues of the science fiction digest magazine AMAZING. Most sources credit it to Randall Garrett (writing as "Ivar Jorgensen") and Milton Lesser (writing as "Adam Chase"). It's well established that Lesser, better known for his hardboiled mysteries under the name Stephen Marlowe, was Adam Chase. Robert Silverberg, who knew everyone involved, says that Jorgensen, in this case, was really Paul W. Fairman, the editor of AMAZING. Jorgensen started out as one of Fairman's pseudonyms before it became a house name.

Regardless of who wrote it—and I lean toward Fairman and Lesser, myself, with Fairman writing the first installment and Lesser the second and third—QUEST OF THE GOLDEN APE is a fine example of the sort of science fiction "they don't write anymore", to the dismay of old codgers such as myself who grew up reading this stuff. It's mostly adventure, with only a little bit of science thrown in to make it colorful.

The story opens with a mysterious, deserted old mansion somewhere in an unnamed eastern state, and a hundred-year-old duty carried out by a lawyer whose great-grandfather was hired by a mysterious old man. (Lots of mystery right off the bat, you see.) On this particular day, the lawyer has to go to the old mansion and open a sealed crypt beneath it. What he finds there is a giant, god-like, apparently young man in a state of suspended animation. Of course the lawyer awakens him, as he's supposed to, turns over to him a mysterious package that contains a bracelet of an unknown alloy, and before you can say, "John Carter", our amnesiac hero is transported to an alien world where he finds himself in the middle of intrigue, danger, and romance.

You're either rolling your eyes by now at this brief description of the plot, or else you're remembering what it was like to be twelve years old and encountering a yarn like this for the first time. I would have been utterly enthralled, probably sitting in the rocking chair in my parents' living room and rocking back and forth so hard that my mother would gripe at me and tell me I was fixing to turn the chair over—which was known to happen from time to time.

There's a lot of Edgar Rice Burroughs influence in this novel, as our hero, who dubs himself Bram Forest for reasons that make sense in the context of the story, finds himself in the middle of warring factions on the planet Tarth, which orbits the sun exactly opposite from Earth, which explains why we've never discovered it. (Isn't this the same gimmick that's used in the Gor books by John Norman? I only read the first one of those about fifty years ago and didn't care for it.) There are a couple of decent plot twists that set this apart from the John Carter series, though. There's also some Doc Savage influence with a hero raised from infancy to be a hero, an echo of Superman with a baby sent from one planet to another, and a lot of sword-and-planet swashbuckling of the sort that we've encountered many times from many authors, carried out at a competent level.

The quality of the writing definitely improves from the first installment to the second, but nobody reads this kind of yarn for fancy prose. The appeal of QUEST OF THE GOLDEN APE lies in its headlong pace, its colorful action, and its larger-than-life characters. The hero is mighty-thewed, the heroine is beautiful and often finds herself without clothes, the villains (including an evil queen) are truly despicable, and a rousing good time is had by all. At least, I had a rousing good time, and that's why I read books, after all.

QUEST OF THE GOLDEN APE has been reprinted once, and e-texts of it can be found in numerous places on-line. If you're capable of hearkening back to the era in which it originally appeared, you might enjoy it a great deal. I certainly did.

Stillman's War - Peter Brandvold

One of Peter Brandvold's best-known characters, Ben Stillman, returns in the new novel STILLMAN'S WAR. It seems hard to believe that it's been more than a decade since there was a new yarn about the Montana lawman. But Stillman is still as rugged and stalwart a hero as ever.

This one opens with Stillman and his deputy Leon McMannigle closing in on a gang of rustlers. Through a tragic twist, the daughter of a powerful rancher winds up dead, and her father declares war on the two lawmen, sending his sons and hired guns to kill them. Stillman and McMannigle are separated for much of the novel, and there are dangerous twists going on back in the town of Clantick, as well, that lead up to an unexpected but satisfying climax.

The action hardly ever lets up in this novel, and even when the bullets aren't flying, Brandvold maintains a high level of suspense. He's a master at piling troubles on his heroes until the reader wonders how they can ever get out of it. He's also one of the best in the business at creating an atmosphere of vivid, gritty realism.

I really enjoyed STILLMAN'S WAR. All of Brandvold's work reminds me of the sort of hardboiled Westerns that Gold Medal published in the Fifties and Sixties. His books are more graphic when it comes to sex, violence, and language, but they have the same tough sensibility and hard-charging plots and action. STILLMAN'S WAR is a great example of fine all-around storytelling. Highly recommended.

STILLMAN'S WAR on Amazon

STILLMAN'S WAR on Barnes & Noble

Tuesday's Overlooked Movies: Bend of the River

I have a vague memory of watching this movie on TV at my sister's house around 1970, but that's all I remembered about it. So when we saw it recently it was almost like watching one I hadn't seen before.

BEND OF THE RIVER was an early collaboration between James Stewart and director Anthony Mann, and it's a strong entry in the series of Westerns they did together. Stewart plays a tough but decent hombre with a shady past who hires on to guide a group of settlers to Oregon. Along the way he encounters and befriends a gunman played by Arthur Kennedy, who also seems like a decent sort at first. Since he's Arthur Kennedy, though, you know that sooner or later he and Stewart will wind up on opposing sides.

That takes a while to come about, and in the meantime the settlers reach Oregon (not without some Indian fights along the way) and settle into their new homes with the promise of supplies being brought upriver by one of the merchants in Portland. Something goes wrong, though, and the food they need to survive through the winter doesn't show up. Stewart and the leader of the group, played by the fine character actor Jay C. Flippen, set out to discover why.

There are a couple of romantic subplots, one involving Stewart and the classy, beautiful Julia Adams, the other involving one of the immigrant girls and a fast-on-the-draw gambler played by a very young Rock Hudson.

One of the nice things about this movie is that there's a lot of moral ambiguity to the characters. Many of them are a mixture of good and evil and can't quite seem to decide which side to come down on. As a result, allegiances change throughout the film and it's hard to predict exactly what's going to happen. That creates some effective suspense, courtesy of the screenplay by Borden Chase and the source novel by Bill Gulick, which was titled BEND OF THE SNAKE.

On a side note, BEND OF THE RIVER is one of the few movies I've seen based on a novel by an author I actually met. Bill Gulick, who passed away last year, was a regular at the WWA conventions during the years I was attending most of them, too. He was also the guy who got extremely angry at a Spur Awards banquet, as I suspect some of you who were there recall. At that same convention, I rode down the Snake River on a raft, but that was over in Wyoming, not Oregon where BEND OF THE RIVER is set.

I enjoyed this one a lot. It's a good, solid traditional Western, and well worth watching.

Monday Morning Digest Magazine: Galaxy Science Fiction, August 1966

An occasional series in which I post the covers of digest magazines I like or that have some other meaning to me. In this case, although I had read a lot of science fiction by 1966, the August issue of GALAXY that year was the first science fiction magazine I remember buying. I picked it up at Lester's Pharmacy, and I recall that it had the second part of a serial by Frank Herbert, "Heisenberg's Eyes" in it, as well as a novelette by Keith Laumer. However, I don't remember a thing about either of those stories, or any of the others in the issue, which included work by James Blish, R.A. Lafferty, and George H. Smith. I must have enjoyed it, though, because I bought other issues of GALAXY when I found them, which wasn't often because distribution of all the fiction digests was pretty spotty in the town where I grew up.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Dime Mystery, March 1941

I keep coming back to the Weird Menace pulps because they have such great, bizarre covers. Where else but on a Weird Menace pulp would you find a guy in top hat and white gloves battling evil mummies? Authors in this issue include such pulp icons as Norvell Page and Emile C. Tepperman, along with Russell Gray (Bruno Fischer) and Stewart Sterling, who are better known for the numerous paperbacks and hardback mystery novels they wrote later on.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Greater Western Action Novels Magazine, September 1940

This is a Western pulp I hadn't heard of before. Not a great cover, but it's pretty action-packed. With stories by E.B. Mann and Norman A. Fox, it's probably pretty good reading, too.