Last night we had a Veddy Brrrittish (and hilarious) crime farce called "The Harassed Hero"(1954), starring Guy Middleton as "Murray Selwyn", a man with a nervous condition. He's been diagnosed with "acute apprehension", so as the movie opens, he and his valet "Twigg" (Harold Goodwin) are preparing for his stay in a nursing home. They've just returned from the doctor's office in a taxi, so Twigg starts organizing Mr. Selwyn's belongings and notices a satchel he doesn't recognize. "Sir, is this case yours?" "No, I've never seen it before". Twigg opens it to find thousands of Veddy Brittish bank notes. Man, they've got some giant-sized money in England. How do they ever fit it into their wallets?
Selwyn figures the satchel - and the money - must have been left behind by a previous passenger in the taxi. "He must've been a bank robber," says Twigg, and they make a note to turn the dough in. But then, there's a knock at the door; it's a man with a gun. He's the passenger from the cab and he wants his satchel back. Twigg gives it to him. "No funny business," says the man. But that's exactly what we're in for, for the next 50 minutes, as the plot winds and winds in the kind of send-up the English excel at. I may not be able do it justice.
The gunman takes his bag and departs. Selwyn and Twigg ruminate on what to do next. Call the police? Return to preparing for the nursing home? They decide on the latter. Twigg opens the front door to take a suitcase to the car, and finds the gunman's body smack dab on the doorstep! We know what happened to him, but Twigg and Selwyn do not, and I can't tell you either. But the last thing they need is a corpse on the doorsill, so they move the body to a back room of Mr. Selwyn's spacious townhouse. Then they resume packing for the nursing home.
Before they leave, Twigg makes a final check to make sure the body is secure. But OMG, it's gone! The windum is open; could someone have stolen it? But who and why? They haven't time to figure it out. Selwyn is scheduled (pronounced shed-jooled) for his nursing home check-in within the hour. He has an attractive nurse (Joan Winmill Brown), whom he soon falls in love with. He tells her his story of a runaway corpse and she thinks he's a nutter, but she humors him. Then, she finds a small metal box with some engraved copper plates inside. Selwyn says they aren't his. "Maybe they're works of art, or deguerrotypes or something". Neither of them know where they came from. It turns out that Twigg took the box from the pocket of the gunman/corpse when he was still on the porch. But they don't put two and two together: copper plates and thousands of British pounds.
The money isn't from a bank robbery after all. It's counterfeit. In a crosscut scene, the counterfeiters are discussing how to get their plates back.
You'll just have to watch the movie, because I'd be here all day describing the plot changes. We talk a lot about screenwriting around here. This movie is an example of A-plus plotting. Every line of dialogue is worked out like math, and every actor knows just how to react in character. Confusion builds more confusion, and each new addition is a puzzle piece. What's amazing is that this is a one hour film that was likely released as the opener on a double bill, and it's far better than anything passing for comedy in movies today. The movie turns into a search for the copper plates. To recover them, the head counterfeiter poses as a nursing home doctor. Trust me, just watch it. Two Huge Thumbs Up for "The Harassed Hero". The picture is razor sharp. ////
The night before, we watched Iris Adrian in "Shake Hands with Murder"(1944), a PRC screwball mystery. Iris plays "Patsy Brent", owner of a struggling bail bonds company. In search of a client, her not-too-bright partner "Eddie" (Frank Jenks) chooses embezzler "Steve Morgan" (Douglas Fowley), who's in jail for filching a hundred gees from his bank. Eddie figures Morgan is good publicity for the firm. Patsy is angry because he's obviously guilty as heck, and they'll lose the bail money if Morgan leaves the country.
She goes in search of him (Eddie failed to schedule a meeting), and finds him sitting at a cafe. It's not easy to discern what's going on at this point, because Iris Adrian is talking a blue streak. According to her bio, she was quite the comedienne, with a sizable fan base, and she runs off so many words it'll knock you sideways. The gist you catch is that Morgan may not be guilty. He's not skipping out on his bail after all; he even invites Iris over to his place, where she tries to steal a package he picked up from the post office. She thinks it's the money from the bank.
Eddie disappears from the movie at this time. He's only in the beginning and the end, and the writer added expository dialogue in all the right places because he knew you'd lose track of what's going on. That's because Iris Adrian is doing her thing, and Douglas Fowley becomes her co-star, playing a good guy for once. Fowley was adept at these roles, and I am liking him more than I liked his son Kim, who in interviews denounced his Dad as a womaniser and an absent father (and maybe there was truth in what he said). But on screen you can't help but like Douglas Fowley, whereas Kim Fowley was a degenerate any which way you looked at him.
Anyhow, once Morgan (Fowley) convinces Patsy (Adrian) that he's innocent of embezzelment, the obvious next question is "who did it?" Morgan says it was an executive at the bank, but he's dead. It's gonna be tough collecting evidence against him. But - wait a minute, he's not dead after all. Now he kidnaps Morgan and Patsy, the oldest trick in the PRC book, and all they have is Eddie the dumbbell to rescue them.
Iris Adrian is cute, and sweet, so if you can handle her non-stop talking, you should enjoy the movie. I liked it, I thought she made a good team with Fowley, so it gets Two Big Thumbs Up despite it flaws. The picture is just a tad soft. ////
And that's all for tonight. My blogging music is a live concert by Traffic (Santa Monica 1972) on Youtube. Watch it, it's really good. My late night is Handel's Jeptha Oratorio. Man, this weekend I had something amazing happen. For years, at least the past ten, I've been searching for a favorite book from childhood. My quest started back in 2008 or thereabouts, when I found a copy of "Hamid of Aleppo." It might have been the passing of my parents that inspired this desire. They were big on books. Dad introduced me to "Hamid". I never thought about it til he died, then I remembered it as one of my favorites from childhood, and I had to track down a copy. I was successful (though it took a while), and when I got it in the mail and read it again, it reminded me of another obscure book. I couldn't remember the title of that one; all I recalled was that it was about a little hunchbacked boy who was shunned, and left home to become a cook. I seemed to remember it didn't come from the library, but from London or Belgium when Dad went to Europe on business in the late 1960s.
Starting about 2010 or so, give or take a couple years, I started Googling about this book, but it was hard because I didn't have a title. I'd put in search terms like "Belgian children's book" + "hunchback boy" + cook," but nothing ever came back. I remembered he learned to make soup, so I added that, and I thought there was a character called "The Major Domo", so I put him in the search terms, too. Still, I got nothing. I slowly slacked off on my search for this book, but I never gave up. In recent years I searched about every six months, whenever something caused me to think of it. Well, on Friday night, that's exactly what happened. I was sitting here listening to music, and all of a sudden for some reason The Major Domo came into my head. You know how the mind is, you never know what's gonna pop up. I got an inspiration then, to Google some search terms then and there. And for some reason I added a new detail. My search went like this: "Belgian children's book about a boy with a long nose who becomes a cook." I pressed "enter" and bingo: there was the cover of the book! "Dwarf Long Nose," it is called. It was written as "Dwarf Nose" by William Hauff in 1826, and later translated into English. The copy I remember had the cover I was looking at, drawn by Maurice Sendak of "Where the Wild Things Are" fame. He did all the illustrations for "Dwarf Long Nose," and I remember looking at the drawings at reading the book over and over when I was about 8. Who didn't love Maurice Sendak at that time, am I right? But the other thing is, that I'm not sure it was the copy Dad brought back from Europe, because I seem to recall a version with small, pencil-sketch illustrations. It's a very famous German fairy tale originally, no doubt it was published many times over the decades, in different countries. Maybe my European copy was in English, I don't know, but I'm pretty sure Dad brought it back from his trip. Maybe I lost it and Mom found the Sendak version at the library.
The important thing is that I found it after all these years and all that Googling, and ten minutes after I rediscovered "Dwarf Long Nose", I found a copy of the Sendak version at an online used book store. Do you think I ordered it as fast as I could? It was only ten bucks, and it should arrive in the mail very soon.
I think it was the "long nose" that did the trick. I'd never remembered that detail before. Hooray for "Dwarf Long Nose"! Nothing is ever lost. I wish you a nice week, and I send you Tons of Love as always.
xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxooxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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