This one’s going to be a multi-parter every other week until it’s all done.
Why Found-Again: When I finally saved up enough allowance to buy this, sometime around 1983 or ’84, it immediately became my bible.
Not the copy I had in my youth. You can tell by the lack of Cup-O-Noodle stains.
Readers of this site have no doubt noticed I can be insufferable about things I’m interested in—why, yes, I am still yelling at the end of Highlander whenever I watch it as though expecting a different result, how did you know?—and one thing I have always been interested in is a detective story. My parents, who I have to assume thought they were getting one of those kids who would tell them what happened at school that day, suddenly found themselves saddled with a would-be miniature Magnum, P.I. blathering on about various kinds of surveillance while not eating her vegetables.
Mysteriously, regaling my family with the details of detective work in no way caused Dad to hurry up and build that network of Three-Investigator-style hidden offices I wanted. Maybe I should have picked up How To Win Friends And Influence People first?
The Premise (Entire Book): Written in conjunction with a retired FBI agent, this book uses fictional teen detectives Frank and Joe Hardy in various scenarios to teach young readers sleuthing skills. (I have the revised 1972 edition.) It essentially works out as half guidebook, half story collection.
The Premise (Chapter 1—Undercover Work): When a plastics factory suffers a series of thefts, the owner enlists the help of the Hardy Boys’ father, who sends Frank and Joe undercover as delinquents in need of jobs.
They do kind of look the part.
The boys manage to infiltrate the group responsible for the thefts, only to be inadvertently ratted out by the factory owner, who obviously should’ve been in the briefing pictured above.
The Verdict: Above all, I remember this book as being hilariously dated, even at the time I was first reading it. This chapter was less Starsky & Hutch than Dragnet, though, heavy on common sense and following procedures. There were, however, a few odd moments:
Even without taking this willfully out of context, Frank Hardy really looks like he’s up to no good. I think it’s the sideburns.Typewriter banter among thieves! What has the march of progress cost us?
Not bad at all so far.
Next time: Jonny Quest eludes yet another attempt to destroy his globetrotting family. Doesn’t narrow it down much, does it?
Welcome to Finally! Friday, an occasional feature to break up the (loooooong) list of things I need to revisit for Found-Again Fridays. Inspired last year when I watched Flashdance only 30 years after I first meant to, I’ll be writing about stuff you… and sometimes I… can’t believe I never watched/read before—and for this week, it’s 1970s crime drama The Streets of San Francisco.
Why Finally? It’s a police drama with a young Michael Douglas in it. If you had any idea how much Law & Order I’ve seen, or how many times I’ve watched Romancing the Stone, you too would be flabbergasted.
…by my not having seen Streets, that is.
The Premise: San Francisco homicide detectives Mike Stone (Karl Malden, who to a demographic including me will forever be “the guy from the American Express ads”) and Steve Keller (Michael Douglas) solve a variety of crimes, from armed robberies gone wrong to apparent political assassinations.
It’s the classic buddy-cop formula: Keller is a bit more the charge-ahead man of action, while the older Stone is craftier (and has an uncanny ability to talk crazed killers into giving themselves up). Still, neither is a slouch in any department, and most of the fun lies in watching them work together to find the killer. And like some of the shows that followed it—Simon & Simon and Magnum, P.I. come to mind—the city itself becomes a kind of supporting character in Streets of San Francisco.
As does Douglas’s hair. Look at that—it’s a force of nature! Or a force against nature. It’s definitely a force, at any rate.
The Verdict: If you are the sort of person who watches Dragnet ’67 for the funky clothes and slang, you’ll love this show. If you like cop shows, you’ll like this show. If your hobby is spotting character actors, you’re going to yell “Vic Tayback!!” a lot. (You’ll also see David Soul as a man hiding his ethnic background and David “Ellery Queen’s dad” Wayne as a newspaper seller.) And if you’ve ever seen Police Squad!, you’re about to find out why they did that title-card gag. Tremendous fun, just dated enough to be interesting rather than absurd.
Might go well with: Seafood, Dragnet, and to the surprise of no one, Romancing the Stone. You have to admit that hair is incredible.
Why Found-Again? I remember loving this show during its original run, but now that I look it up, I can’t figure out how I even managed to watch Picket Fences; I was in college at the time, and TV reception in the dorm was frequently abysmal.* (The exception was Fox, which is how I watched The X-Files.) I must have liked the show even more than I thought.
The Premise (“What Have We Here?” Version): Imagine if Northern Exposure eloped to the mainland US to marry Law & Order, and they compromised by living in Wisconsin.
The Premise (Official Plot Version): Picket Fences centers on the smallish town of Rome, WI, and especially on the Brock family. Father Jimmy (Tom Skerritt) is the sheriff at a time when Rome happens to be fielding some extremely weird crimes; his wife Jill (Kathy Baker) is the town doctor.
This face is merited at least once an episode.Behold, the woman who helped make Mister Frost worth (re)watching.
Though the whole town is an endless source of intrigue, much of the action centers around Sheriff Brock’s police station, where deputies Kenny and Maxine (Costas Mandylor and Lauren Holly) are always on the job—and, if memory serves, occasionally each other. And if you wondered what Holly Marie Combs got up to before Charmed, she plays the oldest Brock child here.
I have, however, saved my favorite for last. I’d forgotten until I saw Fyvush Finkel’s cheery face how much I love the character of Douglas Wambaugh, the lawyer who might as well be a Weeble the way he pops back up after getting smacked down in court. Wambaugh is relentless and never at a loss for words, and he is my hero.
He’s also running for mayor in season 1, which is probably only one reason that guy would have a poster of himself.
The Verdict: I’ll be honest: I didn’t expect this show to have aged well, and parts of it haven’t. But I still love Picket Fences and all Rome’s townspeople. It’s been a long time since I saw a show full of “quirky” characters who nevertheless feel real; maybe it’s an art we’ve lost, or maybe it’s the result of my being without cable for ten years. The latter seems likely.
Might go well with: All kinds of cheese, for all kinds of reasons.
*Previous generations told of walking to school in the snow; lying on my dorm bed and looking almost straight up at the TV on top of the wardrobe—the only way I could get Animaniacs to come in clearly—somehow doesn’t have the same ring of hardship, but will definitely hurt your neck.
This is the third book in a hard-boiled detective series starring young Maggie Sullivan, a P.I. trying to make her way in 1930s Dayton (at some point, Ohio seems to have become the new Chicago as far as the detective novels I read are concerned). Maggie and her friends and helpers are beautifully written, the historical setting is interesting, the mysteries are excellent, and if she doesn’t give her possible love interest a break I am going to explode from frustration. The man can play a penny whistle and catch bad guys, for god’s sake.
What I Should Have Been Reading: I just bought a three-in-one volume of Philip Marlowe novels after seeing The Big Sleep for the first time this summer. Until then, I’d just assumed there were Hammett people and Chandler people in the world and I was clearly Team Dashiell; if I can ever stop reading about Maggie Sullivan, I’m going to put that hypothesis to the test.
Chandler even seems to be watching me reproachfully from the book jacket.
(On a side note, any fellow mystery/movie buffs who are reading this: isn’t The Big Sleep odd? I can’t think of any other movie I enjoyed so much that seemed so much longer than its actual runtime.)
I came late to podcasted dramas after a few years of subscribing to the driest “Boring Fact of the Day”-type podcasts you could imagine. I was therefore probably the last to know about Wormwood, a sort of supernatural(…er) Twin Peaks in which a vision leads booze-swilling former psychologist/current sorcerer Dr. Xander Crowe and his technomancer assistant Sparrow to the titular town. When I did find the 2007 series, I promptly put off listening to the last season for months on end because I didn’t want Wormwood to stop. Fortunately, there’s also a comic book series and two short-story anthologies to keep fans of Crowe and Sparrow from languishing. The book badly needed more proofreading, but the stories are often excellent as two of the most entertaining misanthropes in fiction take on demons, mythical creatures, themselves and each other.
What I Should Have Been Reading: I’ve been on a weird-fiction kick of late and took a chance on a book of Thomas Ligotti stories. I’ve paused halfway through, but the man is a master of elegant prose about horrible things, and I can’t believe I’d never heard of him before this year. I suspect this is how I’m supposed to feel about Raymond Carver but don’t.
I should also start re-listening to Wormwood, for that matter.
The Thing I (Re)Read: Various portions of the Addison Holmes mysteries by Liliana Hart
These books have a special place in my heart—extra-special, considering I’ve read four of them and can’t decide if I like them, and I’ll probably buy the next one and feel the same way. It might be more accurate to say they have a special place in my wallet. But the Addison Holmes books are the story of one woman, not particularly suited for the job, becoming a private investigator—a subject I’m currently trying to write about myself. Watching Addison train and deal with an increasingly demanding vocation when she starts out as a schoolteacher is, dare I say it, educational.
What I Should Have Been Reading: Oh, maybe something from this nice collection of mystery-writing books I have?
Is there a group called “People Who Haven’t Worked Out Which Gun Their Fictional P.I. Carries Anonymous”?
Additional Warning About The Dangerous Ease of Buying E-books: I own Claire DeWitt and the City of the Deadon Nook? When the hell did that happen? You should pick it up, though; it’s really good.
Next time: What anybody who was all Frankensteined out for the year would do: watch Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein for the first time since the oughts.
Writing my post last week sent me off on a tangent, so this time I’m changing the plan slightly and going back to what, in 1993, was one of my favorite movies.
Why Found-Again? Honestly, talking about my love for Kenneth Branagh/Emma Thompson makes me feel like I’m about a thousand years old. (Imagine the Highlander posts I could have written if I were! Speaking of tangents….)
I was fifteen when Siskel & Ebert reviewed Branagh’s Henry V and vividly remember the discussion about how Branagh might be the next Olivier and was otherwise an up-and-coming cinematic Big Thing. For some reason—I’m not a huge fan of the play even after several Shakespeare classes, so it wasn’t Henry as such—I found this very exciting. Two years later, I was also watching Siskel & Ebert when Dead Again, Branagh’s new movie with his then-wife Emma Thompson, got worse reviews.
I didn’t see it till I was nineteen, but once I did, I was hooked. The apparent king and queen of movies in a noirish supernatural thriller—how could I be anything but smitten?
The Premise: A mute, traumatized woman (Thompson) shows up at an orphanage with no apparent memory of who she is; the nuns turn to one of their former charges, hard-boiled PI Mike Church (Branagh), for help. The further Mike digs into the case, however, the more it seems the trauma might have its roots in a famous murder from 1948, linked to the woman’s past life…or his own. But will forgotten crimes be reincarnated as well?
From a stylistic perspective (which readers have probably deduced I have little ability to analyze, but onward!), Dead Again hits all the classic noir beats: the LA setting, the Old Hollywood glamor of the flashback sequences, the dark corners and plot twists and dramatic camera angles.
…and Andy Garcia, noiring even harder than Alec Baldwin.
The cast is likewise great, with the two leads joined by Derek Jacobi as a chiseling antique dealer/hypnotist, Wayne Knight as Church’s friend, Andy Garcia as a 1940s reporter who gets too involved, and a great turn by Robin Williams as a cantankerous ex-shrink who works in a grocery store. You shouldn’t have slept with that patient, pal.
That said, rewatching Dead Again is a little like rewatching Highlander for me: once there’s enough distance from the initial adrenaline rush, doubts begin to creep in. Some of the events seem a little disconnected from each other, in that way where the story makes more sense when you describe it aloud than when you’re watching it on the screen. And then there’s the plot twist, which is not quite as twisty in 2015 as it was in the early 1990s.
The Verdict: Be aware that it comes from someone who fretted over the Branagh-Thompson divorce in a way I’ve never cared about famous people before or since when I say that Dead Again is… just a little goofy. It seems to have moved into that category of movie that I don’t mind watching alone, but am slightly embarrassed to show to other people; the very things I love about it are all a bit embarrassing to explain, and the whole thing seems so dependent on mood.
Parts of this movie are none too subtle on the symbolism, either.
I’d hoped a re-viewing after several years’ abstinence would put me back in touch with everything I adored about the film, but it didn’t quite happen.
On the other hand, the movie and even the trailer still give me chills. I suppose for a movie about reincarnation, hope really might spring eternal.
Might go well with: Little hors d’oeuvres. You thought I was going to make a twice-baked potato joke, didn’t you?
I suspect I’m one of the only people who saw 2002’s The Truth About Charlie, the remake ofCharade, before seeing the original 1963 movie. And I didn’t like it initially, perhaps comparing it in my head to what the old-movie buffs I knew insisted was perfection.
When I finally saw Charade, then, it was with a sense of wonder and relief: the movie, though fantastic, is not a classic in that parlor-furniture, mustn’t-be-touched sense that my friends and family insisted it was. In fact, my appreciation for both versions has only grown over time.
The storyline for the movies is more or less the same: After some time away to think it over, pretty Regina (Audrey Hepburn/Thandie Newton) is just about to divorce her husband Charles when he turns up dead. And not only dead, but crooked—Charles was carrying multiple passports under various aliases, and the life Regina thought she had is revealed to be a lie. An attractive man she met on her vacation (Cary Grant/Mark Wahlberg) seems to have followed her home, but why? And what’s his relationship to the sinister trio who begin to stalk her, looking for a fortune Charles stole long ago?
Things only get more complicated when she’s asked by a sneaky American to spy on the whole cat-and-mouse game.
That makes it sound grim, but the original movie is anything but; it’s suspenseful yet witty and fast-paced, with a solid romantic subplot and interesting relationships, all set against the gorgeous backdrop of Paris. The opening has dialogue worthy of The Thin Man, in my opinion:
So how do Charade and The Truth About Charlie stack up?
The Cast:
This category does have a clear winner: in The Truth About Charlie, Thandie Newton is suitably spunky as Regina, and Mark Wahlberg takes on a rough-edged version of the Cary Grant role, with Tim Robbins as the would-be spymaster (a role Walter Matthau played in the 1963 film). They do their best against the unbeatable originals, but it’s a necessarily losing battle.
Regina 2.0, walking in the shadow of the original movie.“You mean someone did this before?”
And while I applaud tTaC director Jonathan Demme for using a more diverse cast for the three thieves, it’s hard to compete with James Coburn and friends from the original film.
…even when they hurt Cary Grant.
Advantage: Charade
The Music:
Charade’s soundtrack is the work of Henry Mancini, a man famous for the Pink Panther theme but who had a widely varied career, including doing the music for Remington Steele. The man likely never hit a wrong note in his entire life.
Even so, I often think one of my problems with The Truth About Charlie was the plot’s failure to match the adventure quotient of its soundtrack, which is one of those albums I find essential for road trips. This is the first thing you hear as The Truth About Charlie’s credits start:
I love it! There are also tracks by Asian Dub Foundation, Gotan Project, and Charles Aznavour, among others. The techno vibe isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but to me? It sounds like intrigue.
Advantage: The Truth About Charlie
The Setting:
I doubt real Paris was ever the lily-white location of the first Charade film, where the most “foreign” thing the viewer sees is the German tourist Regina uses for cover while surveilling her new friend. The Paris of The Truth About Charlie is more varied: there’s even—gasp!—graffiti. I hate the word “gritty,” but when a movie’s plot features people ruthlessly chasing after stolen war loot, a little grit is probably a good thing.
Advantage: The Truth About Charlie, but only slightly; fantasy-fashion-shoot Paris from the original film is also pretty cool
The Verdict: Mixed. Charade and its remake share the same flaws, really: some parts are more goofy than they need to be, and some of the tonal shifts between terror and whimsy are more jarring than I suspect was intended. As a caper/spy film, I find The Truth About Charlie, and its version of Paris, slightly more believable. But when it comes to heart…much as I hate dinging The Truth About Charlie for not having Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn when it couldn’t, the two leads make Charade the timeless film it is. Put bluntly, I’d watch either on TV on a weekend, but only Charade would cause me to say “I love this movie!” aloud as I settled in for the duration.
Synopsis: A group of bad guys blows up ships while testing their new laser weapon. Being expert in all things sciency, Dr. Quest and family are asked to investigate: eventually they defeat the enemy using a big mirror.
Tip 3: Everyone makes mistakes…no, really!
It’s a tough world out there. One minute you’re out seeking the Lost Temple of the Bewildered Goldfish God and the next you find out the curse wasn’t even real. (Well, it was, but only for eleven seconds.) And so it is with the Quests, who quickly realize the Lizard Men are just laser-wielding scuba divers and deal with them accordingly…with science!
Take a good look while you can…there’s a mirror aimed at his laser beam. (And why did the people reporting frog-men not add “CYCLOPTIC” to that description? It seems important.)
But while all’s well that ends well, this adventure only goes to show the importance of bouncing back when you make mistakes—mistakes like, oh, I don’t know, overestimating the load-bearing capacities of a rope.
And by “bouncing back,” I mean “…after first falling down a hatch and knocking yourself out cold.”
Resilience, my dears.
Next time: I have the perfect Found-Again movie. I can tell because I hate the very idea of rewatching it. Also, as I said last time, I’ll be participating in the They Remade What?! Blogathon hosted by Phyllis Loves Classic Movies. Like Charade? Like The Truth About Charlie? Hate either and have really good reasons why? Come comment on my upcoming post!
Next time on The Quest For Monday!: The Quests head north. Pack your thermals!
This one’s iffy: while it’s true that I once sat down to watch Heaven’s Prisoners and remained in the room the whole time, I fell asleep and never followed up until last week. After all, it seemed incomprehensible that anything with Eric Roberts as the bad guy could be dull enough to incite sleep. It might not be good, but it shouldn’t be dull.
Good news, kind of!
The Premise: This is one of two film adaptations of James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux books: regular readers will remember that these often have a similar structure to episodes of Highlander: The Series. Alec Baldwin stars as Robicheaux, an alcoholic ex-cop who tries and fails to shake his past by leaving New Orleans and opening a bait shop in the bayou. A plane crash lands him with both a foster child and a mystery, and the answer lies with his childhood friend, mobster wannabe Bubba Rocque (Roberts).
People forget Alec Baldwin could noir like a champ back in the 1990s. Then again, I also liked The Shadow.
The good news is that if you get past the first 40 minutes or so without pricking your finger on a magic spindle, Heaven’s Prisoners picks up considerably, with some nice action sequences and interesting secondary characters. (The other good news is the soundtrack, which is naturally blues-heavy.) The bad news is that it’s often a colossal downer of a film; if you’ve read the books, you know Robicheaux is what you might get if Thomas Hardy had a bowl of jambalaya, watched a few cop shows, and decided to write a mystery series, so this is not surprising. And then there’s Bubba Rocque. Did I mention Eric Roberts sports a distracting combination cornrows/French braid/man-bun for most of the film? You won’t be able to forget it.
The Verdict: Definitely better than I remembered (in that I got all the way through it), but still not quite the movie the books deserve.
Might go well with: Etouffée, beer, and the much sillier The Big Easy, since I’ve got to admit I’ve never conked out on that one.
Why Found-Again? For personal reasons too depressing to go into, I don’t watch this very often—which is, as you know if you’ve ever seen it, a total shame. 1999’s Thomas Crown Affair is a wonderful movie, and I don’t say that often enough.
The Premise: Bored gazillionaire businessman Thomas Crown (Pierce Brosnan) turns to art theft for a little excitement and gets more than he bargained for when the theft brings ruthless insurance investigator Catherine Banning (Rene Russo) into his life. It’s a cat-and-mouse game, if you’re the sort of person who thinks a cat and a mouse might hook up at a fancy-dress ball.
The Thomas Crown Affair—a quasi-remake of the 1960s heist film with Steve McQueen—is a mystery movie. It’s a heist movie. It’s a romance movie. It’s an art-museumgoer-geekery movie. It has an amazing soundtrack. It’s a worthy successor in wit and pace to The Thin Man, the movie that is my gold standard for non-supernatural films.* And more to the point, Crown is the other role Brosnan was born to play—after Remington Steele and that shooty guy with the short name.
This film is so. Much. Fun.
The Verdict: Sorry, I couldn’t hear you: I was too busy bouncing on my couch in joy as Nina Simone wailed on my television. Are you watching this yet? Why aren’t you watching this yet?
Watch this!
Might go well with: Champagne, the first season of Remington Steele, apples.
*I’m classifying sci-fi in the supernatural category for the purposes of this review, although there are lots of excellent arguments as to why I probably shouldn’t.
Why Found-Again? Like many bookish kids of a certain time period, I cut my teeth on Nancy Drew novels (I was hard on books, so if you could see them, you’d think I meant that literally) and the Hardy Boys, supplemented by the occasional T.A.C.K. puzzle-mystery collection. But my favorites were the Three Investigators mysteries, so this week I’m taking a look at the first book in that series.
Not the edition I used to have, but my library had the ones with these psychedelic covers. Mem’ries….
The Premise: Inquisitive youngsters Pete, Bob and Jupiter (…yeah) start a detective agency by organizing Jupiter’s family junkyard into an office and a series of brilliant secret passages and by blackmailing Alfred Hitchcock—clearly the best way to do almost anything. For their first case, the three look into the mystery of a vanished old movie star and his spooky mansion. Along the way they have to cope with rivals from school, a menacing ex-manager, and mounting evidence that the darned house may actually be haunted.
I mean it in the best possible way when I say that this one’s a Scooby-Doo episode—a connection I never made when I was watching the Scooby Gang as a kid: maybe I thought everything was like that when I was eight. As explained Gothic goes, though, it’s quite atmospheric, with no amount of explanation quite able to quell the characters’ fright.
The thing about mystery novels for kids is that they center intelligence as the most important quality the character can have—at least, that’s my theory for why I loved these books so much and idolized two of the three main characters. I have clear memories of begging my father to help me move old farm equipment around to make secret passages like The Three Investigators (he refused, thus passively saving me from a series of encounters with various poisonous snakes).
The series is not without its own mysteries, though. Unlike Nancy Drew, who seems to be forever college-aged, I can’t quite figure out how old Bob, Pete and Jupe are supposed to be. They’re too young to drive, but their kid nemesis is not, which makes me think they can’t be younger than 12. And shouldn’t their kid nemesis be interested in girls by now?
The Verdict: This was a surprisingly fun reread, despite being written in what might be called Kids’ Adventurese, with the bowdlerized swearwords and the wholesome protagonists. I suspect a few more of these will be added to the Found-Again archive as time goes on: at the very least there’s still my favorite, The Singing Serpent, yet to go.
Might go well with: popcorn, a glass of milk, envy that you never owned a printing press when you were approximately twelve years old.
Next time: It’s Highlander: Endgame, and probably the end of me writing about Connor MacLeod for a while.
