Alfred Burke as Frank Marker

Alfred Burke, who died this month, was a fine actor who played the most compelling, most human detective on television.

Between 1965 and 1975, Burke starred as Frank Marker, the down-at-heel Public Eye. The series was conceived as a reaction against the flashy and violent American TV detectives dominating the airwaves at the time. What distinguished Frank Marker from his peers was an old-fashioned professionalism and his pride as a small businessman. He always insisted on the term “enquiry agent” rather than “private detective” when dealing with clients. Frank rarely encountered death – his meat and drink was the small time case, which called upon his discretion and knowledge of human nature.

Over seven series, the tone remained consistently downbeat, as Frank struggled to pay his bills and keep faith with the often cynical world he encountered. Burke’s engrossing performance was central to the programme; friendly but distant, Frank was a quiet, almost scholarly man, driven by a sense of fairness. Courtly but cautious, polite yet often steely, Marker pounded the mean streets of Chertsey, Brighton and Windsor with nothing but his thoughts for company.

Tall but always somewhat stooped, Frank was an ordinary man doing extraordinary work. Fussing over a kettle on his gas ring or peering round alleyway corners, his beaky profile made him seem like someone from another era, a medieval woodcut come to life or an unaffiliated father confessor. His voice was cultured but always colloquial, pressing suspects with a reedy insistence. And in every scene, Burke’s performance was precise and unaffected, an utterly convincing portrait of a private man who is often mysterious to his fellows. “Funny old bird,” muses one co-worker, “like some old hen picking around for corn!”

For me, the high point of the programme came in 1969. At the end of the prevous season, Marker had been convicted of handling stolen goods, stripped of his licence and sentenced to jail. This co-incided with ABC’s decision to cease production. The series’ popularity meant that it was picked up by Thames, who continued the show with Marker being released from prison and attempting to adjust to life outside.

Living in a Brighton rooming-house run by the kindly Mrs. Mortimer (Pauline Delaney), Marker finds society unwilling to forgive him his trespass. Forbidden to open another enquiry agency, he is forced to work a series of menial jobs. He keeps those who attempt to help him – his landlady, his parole officer, a police inspector – at arms length, like a wary animal. What makes the 1969 season so distinctive is that, while crime impinges upon the series, the real focus of each episode is Frank learning to trust people again. He saves a young woman from suicide, he responds to the kindnesses of his parole officer, he forms an affectionate partnership with Mrs. Mortimer.

It is these small advances that bring us closer to Frank. The 1969 episodes, all written by Roger Marshall, succeed not just as detective stories but as close studies of a fascinating central character. “Marker doesn’t want anything,” Alfred Burke once observed, “except to be left alone.” Despite this, it was the intelligence and warmth with which Burke leavened Public Eye‘s melancholia that made Frank Marker, for me, the definitive television detective.

There’s a lovely tribute, with further details of Burke’s career, here at Lady Don’t Fall Backwards.

Doctor Who and the Evil Crochet Genius

I know that a few of my readers will like these! Evil Crochet Genius has made a complete set of 11 Doctors, which you can see here. I’m especially impressed with the likenesses of William Hartnell and Colin Baker. Love those question mark collars…

Film Noir Blogathon: Eisner’s Spirit of Noir

Here’s my entry in the For the Love of Film Noir Blogathon, hosted by Ferdy on Films and The Self-Styled Siren. This year the blogathon is raising money for the preservation and restoration of The Sound of Fury and you can donate here.

It’s Michael Chabon’s fault.

Four years ago, I was so knocked sideways by his novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay that I started chasing up the references. One name kept cropping up: Will Eisner. Chabon began his novel with a quote from Eisner and, in his acknowledgements, he thanked Eisner first. And once I started into reading about this Eisner bird, I found that he was considered the big cahuna of 20th century comic creators.

Alan Moore, the boss, once said that Eisner “came up with a complete philosophy of comics that applied to every detail of them, the drawing, the writing, and, most importantly, the storytelling, the kind that occurs between the drawing and the writing.” A few Ebay searches later, and I was in possession of a great deal of Eisner’s weekly adventure strip The Spirit. What struck me immediately was the visual affinity with film noir. Eisner’s cityscapes are full of deep black pools of ink, deep enough and dark enough for a reader to get lost in forever.

In Chabon’s novel, young comic creators Joe Kavalier and Sammy Clay go to see an early screening of Citizen Kane. The revelatory experience of Welles’ filmic innovations inspires them to reinvent their own chosen art form:

“Joe struggled to express, to formulate, the revolution in his ambitions for the ragged-edged and stapled little art form to which their inclinations and luck had brought them. It was not just a matter, he told Sammy, of somehow adapting the bag of cinematic tricks so boldly displayed in the movie – extreme close-ups, odd angles, quirky arrangements of foreground and background; Joe and a few others had been dabbling with this sort of thing for some time. It was that Citizen Kane represented, more than any other movie Joe had ever seen, the total blending of narration and image that was – didn’t Sammy see it? – the fundamental principle of comic book storytelling, and the irreducible nut of their partnership.”

In part, Chabon had based his Kavalier & Clay on the Will Eisner studio. Between 1940 and 1952, Eisner and his collaborators turned out a weekly 16-page supplement distributed by 20 newspapers, each one containing an eight-page Spirit story.

Eisner’s strip tells the story of Denny Colt, a detective who is murdered and comes back to life as the Spirit. Like all those embittered returning war vets, the Spirit has experienced the world of death, and lived. Visually, he’s very different from his contemporary costumed heroes. No underpants on display here – The Spirit solves crime in a blue suit and snap-brim fedora, Eisner modelling his physical appearance on Cary Grant. The one concession to the conventional superhero is the Spirit’s mask, something which Eisner was always trying to lose:

“I didn’t want him to be a superhero. Over the years, I tried so hard to get rid of his mask; he wore dark glasses for a while, and he even went blind once.”

Is the Spirit a noir hero? Well, not really. He’s far too light-hearted, for a start. Often mugging to the reader, breaking the fourth wall to shrug or smile at the events of the strip, Denny Colt is a bit too at ease with himself to qualify. He might be a dead man, but he’s hardly cadaverous. He’s even got a steady girlfriend (don’t ask how that works), Ellen Dolan, daughter of Police Commisioner Dolan, with whom the Spirit enjoys a benign relationship. And of course there’s the Spirit’s sidekick Ebony White, a black street kid whose comical patois often veers into minstrelsy. Our hero wanders down mean streets, sure, but he’s usually got company.

Crazy as a couple of waltzing mice, but at least he's got his pants on.

Many critics have drawn parallels between Eisner’s comic work and 1940s cinema, but it was an association that he was keen to discourage. He preferred to talk about the strip in terms of “stagecraft”. Discussing his experiments with blank panels, Eisner explained, “The real difference between film and this medium [comics] is in what the reader supplies. In film, the viewer gets a realistic portrait which provides everything but smell. The director has sound and vision to work with, and can provide it exactly. The viewer sits in the dark and reacts. In comics, the reader is able to supply sound, the action between panels, the way dialogue is delivered, and in this case, the background. Those are the things an artist must enable a reader to supply.”

It’s especially difficult to claim the Spirit as a noir hero due to the strip’s lack of interest in its protagonist. Noir is about psychic anguish, about being stranded in an alien city, about rushing towards your own demise. But Eisner always kept the Spirit on the sidelines, a deus ex machina who allowed him to tell quirky, subversive stories.

One always gets the sense that Eisner is more interested in his secondary characters, particularly his ever-present cast of femme fatales. While Ellen Dolan is an archetypal ‘good girl’, the Spirit often finds himself tempted by the voluptuous sirens that he encounters on his cases. Eisner sure knew how to draw a broad, and his relish is evident in the inventive names he gave them: Silk Satin, Sand Saref, Silken Floss, Lorelei Rox. The most dangerous of these, and the most compelling, was P’Gell.

The poor sap never had a chance.

Tellingly, while Eisner often played down his cinematic influences, he was happy to account for P’Gell’s ancestry: “Her jawline was inspired by Carole Lombard, who had a very sexy, provocative face. Hedy Lamarr and Marlene Dietrich are part of her, too.”

The Spirit strip’s claim to a noir reading lies in Eisner’s vision of a world ruled by fate. Unlike more recent noir comics (e.g. 100 Bullets), the strip eschews the stylistic pleasures of Hammett, Chandler or Billy Wilder. Instead, Eisner’s stories speak to an understanding of the social deprivation at the root of noir. While the Spirit enjoys a cosy existence on the outskirts of Central City, Eisner frequently takes us into the slums, showing how extreme poverty engenders cruelty and suffering. The fact that these truths are delivered with a wry sense of humour makes them even more devastating.

The splash-page for ‘The Criminal’ (2 November 1947) is typical. Over broken fences, urchins watch the lights of the big city dim as the switch is pulled on a murderer. Some of them are foreseeing their own grim future. Yet, as always with Eisner, there is humanity amid the squalor: observe the Oriols A.C. sign nailed to the shack.

Central City is a threatening, unfair place and this is often visualized through expressionistic compositions. In ‘The Partner’ (26 January 1947), a cynical tale of political racketeering, Eisner sets up the whole story in his splash page. The play of shadow and light anticipates the self-destructive greed of the main players, whose carefully wrought schemes are doomed to go up in smoke.

Most importantly, Eisner consistently shows a commitment to telling the stories of little men, guys whose desperation leads them to sin. In ‘The Killer’ (8 December 1946), we follow the life of Henry, a poor nobody working a dead-end job to support his trampish wife. Going away to war makes Henry an accidental hero, but when he returns to America, he finds that nothing has changed. He’s back where he started. And unsurprisingly, he breaks. What’s so extraordinary about this particular strip is the decision to take us “inside” Henry’s head.

It’s as though we’re pulling the trigger with Henry, momentarily enjoying his pyrrhic victory. Of course, the strip ends with him being led away in handcuffs (the Spirit is quietly sympathetic), but not without Eisner suggesting that repressed violence is an endemic problem in ante-bellum America.

No less tragic is ‘The Story of Gerhard Schnobble’ (5 September 1948), an insignificant little schlub who dreams that he can fly. After 35 years of faithful service to a bank, he fails to prevent a robbery and gets fired. Hoping to prove to the world that he’s a somebody, he leaps from the top of a skyscraper, taking wing as the city reaches up to meet him. But it’s Gerhard’s misfortune to catch a stray bullet from one of the robbers as he falls. The Spirit catches the villains, and Gerhard’s body is taken away, already forgotten by the crowd.

Or there’s Freddy in ‘Ten Minutes’ (11 September 1949), who shoots Max, a candy store owner he’s known all his life, for the coins in the cash register. “I didn’t mean it. Believe me, Max,” he screams at the smiling corpse, “I needed dough to leave town… I’m sick o’ this block… A fresh start… That’s all I want…” Seven minutes later, he is dead too, crushed by a subway carriage.

This preoccupation with fatal mistakes and desperate lives, the very essence of noir, runs through The Spirit. And without fail, Eisner ends these tales with a twist of gallows humour, a reminder that it’s all an awful joke. ‘Ten Minutes’ is a good example. As the Spirit and Dolan muse on when Freddy went bad, a passer-by comments, “What’s ten minutes in a man’s life?”

In this eight-page story, a “perfect blending of narration and image”, Will Eisner shows us that ten minutes can mean the difference between a lifetime of frustration and a cold slab in the Central City morgue.

For the Love of Film (Noir) Blogathon

I’m currently writing up my contribution to the exciting Film Noir Blogathon, hosted by The Self-Styled Siren and Ferdy on Films. As well as inciting a lot of hard-bitten whisky-swilling bloggers to wax lyrical on the cynical underbelly of Hollywood, the blogathon serves a good cause. This year, it’s all in aid of The Film Noir Foundation’s efforts to restore The Sound of Fury (Cy Endfield, 1950), a neglected classic starring Lloyd Bridges. It’s a remake of Fritz Lang’s Fury, and the word on the street is it may be better than original. But how are we ever going to find out if the print wastes away?

Marilyn Ferdinand describes where your donation will go:

“A nitrate print of the film will be restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive, using a reference print from Martin Scorsese’s personal collection to guide them and fill in any blanks. Paramount Pictures has agreed to help fund the restoration, but FNF is going to have to come up with significant funds to get the job done. That’s where we come in.”

You can donate using the button below, and you’ll automatically be entered into a raffle.

The prizes are as follows:

1. The brand-new deluxe DVD edition of The Prowler.

2. A DVD documentary on Eddie Muller, The Czar of Noir, featuring his short film with Marsha Hunt, The Grand Inquisitor.

3. Illustrator Steve Brodner will be contributing a drawing of Lloyd Bridges as a raffle prize during the blogathon. Look in the photo album on the Facebook page for samples of his work.

4. A full set of all nine posters for the Film Noir Foundation’s NOIR CITY film festival, held each year in San Francisco since 2003.

5. A set of all three NOIR CITY SENTINEL annuals. Noir City is the Foundation’s flagship publication.

6. Programs from NOIR CITY 8 and 9

7. An autographed copy of Eddie Muller’s first novel, The Distance.

And if you want to join in the blogathon as a writer, there’s still plenty of time, so get typing. The rules can be found here. Links to entries so far (and there are some doozies!) can be found here.

And what will I be blogging about? Well, here’s a big clue:

They Had Faces Then #5

DeWitt Bodeen: “Although Irene Dunne once said that she felt her best performance came on about the third take, every take was consistent in timing and action. If she paused slightly to pick up an object, she always paused at the same place, picking it up in the same way with the same hand. Her precision was remarkable.”

Leo McCarey: “You can really call Irene Dunne the first lady of Hollywood, because she’s the first real lady Hollywood has ever seen.”

Quotes from Danny Peary (ed.), Close-Ups: The Movie Star Book.

 

Chanson de Montmartre

Hello everyone! It’s been a busy couple of weeks and I’ve been neglecting my blog. So I’m back with something a little bit different. As you might recall, I posted a link a little while ago to this wonderful news story, which prompted Yvette’s short story challenge.

I’ve been doing lots more creative work this year, and so the discipline of the challenge appealed to me: a short story in 1,500 words. I decided to make it a bit harder on myself and give myself a time restriction too! I wrote the first draft of this in an hour yesterday and spent another hour this morning tidying it up. It comes in at 1, 161 words – please leave me a comment and let me know what you think!

Chanson de Montmartre

Monsieur Lepic stood in the gateway to the courtyard, basking in the evening sunlight. It was one of his favourite things to do, just standing and watching people as they rushed up and down his busy little street. One of the luxuries of being a concierge, he reflected, was the sense of ownership that came from occupying a little space of the pavement. It made one feel part of something larger. It gave one a sense of continuity.

But what, he wondered, did the woman upstairs know of such things?

The smell of fresh bread drifted over from the new boulangerie on the corner. Monsieur Lepic sniffed at it appreciately. Yes, if they kept up this standard, they’d have no shortage of customers. He would often boast to his friends that he had everything he needed on his humble street – beautiful cheeses from the fromagerie, fresh produce from the vegetable stalls, a café, a bookshop and, best of all, the basement bar where the young conservatoire students would gather to play bebop.

Monsieur Lepic had always lived on the street. His mother had owned the courtyard building before him, which connected to the thoroughfare by a gated alleyway.  Madame Lepic had been a landlady back in the era of the true Montmartre, when the 18th arrondisement had been full of artists, prostitutes and troubadours. His mother had loved looking after her exciting tenants and, it was rumoured, had even modelled in her younger days. She had never disclosed the exact details to her son, for which he was truly grateful.

One day, when Monsieur Lepic was only five years old (they called him Georges back then) a beautiful and mysterious woman had taken a tenancy in the courtyard. She had moved into the top floor apartment, filling it with all manner of exotic paraphernalia. Her name was Emilie Torrence, famed throughout the picture magazines as a bohemian and an adventuress. This thrilling addition to his domestic life fascinated the young Georges. He would spy on her comings and goings from his bedroom window, ducking his head and blushing whenever she chanced to look up and wave at him. Once, and only once, he had peeked through a crack in her apartment door and watched as Mademoiselle Torrence brushed the feathers of a stuffed emu with a scrap of cheesecloth. What eccentricity!

Looking back, Monsieur Lepic could see that he had been in love with her glamour, and with the heady world in which she moved. He had even wanted to be an artist once. How strange to think of it! M. Lepic smiled and patted his belly for comfort. Already the sun was disappearing behind a chimneypot. How fleeting it all was, he reflected. And how Montmartre had changed since those days. They had pulled up the roads that summer to put in electric streetlights. It was an improvement, perhaps.

When the eminent painter Chemin had died, it emerged that he had left all of his fortune to Mademoiselle Torrence. Chemin’s outraged wife took the matter to court, and Monsieur Lepic recalled how the street had been full of reporters, stopped at the gate by his mother’s broom handle. Mademoiselle Torrence stayed on as a tenant, but now her rent arrived in green envelopes from the solicitors Grosseau et fils. To the outrage of the newspapers, and the joy of everybody else, Chemin’s will was upheld and Emilie Torrence’s future was assured. Monsieur Lepic remembered this as a time of great celebration in the courtyard. He would lay awake at night and listen to the sound of laughter and Vitaphone recordings.

A little while after the passing of Madame Lepic, Emilie Torrence accepted an invitation to take up residence with a Pasha in the South of France. Her rent would continued to be paid, and her belongings would remain. “I entrust my past to you, Monsieur Lepic,” she had said on the day of her departure. The next day the courtyard had seemed quite empty.

For a year, the apartment had lain untouched, the door locked. But one cold winter’s morning, Monsieur Lepic’s curiousity overcame him. After all, it was his building. He ought to check inside once in a while, for maintenance. It was his duty, after all.

Given these indisputable truths, it is strange that he had felt so guilty when unlocking the door, as though trespassing in church. The room had taken up such a large part of his youthful imagination that entering it seemed like desecration. It was strange indeed. Turkish drapes hung everywhere, shrouded in cobwebs. The bed stood solidly in the middle of the room, cold and sad. M. Lepic had fancied that the stuffed emu was watching him reproachfully.

A picture frame leant against a mahogany bureau. Bending down to regard it, M. Lepic had seen that it was a portrait of Emilie Torrence in her youth. She had been very beautiful. Even through the dust, Monsieur Lepic could admire the bright blue of her crinoline dress and the way that the artist had captured her delicate complexion. In the corner of the painting, written in neat black letters, was the signature ‘Chemin’. Suddenly feeling very sad, Monsieur Lepic stumbled out of the room and locked it behind him.

The light in the street had almost completely faded now. Monsieur Lepic lit a cigarette and watched the girls making their way down to work the Boulevard de Clichy. It had surprised him to receive a letter from his absent tenant that morning, even more so when she appeared on his doorstep a few hours later. He wondered how much longer she would be. As if in answer to his question, she came along the alley toward the gate. Though stooped and aged, she was still beautiful.

“Thank you for waiting,” she said. “This will be my last trip to Paris and I so wanted to look at the room one more time. I wanted to look at my painting.” She smiled at him and he wondered if she knew of his trespass. But how could she?

“Will you want to have any of your things sent down to you, Madame?” M. Lepic asked, discreetly tossing his cigarette into the gutter.

“No, no. I have no use for them. I wish you to dispose of them as you will. You have been a faithful guardian. I am so grateful.” She reached out to take his hand. It was like a blessing. “Dear Monsieur Lepic. Dear Georges.”

For some time after she had gone, Monsieur Lepic stood in the gateway to his courtyard. He was quite certain that he would never part with her belongings, would never even let the room to anybody else. It was a treasure-house, a memory of a lost time. Thinking of his dinner, Monsieur Lepic turned to go back indoors, just as the streetlamps came on and the hill of Montmartre lit up like a precious stone.

Classic Chandler on Radio 4

Today Radio 4 begins its Classic Chandler season. Consequently, we have a new Philip Marlowe in Toby Stephens. I must admit that my first reaction to this bit of casting was not that positive. In the trailers, Stephens’ American accent sounds a little strained. Why not just cast an American, I thought? Then a friend very reasonably reminded me that Equity rules might rule out this option. Then I considered the logistics of casting a season of eight plays with ex-pats. And then I wised up.

Stephens is a very good actor, after all (and the son of a great Sherlock Holmes!) and the clip below shows that he is passionate and knowledgeable about Chandler’s world. I shall try to be less grumpy in the future.

The rumpus kicks off today at 11.30 AM with A Coat, A Hat and a Gun, a half-hour feature on the life of Raymond Thornton Chandler (Chris’ blog has a nice piece on this subject here).

Tomorrow, the afternoon play at 2.15 PM is Double Jeopardy by Stephen Wyatt. I think I’m even more excited about this than by the new Marlowe adaptations. It’s a play about Chandler and Billy Wilder going ten rounds over the writing of Double Indemnity. It’s got Patrick Stewart playing Chandler. Yes, that’s right. Patrick Stewart. And Adrian Scarborough as Wilder! Oh, and it’s written by the man who wrote this. Yum, I can’t wait…

The season continues with the Toby Stephens plays every Saturday this February. So, we’ll be treated to The Big Sleep on the 5th, The Lady in the Lake on the 12th, Farewell My Lovely on the 19th and Playback on the 26th, all being broadcast 2.30-4.00 PM. Later in the year the season will conclude with The Long Goodbye, The High Window, The Little Sister and Poodle Springs (presumably following the Robert B. Parker version?).

In other words, we’re being spoiled silly. I, for one, plan to listen to these little beauties with a fedora perched on the back of my bonce and the venetian blinds down…

They Had Faces Then #4

Yvette has reminded me that Clark Gable was born on 1st February in 1901.

I don’t know how I’ve managed to miss it but I’ve never seen his most famous picture, Gone with the Wind. However, I do cherish his performance as Peter Warne in It Happened One Night. To me, it’s one of the great comic performances of the 1930s, in one of that era’s most delightful films. Just thinking about his rules of hitch-hiking makes me smile!

Myrna Loy, who acted with Gable several times (and rejected his advances a number of times too!), recalled, “He loved poetry, and read beautifully, with great sensitivity, but he wouldn’t dare let anybody else know it.”

Loy and Gable made a great screen pairing, especially in Manhattan Melodrama, Test Pilot and Wife vs. Secretary (how I relish the name of that movie!).

Loy, Gable and Jean Harlow in Wife vs. Secretary (Clarence Brown, 1936)

Hammer Horror socks!

Yes, I got socks for Christmas. But look how cool they are!

These came from Asda, at £2.99 a pair. They also had a Taste the Blood of Dracula design. I probably should have got them too…