NIGHTWEBS
By Cornell Woolrich

Cornell Woolrich was the poet-laureate of noir. His career as a pulp writer spanned the ‘30s and ‘40s. His output was large and distinguished by many successful screen adaptations. Yet, Woolrich is little known outside of crime novel aficionados. Perhaps it is because of the intense darkness he found beneath the sunlit world.

Nightwebs brings together both the dark and the light with a dozen tales groups under the headings of “The Claws of the Night”, “Death and the City”, and “The Butchers and the Trapped”. They are a nightmare ride through the doomed roller coaster of Woolrich’s imagination. They are also representative of the classic themes of Woolrich’s work: guilt, loss, suspicion, cruelty, and a kind of cosmic fear of a world filled with a malignant will to crush one’s soul.

“Grave for the Living” is about an abominable cult that practices burial alive, which is pretty mild compared to torturing someone with sulfuric acid as the police do in this ghastly tale. “The Corpse Next Door” is a Depression-era nightmare of life in a decaying tenement and the decay bred by a guilty conscience. “You’ll Never See Me Again” is about the loss of a loved one, but Woolrich’s characters are apt to physically lose a loved one. Retrieving them is compounded by the difficulty of demonstrating they are really missing.

“Dusk to Dawn” is another Depression story, but instead of dwelling on the horrors of guilt this tale describes the thrill of shedding one’s decency for savagery. “The Screaming Laugh” is an off kilter “whodunnit” where Woolrich’s verve for the absurd is matched by his relentless pacing. “Dead on her Feet” visits that most characteristic of ‘30s entertainments, the dance marathon. It also features one of Woolrich’s most sadistic detectives.

Woolrich wrote noir tales that mixed depravity with love, bleak doom with hope, and sadism with tenderness. His tales can have a wild improbability or a realism rendered with painful clarity. What they all have is an ability to compel a reader’s attention.

-Dave Hardy

LOST STORIES
By Dashiell Hammett

This collection pulls together a variety of Hammett stories, few of which have ever been anthologized and none recently. Consequently the collection focuses on early, minor work. That’s not to say it’s bad, it is surprising to see what a good craftsman Hammett was right from the start. However, by and large this is not his top-drawer work.

The collection includes some non-crime stories such as “Holiday”, a piece of naturalism that is very much in the vein popularized by Hemingway. The story concerns a tuberculosis sufferer on a spree in Tijuana. Tuberculosis was a subject very close to Hammett’s heart: he suffered from TB and lived hand-to-mouth for years on small disability checks.

Some of Hammett’s sense of humor and irony shines in tales of low-life crooks in “Itchy” and “The Green Elephant”. Both concern crooks who try to be something different, still crooks, but different kinds of crooks, and find that change brings a terrible price.

“The Road Home” and “Ber-Bulu” show a rarely seen side of Hammett’s fiction: stories with exotic settings and adventure motifs. Hammett later reversed the adventure story trappings in “The Ruffian’s Wife” and “The Maltese Falcon”, bringing the exotic into hard-boiled crime stories set in American cities.

One recurring theme is comic deflation. Stories such as “The Crusader”, “The Barber and his Wife”, and “Ber-Bulu” depict men with a greatly inflated senses of self-worth and physical power, suddenly brought down to earth.

While many of the stories are short, in fact some qualify as micro-fiction, editor Vince Emery includes a great deal of biographical material and critical analysis. The criticism is insightful and written in a bullet format intended for casual readers rather than scholars. The biographical data is likewise valuable, but would benefit from more focus. Maybe some folks need to be reminded that Hitler came to power in the 1930s, but is it really relevant here? Matters that lie much closer to an understanding of Hammett’s life and times need a little more detail. Emery’s assertion that Communist infiltration of Hollywood was directed from Moscow really needs to have footnotes to support it. While Hammett’s shifts in viewpoint to support the party line are unpleasant to read about, more detail on his Communist associations might help a reader sort out what Hammett truly believed.

Lost Stories has some fine Hammett fiction in it. However, this is a collection for a completist or someone trying to build a deeper picture the greatest crime-fiction writer of the 20th century. Beginners should start with The Big Knockover, The Thin Man, The Maltese Falcon, The Glass Key, or Red Harvest. Read any of them, you’ll read the rest and a yearning for Lost Stories won’t be far behind.

-Dave Hardy

ELDORADO RED
By Donald Goines

Most crime writers approach their topic from the far side as it were. They read about crime. Donald Goines lived it, it gives his pot-boiler crime novels an urgency not exactly found in other, more polished work.

Eldorado Red is a successful numbers racketeer. His son Buddy is a junkie. Red lives a life of luxury while Buddy seethes over the deprived childhood he had with his mother (Red’s estranged wife). But Buddy is an ambitious young man, he knows the routine at the houses where Red’s runners deposit their take. In dizzying round of larceny, he and his addict pals rob them all. Meanwhile Red’s henchmen are busy tracking down the heist gang while Red takes on a number of beautiful ladies.

It sounds a bit like a Quentin Tarantino film. I daresay it would make excellent material for QT. Goines knew his subject well, having robbed several numbers houses to support his heroin addiction.

Not that Eldorado Red is exactly flawless. Red’s easy-come-easy-go relationship business seems out of place on this action packed 24-hour robbery and murder spree. Goines’ dialog sometimes sounds a bit stilted, though that may have been an editorial retreat from the smooth street dialect his characters use.

The best way to approach this book is to imagine the speech in your mind, letting the real voices you may have heard bring the story to life. Goines characters are ruthless but at the same time a bit purposeless. For all the blood they shed in the name of money, few will end up rich. None can be said to be better off. There is a street-wise cynicism that pervades this tale, making it among the hardest of hard-boiled yarns.

-Dave Hardy

DOG EAT DOG
By Edward Bunker

Eddie Bunker was a crime writer who knew crime: he grew up in the California criminal system and was a professional thief. That experience, plus twenty years of labor as a professional writer, gives Dog Eat Dog a brutal realism that is seldom found in fiction.

The novel is about three jailhouse buddies. Deisel is a tough hoodlum who works for a low-level mobster while keeping a middle-class lifestyle with his wife and kid. Mad Dog is a violent, paranoid nutcase with a cocaine habit. Troy is the product of a prosperous, upper-class family where madness and brutality was the norm. Newly released from prison he plans to rally his buddies and cut a swath through the underworld.

Dog Eat Dog follows these hoodlums through their lives of crime: drug-binges and violent rages, family life and crime for hire, high-priced hookers and the LA night-life. Troy’s gang progresses from robbing drug-dealers to acting as hired guns for a Mexican drug-lord. The uncontrolled nature of a life of crime propels the story to a brutal and bloody climax.

California’s new “three-strikes” law hangs over the heads of these men. They are acutely aware that any crime: from check fraud to armed robbery, means a life sentence. The life of these criminals forms a backdrop for their constant self-justification and commentary on prison. They all are products of broken homes and jail. Each proclaims that they learned their toughness as a survival mechanism in reform schools and prison. Troy’s sudden arrival in 1990s America lets him see a society in free-fall that seems normal to the rest of us. They also uniformly blame society’s anger on what they see as the real problem: out-of-control African-Americans. In the eyes of Troy, Deisel, and Mad Dog black teenagers with AK-47s are ruining life for decent, hard-working crooks.

While Bunker makes pointed commentary on society through he eyes of Troy, he is too aware of how criminals build a wall of BS around their selfish and destructive lives. While loudly proclaiming their disdain for the senseless harshness of the three-strikes law, Troy and his pals have no intention of being anything but violent criminals. They praise the open, money driven world of Mexican prison as better for a prisoner’s rehabilitation, all the while they are planning a ruthlessly violent crime in a drug-lord’s cell. Troy’s self-pitying litany of “what-did-I-do-wrong” is a brutal impeachment of a violent man.

Before the story has run its course, everything is turned upside down. Make no mistake, each of these men believe that they have some moral limit: Troy doesn’t see himself as a killer, Deisel only wants to provide for his family, Mad Dog is, well…, Mad Dog is loyal. But Bunker doesn’t shy away from showing that it isn’t just broken families or prison that corrode a man’s soul, but also his choice to commit himself to the treacherous world of crime.

Bunker’s story may be too raw for some, but it is a fascinating insight into the underworld from a man who had seen it from both sides. Dog Eat Dog is also a compelling thriller with edge-of-your-seat twists and turns. After the action is done, it will leave you wondering just how we’re supposed to deal with the criminals our society produces.

-Dave Hardy

BLACK CAESAR
Dir. by Larry Cohen

So if a white guy writes and directs a movie about a black gangster who is super-cool, but also a super-scum bag, is it exploitation or iconography? Does anybody care? Is the soundtrack by James Brown the coolest thing since Isaac Hayes sang the theme song for Shaft?

Tommy Gibbs (Fred Washington) is a go-getter street hood and a crack shot with a broom-handle Mauser. He has tons of ambition and balls to match. Black Caesar chronicles his rise from shoeshine boy and mob runner to Lord of the Ghetto. He survives a vicious beating from McKinney (Art Lund), a crooked cop. Tommy becomes first an underling then a partner and finally the overlord of the alliance of Mafioso and crooked cops that run Harlem. Tommy hires a smart white lawyer (William Wellman Jr.) and even buys off McKinney.

Some lessons to take away: don’t stand around on the street getting a shoe shine when there’s a contract out on you, do build up a loyal cadre of devoted gunmen, don’t ever, ever bring a crooked cop less than the pay off he was expecting, most critical, don’t keep a ledger of every bribe paid to the crooked cops and judges, it’s just plain a bad idea.

Black Caesar suffers from iffy acting, dialog that is sometimes incomprehensible (speaking to a Mafia capo, “I spent years in your private institutions.” Does la Cosa Nostra run youth camps?), and sound that appears to have been recorded on a Mr. Microphone hanging on a mop-handle. I was glued to my seat. Because all that aside, the film is deliriously over the top in its treatment of racial power fantasies. Tommy’s mom is a maid and his dad abandoned him. Tommy’s two best friends are Joe, the nerdy kid, and Rufus, a hood turned into a sleazy preacher. Of course they plan to use crime profits to improve the ghetto (Cohen is honest enough to show that plan never comes to pass). Tommy is brutal and direct in his dealings with his girlfriend Helen (Gloria Hendry).

The real jewels in the crown are Tommy’s revenge on the white crime establishment that scorns him. Some people buy respectability, Tommy buys his lawyer’s up-town apartment, furniture and clothes included. He celebrates by throwing the lawyer’s wife’s fur coats over the balcony. In a twisted climax, Tommy humiliates a white enemy by smearing shoe polish on his face and making him sing “Mammy”!

What stands out here is Fred Williamson’s take as a super-cool, ghetto Alain Delon. While not exactly in the same league as Richard Roundtree, he is a bit above the “You kilted my bruth-ah!” skewered by Robert Townsend in The Hollywood Shuffle. Black Caesar is a true low budget gem. Is it offensive, racist trash or a Black insurrection on screen? I guess that depends on your point of view. There’s a reason they call the genre “Blaxploitation”.

-Dave Hardy

THE BIG SLEEP
Dir. by Howard Hawks

The film adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s classic detective story is marvelously done. This is the silver-screen vehicle that put the Bogart and Bacall chemistry on the map. The screenplay is a memorable collaboration between William Faulkner, the darling of literary critics in the ‘40s, and Leigh Brackett, one of the great SF-action storytellers of all time, as well as Jules Furhtman.

Hard-boiled PI, Philip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart) has been hired to help General Sternwood (Charles Waldron). The general is an elderly millionaire with two daughters who are about 46-flavors of trouble. Carmen (Martha Vickers) is being blackmailed. Vivian’s (Lauren Bacall) husband Rusty Reagan (a man the general respects) has disappeared and may be responsible.

What Marlowe finds is a sordid mess where secrets need to be buried as fast as they are unearthed. Navigating from swanky Hollywood nightclubs to scuzzy porno stores (back then they were illegal!) and all manner of high-society lowlifes, Marlowe follows this exceptionally twisted skein to its end.

The Big Sleep is a true classic, entertaining and stylish to see.

-Dave Hardy

THE BIG CLOCK
Dir. by John Farrow

The Big Clock is a film adaptation of Kenneth Fearing’s novel of the same name. For anyone who finds critics’ ramblings about “the love-wrack”, the sense of a moral void, and the general doom-laden bleakness of neo-noir to be a bit pretentious would do well to watch this old-time Hollywood film and recall that you can tell a hard-boiled story with a bit of humor.

George Stroud (Ray Milland) is editor of Crimeways Magazine. Stroud has a reputation for tracking down criminals and getting scoops by interviewing them before the boys in blue. You’d think that would get a guy some respect from his boss, but Stroud works for Earl Janoth (Charles Laughlin), the slimiest creep in publishing. Stroud has promised his wife (Maureen O’Sullivan) he’ll take a vacation and Janoth has promised to fire him if he does. Torn between letting more leave time accumulate or being fired and blacklisted, Stroud’s in a pickle. While drowning his sorrows, he just happens to meet the lovely Miss Pauline York (Rita Johnson), who just happens to be Janoth’s ex. Pretty soon Stroud finds he’s spent way too much time with Pauline and is in deep with his wife. Pauline has a confrontation with Janoth and ends up deep in death.

Janoth knows he’ll be in deep with the electric chair unless he can pin the rap on someone else. So he sets his ace crime-stopping editor to finding the guy Pauline was partying with. Stroud must simultaneously track down the clues that will frame him for murder, while finding a way to prove he’s innocent. Not wrecking his marriage is his side dish.

This is a good, fast-paced suspense tale. Milland, Laughlin, and Johnson were all superb. The story builds tension, but provides relief with quirky humor. If The Big Clock sounds familiar, it should. It was re-made as No Way Out, starring Kevin Costner in 1987. While this was one of Costner’s best movies (yes, I know that bar is rather low), I still recommend The Big Clock on its own merits.

-Dave Hardy

THE ASPHALT JUNGLE
Dir. by John Huston

This 1950 film tells the story of the perfect heist that had a few flaws. The script is by W.R. Burnett (High Sierra, Little Caesar, &c), the master of hard-boiled crime movies, and the direction is by John Huston (The Maltese Falcon, Treasure of the Sierra Madre) making Jungle a playground of titans.

The story may seem a trifle complex: Doc (Sam Jaffe) has just been released from prison and wants to make a one big score and get out of the country. He contacts Emmerich (Louis Calhern), a big shot crooked lawyer who agrees to bankroll a massive jewel heist. While these gentry provide the mcguffin, Dix Hayden (Sterling Hayden) is the heart of the movie. He’s a down on his luck hoodlum who just wants to make enough dough to go back to the farm in Kentucky.

The trip back to Kaintuck ain’t an easy one. Everyone is on the make, and the merely dishonest are prey for the utterly corrupt. As Doc’s plan begins to fall apart from unforeseen consequences and treachery from within, the true character of the gangsters is revealed. Burnett’s hoods move from sleazy to decent or to something worse than sleazy. But Burnett finds something worthy in even the worst of them. Pretty soon blood is flowing and the people who appeared indispensable become disposable and underdogs get their moment in the sun.

Marc Lawrence and gives a marvelous performance as Cobby, the low-life bookie. James Whitmore is a hunchbacked diner operator who moonlights as a getaway driver. His food may not be much, but he’ll hide your gat if the cops are about to frisk you. The supporting cast is rounded out by Barry Kelly as a crooked cop and Marilyn Monroe as Emmerich’s girlfriend.

While never as over-the-top bloody as modern crime movies, The Asphalt Jungle is suspenseful. It is also a movie that makes you care about what happens to its cast of hoodlums, criminal masterminds, and three-time losers.

-Dave Hardy

BIGGLES: PIONEER AIR FIGHTER
By W.E. Johns

In the early 1930s Captain W.E. Johns of the Royal Flying Corps crafted one of the enduring heroes of aviation stories: Biggles. Generations of British boys have thrilled to the adventures of Captain Bigglesworth and his pal Algy. Whether in the skies over France, flying East, West, North, or South, on vacation, or flying to work, Biggles upholds British pluck and fair play.

Biggles: Pioneer Air Fighter chronicles some of those early adventures. The volume brings together sixteen short stories set in the later stages of the Great War (the one that ended all war, you know?). The stories are in fact culled from the first and third Biggles books: The Camels are Coming and Biggles of the Camel Squadron. There is also and introduction by Johns about air warfare and a note about how Biggles and air warfare began.

The stories themselves tend to be brief and pointed little anecdotes about surprising events in war or tricky tactical problems that Biggles and his squadron mates must work out. There are also side trips to the trenches and the home front. The world of spies gets a look in as well. Biggles may have to figure out how to down a heavily armed scout plane or to rescue a Tommy with a leg wound. A trip home finds him getting a white feather from supercilious civvies and a DSO on the same day.

What makes these stories compelling is the very serious matter Johns interjects in what are boys stories. Formally the Biggles tales read at a grade school level. But the content is much more adult. Johns recalls comrades who fought their first and last battle on the same day, men flung from aircraft spiraling down, a pilot whose sole air kill was a friendly pilot.

The stories have light banter and a fast pace that obscures the darkness below. Biggles best friend dies in a flaming mid-air collision. Pilots leap from burning planes rather than die in the flames. Military intelligence coldly arranges for a spy to arrange her own demise. Biggles begins to drink heavily and crack up under the strain.

Johns notes in his introduction that most of the adventures that happened to Biggles were based on real events. Given the mix of defiant jauntiness and soul-crushing horror, that is easy to believe.

Long relegated to the land of corny boys stories, the adventures of Biggles are worth a fresh look for aficionados of hard-edged action stories.

-Dave Hardy

THE EAGLE AND THE HAWK
Dir. by Stuart Walker

The WWI flying ace genre has recently returned to the big screen with Flyboys, a special effects blockbuster that did not bust any blocks. It’s worth dipping into the era of the classics to see what made young men in their flying machines into Hollywood icons.

Exhibit number one is The Eagle and the Hawk. It was directed by Stuart Walker and based on a story by John Monk Saunders, the eminence grise of biplane flicks. Saunders either scripted or wrote stories that were the basis for Wings (the first ever winner of the Oscar for Best Picture), Dawn Patrol, Ace of Aces, and Legion of the Condemned. He was also married to Fay Wray, who with the help of a 40-foot ape named Kong, gave biplane pilots something worth doing on screen.

Eagle and the Hawk is the grimmest of the flying ace films. Wings was about daring Yanks giving the Kaiser a sock on the beezer and Dawn Patrol made jaunty fatalism a badge of honor. Eagle and the Hawk is neither, it shatters the conventions of the genre in just about every way conceivable.

Frederic March plays Jerry Young, a pilot in a two-seater scout. These were not nimble dog-fighters, but slow-and-steady reconnaissance planes used to track enemy movements. But they bristled with guns and could throw sheets of lead. Younghas a problem, he is a talented pilot who blasts any German that crosses his sights, but at a terrible cost. His observers keep getting killed. As Young’s chest fills up with medals, his soul begins to crack under the bloody strain of losing comrades. Finally he gets a new partner, Crocker (Cary Grant), who despises Young for having given a negative report that washed him out of pilot school.

The enemy barely registers, death is mostly from anonymous bombs and bullets. The most harrowing thing is to actually see an enemy in death. In spots The Eagle and the Hawk approaches film noir in its use of symbolism and light to show the deterioration of Young. Not until The Blue Max, would any WWI ace film come close to the darkness of Eagle and the Hawk.

It’s hard to imagine a film like this being made today. The climax is one of Cary Grant’s finest parts in its stark simplicity and wrenching imagery. Modern movie-makers would benefit from the less-is-more lesson of the 1930s.

-Dave Hardy

SCARLET DREAM
By C.L. Moore

Northwest Smith is Jirel of Joiry’s outer-space companion. Both were created by C.L. Moore in the ‘30s and made regularly appeared in Weird Tales alongside Conan the Cimmerian, Cthulhu, and many other notable creations of Robert E. Howard, H.P. Lovecraft, and Clark Ashton Smith. Moore definitely should be mentioned in that context because here work explores similar ground as the three greats, but with some rather different results.

Northwest Smith is a regulation space-opera hero, a smuggler and outlaw who shuttles from the lawless drylands of Mars to the reeking jungles of Venus. His best friend is Yarol, a handsome and deadly Venusian adventurer. In his spaceman’s leathers and with the fastest ray-gun this side of the asteroid belt, Smith might seem to be a precursor of Han Solo or Mal Reynolds. Smith doesn’t really encounter the same kind of situations they do though. Moore turned the space-opera adventure formula on its head even before it had really begun to harden into cliché.

One can reduce Moore’s formula to a simply equation: an action hero is transplanted into a horror story. That is not to say the stories are simplistic. Moore eschewed the straight-ahead violence and fast paced action of REH or Doc Smith. She gave her hero a hard-edged attitude and a man-of-action simplicity that contrasts with the often passive qualities of horror-story protagonists.

What Smith encounters are dreamworlds of great beauty and even greater terror. In “Shambleau” an act of selflessness on Smith’s part plunges him into a nightmare embrace that threatens to destroy his soul. Vampirism, whether for blood, or the soul, or beauty, or the spirit is a recurring motif in Moore’s stories. Everything that lives does so by taking, irrevocably, from the essence of others. “Shambleau”, “Black Thirst”, “The Tree of Life”, “Scarlet Dream”, and “Julhi”.

Moore’s other great motif is that of gods that have been forgotten or lost. “Dust of Gods” and “The Cold Gray God” both feature deities who have been forgotten by man but may forcefully return to this universe. “Lost Paradise” and “Yvala” put Smith and Yarol into head on confrontation with mythic powers.

While Moore’s plots may be simple, her imagery is vivid and filled with moments of great beauty and a rich language of symbolism that would keep a more psychoanalytically minded critic scribbling for months. Suffice to say that Moore’s unique blend of space-opera and horror will be of interest to fans of both genres.

-Dave Hardy

ONE RIDE TOO MANY
By Frank Bonham

This nifty little anthology (edited by Martin Greenberg and Bill Pronzini, who edit anthologies on an industrial scale) brings together some of the best Westerns of Frank Bonham. The stories mostly date to the late ‘40s and appeared in such magazines as Dime Western, Argosy, Blue Book, and Liberty.

All too often the Western suffered from a lack of place and time. That may sound odd, after all don’t we know when Westerns take place and where? They happen in the old days, in the West. I can’t begin to say how many of those stories I’ve read that take place somewhere between the Mississippi and the Pacific and sometime after Colt developed the revolver. Instead of delving into the rich, varied, and lively worlds (emphasis on the plural) that the hugely divergent settlers encountered on the ever-changing American frontier, too many writers served up routine never-never lands stocked with cookie-cutter characters.

Not this collection. While Bonham sometimes shirks his duty on setting a specific place, his characterization is lively. Bonham brings to life some interesting customs and social conflicts that take these stories out of the routine. Some aren’t even exactly Westerns: “River Magic” and “Plague Boat” take place on the Mississippi and involve clashes between the riverboat men and the little-known subculture of the shanty-boat folk (they’re real, I looked ‘em up). “Trouble at Temescal” takes on the clash between Anglo squatters and the wealthy, but beleaguered Californio land-owners in the aftermath of the Mexican War. “Dusty Wheels-Bloody Trail” recounts the tribulations of a wagon train going from El Paso to Mexico City at a time when both the United States and Mexico were torn by civil war. Though burdened by some overly complex plot business, it’s still an effective tale.

There are tales that don’t rely on shooting, “Chivaree” looks at old time customs and how a man was expected to prove himself before he could be fully accepted. “One Ride to Many” is about modern day rodeo competitions and “I’ll Take the High Road” tells of the clash of cultures encountered by a young couple setting up in the dude-ranch business. There’s also a reminiscence by Bonham about his early apprenticeship to a rather shady pulp-fiction mentor.

If you like old-time pulp Westerns, but prefer to read something that’s a bit more than routine horse opera, One Ride too Many is recommended.

-Dave Hardy

JOY GIRL COMMANDOS ATTACK!!!!!

The lovely and talented Mrs. Dave has begun a new blog: Joy Girl Commando, a compendium of politics, economics, personal enlightenment, and kultur. It’s the sort of place where Murray Rothbard can hang out with Norman Saunders. The all-TRUE details of hitherto secret libertarian missions behind statist lines will be revealed (Hamsters Ripped My Flesh! Soft Flesh for the DMV’s House of Agony! Pagan Cult Worships my Impounded 1978 El Camino! Sin-Crazed Coeds are Ruining the Adirondacks!).

Feel free to wander on by and drop a comment or two. The boys over at Total Information Awareness want to know how you’re feeling today. They’d love to have you in for a chat, but all the water-boarding stations are booked through next Thursday. Joy Girl Commandos do advocate the use of torture, but only for recreational purposes (the safe word is “Quraysh”, Mr. al-Hajj). Meanwhile peruse the magazines in the lobby (Soldier of Fortune, Woman’s World, Pravda, Highlights), the Joy Girl will be with you shortly.

Vote early and often kiddies!

-Dave Hardy

http://joygirlcommando.blogspot.com/

THE MOST TERRIBLE TIME IN MY LIFE
Dir. by Kaizo Hayashi

The Most Terrible Time in my Life is an offbeat homage to film noir, half send-up, half love letter. The protagonist is Maiku Hama (Masatoshi Nagase), and yup, he’s a PI. He drives a vintage two-tone convertible and has a dreary office with a bottle of whiskey in the desk. Sure the convertible has a bad habit of over-heating and the office is over a movie theater that charges his clients admission before they can see him.

Mike, er Maiku, helps out a Taiwanese waiter in a confrontation with some hoods. The waiter, Yang in turn asks Maiku to find his brother. Despite advice from Lt. Nakayama, his kid sister, and Jo Shishida (A well-known Japanese tough-guy actor from such films as Branded to Kill &c., played by himself in a gloriously over the top performance), Hama forges ahead. Fingers get severed and beezers are slugged, and Hama nearly ends up sleeping with the sushi.

The humorous tone evaporates in the increasingly violent second half of the film, this is not entirely a light-hearted romp. Shot in black and white, Most Terrible Time goes for a look that echoes classic noir. Just as boundaries are increasingly blurred in modern Asia, Hayashi brings a Japanese sensibility to this eccentric and entertaining mix of French noir and American hard-boiled.

-Dave Hardy

BRANDED TO KILL
Dir. by Seijun Suzuki

According to the DVD cover, Seijun Suzuki took a routine yakuza eiga script and made Branded to Kill from it. Nikkatsu studios took one look at the product and fired him. Well, I can see that. But don’t think that means Branded to Kill isn’t good! It’s just… different. And here at Fire & Sword we’re about support and love for those who are different. We’re also about really high body counts!

Branded to Kill follows the fortunes of Hanaba (Joe Shishido), the No. 3 killer in Japan. He is an ice-cold killer and a tactical genius, his one weakness is the smell of steamed rice. He and the missus (Mariko Ogawa) live a life of domestic bliss. He is hired to carry out an assassination, but fails. The price of failure is death. Meanwhile, Hanaba has fallen for Mariko (Annu Mari), a gang-girl with a flat affect and a fetish for dead birds. Then things get really bizarre.

The film borders on the surreal. When not is combat (or sniffing rice) Hanaba is often on the verge of delirium, as if he’d just received all the saps to the head and drugged drinks that afflicted Philip Marlowe and Mike Hammer combined. Suzuki doesn’t shy away from the odd bit of visual effects to suggest Hanaba’s trip through nutso-Nippon. Hanaba veers from self-destruction to a ferocious will to conquer with lunatic intensity (reminiscent of Beat Takeshi’s suicidal yakuza in Sonatine)

Suzuki’s vision is stylized beyond all connection to reality. Killers have official rankings (based on numbers or style, one wonders). Messages are delivered via 16mm film reels. Suzuki crafts a stand-off scene that would make John Woo’s head spin. And Hanaba has an awesomely cool broom-handle Mauser with a shoulder stock and automatic fire.

While Branded to Kill is probably too long (a little bit of Suzuki’s madness goes a long way), it is a film of distinctive qualities. Suzuki made forty-two films for Nikkatsu, perhaps it was the sheer volume that drove him to the extravagance of Branded to Kill. It is truly a unique film, funny, deranged, and memorable.

-Dave Hardy

RASHOMAN
Dir. by Akiro Kurasawa

Perhaps more than any other Kurosawa film, it is Rashomon that is considered his masterpiece. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love Yojimbo and Sanjuro, but this is a film even for people who wouldn’t be caught dead watching a samurai film.

It’s a beguilingly simple idea (I first saw it on All in the Family), various people tell a story, and each is compared. It begins when a woodcutter (Takashi Shimura) finds a dead man near a forest road. The dead man is a samurai (Masahiko Mori), travelling with his wife (Machiko Kyo). The notorious bandit Tajumaru (a very young Toshiro Mifune) had attacked them, raping the woman. He proudly confesses to killing the man. Or did he? Tajumaru proudly tells of how the woman could not resist his virility and brought about a bloody duel between the samurai and the outlaw. But the woman tells a different story, it just isn’t the one you expect. A spirit medium channels the dead husband and he tells yet a third version. Each one blackens someone’s character, while sparing another’s. Which one is true? Is it possible to find truth at all? How do we find redemption is a world of self-serving lies?

Though certainly not a tough-guy action film in the conventional sense (though there is a surprising amount of swordplay), this is a historical drama of top quality. It is also the sort of film that denies us easy answers while establishing the questions we need to ask.

-Dave Hardy

LONE WOLF AND CUB: SWORD OF VENGEANCE
Dir. by Kenji Misumi

Comic book fans the world over are familiar with Kazuo Koike’s Lone Wolf and Cub, one of the best action comics ever, and a magnificent evocation of the dark side of Tokugawa Japan. Perhaps fewer people are aware that they were made into a series of movies. Even fewer realize how deeply committed the protagonist is to attachment parenting and taking children seriously, Ogami Itto isn’t known as “the baby-cart assassin” for nothing.

Sword of Vengeance is the first in a series of six films about Ogami Itto (Tomisaburo Wakayma) and his particular Highway to Hell. The time is the 17th century and the Tokugawa shogunate has imposed a police state on Japan. Ogami is the shogun’s executioner, when the orders a noble to commit seppuku (hara-kiri to us vulgar gaijin), Ogami stands by with his very sharp sword to make sure the deed is completed swiftly. But rivals from the Yagyu clan frame Ogami and arrange for his family to be slaughtered, only Ogami’s son Daigoro (Akihiro Tokayama, the cutest little shaver ever to go a killing spree) survives the massacre. Ogami is ordered to commit seppuku. But Ogami goes off the rails and declines that honor. In a touching scene he asks an uncomprehending Daigoro to chose: a life of murder with dad or instant death by his sword. In short order Ogami takes on the entire Yagyu clan with nothing but a stroller and a bad attitude (it’s quite a stroller though). Having done the unthinkable by refusing to commit seppuku when ordered, he has no choice but to become a hired killer. With Daigoro in tow, every day is Take Your Kid to Work day for Ogami.

All of Ogami’s back-story is inter-cut with an account of one of his jobs. It’s a brutal demonstration of just how far out of, not just social norms, but even normal affect Ogami has taken himself in order to be an assassin. The problem is that while the assassination story is good, it can’t bear the weight of Ogami’s fall from grace and the film is rather unbalanced. The one story culminates with a dramatic change in the protagonist while the other ends up with, well, an awful lot of dead guys. In true chanbara fashion, Ogami slices samurai like an automated salami processor. Finally, this may seem a very petty quibble, but I found Tomisaburo Wakayma’s face too fleshy to match the austere visage of Ogami that Koike’s art had burned into my brain.

If you are in love with Lone Wolf and Cub or just like chanbara, you can expect some pretty good stuff here. If you are new to samurai film in general, then consider starting with Yojimbo, or better yet, check out Koike’s comic books first hand.

-Dave Hardy

KILL!
Dir. by Kihachi Okamoto

The received wisdom is that the Western (Shane, The Searchers, Stagecoach) begat the Samurai film (Yojimbo, Sanjuro, Seven Samurai) which begat the Spaghetti Western (A Fistful of Dollars, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly). Of course it was never so easy, Kill! shows Okamoto’s ability to incorporate all those influences and feed them back with a generous dose of comic comment.

The scene is set in classic fashion: a sandstorm in a burnt-out ruin of a town. A ragged wanderer enters, instead of confidently taking stock of the situation he brashly announces he is a REAL SAMURAI and just as soon as he gets a meal he’s going to get a samurai job. His meal plans devolve to scrabbling in the dust for a chicken even more scrawny and ragged than himself. The “samurai” is Hanjiro (Etsushi Takahashi) a strong but not-too-bright type who’s looking to move up in the world. Sharing his quest for the chicken is Genta (Tatsuya Nakadai), who claims to be no more than a yakuza (a term for gangster derived from a losing hand at cards, the very name encodes the Japanese sense that to be an outlaw is to be a loser). Their quest for chicken tempura is interrupted by an assassination. A group of idealistic young samurai have decided to murder a corrupt official. Seven of the young men survive, only to find out they’ve been betrayed, the lord who connived at their act of political murder wants them dead. The Seven will take the blame and the lord will reap the reward. The only thing that stands in the way of the evil plan is Genta’s ability to sabotage it with a Bugs Bunny-like defiance and wit that is more in the nature of a trickster hero than a sword-swinging killer.

This is of course a re-take of Kurosawa’s classics: Yojimbo, Sanjuro, Seven Samurai, and even The 47 Ronin. The joke is that the idealists are something closer to suckers, the peasant who wants to be a real samurai is disillusioned, and the loner who holds the balance is less a determined avenger than a man trying to live down his own past. Nakadai plays Genta as a marvelously diffident vagrant whose very cynicism allows him to penetrate the follies of the idealists, crooks, and hired swords around him. Takahashi plays off him giving a Hanjiro a wide-eyed acceptance and enthusiasm that literally has him bouncing off the walls. Takahashi conjures it deftly in a scene where the crooked lord is laying out his scheme for the hired thugs, while everybody is listening respectfully Hanjiro is fidgeting like a kindergartner who just had a Pepsi and half a box of Twinkies. Hanjiro is revealed as a true Son of the Earth, he likes his women “earthy” too.

Kill! plays with a comic deflation of samurai ethics in much the same way the Spaghetti Westerns turned the traditional Western on its head. If Tuco Ramirez wandered into the middle of Kill! he’d be right at home. Masaru Sato’s (he also scored Yojimbo, Sanjuro and about over a hundred other films) score is a Japanese echo of Ennio Morricone.

Okamoto was a director of consummate skill. Though never so widely known as Kurosawa, Okamoto’s many masterpieces (Sword of Doom, Red Lion, Human Bullet) have seeped into the consciousness of film fans. Okamoto’s satiric vision deserves to be better known.

-Dave Hardy

ZATOICHI
Dir. by Kenji Misumi

The story of the wandering swordsman is as deeply ingrained in Japanese cinema as the tale of the Western gunslinger is in American pop-culture. But don’t expect a chanbara (a sword-and-samurai action film) to be just a Western with a samurai for sheriff and swords for six-shooters. Zatoichi, a tremendously popular film that inspired a couple dozen sequels and a long-running TV show, features a uniquely Japanese style of hero, whose anti-hero status paradoxically confirms his idealism.

The tale is set in feudal Japan. Ichi (Shintaro Katsu) is a blind man and a masseur (a rather low-status occupation in a class-conscious society). He calls upon a yakuza boss and proceeds to engage in not-so-friendly game of dice with the boss’s loutish gangsters. After schooling the hoodlums in hygiene and honesty Ichi gets a warm welcome from Boss Sukegoro Iioka. Sukegoro has an ulterior motive for his hospitality: even though he’s blind, Ichi is the deadliest swordsman around. A gang war is brewing with the rival Sasagawa clan. Sasagawa happens to have his own sword-slinger: a samurai who has sunk to being a hired killer for gamblers.

The movie is not all bloody sword-fights. In fact, there aren’t very many at all. A great deal of attention is paid to the sordid lives of the gangsters and Ichi’s growing disgust with the kind of life he finds himself in. Therein lies the distinctive quality of Zatoichi, it is almost sentimental in its appreciation of courtesy, natural beauty, and respect for an honorable foe. Ichi’s uniquely Japanese character is that he is deeply ashamed of what he does and how he lives, even though he continues to live that way. There is none of the cynical posturing of the far more hard-boiled ronin Sanjuro played by Toshiro Mifune. Ichi is not an anti-hero in the sense that he defies society’s norms, but in that he doesn’t even consider himself to be heroic.

Zatoichi is a film that will best engage a viewer who wants a distinctively Japanese story with excellent characterization and just a bit of ferocious action.

-Dave Hardy

SANDOKAN
By Emilio Salgari

I first came across Sandokan and the Tigers of Mompracem in “Prowl Unceasing” by Chris Roberson in the masterful anthology of swashbuckling SpecFic he published, Adventure Vol 1. Well, is it any wonder that a guy who has published Jess Nevins’ encyclopedias of pulp heroes & penny dreadfuls would know about Italy’s most famous dime novels? Is it any wonder that when I heard about a series of novels about dashing Malay pirates doing battle with James Brooke, one of Victorian Britain’s actual swashbucklers, I had to get a hold of them?

Nope and nope. But, be warned there is only one translation of Salgari’s multi-volume oeuvre. Back in the 1880s Salgari became a tremendous hit with Italian readers. His works have been extensively translated into Spanish and have been the basis for movies, TV series, action figures, and other product tie-ins. How is it that such a popular writer is apparently unknown in the English-speaking world except for some eccentric fans in Texas?

To be certain, Sandokan is a dime novel. Sandokan is a Terribly Romantic Pirate of a kind that would have appealed to readers in Rafael Sabatini’s day, but seems a bit over-the-top in our more cynical era. Sandokan is an exiled Malay prince who commands a band of pirates from his island headquarters of Mompracem. He is the enemy of all colonialists, Dutch, Spanish, and especially British. He and his pal Yanez, a Portuguese adventurer, defy the world. But, alas for Sandokan, he has seen Marianna the Pearl of Labuan, and is obsessed with her beauty. This would be no big problem, except her British uncle (she’s Eurasian), Lord Guillonk (I’m not making that up) is the blood-enemy of pirates. Even worse, she has been betrothed to Baron Rosenthal. All Sandokan has to do is kidnap her from the middle of an armed villa and hold off the entire Royal Navy. Love will do the rest.

It’s fun stuff, with an interesting setting and unusual characters. But Salgari is rather limited when it comes to creating characters that are even remotely credible. I like my characters a bit broad, but these guys are stretched. Sandokan throws his men’s lives away just to get a look at Marianna. Indeed, he falls in love with Marianna more or less on a whim. Although Yanez and Sandokan talk about how his obsession with Marianna means the end for the Tigers, nothing much comes of it, except lots of predictable slaughter. And just how many British peers have Jewish names? I was half expecting Earl Shlomo Mankowitz to show up and help Baron Rosenthal.

Salgari does not let the action slow for more than a nanosecond before there’s a battle with British ships, soldiers, sharks, or orangutans. Sometimes it gets to be a bit much, even for me, and I do love a high body count.

This may sound like excessive negativity from a crabby old man who’s read too many pirate novels. I really wanted to like Sandokan, and I found the book grew on me in a corny, clunky sort of way. So you might enjoy Sandokan if you are a historian of genre writing, or you might enjoy it if you are willing to commit to the utterly improbable and terribly romantic.

-Dave Hardy

PIRATE KING: COXINGA AND THE FALL OF THE MING DYNASTY
By Jonathan Clements

Jonathan Clements weaves a fascinating account of the rise and fall of the Zheng clan. This is several histories in one: that of a Chinese family, the rise and fall of empires, the colonization of Taiwan, the rise of Western colonialism, missionaries in China, and the economic history of the Pacific Rim.

While the title promises a biography of Coxinga, the “Pirate King”, it is just as much a biography of his father, Nicholas Iquan. Clements describes Iquan’s rise from disgraceful scamp to disgraceful scamp ruling a massive confederation of smugglers and pirates. Iquan was the sort of lad to seduce his stepmother (Chinese families wer polygamous in those days) and was exiled to be a trader in Macao. He came under the tutelage of “Captain China”, and was instrumental in running elaborate swindles on the Dutch and English traders based in Japan. Clements describes Iquan’s hustles with frank admiration and gleeful comic timing. Iquan battled his way into succeeding as Captain China’s successor and grew powerful enough that the imperial authorities bought him off with high titles in return for his political and military support.

Clements also lays out the decline of the Ming dynasty. In 1644 a horde of bandits actually captured the capital precipitating an invasion by the Manchu hordes. Compared to the bandits, the Manchu were civilized. They swept south smashing the poorly led Ming armies. A crafty old sea-dog like Iquan knew which way the wind blew and he surrendered to the Manchu.

But he hadn’t counted on his idealistic son, Coxinga (a latinization of Koksen'yua, one of his titles). Coxinga refused to surrender and fought a sixteen year rearguard battle against the Manchu, holding out on his remote coastal lairs. Though the Ming claimant was little more than a fugitive, Coxinga led a formidable rebel fleet whose smugglers were a major economic power and whose marines came within a hair’s breadth of seizing the capital.

Pirate King examines the role of the Dutch. Iquan and later Coxinga prospered as the intermediaries who smuggled goods back and forth to the Dutch. The Dutch in turn sought a trade port in China, but were blocked by the desire of both the authorities and the smugglers to maintain their respective economic strangleholds. The irony is that Coxinga made the break with the Dutch. As the Manchu grew more powerful, he needed a safe base offshore. The Dutch colony on Taiwan would be perfect. Thus Coxinga inaugurated the strategy of using Taiwan as a place of refuge for representatives of defeated Chinese regimes.

Pirate King is filled with fascinating characters such as Wu Sangui, the general who gave up his loyalty for love of a woman. There is Adam Schall, the Jesuit who became the chief astronomer of the Manchu emperor and handled a cannon to defeat the Dutch. Clements tells the story of Reverend Hambroek, who gave his life to carry a message of defiance to Coxinga. Pirate King is a gripping, fast paced, and often funny story of a real-life pirate warlord and the world he lived in.

-Dave Hardy

WHEN CHINA RULED THE SEAS
By Louise Levathes

When China Ruled the Seas is an account of a little-known chapter in history, the high era of Chinese sea-going voyages of trade and exploration. Many people are familiar with the drive to reach the ports of the Indies that drove European voyages of exploration in the late 1400s and 1500s. A similar impulse drove Chinese mariners onto the Indian Ocean decades early, leaving us with a fascinating might-have-been scenario: what if China had not left the field to the Europeans?

In the late 1300s the Mongol rulers of China were overthrown and a new dynasty came to rule the Middle Kingdom: the Ming. During the mop-up campaigns a lad from a Muslim Chinese family was captured and castrated. His name was Zheng He. The eunuch lad was a prisoner of the Ming prince Zhu Di, who found Zheng He to be an able servant. Lest anyone picture Zheng as a mincing ninny, the eunuch was a strapping six-footer with a booming voice who followed Zhu Di into battle. When Zhu Di came to power as emperor of China, he did not forget faithful Zheng He. Zhu Di wanted to expand Chinese influence overseas, his method was to send a massive Chinese fleet comprised of some of the biggest ocean-going vessels built to that date on a trans-Indian Ocean trading/diplomatic mission. Zheng He was to be in command.

Levathes gives the reader a swift background on Chinese ships and sailing techniques, just enough for a layman, but not so much that it overwhelms. She also describes the nature of building the fleet. Like any other government programs, it was plagued with cost overruns, contract padding, and some outright corruption. The treasure ships were something like the famous Spanish galleons: massive enough to carry plenty of goods and supplies on an extended voyage, but lean enough to go into battle in the distant waters where they were the only Chinese presence.

The mission was not one of war and it was not exactly trade. It was more like an armed diplomatic mission that carried out elaborate gift exchanges. Zheng He’s fleet had no problem smashing pirates when they found them or intervening militarily to back an ally. However, the Chinese weren’t interested in conquest. Zheng He focussed on establishing relations with local rulers who would pay “tribute” to the Chinese emperor. In exchange the Chinese plied the locals with valuable gifts. The relative value of the gifts may have depended more on diplomatic status than market value.

That seems to have been part of why the voyages were eventually discontinued. The Chinese bureaucracy were superb bean counters and they found the trips were not cost effective. After massive spending on the fleet, they never gathered enough tribute to make it pay. Infighting between the Confucian civil servants and the eunuchs of the emperor’s household doomed the project.

Here’s where I find a fault with When China Ruled the Seas. Where was the Chinese merchant class? How did they react to the expeditions and what did they do when they ended? Did private traders take up where Zheng He left off? Why were the Confucians so hostile to private trade? I felt that some of these areas needed to be better explored.

On the other hand, Levathes is a veteran National Geographic writer and she knows how to lay on the colorful detail. We learn a lot about court intrigues, the founding of Beijing, and Chinese beliefs about sex (Korean women were considered just right). When China Ruled the Seas is a colorful telling of a tale that has been overlooked in the West.

-Dave Hardy

ARRR, MATEY

Avast ye swabs! Today is, yes you guessed it, National Talk Like a Pirate Day. Shiver me timbers!

In honor of same, I present a bit of shameless self-promotion. You can still get a copy of Black Sails, a collection of pirate yarns from 1018 Press for a mere $11.99 (dollars, not doubloons). The stories range from the comedic to the horrific, from Davy Jones Locker to the skies, and all points in between. Your humble subscriber, Scurvy Dave Hardy, has a salty yarn of piracy, curses and cruelty on the high seas titled “Black Curse of the Noose” in said collection.

-Dave Hardy

MY ALMA MATER

I see that the school where I earned my degree, the University of Florida, has made international headlines. During a Q&A with Senator John Kerry a student rambled on at length with his question. The student’s microphone was cut off and then university police moved in. The student was arrested and tasered.

Now as I recall when I was an undergrad, it was unsafe for a young woman to be pretty much anywhere on the streets after dark. It was unsafe for a young woman to be in fraternity house during parties for that matter (except ATO, they at least kept their hands off the girls). Occasionally it was unsafe for a young woman to be in her home. Gainesville was just about a rapist’s dream.

But times move forward and UPD has at least declared war on long-winded bores. Had that been the case in my day, about 9 out of 10 classes would have ended up with the prof being tasered. As for undergrads with stupid questions, well, it would not have been pretty.

I look forward to the day when UPD can end every visiting speaker’s lecture with tear gas and a baton charge. Why stop there? I’m sure Kerry was twice as boring as the presumptuous fool who dared think that questions at UF didn’t involve electric shocks. Let’s just have the police command all “Free Speech Zones”. “Free” as in savage, “speech” as in beating.

So for all you folks palnning to send your kids to UF, look forward to your daughters being raped by thugs and your sons being tortured by the police.

Go Gators!

-Dave Hardy

HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS
Dir. by Zhang Yimou

Perhaps it is natural the Chinese filmmaking is a bit of a grab-bag. Asians were forced to adapt to deal with the inrush of Western culture. In more recent times they have been able to pick and choose, blending foreign elements with home-grown style. The wu xia genre is typically Chinese, with its emphasis on history and traditional social structure. Nonetheless, while watching House of Flying Daggers I found myself thinking how much it reminded me of a Jean Pierre Melville film. Hard-boiled cops and outlaws with a code of honor meet in a world of tarnished honor. And yet, I couldn’t help but remember that Chinese detective stories date back to a time even earlier than the one Flying Daggers inhabits!

The story is set in the 800s. The Tang dynasty is crumbling and China is in the throes of a revolution. The gendarmes are battling a subversive movement known as the House of Flying Daggers. Leo (Andy Lau) a police captain sends his lieutenant, Jin (Takeshi Kaneshiro) to infiltrate the Peony Pavilion where the new showgirl is rumored to be linked to the Flying Daggers. The girl is Mei (Ziyi Zhang), not only is she supposed to be the daughter of a recently deceased Flying Dagger leader, she is also blind. Mei can also play a mean game of “echo”, which involves beans, drums on posts, a Chinese orchestra, and evidently, swords on the end of ladies’ sleeves. Leo raids the Pavilion and before you can say “Minsky’s!” Mei is in the calaboose with a front row seat at the torture chamber. Mei is clearly limber, but having your arms pulled out of their sockets is a bit much.

Before Mei can get a Rolfing session from the Chinese fuzz, Jin busts her out of the can and they head for the hills. In true noir style, the viewer finds himself asking who is for real in this situation. Is Jin just an undercover cop doing his job? What are his feelings for Mei and what are her feelings for him? Before it is all over the view finds the veil of deception covers just about everything and everybody.

There’s a curious side note to all this. Zhan Yimou doesn’t exactly romanticize either the cops or the insurgents. Both view their agents as expendable. They are soldiers in war where personal happiness is irrelevant, they are just eggs to make an omelet. That’s a significant subtext in these times.

Flying Dagger is set in a land of lush landscapes, not as stark as the Central Asian wilds served up by Ang Lee in Crouching Tiger, but suffused with color that can be gentle or harsh. There is of course, action galore. The wire-fu is offset by some intense ground battles and Ziyi Zhang has a real dancer’s grace. Zhang Yimou doesn’t neglect the more extravagant traditions of wu xia. There are battles fought in the tops of bamboo stalks and arrows that bank and ricochet like billiard balls. It makes for some spectacular eye candy. If I have one complaint, it is that at two hours the film might have benefited from a bit of trimming. After the midpoint of the story (plot-wise not time-wise), a little less in the way of beautifully composed reaction shots might have been more.

Still it’s hard to deny that House of Flying Daggers is a marvelous blend of action and romance.

-Dave Hardy

THE BRIDE WITH WHITE HAIR
Dir. by Ronnie Yu

Sword & Sorcery may seem like it is mired in endless pastiches of Conan coated in a rancid syrup of Tolkein, a fur-clad barbarian finds the magic bowling trophy and slays the evil wizard, thus fulfilling his destiny, at least until the advance is spent. Well, I’m here to tell you that Sword & Sorcery thrives on Chinese movie screens only over there they disguise it by calling it historical. But when you hear a movie called wu xia it’s really a fantasy set in a historical frame.

The Bride with White Hair is set in the last days of the Ming Dynasty in China. Cho Yi Hang (Leslie Cheung) is an orphan adopted by the Chief of the Wu Tang Clan (the Chinese martial arts society, not the NY rappers, though some Dirty Ol’ Bastards are in the mix). Cho is the handsomest guy, the best swordsman, and the most popular fellow, so naturally he’s going to be the next leader. His girlfriend is the beautiful and ambitious Lu (Kit Yang Lam). For Cho the future is bright.

Alas, he lives in interesting times. The foreign tribes are on the move. The Ming are tottering, and worst of all the Evil Clan has awoken. The Evil’s are lead by the Chis (Francis Ng and Elaine Lui, in a hysterically over-the-top performance)a brother and sister pair of twins who do everything (I mean everything) together. Then Cho meets the Wolf Girl, a feral child raised to be a kung-fu killing machine. She might chop a guy into nine parts, but she’s nowhere near the ball-busting shrew Lu is. Though Cho is poised for greatness, he finds it comes at a cost. The people around him start showing a brutal and bloodthirsty streak. Cho just wants peace, but of course he’s not gonna get it.

Bride has a lot going for it. Delirious musical scenes with dancing devil worshippers follow brutal mediations on the nature of power. The sets tend to the minimal, and practically all action takes place at night, as if to emphasize the night that is descending on Chinese culture. Black humor pervades this Chinese Gothic tale of love and betrayal. While some people are put off by the camera tricks and “wire-fu” choreography, this is a movie about people. Sure they can run straight up trees or stop 1,000 falling flower petals with a sword, but they are people. While Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon set the gold standard for wu xia film, The Bride With White Hair deserves a very honorable mention.

-Dave Hardy

SOUTHERN COMFORT
Dir. by Walter Hill

Southern Comfort is one of the best works from Walter Hill, a director with a distinguished resume (48 Hours, The Warriors, Trespass, etc.). It is also the best Not-Vietnam film.

In 1981 the Vietnam War was still relatively raw for Americans. One can only imagine what studios said when approached with the idea of filming battle scenes in the jungle. It would be expensive and controversial, two things that are pretty much anathema in Hollywood. Not being Francis Ford Coppola, Hill took a different tack. He made a movie about a group of Louisiana National Guardsmen on weekend maneuvers.

Hardin (Powers Boothe) is a Texan who has just moved to Baton Rouge and transferred to the Louisiana Guard. He finds his new comrades to mostly be ignorant, gun-toting rednecks (“Just the ones I been around all my life,” he says). In this passel of misfits, he gravitates to the only other misfit whose IQ is more than room temperature, Spencer (Keith Carradine).

While the squad is on maneuvers, they steal some pirogues from the swamp-Cajuns. They also indulge in firing blanks at anything that moves. Unfortunately the Cajuns aren’t in on the joke and reply with real guns. Lost and under fire, the Guardsmens’ jaunt across the swamp turns into a bloody nightmare.

By now you may have guessed that this story has bugger-all to do with Cajuns. They are hill-billy stand-ins for the VC. Much of what transpires to Bravo squad is the stuff of Vietnam movie-cliché, except of course it wasn’t cliché at all in 1981. The enemy is mostly invisible, they attack with unpredictable and highly effective means that demoralize the troops. The Guardsmen are book soldiers, they are prey to ferocious conflicts among themselves, and use drugs in the field. The civilians (yes, there are civilians) speak an incomprehensible patois and the troops must either brutally treat them as or enemies trust them with their lives.

The most compelling element of Southern Comfort is the cast and characters. The relationship between Hardin and Spencer is at the core of the film. It’s classic Walter Hill fare: two men bond under the stress of a survival situation. The supporting cast is no less compelling. They are a scruffy, unmilitary lot, alternately oafish and vulnerable. Fred Ward plays Reese, a man who thinks of himself as a hardened killer. Alan Autry (credited as Carlos Brown) plays Bowden, an emotionally unstable high school football coach. The underrated standout is Les Lanom as Sgt. Casper, who plays a desperately unimaginative and naïve squad leader whose doomed efforts to lead the squad are almost painful watch in their folly. Fine performances by Peter Coyote, Lewis Smith, Franklyn Seales, and T.K. Carter, and Brion James (as a Cajun trapper) round out the cast.

The film builds a tour de force of intercut music, image, and action that makes an ending that is of exceptional emotional impact. As in real war, men may survive, but Hill makes it clear that his protagonists will be marked by the struggle. Do the survivors run toward rescue or away from it?

-Dave Hardy

THREE HUNDRED SPARTANS
Dir. by Rudolph Maté

Thermopylae is the Greek Alamo. A small group of Greek soldiers held a strategic pass against overwhelming odds because it was their duty.

Before it became a controversial hit, the battle of Thermopylae was the subject of a film way back in 1962. Staring Richard Egan as Leonidas, the Spartan king, Three Hundred Spartans takes a slightly less extreme look at that critical battle.

Xerxes, the king of Persia, has determined to conquer Greece and avenge an earlier defeat of his father at the hands of the Greeks. Xerxes has two voices competing for his ear: Artemisia, the queen of Lycia, and Demaratus, an exiled Spartan king (the Spartans had two kings). While Artemisia flatters Xerxes and tells him how the Greeks are a pushover, Demaratus warns Xerxes that he’s in for a fight.

Meanwhile back in Sparta King Leonidas is working with Themistocles, an Athenian politician, to get a united Greek force to confront the Persian hordes. Unfortuntely, the Spartan elders won’t go for it and Leonidas is on his own.

Phelan, a young warrior, has an even bigger problem. Queen Gorgo herself has given him his shield, with the classic Spartan injunction: come home with your shield or on it. Phelan’s got a beautiful girl and he’s going to war, that’s heaven for a Spartan. Alas, his father was spotted in the company of Demaratus at the Persian court. Phelan is stripped of his rank. Under these trying circumstances this disparate group meets in one of Antiquity’s bloodiest battles.

Three Hundred Spartans is not exactly Spartacus. The acting is more dinner theater than Hollywood. I half expected Xerxes to twirl his mustache and say, “A curse upon these Spartans! They have foiled me again!” Well, actually that would have been cool, but you can’t get everything.

The battle scenes are actually pretty well done, considering that they did not seem to have enough extras. The troops look like guys who’ve been in a week-long hand-to-hand fight. The big problem with the lack of extras is that the Spartan phalanx is reduced to single lines with large spaces between them. The claustrophobic confines of clashing shield walls gets on screen, but rather late in the game.

Overall, the film holds rather well to history. The real virtue is not so much the rather limited storyline as the sense of drama inherent in the clash of cultures diametrically opposed in their politics and way of life. While I might not pay hard cash to add it to my collection, you can always ask your library to get it for you.

-Dave Hardy

SPARTACUS
Dir. by Stanley Kubrick

This is still the greatest of Sword & Sandal films and for my money still the best gladiator film (though Gladiator was pretty damn good). It is also one of many film triumphs by Stanley Kubrick.

The tale is about Spartacus (Kirk Douglas, in all his cleft-chin glory), a Thracian slave bought to be a gladiator. Spartacus is an odd mixture of under-class humility and iron-willed rebelliousness. On other words, he takes a lot of guff, then he snaps really violently. Spartacus takes a liking to Varinia (Jean Simmons), a beautiful slave girl. When Crassus (Lawrence Olivier) an ambitious Roman politician of the ultra-right wing variety, buys her Spartacus leads a revolt in the gladiator school and starts raising hell.

The crux of the film is the idealistic hopes aroused by Spartacus’ revolt in the downtrodden slaves of Rome. When the revolting masses start whipping the Roman troops sent against them, something like a revolution begins to rear its head. While Spartacus and his comrades are advancing the materialist dialectic in the countryside, Crassus is engaged in political battles with Gracchus (Charles Laughton) and the populist faction in the Senate.

This film has always been a favorite of mine. Though over the years I have come to a few criticisms of it. The film is an adaptation of Howard Fast’s novel. Fast was a Marxist who wanted to write about the legendary hero of revolution, in effect a Trotskyite Beowulf. His Spartacus is a slave born of slaves, a man of great humility, except when faced with class oppression. He is an instinctive Marxist. Indeed at the risk of a spoiler, he ends up nearly Christlike.

From studying the records we learn that Spartacus was actually a mercenary and a highway robber before he was a gladiator. That background helps make his phenomenal success against seasoned Roman troops more believable. Crassus was nowhere near the brilliant manipulator of politics that he appears as in the film. Although he beat Spartacus in the final battle, his triumph was stolen by the far more charismatic Pompey. Spartacus was a bit more like Conan than Che Guevara, and Crassus bore more of a resemblance to George W. Bush than Napoleon. But neither version would quite suit left-wing politics.

That’s not to say that I don’t still love this movie. The spectacle of Rome is splendid. The cast is marvelous (did I mention the amazing performances by Tony Curtis and Peter Ustinov?). In fact, Spartacus is part of what helped me develop a fascination with ancient history. It is so good, I think it may even be time for a remake of this classic tale of defiance, hope, and tragedy.

-Dave Hardy

RECEIVED

Here are some belated notes on recent appearances by myself. I got my copy of Black Sails, the anthology of pirate-fantasy stories from 1018 Press. Some favorites are “The Death of Captain Eugene Bloodcake and Fall of the Horrid Whore” by Joel A. Sutherland (it’s about as weird as it sounds, and that’s a good thing). “The Siren’s Lure” by Jordan Lapp is a sparkling swashbuckler. There’s a lot of good stuff in here with all kinds of pirates from sheer fantasy to sharply defined history to Zeppelin pirates, in stories that cover comedy, horror, and action. It’s more than I can list right now, when I have a little more time I hope to comment on some of my fellow contributors’ tales in more detail.

From a while back The Cimmerian V4, N3 with my article “Worms of the Frontier” is available. There’s a fine article on Howard’s Sword & Sorcery influence on Heavy Metal by Scott Hall. Gary Romeo looks at the origins of the phrase “Sword & Sorcery”. Paul Shovlin takes a long hard look at Solomon Kane. I consider “Worms of the Earth” as a classic of American writing that imports the American frontier into Iron Age Britain.

Finally, my good friend GW Thomas has gotten Talbot Mundy’s classic TROS OF SAMOTHRACE out in one volume. This is some of the best historical fiction I’ve read. If you like Harold Lamb’s Cossack stories or Robert E. Howard’s Crusader tales, check out Tros. He’s a one man navy with a band of Freedom Fighters out to stop Julius Caesar from turning Britain into a Roman colony. It is way cool. Gary deserves a big hand for keeping this out where the public can get it: www.lulu.com/ragemachinebooks.

-Dave Hardy

THE VALLEY OF GWANGI
Dir. by Jim O’Connolly

This is one straight from the good old days of the Saturday afternoon monster movie. It stars the animated creations of Ray Harryhausen, a menagerie of carnivorous dinosaurs, belligerent pachyderms, and a mighty cute lil’ prehistoric pony. Oh yeah, there are some actors too.

A down-on-its-luck Wild West show hits a small Mexican town, the lady boss, T.J. (Gila Golan) is looking for the Next Big Thing. She’s pretty sure it’s not her ex, Tuck (James Franciscus) who has also hit town. Rather it’s a prehistoric horse the size of a housecat. An English paleontologist (Laurence Naismith) recognizes this as the find of the century. The business is complicated because Carlos (Gustavo Rojo), the chap who found the itty-bitty horsy, is from a Gypsy band ruled by his crazy old one-eyed mom (Freda Jackson). She is determined that mini-Dobbin must go back. Pretty soon the cowboys and the paleontologist track down the mysterious valley where the beastie came from. In a thrilling sequence the buckaroos rope, throw, and brand them a meat-eating Allosaurus known as Gwangi.

Pretty soon Gwangi is slated to be star of the show. But one should never cross an eye-patch wearing Gypsy granny lightly, especially when she has a midget sidekick! Gwangi escapes and after dining on an elephant and a dozen or so ticket holders (from the cheap seats, thank God!) he’s gunning for Tuck and T.J. The fastest hand will survive!

Now a cynic might say this is just King Kong in Mexico (if we took care of the dinosaur problem, immigration reform would be a snap). But this has COWBOYS and DINOSAURS, for crying out loud! Who could not love it? Gwangi is rousing good fun and classic special effects from the master of stop-motion.

-Dave Hardy

ALDAIR IN ALBION
By Neal Barrett Jr.

While Neal Barrett is well known for works that verge on the surreal (e.g. Interstate Dreams) or the grimmest of grim futures (Through Darkest America), he can put together a rousing tale of swashbuckling adventure.

Aldair is a student at the University in Silium. Like many a youth, he runs afoul of the Pigs. But Aldair is something of a boar himself. In this version of Europe, different species of animals form the rival kingdoms. Aldair is a boar from the Venici, a tough border tribe used to acting independently. Rhemia is an empire of pigs, who face the wolfish Stygianns to the north and the sophisticated and snaky Nicieans to the south.

Unfortunately for Aldair, his comfortable life is disrupted when he is accused of heresy. In an off-kilter version of The Defiant Ones (or is it The Three Little Pigs?) Aldair joins up with Rhief, who is literally the big, bad wolf. They are looking for Albion, a mystic land of wonder and terror. But first they travel through a good bit of the known world on picaresque adventures that see them as pirates, slaves, mercenaries, scholars, and child-care specialists.

Aldair in Albion is real rousing fun, but not at the expense of well-drawn characters and a humanistic (or is animalistic appropriate here?) belief in the value of truth. It forms part of a larger body of quality writing given to us by Mr. Barrett, and one that has surely earned him some kind of recognition for a lifetime of achievement as a writer.

-Dave Hardy

DAWN’S UNCERTAIN LIGHT
By Neal Barrett, Jr.

****NOTE: If you haven't read Through Darkest America yet, you may want ot skip this review as it does neccessarily reveal a plot point or two.****

The sequel to Through Darkest America completes the saga of Howie Ryder and his search for his lost sister. He is a bitter young man, savagely mutilated by an enemy. In the last novel Howie escaped the chaos of the war in the west between Lathan and the American government. However he discovered the truth about the soulless “stock”, the creatures that look and walk upright like humans, but do not talk and are considered to be meat.

Yes, I said meat. Howie lives in a future America devastated by nuclear war. Life goes on, farmers raise crops and families, warlords make war, and people eat stock. Only Howie has learned a thing or two about stock and he is determined to rescue his sister from a fate that is worse than death, but probably includes death anyway.

Barrett’s vision of the future is bleak. There isn’t even the comfort of total destruction, rather mankind has been stripped down to his essentials: hypocrisy, bloodlust, and murder for food. The reader may not find Dawn’s Uncertain Light to be as nightmarish as its predecessor. It is hard to top the repeated shocks Barrett administers in that particular work. Rather Dawn toys with the notion of Howie as a mythic figure who is unaware of his status. Just as Darkest America was a cannibalistic trail-drive western, Dawn is the vengeance trail of a legendary gunfighter, told in Barrett’s own unique style.

-Dave Hardy

THROUGH DARKEST AMERICA
By Neal Barrett, Jr.

It’s not very often that a fiction writer can make me cringe. Very little of what makes its way into print is even a tithe of the awfulness that is splashed across headlines and that is usually watered down to meet the demands of a public that has no tolerance for news that might be upsetting.

But Neal Barrett, Jr. pulled it off here. There are lots of apocalypse tales that make the Apocalypse seem like not such a bad place. Sure, all that radiation killed off the weaklings, but a new race of übermenschen will arise and liquidate those pesky mutants. What’s to worry about? Mr. Barrett has a few suggestions of what you should worry about.

At first glance Through Darkest America might seem to be one of those cozy Apocalypse tales. America functions at a lower level, but not much lower than our pre-industrial past. Rape, murder, and torture inflicted by soldiers, outlaws, and warlord militias are pretty common, but that’s true of 21st century DR Congo. There are some unusually disturbing details to this new world, but Barrett’s protagonist, Howie, is such an earnest and engaging lad that one can’t help but identify with his world view.

In many ways Through Darkest America is much like a Western. Howie avenges a savage attack on his family and lights out for the Territories. He encounters outlaws, Johnny Rebs, and dance hall girls with hearts of gold in this off-kilter version of Huckleberry Finn. But Barrett only lets his readers go so far on that path before bringing them around to a very nasty elephant in the corner.

This is science fiction with guts. Barrett doesn’t mind launching brutal attacks on our deepest taboos about food and sex. Definitely not for the squeamish, if you want a cozy Apocalypse, look elsewhere.

-Dave Hardy

KINGS OF INFINITE SPACE
By James Hynes

Speaking as a six-year veteran state employee, I’d like to say that James Hynes novel, Kings of Infinite Space, is pretty much true. Not the part about overbearing co-workers, ill-paid temps, or difficult parking. I meant he part about blood sacrifices in the unexplored network of pre-human caves under our offices.

Oops, I wasn’t supposed to tell about that. Anyway, the story is about Paul Trilby, formerly a professor at a prestigious Midwestern university, now a temp-worker for the Texas Department of General Services, TxDOGS. The guy in the cube next to Paul is dying, his work is mind-numbingly pointless, and he’s haunted by the ghost of the cat he murdered. Paul lives alone and friendless at the Angry Loner Motel.

Fortunately Paul has got co-workers. There’s Olivia Haddock, former beauty queen turned soul-sucking bureaucrat, Callie the Mail girl with a budding interest in literature, and Colonel Travis Pentoon and his sinister lunch-time cabal. The people outside the office are even odder: Boy G the homeless guy with the mantra “Are we not men?” and Stanley Tulendij the dark angel of TxDOGS and sole-survivor of a fateful outing to the dread Lonesome Knob.

Kings of Infinite Space is part Office Space, part Lovecraft, part Worms of the Earth. There are hilarious sideswipes at the text-book industry, SUVs, and enough weird movie references to make Harry Knowles’ eyes bug out (see if you can find the bit from Ben Hur, it had me laughing pretty hard). The tale also plays with the rivalries between classes and sexes, in particular it gnaws on the notion that men can re-gain paradise if they just get the women back in line. I certainly don’t think that we are supposed to take Paul’s PC, holier-than-thou, gender-constructionism at face value. I did find myself laughing out loud quite frequently, which few comedic novels can make me do.

And now for the part I was warned by a former Purchaser-IV not to tell anyone about. It appears that the author in fact found the true story crammed into the pages of a GSA Employee’s Manual. As foretold in the Book of Eibon and the prophetic Agency Strategic Plan FY2002-2005, there will come a great…

What is that scratching noise from beneath the house? The floor is falling away! Dear Lord! Those pale faces and clawed hands! ARE WE NOT MEN! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

IMARO 2: THE QUEST FOR CUSH
By Charles Saunders

The second volume of Imaro’s adventures picks up where the first left off. If you aren’t familiar with Imaro, here’s his story thus far. It takes place in Nyumbani, a fantasy version of Africa. Imaro is from the Ilyassi, a fierce warrior tribe of the plains. But he is an outcast because his father was an unknown man from another tribe. Hounded by evil sorcerers who serve demonic entities, Imaro becomes an exile and a leader of bandits. The Quest for Cush begins in medias res, with Imaro in hot pursuit of the outlaw who has stolen his beloved Tanisha.

Along the way Imaro makes a friend in Pomphis the Bambuti. Pomphis is a Pygmy who has lived in the cities of Nyumbani and is more or less a walking encyclopedia of Nyumbani lore. Imaro, Tanisha, and Pomphis must make their way to Cush. There Imaro hopes to learn who his father is, what has happened to his mother, and just what his destiny is. Imaro does have a destiny, he must oppose the Mashataan. These are demons who once conquered Nyumbani but were expelled. They are plotting a comeback and know that somehow Imaro stands in their way.

The plot of a hero with a destiny is a pretty standard one. What gives the Imaro stories a special touch is Saunders’ rather unsentimental take on the whole thing. Imaro is not a knight in shining armor, he’s a hard-as-nails outlaw with a grudge against evil wizards. Pomphis and Tanisha serve to soften Imaro, but not much. Nor is Nyumbani a romanticized version of an Africa inhabited solely by wise elders and respectful children. It’s a land with cruel customs, learned scholars, sleazy traders, brutal thugs, compassionate healers, and dire magic. In short, it’s a well-rounded place, not just a two-dimensional backdrop for sword-fights.

Saunders also has a barbed wit. The opening story is a dead-on parody of traditional “lost-race” stories that will make you smile and wince at the same time. The tale of how the Mashataans used the people of Atlan, and how the people of Atlan used the Nyumbanis is razor-sharp Sword & Sorcery myth straight from the real world.

The Quest for Cush is a very worthy successor to the first volume. I’m looking forward to reading the rest.

-Dave Hardy

IMARO
By Charles Saunders

I used to think of Sword & Sorcery as the province of the Big Three: Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, and Michael Moorcock. After reading Imaro I may have to make that the Big Four.

Back in the 1970s Charles Saunders was a devoted fan of science fiction and fantasy, especially the swashbuckling adventures of Tarzan, Conan, and other larger-than-life heroes. However, he was very frustrated by the lack of black heroes. SF and Fantasy were lily white and Saunders was a black man who felt rather isolated in fandom. The pulp-era in particular abounded in casual racism. So Saunders set out to do something about it. He created his own hero: Imaro.

The Imaro stories took off and eventually DAW Books agreed to a series of Imaro paperbacks. Owing to missteps by DAW and long intervals between the books, they failed commercially but have remained a devoted following among Sword & Sorcery cognoscenti. Reviving the stories became problematic after certain events in Africa rendered some critical plot points uncomfortably close to a headline. Eventually, after encouragement by the well-known Australian fan Ben Szumskyj, Saunders replaced the troublesome tales with new works and Night Shade Books brought Imaro into the 21st century.

The result is not merely an Afrocentric Conan. Imaro has a backstory that is essential to his growth as a character. As a boy his mother is exiled and he never knows his father. He is barely tolerated by his tribe. Although he excels in his prowess as a warrior, it is never good enough. When he finally reaches manhood, he is framed as a coward and forced to flee his own people. In the end Imaro only finds acceptance among the outlaws of the borderlands.

In other hands this might be Black Caesar, but Imaro is persecuted by a mysterious cabal of evil wizards who want him destroyed for mysterious reasons. Saunders is a fantasy writer and his tales should appeal to all Sword & Sorcery fans. The Imaro tales are as firmly rooted in African legend and history as Tolkein’s work is in European myth. It makes for a distinctive setting that many readers will not have seen before. I strongly recommend Imaro and I’m looking forward to seeing the rest of the series from Night Shade.

-Dave Hardy

IMARO!!???

I just read a blog entry over at Black Gate to the effect that Night Sahde books will not be continuing the Imaro series. Look at: http://bg-editor.livejournal.com/

I don't know the source of that bit of intelligence, but it is disheartening to say the least! I read the Night Shade editions a few months back and was very impressed with Saunders' Sword & Sorcery tales that teetered between cynical despair and outright optimism. I hope that Night Shade does not cancel the series. The best way to convince them of that error is to buy the books!

Now that the good folks at PC Guru have recovered the data off my terminally crashed hard drive, you can expect to see my reviews of Imaro 1 & 2 shortly.

-Dave Hardy