Tag: Leslie Charteris

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Many Happy Reruns: Katharine Hepburn and Leslie Charteris

Well, I prefer doing it slowly, in narrow, dusty aisles, surrounded by strangers. Browsing for second-hand books, I mean. Nowadays, it is so much easier, and often cheaper, to pick up that elusive volume by going online, rather than making a day of it in out-of-the-way bookstores, antique shops, or flea markets. I’m not giving up on that experience, though—on the thrill of the hunt and the triumph of the catch. Hay-on-Wye, where I went yesterday, is the very place for such a literati safari. It is a tiny Welsh village with a population of about 1500; but its narrow streets are lined with about forty bookstores, some of which specialize in Hollywood cinema and crime fiction. That’s where Hepburn and Charteris, both born on this day in 1907, will come in . . . eventually.

Yesterday, I came home with a little something for my Claudette Colbert collection (pictured), with another copy of Norman Corwin’s Thirteen by Corwin (a fine one with dust jacket, previously owned by the BBC research department), and a title from the Directors Guild of America Oral History series, an interview with television pioneer Worthington Miner.

Prior to entering television in the late 1930s (yes, NBC did have a television schedule back then, even though only a few thousand Americans owned a set), Miner had been a theatrical producer in the 1930s; and, in March 1937, his leading lady was none other than Ms. Hepburn, who starred in an adaptation of Jane Eyre (previously discussed here).

According to Miner,

Katie was a wonderful Jane; it was her cup of tea, and she sparkled. But we had a dreadful Rochester and an even worse last act. [. . .] As a result, we decided to book it on the road for a few months and not risk bringing it into New York. For weeks on end it battled the elements, storms and tornados, floods and disasters, without an empty seat in the house. Katie’s name was already a prodigious drawn in the hinterlands. Jane Eyre made a tidy profit, but the kudos was nil for any of us, even Katie herself.

Years, later, Miner was involved in securing the rights Long Day’s Journey Into Night for another producer, with whom Miner strongly disagreed about Hepburn in the role of Mary Tyrone. Miner believed that Hepburn—a “mercurial, unpredictable performer”—was utterly “wrong” for the part. In the “right” role (Tracy Lord in The Philadelphia Story, for instance, which she reprised in several radio productions) she was “incomparable, a class unto herself.” When miscast, however, she could be “aggressively, monstrously bad.” To me, Undercurrent comes to mind; Hepburn was just not cut out to be the victim, even when permitted to fight back.

Someone very much angered by Hollywood casting was Saint creator Leslie Charteris, who shares Hepburn’s birthday. I have mentioned previously (and have been corrected on some muddled facts by Saint expert Burl Barer), that Charteris was not at all pleased when George Sanders took over the role of his Robin Hood of Modern Crime. He much preferred Louis Hayward, who had portrayed Simon Templar in The Saint in New York.

Now, one of the writers involved in adapting Charteris’s novel for the screen was Irwin Shaw, whose play Bury the Dead Miner had produced on Broadway and whose final radio play, “Supply and Demand,” he directed for the Columbia Workshop in the spring of 1937, when Hepburn was touring with Jane Eyre.

Perhaps I am overly fond of such six-degrees-of-separation games; but with some Miner assistance, I could almost send Hepburn and Charteris on a dinner date, discussing a role that might have been swell as a follow-up for Bringing Up Baby: a sophisticated screwball-mystery of The Thin Man variety.

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Having a "Million Pound Day"; or, the Case of the Breathless Blogger

Well, I was just trying to get into Hollywood Horror House (also known as Savage Intruder), an obscure, late 1960s Hagsploitation movie starring Miriam Hopkins, a video tape of which was sent to me (and is being reviewed here) by a connoisseur of camp, when I was seized by a violent coughing fit. Judging from the opening slasher scene, the film itself seems quite capable of irritating the throat muscles; but this was the oft-mentioned, nagging cold I have not been able to get off my chest ever since I caught it one rainy November night in New York City.

Being even more stubborn than the cough, I decided to tough it out once again—until I was entirely out of breath by about 2 AM. So, after a trip to the emergency room, I am loaded with steroids, sucking on my inhaler, and ready for another dose of murder and transmogrification.

As I remarked in the previous post, I have been following the adventures of the Saint in a series of RKO thrillers that aired on BBC 2 in early January (after having missed the movies when they were shown elsewhere a few months ago). The first film adaptation of a Saint story was the 1938 thriller The Saint in New York. Except for a bit of cross-dressing, it is very much a gangster movie fit for a Robin Hood of modern crime rather than one of those cosmopolished capers in which a smartly-suited man about town amuses himself, like a Nick without his Nora, by solving the odd case of murder between Martinis.

The Saint Strikes Back [my thanks to Saint expert Burl Barer, for editing here], the second Simon Templar story to be adapted for the screen, is somewhat closer to the Nick-and-Nora formula, with Simon being paired with a lovely—if preposterously coiffed—sidekick who actually kicks instead of just standing aside. Author Leslie Charteris disliked the film intensely—or at least its star, George Sanders.

As Barer shares in his book on the multimediated Saint (The Saint: A Complete History in Print, Radio, Film and Television), Charteris would have preferred a Cary Grant; but the studio was not in need of, nor willing to pay for, such star power to churn out a potentially long-lasting, low-budget franchise.

Shortly after striking back in San Francisco, Sander returned as The Saint in London, based on Charteris’s 1931 story “Black Face.” Retitled “The Million Pound Day,” it appeared in the first Saint omnibus, the 1951 paperback edition of which (pictured above) I found some years back at the Black Orchid, a mystery bookstore in Manhattan. So, I released my copy of Arrest the Saint from its wrapper at last, started to read and, inevitably, compare.

My intention was not to go in search of the real Simon Templar, but to find out what had been done to it, for better or worse. Most of the Saint adventure starring Vincent Price, one of the Templars of the airwaves, were written especially for the medium in which they played out. To my surprise, “The Million Pound Day” has all the makings of a terrific radio play.

Indeed, Charteris, (who, as I mentioned earlier, did write for radio), clearly acknowledges his interest in audio thrills: “Simon heard the juicy whuck! of his shoe making contact. . . . The wheezy phe-e-ew of electrically emptied lungs merged into the synchronised sound effects, and ended in in a little grunting cough.” The story, unlike the film, opens in “impenetrable” darkness. The first sound we hear (or are told about) is that most impressive of sirens—the scream of a human being in peril. Footsteps are approaching—a “wild tattoo” of running feet that spelled “stomach-sinking dread” and “stark terror.”

Rather than being pointed to a crook whose capture requires the Saint’s reckless, beyond-the-law approach to matters of turpitude, Simon finds himself in a dangerous situation of uncertain moral boundaries. Whereas the film shows a duel between two men, with the police more than halfway on the Saint’s side, the short story offers a free-for-all by twilight. “But the Queensberry Rules were strictly observed. There was no hitting below belts, which were worn loosely around the ankles,” Templar remarks nonchalantly after his first encounter with the criminal and his prey.

Whether the endangered one is a rogue, a gentleman, or both, matters little. Simon rescues the hunted, knocks out the “gorilla” in pursuit, and rushes the victim to a hotel near his own apartments in London. As a result of his selfless efforts to save the life of a stranger, the Saint is being suspected by the police of having committed the crime himself.

Hollywood movies tend to draw far clearer lines; and Charteris’s intriguing ambiguities were lost in the process.

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Original? Sin!: Romancing the Reproducers (Part Two)

Well, I did say “romancing,” didn’t I? It may have sounded more like “pooping on” in the entry I balderdashed off yesterday. The accompanying image, by the way, referred to the new television series Balderdash and Piffle (on BBC2 in the UK), which invites the public to challenge, edit and amend the Oxford English Dictionary. More about that in a few days, perhaps. So, why “romancing”?

For one thing, I am very much attracted to and fascinated by remakes and adaptations. I am not one of those clamoring for so-called original material in favor of a smart revision or charming homage. Let’s face it: “originality” is a downright prelapsarian concept. There are only so many juicy stories to tell. We should not expect to be handed another forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge; which does not mean that we should settle for any old lemon.

Reworking a so-called classic can be a questioning of its definitiveness, its very status. It can also mean a translation of a great idea or worthwhile thought into a context and language more accessible to present-day audiences, thus a way of keeping the original alive in spirit, rather than slaughtering it.

As diverting as both King Kong and The Producers might have been, I feel they have failed on both accounts. Yet even though I am not infrequently disappointed with remakes and sequels (which are often remakes in disguise), I seek them out again and again, embracing them—in concept, at least—as an alternative form of criticism.

Last night, for instance, I watched The Saint in London (1939), which aired during the first week of January 2006 on BBC 2 in a series of four Saint adventures. The movie is a reworking of Leslie Charteris’s mystery “The Million Pound Day.” So, I could not refrain from digging up that story from my library and will probably report my comparison in the near future, drawing on the 1940s Saint radio series as well.

I felt compelled to do the same after watching King Kong, of which I found an undated radio adaptation, with Captain Englehorn as narrator. And I might take the same multimedia approach to the Charlie Chan mystery, The Black Camel, having recently come across a first edition of the 1933 omnibus The Celebrated Cases of Charlie Chan at a local second-hand bookstore.

Tracing an adaptation to its source—not necessarily an original itself—often enhances my appreciation or understanding of a work and its workings. It does not follow that the older version is superior by virtue of its antecedents, even though our fondness for it may make us sceptical of any attempts at revision.

While in London, I saw two 1930s plays. One was the Kaufman and Hart comedy Once in a Lifetime, the other And Then There Were None. The latter is based on the 1939 Agatha Christie novel in which ten strangers find themselves on a remote island, murdered, one by one, by an unknown adversary among them. Rene Clair’s 1945 film adaptation is a marvel of both atmosphere and fidelity—right until the very end. One reviewer having his say on the internet movie database (IMDb) remarks that the novel’s ending “would never *ever* work in a dramatized setting, film or stage”—but Kevin Elyot’s new stage adaptation proved him wrong. I couldn’t wait for the play to be over. Not because it was so awful, not because I wanted to know the identity of the murderer (familiar to me from book and film)—but because I needed to see what was being done to the ending. A very satisfying counting down of corpses it turned out to be.

Once in a Lifetime—staged by the National Theatre, no less—was dead on arrival. Even the spirit of nostalgia, if I were possessed by it, could not assist in animating this propped up carcass. Period costumes, smart sets, and fidelity to the script—itself much in need of tightening and deserving of fresher jokes—are no substitute for a director’s knowing and assured handling of material that was still relevant and topical in 1930 (the advent of cinema’s sound era), but that now comes across as a quaint and pointless revisitation of Singin’ in the Rain—without the Singin’. A soggy muddle indeed.

The program for the show supplied a “Once in a Lifetime Glossary” to an audience confronted with a slew of 75-year-old in-jokes. What’s left is a dim farce of decidedly low wattage. Very few directors can work up and sustain the energy to prevent the potentially zany from being plain dull.

In short, rummaging through remakes and revivals can be a disenchanting exercise; but there are rewards in romancing the reproducers, especially if they take you to the occasional gem you might have otherwise overlooked.