BunzelGram October 10, 2022 Issue #107 This Week's Thoughts On Mysteries, Thrillers, and All Things Crime |
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I always try to say something nice about a creative project into which someone has poured their soul, energy, and creativity. But I’m going to break that personal canon today by talking a bit about Clint Eastwood’s 1977 film The Gauntlet. It was one of several DVDs I picked up at Bouchercon last month (see The Maltese Falcon article, below), and I was looking forward to watching it for the first time since I saw it on opening weekend 45 years ago. What a total disappointment. Terrible screenplay, Eastwood seemed to simply phone his performance in, and Sondra Locke…don’t get me started. Not only is the plot highly contrived, but the final armored bus scene is laughable. And don’t get me started about the Bonnie and Clyde-type shoot-out at the Nevada-Arizona state line; anyone who has studied U.S. geography knows there isn’t a single highway where a car can cross that border without also crossing a river. —Reed Bunzel |
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The Man Who Would Be Bond Follows The “Somewhat Fictionalized” Life Of 007 Creator Ian Fleming As an unapologetic fan of the James Bond film franchise (I've seen them all), I was surprised that I’d never heard of the 2014 British miniseries titled The Man Who Would Be Bond. This four-part program follows the military career of Ian Fleming, the creator of the James Bond series whose personal life was nowhere near as dashing or adventurous as that of the character he created. Spanning the period of 1939 to 1952, the somewhat fictionalized biography details Fleming's romantic adventures as well as his espionage for the Royal Navy during World War II. The project begins in 1952 in Jamaica, where Fleming (Dominic Cooper) is on his honeymoon with his new wife Ann (Laura Pulver), who disapproves of his preoccupation with finishing his first spy novel, Casino Royale. The show then flashes back to ‘39, as Fleming is presented as something of a rogue and a ladies’ man, the black sheep in an aristocratic family in which his brother Peter (Rupert Evans) is already a successful author. Soon enough, Fleming is recruited to work in Naval intelligence, though his swashbuckling tendencies and wildly imaginative ideas run somewhat counter to his drab desk job, where his boss (Samuel West) is an ersatz M and his office-mate Lt. Monday (Anna Chancellor) a veritable Miss Moneypenny. Perhaps foremost, though, Fleming is repeatedly drawn to Ann, who’s not only married to an absent military officer but already the mistress of a wealthy man. While Variety describes the series as “shaken but not particularly stirring,” it is highly reflective of the actual drab existence of most spies of that era, and today. | | |
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The Maltese Falcon Remains One Of Noir’s Top Cinematic Masterpieces While at Boucheron in Minneapolis last month I picked up a used DVD of the 1941 film noir classic The Maltese Falcon, based on the crime novel by Dashiell Hammett. It had been decades since I’d last seen it, and it remained as beautiful to watch as it was the first time I ever saw it. Written and directed by John Huston in his directorial debut, it stars Humphrey Bogart as San Francisco-based private investigator Sam Spade and Mary Astor as his femme fatale client. [Gladys George, Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet co-star.] The story follows Spade as he deals with a trio of unscrupulous reprobates, all of whom are trying to get their hands on an invaluable jewel-encrusted falcon statuette that was presented as a gift in 1539 by the Knights Templar of Malta to Charles V. A pair of murders force the police to look at Spade as a person of interest, while he becomes entangled in a dangerous web of intrigue, deceit, theft, and duplicity. The falcon itself actually is a classic example of a cinematic “MacGuffin”; we don’t really care much about it, just that everyone in the story seems to be after it. As film critic Roger Ebert said, “To describe the plot in a linear and logical fashion is almost impossible. That doesn't matter. The movie is essentially a series of conversations punctuated by brief, violent interludes. It's all style. It isn't violence or chases, but the way the actors look, move, speak and embody their characters." | | |
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The Dark Art Of Mystery And Suspense As Seen Through The Eyes Of Masters Shrouded faces. Fleshy indulgence. Dark streets. Violence and mystery. Tour almost any art gallery in the world and you’ll find it filled with images of death and destruction, horror and seduction, loneliness and fear that inspire the imagination and cause us to think twice about the underlying story behind the painting. Michael Connelly named his LAPD detective Hieronymus Bosch after studying that painter’s particularly unnerving triptych “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” which he believed symbolized the sloth and temptation found in the streets of Los Angeles. Norwegian artist Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” is particularly gripping in its symbolization of the anxiety of the human condition. And in "The Girl with the Pearl Earring,' Johannes Vermeer gives us a young woman whose seductive gaze leaves us wondering: Is she happy? Is she sad? Why is she looking with such longing, and for whom? Painting mysteries have echoed the art world for centuries, and the interpretation—just like beauty—lies in the eyes of the beholder. For two different takes, here’s a list of seven painting mysteries that have baffled the art world, and another that depicts the surrealism and sometimes off-kilter realism of 20th century artists. | | |
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COLD CASE FILE Remains Of Pennsylvania Teen Missing Since 1969 Identified Through Her DNA Joan Marie Dymond was 14 years old when she went missing from Andover Street Park in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania on June 25, 1969. She had told her parents after dinner that she was going there to meet some friends, but she never returned home. Now, over half a century later, DNA testing has confirmed that human remains found in Luzerne County in 2012 are those of Dymond. Her partially decomposed body was found in November 2012 on the grounds of a former coal-mining operation in Newport Township, west of Wilkes-Barre, by several people who said they were digging for relics in a trash-filled depression in the ground. An examination of the remains determined them to be those of a female in her mid-teens to early 20s, and lab results suggested she likely died in the late 1960s and that death by foul play was probable. A DNA sample was submitted to national databases to be compared with profiles on record, but results were negative. In March 2022, almost 10 years after being discovered, the remains were submitted to Othram, Inc. to undergo genetic genealogy testing. With the company’s help, investigators were able to find possible family members of Jane "Newport" Doe and subsequently collected DNA samples that eventually confirmed Dymond's identity. | | |
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Raymond Chandler Reportedly Feuded With Almost Everyone In Hollywood The United States in 1949: The country has survived the ravages of a second world war, and was hurtling and hustling its American way toward a Cold War and the middle of the century. Six long years had elapsed since Raymond Chandler—successor to Dashiell Hammett as the "crime boss" of the hard-boiled boys—had published his last detective novel, The Lady in the Lake. During that lengthy intermission between novels, Chandler had gone to work in Hollywood, where he wrote scripts for two classic American crime films: Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, based on the James M. Cain crime novel, and The Blue Dahlia, for both of which he received Academy Award nominations. Then, in 1950, Chandler toiled on scripts for Alfred Hitchcock’s classic suspense flick Strangers on a Train, based on Patricia Highsmith’s recent debut thriller, and it was then that he began to earn the reputation of prickly, temperamental writer and notoriously difficult collaborator. As mystery novelist Curtis Evans wrote last week in Crime Reads, “Chandler’s sensitivities drove to distraction Billy Wilder, with whom Chandler collaborated on the Double Indemnity script. At one point Chandler even submitted a list to the film’s producer explaining why he could no longer work with the famed director. Yet that mutual antagonism paled compared with the enmity that developed between Chandler and Alfred Hitchcock when Chandler was working on the screenplay for Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train in 1950, complaining about god-awful jabber sessions.” | | |
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ALSO: Ten Intriguing Crime Novels With Unreliable Narrators When reading a novel there often is something very pleasurable about being taken for a wild ride, and the effect is definitely heightened when an unreliable narrator is part of the mix. [Novel Suspects] Silver-Haired Sleuths: The Best Senior Detectives In Classic Crime Chasing after murderers, bank robbers and cat-burglars might seem like a job for the young and athletic, but in mystery fiction, age is no barrier to cracking a tough case—as this selection of the finest elderly crime solvers shows. [Murder-Mayhem] Theo Wenner On Photographing Homicides…And The Cops Who Live With Them Photographer Theo Wenner, son of Rolling Stone magazine founder Jann Wenner, spent many years around New York City homicide detectives. His new book captures them like never before. [Crime Reads] |
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Coming January 10, 2023: Greenwich Mean Time “A globe-spanning, mind-spinning thriller that will delight fans of Jason Bourne. Rōnin Phythian, an assassin with extraordinary powers and a code of his own, deserves a sequel. Make that sequels.” —Joseph Finder, New York Times bestselling author of House on Fire When photojournalist Monica Cross literally stumbles into the site of an old airplane crash at the edge of a Himalayan glacier, she is exposed to a dark and deadly secret that was meant to remain hidden forever. Unaware that her life is in grave danger, she attempts to get home to New York while the Greenwich Global Group—a dark-web, murder-for-hire outfit—pulls out all stops to make sure she never gets there. Spanning ten time zones, nine countries, and four continents, Greenwich Mean Time is a tightly spun thriller that plays out against a sinister plot designed to change the course of history for all time. | | |
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