Found Pages: The Remarkable Harold Ernest (“Darcy Glinto”) Kelly, 1899–1969.

A readable autobiography by one of London’s two top post-war gangsters, the other being Jack (“Jack Spot”) Comer, before the Kray twins came along. Ghosted by the crusading crime reporter Duncan Webb.

Confesses to a lot of criminal activities going back to the smash-and-grab raids in the mid-Thirties at a time when thieves, in contrast to persons engaged in protection rackets and illegal gambling, were low down in the prestige system of professional criminals.

Fascinating on the vast sums being made in the black market at the start and finish of the 1939 war, and the need from criminals to be able to display their wealth socially.

Makes a point of the fact that back then, British gangsters didn’t kill one another.

A journal kept by what at that time would have been called a gentlewoman during the Russian occupation of Berlin in 1945, chronicling the hardships and fears of daily life, including being frequently raped by the Russian soldiery.

Fredric March fights back, after a bit, against considerable odds and finally defeats paranoid pitiless home-invading Bogart and his two fellow escapees and saves his wife and daughter.

Thirty-odd years ago, when I sought permission to include a still from the home-invasion rape scene in A Clockwork Orange in my Violence in the Arts, it was refused on the grounds that Stanley Kubrick was against violence.

Oh yes?

One needs to keep a sharp eye turned on some protestations of moral purity.

Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly is a fine portrayal by Ralph Meeker of a California private-eye as a sleazy, bullying, narcissistic, out-for-the-fast-buck jerk, who no doubt subscribes to Playboy and takes the Playboy Philosophy seriously.

Since he’s called Mike Hammer, the movie of course becomes politically acceptable.

But script-writer A.I. Bezzerides, pursuing his own Cold War agenda, is deconstructing a very different and more acceptable Hammer, and the movie is more violent and nastier than the book.

As such, it was taken up in a major way in France as En Quatrième Vitesse, (In Top Gear) and existed for a while in the almost-limbo of the almost-banned, or at least significantly cut.

A particularly nasty piece of violence, incidentally, is Meeker’s breaking of an irreplaceable record from an opera recording belonging to an inoffensive opera-lover from whom he wants some answers.

The despicable and truly weak son of the big rancher, after catching a self-defensive bullet from cowboy James Stewart, has his men immobilize Stewart and then deliberately (“No, no,” we’re protesting, “you can’t do that”) puts a bullet through the palm of Stewart’s gun hand.

See comments on Blue Blood Flows East.

The best Lew Archer novel.

A darker, grimmer, less romantic re-doing of John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle, with a brilliant script by Jim Thompson, and the deadest-looking bodies after a shoot-out with shotguns.

“Don’t ask me more. As long as you live, don’t ever ask me more”—John Wayne to his young sidekick about the unshown body of the latter’s sister (betrothed?) which he has come upon after the Comanches have done their (unshown) worst with her.

Without the power of Wayne’s performance, the movie would be merely one of a bunch back then that were cashing in on the supposed appeal of the new super-wide screen, here useful for displaying Monument Valley and other Western landscapes in different seasons, with the low-budgeted decent citizens Disney-clean in gingham.

As it is, the movie offers the audience the pleasures of hearing their own imperfectly tamed racist feelings given unabashed voice by Wayne until almost the end, when there’s the further pleasure of having the Unreachable Father (figure) turn away from his wickedness (in an of course unforgettable scene).

A reissue of Kill and Desire (1950), published over the name of Duke Linton, AJH THJ, and reissued in 1997 as Kill and Desire by Frances, with an introduction by Steve Holland.

Obviously not by Kelly. The paragraphs are short, the plot sketchy, the characterization one-note, apart from the cabin-in-the-woods artist who turns into an arm-breaking angel of vengeance, with a bit of sexual sadism on the side, and then reverts back into a sweetie.

Author?

See comments above, 1954.

Contains an influential section on tough British pulp novels after WW2, which he acknowledges can at times have a raw power. Since he was writing polemically against works displaying and gratifying low tastes, the publishers were leery of possible libel actions. So he couldn’t name names or pillory actual passages, and had to make up his own. Which he did with gusto, especially one which combined elements from No Orchids, Lady—Don’t Turn Over and maybe some other work, and achieved a level of sadistic pulp-zine grotesquery beyond what you would find in the Chase and Glinto originals.

Here he is on the general ambience of the Mushroom Jungle (Steve Holland’s term):

Maybe I haven’t found the right books, but I’ve been coming to see this as overheated prose.

The so-called Wolfenden Report, named after its chairman, John Wolfenden, recommends decriminalizing homosexual acts between consenting adults in private but increasing the penalties for soliciting by street prostitutes, and making male prostitution illegal.

The envelope of the showable is suddenly stretched, in colour, in the assembling of body parts (those floating eyeballs!) and the details of the operation, inaugurating the series of Hammer Horror pictures in which Baron Frankenstein and Count Dracula, as played with authority by Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, are no longer figures of fun but passion-driven individuals in their own right who can be brought back, irrepressibly, in movie after movie.

By Frances? Kelly? Whom?

In the absence of unequivocal written statements by Kelly or Frances, or a hand-written or revealingly typed manuscript, there would appear to be no substitute for actually examining the texts.

Here is the blurb:

Here is how the novel opens

Wall-to-wall cliché. This is either Kelly writing considerably below par or someone else using the Glinto name.

Consistently offbeat and excellent in its handling of familiar themes—robbing a bank, making a getaway, killing an unwanted accomplice. Thompson, for whom liquor hasn’t made life easier, has a criminal imagination. Near the end, the book lifts up to a level of what the French call l’insolite”(the unusual, the unprecedented) that’s probably unequalled in its cool horror in any other thriller. This part doesn’t figure in the Peckinpah movie.

A curiosity for the literary theorist. Hank Janson (pronounced Yanson), a fictional character and pseudonymous author, writes the autobiography of actual former master-criminal Jack (“Jack Spot”) Comer, who’s now down and almost out professionally, basing it, supposedly, on searching interviews with Spot, but admitting at the outset that he’s partly fictionalized things.. He suggests at the end that

The talking Spot comes across as boastful, self-pitying, and paranoid. But by now he is poor, largely bereft of muscled associates, and suspected (unjustly) of being a grass, so that any opportunity to present his own point of view, settle grudges (if only verbally), and be paid for it is welcome.

Wensley Clarkson’s Hit ‘Em Hard: Jack Spot, King of the Underworld (2002) is excellent. It connects up a lot of dots and shows how different Spot, whom he obviously prefers to Hill, was in his prime, when he was the nearest thing to a British Al Capone. Clarkson has the grace to offer a justification of his use of nominally direct speech for which there has been no verbatim documentation.

A classic, nail-biting defining of a situation, in which, other courses failing, a decent citizen and his family have to resort to violence and cunning to defend themselves. Nightmarish, smiling Max Cady, with his cheap suit and terrible false teeth, returns to exact a drawn-out payment from the hero and his wife and daughter for hard time served after being interrupted in a rape. His account of the extended punishment he’s meted out to the woman who “betrayed” him and remarried in his absence is an erotic chiller.

Lest we forget. More shocking than his 1954 The Scourge of the Swastike.

Politically explosive account by the editor of an Algerian newspaper of being tortured by French paratroopers during the Battle of Algiers, up-ending the standard French image of themselves as members of the Resistance heroically defending France and civilization in defiance of the Gestapo. Sartre says in the Introduction, p.15,

First appearance in English. See Violence 1

The tall and imposing Dracula of Christopher Lee, without any foreign accent, is now charged with erotic energy, and his white fangs draw red blood from the bare necks of bosomy actresses in satiny lace-edged nightwear.

This presentation of organized crime was so scary at the time that I tried to get Ross Macdonald, who had himself been a Ph.D. student, to review the book for a student quarterly that I was co-editing. He declined, evidently not seeing the subject as important. I think the word “Spillane” was used, not favourably.This was ten years before the spaghetti-sentimentality and unpleasant violences of Mario Puzo’s The Godfather. Here is the end of transplanted Sicilian “Johnny Cool” who believed that he had successfully killed his way to the top in America.

A surreal-feeling and at times hilarious Harlem in which Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson (honest Black plainclothes cops) have no problem about using their shiny long-barreled revolvers and, in this best book in the series, a barman, defending himself from a knife-thrust by a drunken customer, accidentally cuts off the man’s arm:

Remember the hanged man?

“Nice Jewish boy (Harvard, class of 1939) seeks relationship with cool, slinky, jiving Black cats with GREAT orgasms. Interest in Zen and philosophical bull-sessions welcome but not essential.”

Milestone text in the bad-faith infantilizing of Black males by elite White males scared of co-option by the Grey Flannel Suits and wanting there to be, somewhere, a reservation of vicarious “freedom.” Ditto, the sentimentalizing of psychopaths.

Instant-Zen, with no interest in the culture-embedded and patiently acquired self-abnegation of the actual Zen of swordsmen, archers, and others. So, alas, “American.”

Stormin’ Norman, All-American Bad Boy. (Hunter Thompson is funnier, and for real.)

But, honour where it’s due, when Mailer reprints the article in Advertisments for Myself (1959), he includes replies to it by Jean Malaquais and Ned Polsky that blow it out of the water.

In fourteenth-century Sweden the 15-year-old daughter of prosperous peasants is raped and murdered by two goatherds, who are later killed with an axe by her father (Max von Sydow) when they unwittingly seek a night’s shelter at his farm.

A painful and poetic horror masterpiece about skin-graft specialist Dr. Genessier transplanting in his underground operating theatre the facial skin of living women onto the face of his daughter, hideously scarred in a car accident for which his too-fast driving was responsible. The painfulness comes in part because we already know quite a bit about the principal victim before she is kidnapped.

The British press is outraged. Two or three men reportedly faint when it is screened at the Edinburgh Festival. Franju remarks, “No wonder the Scots wear skirts.”

Kit Kennedy arrives in a well characterized wagon-trail town, Halt Town, catches a runaway stallion belonging to proud landowner Carmen Rodriguez, meets Trixie Lee, saloon-girl, and Black Humphrey (old black servant), turns down a job offer from smoothie Virginian Eugene Colet, foils a lynch-mob assault on Carmen’s ranch (lousy Mex!), escapes ingeniously from gunmen waiting for him outside lawyer Judson’s office where he’s enquiring about the documentation of Carmen’s property, rescues Carmen from kidnapers, and gently deflects Trixie’s candid declaration of love for him.

The action intensifies dramatically when an enraged crowd of settlers are persuaded that Kit started the fire that has destroyed their wagons, and get set to hang or burn him. Good crowd description. A lovely final conversation, partly about the management of horses, between him and Carmen, as subtle as anything in Donald Hamilton.

A good five-page account of a body-contact fight with Bull Engel (pp. 83-87). Convincing-sounding Black speech by Black Humphrey. A convincing relationship with Carmen (good use of horses).

See Sidebar 9 for quotations.

The first book in the long-running series about counter-assassination agent Matt Helm, who, drawn out of his peacable married retirement as a free-lance writer/photographer, ends up torturing and killing beautiful turncoat and former wartime partner Tina in order to save the life of his kidnapped baby daughter.

Torture, like rape, is rare in the Helm books, however, and, as viewed through Helm’s eyes, is no big extra-special deal, even when he himself is on the receiving end of a soldering iron. But then, it’s done between professionals.

It would be reassuring to know that quintessential professional Helm was out there somewhere now. Simon Harvester’s Dorian Silk too, for that matter, who really knew Afghanistan and the Middle East on the ground.

There’s more about Hamilton, now terminally bed-ridden in Sweden, in “Thrillers” (“Quickies” and “Writer at Work”).

A movie cameraman, warped in childhood by a sadistic behavioural psychologist father, films women at the moment of death at his hands. Not at all “British.” The critical outcry effectively ends the career of one of Britain’s two or three best directors.

Stanley Baker, who had some acquaintance with the criminal fraternity, is convincing as a hard-man professional criminal inside and outside the prison where methodical beatings by prisoners take place without interference from sardonic head warden Patrick Magee. “The bursts of violence in The Criminal are orgasmic in their surety, in their explosive feeling of energy at last unleashed.” (Dan Callahan on the Web.). Probably the most realistic presentation that we have of professional English criminals prior to Performance (1970).

According to Robert Murphy, London gangster Albert Dimes, who was introduced to Losey by Baker, “provided the authentic background detail which … made The Criminal so unusual among British crime films of the period.” (Smash and Grab, p. 151)

Has anyone who saw the movie back then felt wholly secure while taking a shower when they’re alone? All the tacit rules are broken with Janet Leigh’s murder, just when she has decided to return and face the music after her impetuous flight to nowhere with her employer’s cash.

Plain workmanlike prose, no pseudo-regionalisms, no “hombres,” no flickers or flares of poetry.

Young Rudd Wayne whose father has been killed in a show-down arising from accusations that he’s bungled a cattle drive, kills (fairly) the man responsible for provoking the duel, breaks up a rustling operation and finds himself in charge of another drive which a villainous banker has paid to have sabotaged.

The kinds of three-dimensional and psychological problem-solving that the hero engages in makes this feel like a Kelly to me. It contains (a) a well-described hand-to-hand fight, (b) good substantial paragraphs describing Wayne searching a craggy area for rustled cattle and thinking about where they might be stowed, (c) Wayne on the trail retrieving by some daring psychological risk-taking a seemingly hopeless situation after the horses of all the crew but himself are carried off by hostile Indians, (d) a couple of nice bits of dialogue with young Stella Goss in which Rudd is holding back honorably because he thinks she’s committed to another and Stella is probing his state of mind.

Hank busts a white-slave brothel operation that he has learned about from an old flame who was abducted into it.

See Sidebar 5.

An exploitation novel in writing-by-numbers prose that contains sentences like “Nick munched his refreshing steak tartare in the little back street restaurant in Marseilles.” The exploitation technique, as with numerous Adult movies in the Sixties and Seventies, consists in taking a respectable genre structure—here, a British investigative reporter going to France to locate kidnap victims and infiltrating the gang responsible—and then raunchifying elements like a nightclub duo act, a couple of “disciplinary” rapes (here droolingly anal), a knife killing in bed, with subsequent slicings, and the hero’s sexing with those insatiable French girls.

Not a trace of interesting thought-processes in the characters. A reminder, by way of contrast, of how seriously Kelly works at the best of the Jansons attributed to him.

Curious that a dozen more years have to pass before One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich focusses the attention of the West on the horrors of the Russian Gulag that Herling has already presented, unsensationally (well, apart from a gang-rape episode), in his admirable book.

Robert Mitchum as Southern male menace incarnate, undeflectably bent on retribution against Mr. Decency Gregory Peck, with his nice wife and nubile daughter, for being responsible for his doing time for a rape to which he felt perfectly entitled.

On the inside front flap of the just jacket we have:

The relationship between Blake, Patricia, and Hannay is kept simple. Blake and Patricia soon like one another and Hannay approves. We have extended descriptions of the horse race, a couple of fist-fights, a couple of gunfights (the second of them Blake alone against four toughs), an aborted stampede, and the conflagration that give the book its title. The most painful episode is the discovery of eighty-three Hannay cows out on the range where they have been hamstrung and left to die, with the buzzards gathering.

Hank liases with a girl maintained in luxury in Washington to enable spies to nobble a Senator. There’s a good extended escape from a house where Hank’s being held prisoner, and a good fight

Hank breaks up a large-scale white-slave operation, at considerable risk to himself, enduring an extended Stephen-Frances-type beating at one point and at another engaging for three pages of solid text in a hand-to-hand fight. A elaboration of elements in Reluctant Hostess, including another slave narrative (echoes of Chase’s Miss Callaghan Comes to Grief ?) by a plucky woman who has resourcefully escaped.

The first book in the series about professional thief and strong-arm man Parker (no first name), surely the least sentimental protagonist of any major thriller series.

Importantly, Parker and his associates are not members of the Mob, are unintimidated by it, and knock hell out of portions of it on several occasions, most impressively and entertainingly in Butcher’s Moon (1974).

There is very little torture and rape in the series, and what there is isn’t done by Parker and Co.

The first high-energy, full-bodied, enviably knowledgeable and self-assured voice of an emergent newer England, so refreshing after the depressiveness of the so-called Angries of the 1950s. Deighton, mirabile dictu, not only likes the Americana that he observes so closely out at the atomic base on Tokwe Atoll, so different from the penny-pinching cramped quarters of W.O.O.C (P) on Charlotte Street, but, almost uniquely, gets American speech exactly right. He still finds England more interesting, though.

By centering London on the map like this, and stimulating writers like Martin Woodhouse, Adam Hall, Adam Diment, James Mitchell, Brian Cleeve, and others to come up with their own fast-moving and strong-flavoured first-person or single p.o.v. London-based espionage novels, Deighton may have sounded something like the death knell, or at least the publican’s first “Time, gentlemen, please,” of British pseudo-American gangster fiction.

A professional British criminal (“Allerton” is a pseudonym) talks freely with a remarkable interviewer.

Janson nails a dangerous armed-robbery gang, which makes attempts on his life. The tension slackens somewhat towards the end.

The first gore flick, unbearably incompetent now, apart from an opening bathtub sequence, but at the time eliciting from one of the editors of Midi-Minuit Fantastique the observation that you’re horribly afraid while watching it because you never know when a sequence is going to end. There’s a lot to be said for not in some sense knowing in advance what can’t happen in a work.

From Blood Feast to Hostel (2005)—we’ve come a long way.

A fictive but real-feeling imagining, on a shoe-string budget, of what it would have been like had Germany successfully occupied England in 1940. Lacks the simple moral certitudes of British wartime movies. Some individuals actively collaborate. Lots of others simply go along, since Germany is running things with a light hand and the nasty things that happen are happening out of sight and mind to others, such as the retarded children who are quietly euthanized in the cottage hospital with its nice clean sheets and well-starched nurses.

The movie, like lots of subsequent ones, benefits greatly with young Andrew Mollo’s perfectionism about military uniforms being accurate and having a lived-in look.

Explosive mix of Marxist-Leninism, racialism, French-style universalizing of particular situations (colonial Algeria), Robespierrean absolutism, psychiatric case-histories from the war for Algerian independence, and pervasive binary-antithetical thinking.

Potentials for disaster (as we now know) swirl and seethe in easily assimilable generalizations at the start of the book.

The blood of innocents drips from those words. But of course, naturally, bien entendu, you can’t make coq au vin without killing chickens.

The comments on Amazon.com are lively. I like the sound of the suggestion that, “In essence, Fanon’s theory is a justification for violence based on race, and for the control of people through propaganda and terror while spouting democratic theories.”

Hank copes as a deputy with gangdom in Timmins, Ontario! The first-names “Lynx" and “Carrie” at one or two points, plus the abundance of Tommy-guns and Lugers as current hoodlum weapons of choice, bring the Glintos to mind.

Despite the off-the-beaten-track locale, the book is too three-dimensional, workmanlike, grammatical, knowledgeable, and action-packed to be by the Canadian Jim Moffatt, to judge from his Janson The Dish Ran Away in the same year. A great swan-song—if it was indeed by Kelly. Williams and Holland assign it to Michel. Steve Holland assigns it outright to Kelly, THJ,

A bit of phrasing in Give the People Homes (1955) suggests that Kelly himself was in Canada at some point, and white-trash Ella Timmons figures in Deep South Slave.

The first Travis McGee book, introducing the Florida boat bum and exemplar of the Playboy Philosophy who lives by recovering stolen property for a percentage and, over the years, copes with a lot of genuinely scary villains—here, Junior Allen, who has enjoyed turning a sensitive, well-bred woman into a sex-slave out at sea in his cabin cruiser and later is all set to give a lovely virginal young girl the same treatment.

Torture, rape, and sadistic degradation are always possibilities in the McGees, which are such gripping reads that run-of-the-mill British “Mushroom” paperbacks pale beside them.

Life, lust, liquor, and brutality among the lowest of the blue-collar (white) urban low. Harry (who has trouble coming to terms with his being really one of Those) and prostitute Tra-La-La come to particularly unpleasant ends. The final part, about a housing project, is a vision of hell.

As I say in Violence in the Arts (1974)

The start of the frenetic British spy series, in which, though more or less perpetually on the run in some way—cars, planes, legs, with Hall drawing on his own expertise as a former apprentice test driver—agent Quiller very rarely kills anyone.

Ex-IRA jailbird Sean Ryan is compelled to infiltrate a truly frightening British neo-Fascist organization on behalf of a British security service. In Counterspy , that same year, and Dark Blood, Dark Terror (1965) he is in page-turning peril from other groups.

A powerful documentary-type filming of the Battle of Culloden and the merciless repression that followed it, putting an end to the hopes of Bonnie Prince Charlie regaining the English throne for the Stewarts, and permanently changing Scotland’s social structure.

In Dickens’ Hard Times, a landscape is described as “neither town nor country but both spoiled.” Capote’s every-New-Yorker-reader’s-favourite-True-Crime-opus is neither documentary nor fiction, but both spoiled.

An exasperating feature of nominally factual writing is “verbatim” dialogue or speech which couldn’t have been recorded or recalled (“Lyndon rolled away from Lady Bird and reached for his bathrobe, saying, ....”). In Cold Blood is rife with it, and the recorded parts—police transcripts, etc—feel tidied up to remove hesitations and redundancies. Capote also has no problem with telling us what characters were thinking or feeling at various points.

The over-all effect is to give readers the comfortable assurance that they know all about the humanized killers, and diminish the terror of the victims. These are things happing to Them (in Kansas yet!), not to us here in the Upper Fifties of Manhattan.

Capote as the engaged “I” of the movie about him figures only in the preface. Elsewhere, this is one of God’s scribes speaking, but not a particularly interesting one. A movie like Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer, is emotionally sounder, or Jim and Debbie Goad’s horrifying Answer Me, no.4.

Among other episodes, McGee, temporarily paralyzed by a bullet wound, lies in the yard outside a bedroom and has to listen to Mitchumesque stud Boo Waxwell jocularly talking to, renewing his raping of, and arousing against her will a now no longer arrogant Southern-establishment wife.

First over-the-counter big-market editions of Sade’s “forbidden” works in translation. Followed by Grove’s The 120 Days of Sodom in 1966 and the monumental Juliette, trans. Austryn Wainhouse, in 1968, his most important book.

The best of the Sean Ryan books, with believable high-level and on-the-ground menaces as reluctant agent Ryan has to nurse-maid over to the Continent a loathsome IRA thug whom he has broken out of prison. Towards the end, Rafferty is given the strappado by some very unpleasant people seeking information:

And no, this isn’t “exploitation.” It is highly functional and the only such episode in the book. But it, like episodes in previous books by Cleeve, is a marker establishing and extending the boundaries of the possible. And we can see how “respectable” thrillers have outpaced, in the thrills they provide, the ones by almost all those now forgotten and/or unread “Jungle” novelists, and how readers who simply want the sex-and-violence moments have to turn to books like Van Heller’s.

By far the most disturbing British crime novel up to this point, and maybe ever. Knowing as we unavoidably do that the youth in the railway carriage, back in the days of compartments, is eventually going to rape and kill the charming seven-year-old girl, who at first is being looked after by a couple of friendly nuns, then (after they have to leave) by a solid-seeming woman who promises to keep an eye on her but then joins a friend in another compartment, leaving her alone with the narrator and what is a massive jump-cut, with some especially sickening details after it—all this is like feeling the terrible inevitability of an impending train wreck as the narrator’s quasi-interior monologue progressively darkens, though without becoming sexually explicit.

It is all much worse than the self-revealed violence of the narrator of Gerald Butler’s Kiss the Blood Off My Hands (1940). Loughran has reached down and out into the all-too-common generic awfulness of a certain kind of youth, presenting himself to an imagined generic auditor as poised, worldly-wise, knowing his way around with women, smartly dressed, tough in relation to others like him—and then the façade increasingly cracking and crumbling as more and more fears, failures, resentments, and moralizing viciousness show themselves and we are being drawn into a partly controlled madness that goes on presenting itself as a true knowledge of how the world, in all its looking-out-for-Number-One callousness really is, and how disgusting females, apart from the purity of nuns and pre-puberty kids like the victim here, really are.

In its rhetorical cunning of homicidal self-presentation, and authorial mercilessness, it is the nearest British equivalent to works like Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me (1952) and Hubert Selby’s The Room (1971).. We’ve come a long way beyond the impotent, class-constricted whining, bitching, and bullying of Look Back in Anger. Yet it’s still “English” in the quasi-domestic setting and the securities that it is presumed to be providing.

What would Orwell have had to say about the “Americanization” here, I wonder?

McGee comes upon the nailed-to-a-wall body of a petty crook who has been methodically tortured, until death intervenes, in pursuit of information. Subsequently McGee, bound to a chair, has to listen while one of his temporary ladies screams in the next room in the hands of a former Gestapo interrogator who loves his work.

A movie almost too disquieting to watch, because you very soon grasp that there is no guarantee that any character will be safe from the horrible attentions of 17^th-century British witch-hunter Matthew Hopkins, finely played by Vincent Price (though by the sound of it Reeves had wanted Peter Cushing) and his brutal assistant.

A masterpiece, brilliant in its handling of non-actors, and defining “revolt” with the same kind of moral gravitas as Rosselini’s defining of “resistance” in Open City, but more intelligently.

It accommodates not only the ideologically-nourished heroism of the rebel leaders, but also the deliberate, soldierly murderousness of the young women planting bombs in cafes where they have looked at other women going about their normal lives, and the lucid rationale of the paratroopers charged with suppressing the revolt and breaking their way up through the rebel cells by means of the kind of torture that Henri Alleg had described in The Question.

Reissued with important supplementary material about Algeria since then, its post-independence development not following the standard onward-and-upwards Marxist scenario.

Essentializes the Western to men killing other men with revolvers and working cons on each other. Borgia West. Beatings look like beatings and take a while to recover from. A star is born. The sales of small, black, hard, twisted, wonderful Italian cigars increase. The Western revives.

An impressively long, detailed, and, in the conventional sense, well written three-volume novel about the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath, with some credibly horrible and at times very sad episodes.

Puzo’s ode to Italianate, Borgia-esque power.

Here, as an early hook, is punishment being administered outside a bar to two jerks who sexually assaulted a nice Italian daughter:

How could you not adore a God (father) who had the power to order such things?

Splendid, callous (those civilian deaths), ridiculous (the dialogue), and cinematically indispensable.

An intensification of witch-finding cruelties, Herbert Lom not up to the authority of Vincent Price the previous year, but the movie is sickening because you know that such tortures actually happened, and because during the maladroit earlier parts you know that particular individuals are going to be appallingly mistreated.

English gangdom now fully on the map in a brilliant novel. See my “The Best Thriller” elsewhere in this site.

Arty and laden with dopey “significance” once tough criminal-on-the-run James Fox takes refuge in fading rock-star Mick Jagger’s acid-drenched lair, but authoritative earlier in its presentation of the unpleasant manners and methods of London gangsters.

Four documentary hours of France during the Occupation, when for a while, before the economic looting and general repression got under way, it was far from evident to a lot of the public that the order-affirming German and Vichy regimes were inferior to the pre-war chaos. Later on the French militia and gestapo were more vicious than the Germans in their war against the Resistance. So easy now, with the privileges of hindsight, to know which side one would of course have been on oneself. But back in 1940–41? And how about the menaces, and conflicting ideologies, and cravings for peace at any price in the present century?

Frederick Forsyth, The Day of the Jackal

The huge OAS conspirator Kowalski is tortured at one point by French security agents using electric shocks in order to crack a major assassination plot.

Contains possibly the worst rape episode in above-the-counter fiction, plus an extended revenge fantasy, including rats and cattle prods, about the two cops who arrested the principal character.

A remarkable work of historical re-creation, too painful to re-experience, in which most of the focus is on the victims before and after being tortured.

First English-language translation of Vian’s infamous J’Irai cracher sur vos tombes (1946), which appeared over the pseudonym Vernon Sullivan and was an early French hommage to things American back when, let’s admit it, les Americains gave a bit of assistance to De Gaulle and the Resistance in ridding France of les Boches.

A Black who’s passing establishes himself as the manager of a bookstore in a small Southern town, in preparation for avenging the lynching of his brother. Rape, anal sex, sex with a child, sex with a new-made corpse, an atrocious killing. “My face was covered with blood and I backed away a little on my knees. I have never in my life heard a woman scream like that …”

The book is banned—banned in France yet!—and Vian is heavily fined and sentenced to fifteen days in jail (which he doesn’t have to serve). I’m reminded of Kelly/Glinto and the Lady—Don’t Turn Over case, both writers having pushed the envelope. But the narrative is suspenseful, character-driven, and not “exploitation.”

Vian’s three other Sullivan books seem to me nothing much, though I may have missed things in the French. The 1962 French movie is nothing much either, though the large bookstore has the same charming irreality as the bar in Once Upon a Time in the West.

The 1972 American-made rape-and-revenge I Spit on Your Grave has nothing to do with the book.

Suffers for a bit from too few camera set-ups (budget problems?), but gathers momentum, with consistently well-observed performances, a brilliant transposition of the action from Scunthorpe to the visually interesting sites of Newcastle, and unforgettable episodes.

A splendid filming of James Hadley Chase’s No Orchids for Miss Blandish. With Kiss Me, Deadly, one of Aldrich’s two best movies, and his least cynical.

What feels like realism in the rendering of the Boston-area speech and thought processes of not very bright criminals, smarter ones who profit from them, and law-enforcers who aren’t sharply different from the latter.

A rape-and-revenge movie that still disturbs. The two teenage victims, whom one really cares about, bravely do everything they can to escape from their tormentors. But the latter remain unreachable, and yet still intelligibly human and individual. In their urge to torment and destroy, they are rather like children cruelly playing with a captured bird or little animal. The few small cuts were no doubt necessary for distribution purposes, but the excised moments were functional.

Consistently hateful. Peckinpah simply doesn’t know the England that he’s working in with supposed realism, and doesn’t like anyone in the movie or want us to either. I see that Time Out loved it. But then, Time Out, while sneering at The Long Good Friday, also loved the preposterous Shawshank Redemption.

Well, the Italians, like the Kennedys, have certainly moved stage-center, with their concern with honour, loyalty, courage, family, success, and power. Capone should have been so lucky.

Splendid entertainment at the time, with strong shock-points of violence, but nauseatingly sentimental and obsequious now. Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990) was a badly needed antidote that hadn’t been provided by the more pretentious Part II and the egregious Part III.

The adoption of The Sopranos as an All in the Family for our time doesn’t seem cause for self-congratulation.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago , English language translation.

Includes descriptions of thirty-one interrogation techniques, ascending from mild to frightful, and their effects. See chapter 3, “The Interrogation.”

See also Sidebar 13

A major loss to cinema was the failure to film this superb Carter prequel, set in a London dense with more or less criminal types and locales (Ted obviously wrote it with filming in mind) and doing for the shotgun what Scarface did for the tommy-gun. Presumably Michael Caine, who by his own account had seen Get Carter as showing what violence is really like, had been put off by the outcry in the States (Time? Newsweek?) against its violence. Having a President in the White House called Carter probably didn’t help.

A pity that the grandfather is obviously a younger man in a latex mask, but by the sound of it a genuine oldster would have been unlikely to hold up during the manic and exhausting filming in Texas summer heat. Otherwise splendidly imagined and shot.

Surprisingly powerful. Done absolutely straight, with no low-budget irony substituting for craft, and a magnificent performance by Dyann Thorne as experimental-medical-unit commandant Ilsa. The story-line is character-driven and not just a way to link together atrocities. The other Nazis, both officers and brutish other ranks, feel real and are hateful. Someone has really been thinking about body-English. No camera set-up is repeated. Someone has really been working at making a movie.

It’s still one that lots of people would very reasonably not want to sit through, but it’s better art than a truly vicious movie like The Vanishing (1988), with its kidnapped woman buried alive while she’s unconscious and slowly dying in the pitch-black and featureless space into which she has awakened. Time Out simply adored that one.

The two subsequent Ilsa movies are mere S&V exploitation, obviously put together on the cheap.

Robert Mitchum’s other greatest role, in a movie in which his and Ken Takakura’s explosive violence at the end against Tokyo gangsters is energized by a complex honour-permeated relationship with its roots in the post-war occupation of Japan, and centered now in the beautiful and mature renewal of Mitchum’s relationship with the lovely Keiko Kishi.

A repulsive movie, in what may not have been the way intended. The four rich roués, shutting themselves away during the late stage of Italy’s Fascist state, are indeed as loathsome as any anti-Fascist could wish. The problem, for me at least, is with their young victims, who seem almost zombie-like in their uniform passivity in the face of, on paper, the unspeakable tortures and degradations that the four monsters have them endure.

Where are the tears, screams, pleading, bleeding, bladder-and-bowel incontinence that belong in the same stylistic conventions as the tormentors? Their nude bodies remain undamaged and untarnished.

Near the end, what isn’t there is brought out by the short segment in which we witness from a distance what are obviously horrible things being done, out of earshot, in the garden of the villa. Of course a movie with that kind of thing brought indoors and close to would be intolerable. But as it is, the inconsistency is as alienating and irritating as the low-budget exploitationers of Russ Meyers.

Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS and Men Behind the Sun are better. You sympathize unequivocally with the victims, their tormentors aren’t caricatures, and you don’t feel numb at the end.