Author: Keith Humphreys

Categories
Action/Adventure Mystery/Noir

Kansas City Confidential

In the years after the war, actor John Payne, director Phil Karlson, and producer Edward Small collaborated in various configurations, yielding a solid run of modestly-budgeted, high quality films. The post-war period saw many movies merge elements of film noir with the traditions of the gangster melodrama, including the first collaboration of these three men: 1952’s Kansas City Confidential.

At one level, this is a superb heist film (which allegedly influenced Quentin Tarantino’s conception of Reservoir Dogs). A masked criminal mastermind half-recruits, half-bullies three lowlifes into pulling off an armed robbery. All of them wear masks and thus are unknown both to the police and to each other. The mastermind instructs them to hide out until the money is laundered, and gives them a secret method of identifying each other when the time is ripe for the payout. Meanwhile, an ex-con, ex-GI (Payne, playing two noir archetypes in one!) who was at the wrong place at the wrong time gets pinched by the police. He escapes their clutches and decides to pursue the gang, though whether he wants them brought to justice or just desires a piece of the pie is not immediately clear.

This film is proof-positive that you don’t need much money to make a solid, entertaining film, and the complete lack of pretension to anything else is one of Kansas City Confidential’s charms. The script has some satisfying twists and moments of delicious tension. All the performances are very good, particularly Jack Elam as a twitchy, chain-smoking criminal, Preston Foster as an embittered ex-cop with both a brutal and a soft side, and Payne as a cynical tough guy out for some sort of redemption. George Diskant’s camerawork, particularly in the first half, is striking, with effective use of close-ups and lighting to let the actors act and the dark mood to suffuse the audience. The film’s viewpoint is bleak: The cops are not much better than the criminals, to extent that they are even different people at all.

John Payne’s career is almost a noir story in itself. He was originally an upbeat singer and dancer in light-hearted films and was also of course a star of the heartwarming Miracle on 34th Street. But a few years after the war he changed into a tough actor with great physical presence and a clipped style of delivering dialogue. He was very smart about the film business as a business (and shrewdly cleaned up a packet in Hollywood due to wise investments) and may therefore have grasped that the war shifted filmgoers’ taste toward darker movies that would begin to supplant sunnier fare. Whatever the reasons for his transformation, he was very effective both as a smiling song-and-dance man in love with the All-American girl as well as in the hard bitten roles he later took on. Truly, an actor of significant range.

Happily, Kansas City Confidential is in the public domain and you can therefore legally watch it for free here at Internet Archive.

p.s. Payne, Karlson, and Small also collaborated on another of my recommendations, 99 River Street.

Categories
Action/Adventure Drama Mystery/Noir

99 River Street

There are worse things than murder. You can kill a man one inch at a time.

Another of my recommendations, Kansas City Confidential, brought together Director Phil Karlson, Producer Edward Small and Actor John Payne in 1952. They re-teamed the following year to make another fine film: 99 River Street.

Payne is compelling as ultra-hard-luck Ernie Driscoll, a former boxer turned cab driver. In the opening scene, which is a pre-Raging Bull master class in how to convey the violence of boxing on film, Ernie is on the verge of becoming champion when he gets a bad break. And the bad breaks keep coming for the rest of the movie, in his marriage to his ice-cold beauty of a wife (Peggie Castle, at her best), in his friendship with a manipulative aspiring actress friend (Evelyn Keyes, on fire here), and in his battles with some ruthless jewel thieves who want to destroy him for reasons he can’t understand. His only consistent source of support is his former manager, a dispatcher at his cab company (played sympathetically by Frank Faylen, who played a cab driver in many Hollywood films and apparently got promoted).

If this film noir/gangster melodrama deserves one adjective it’s brutal. There are many scenes of physical violence, filmed with unusual realism (My favorite is Payne’s torture by and knock down drag out with a karate chopping jewel thief played by tough guy Jack Lambert). The emotional violence is even more pronounced, particularly in a long, gripping sequence in which Driscoll is played for a chump by a group of “theater people”. The tragedy of Payne’s character is that while he once was a master of his violent nature, frustrations and failures have led him to become a slave to it, preventing him from being happy in his achingly simple new life ambition of moving from hack work to becoming the owner of a filling station. Payne and Karlson are well up to the challenge of bringing across Driscoll’s emotional flaws and vulnerabilities, while at the same time making him completely credible in the many physical confrontations of the story.

The movie also gives the audience a fine bunch of criminals to root against. Brad Dexter (the guy from The Magnificent Seven whose name few people can recall) is both scary and smooth as the jewel thief who frames Payne for a terrible crime. Lambert exudes the menace that served him so well in his decades as a heavy in films and on television. Eddy Waller is even scarier in a different way as a criminal who has a kindly manner but in fact is a cold-blooded killer. The final, extended confrontation at 99 River Street of the protagonists versus the villains is thrilling and satisfying.

The only weakness of this movie is the final two minutes, a tacked on “where are they now?”-style epilogue that is too upbeat and pat given the tone and content of the rest of the film (The otherwise perfect Sideways had the same flaw). It was unlike Karlson and Small to pull a punch, but it doesn’t diminish 99 River Street as a gritty, gripping piece of cinema.

Categories
Comedy Romance

Annie Hall

Given how many weak movies make a lot of money and garner a pile of laurels, it is particularly satisfying when justice is done and a magnificent film is a hit both with audiences and critics. So it was with 1977’s Best Picture Oscar winner Annie Hall.

The plot is straightforward. A neurotic Jewish comedian from Brooklyn who is a lot like Woody Allen falls in love with a kooky, lovely, endearing Wisconsin girl who is a lot like Diane Keaton. He educates her about his hang-ups, psychoanalysis, death, and ethnic baggage. She educates him about how to lighten up and enjoy life. But it doesn’t last. And then it is on again. And then it is off again. And along the way the audience laughs very hard many, many times. As in Shakespeare plays, there isn’t much new here story-wise, but the execution is an inspiration.

Director/Star Woody Allen was at the time known as a sharp stand-up comedian and a maker of funny, lightweight movies (e.g., Take the Money and Run). No one but Woody knew that he also had the ability to make extremely personal, affecting films with strong dramatic moments combined with his trademark hilarity. This movie launched a new phase of his career which has produced many artistic triumphs.

And as for Keaton, I once quoted former Stanford University President Gerhard Casper saying that “falling in love with Audrey Hepburn was an essential, civilizing experience for all human beings“. For a subsequent generation, the same could have been said of Diane Keaton. Men wanted to take care of her and women wanted to dress like her and a have a cool New York apartment like her. Allen puts incredible faith in Keaton, letting the camera roll and roll as she is alone on screen in several key scenes, and she delivers every time.

I can’t close without posting one of the most famous bits from the film (it ruins nothing of the story), which highlights Allen’s endearingly hostile wit, his chronic and effective breaking of the fourth wall, and his on screen chemistry with his amazing co-star.

Categories
Drama Foreign Language

Behind the Sun (Abril Despedaçado)

Artistic concepts and projects can span the world. If Shirley Jackson’s classic American short story The Lottery could be said to have an Albanian parallel, it would be Ismail Kadare’s novel Broken April, which a French and Swiss production group, in alliance with some very talented Brazillians, turned into 2001’s Behind the Sun.

The story is extremely simple, almost an Aesop’s fable. In rural Brazil in 1910, a family of sugar cane cutters has been feuding for generations with a family of ranchers. The conflict began when some land was stolen and one member of one of the families killed a member of the other. In response, the victimized family took precise revenge, killing one but not more than one of the members of the perpetrating family. That family then responded in kind. Over the decades countless members of both clans have died, but no one seems interested in stopping — or even questioning — the tradition of violence other than a young boy in the cane cutting family who goes by the name “Kid”. Meanwhile, an alluring pair of circus performers appear on the scene, with the potential to change the life of the “Kid” and that of his beloved older brother Tonho (played with vulnerability by Rodrigo Santoro), who is next in line to be murdered.

This is a movie of staggering beauty photographed by Walter Carvalho, a superstar of Brazilian film of whom most Americans have never heard (Director Walter Salles is somewhat better-known outside of Brazil, but not as much as he deserves). The arresting visuals are often accompanied by stylized, amped up sound, with a murderous chase through the cane fields being particularly hard to forget.

The acting is uniformly fine, including by the young Ravi Ramos Lacerda as “Kid” (He acquires another name — Pacu — as the film progresses). The actors draw us into a world of brutal simplicity leavened by moments of magic and tender affection. These latter moments are critical because the humanity that the actors infuse into the characters is precisely what makes the unreasoning doom that hovers over all of them so terrifying and maddening.

If you are one those readers who finds the symbols and allegory in much of Latin American literature to be heavy-handed, you may have a similar reaction to aspects of this movie. But even if the Gabriel García Márquez-esque story touches put you off a bit, it should not blunt your appreciation for this powerful, poetic piece of cinema. The exquisite visuals and heartfelt performances are virtually impossible not to appreciate.

Behind the Sun wasn’t promoted effectively when it was released, and as a result did not receive the audience attention it deserved. But those who found it constitute a band of fierce admirers which you would be fortunate to join.

Categories
Drama Mystery/Noir

Chiefs

Chiefs was broadcast on CBS 30 years ago and like millions of other Americans I was glued to the set each night as its sprawling, multi-generational tale of law enforcement, small town life, racism and the hunt for a clever serial killer unfolded.

The mini-series centers on three police chiefs in the town of Delano, Georgia and a fourth man who is denied the chance to be the chief and is forever embittered. The story is narrated by the town’s leading citizen: Banker, investor and politician Hugh Holmes (Charlton Heston). In 1924, Holmes persuades the town council that Delano has grown big enough to have a police station. They hire gentle farmer Will Henry Lee (Wayne Rogers) as their first chief, enraging a WWI veteran who wanted the job (Keith Carradine). The choice of Lee is also disdained by good ol’ boy county sheriff Skeeter Willis (Paul Sorvino), who sees the responsibility of police mainly as keeping poor people and Blacks in line. Meanwhile, runaway boys begin disappearing around Delano, and Chief Lee comes to suspect that he is dealing with a sexually motivated serial killer. But tragic events intrude before Lee can apprehend the murderer.

The story then moves forward to the end of WWII, when a thuggish war veteran named Sonny Butts becomes Chief (Brad Davis). He uses the power of his office to terrorize Blacks, women, and anyone else he can get his hands on, to the point that Holmes is able to begin making moves to have him fired. Butts concludes that if he can solve the decades-long murder spree, which is still underway, he can save his job. He comes close but also fails, leaving the mystery to be attacked again by a different chief in 1962, Tyler Watts (Billy Dee Williams). But Watts has more than murder with which to contend. He is under great scrutiny and indeed threat as the town’s first Black chief, and he also must be careful not to endanger the political career of William Henry Lee’s son (Stephen Collins), who is running for governor as a racial moderate. There are many other clever ties between the stories of the three episodes, but revealing them would be a crime of its own.

The narrative structure of Chiefs, based on Stuart Woods’ novel, is inspired. With each generation we get to see the changes in Delano and in the South more generally, particularly with regards to race. Yet there is also continuity in the horrible murderer and the indirect partnership of three different men who do not know each other yet collaborate across the years to track down the killer.

The series features no bad performances and many strong ones, including by an agreeably restrained Heston. Paul Sorvino is also tremendous as Skeeter. Some actors think the way to play a racist realistically is to stamp around yelling epithets and dripping hatred. But Sorvino has it right: Most racists don’t repeatedly proclaim their racism any more than air breathers make repeated attestations to their love of oxygen. For Sorvino’s Skeeter, racism is just who he is and how life as he sees it is, and that makes him much scarier than the usual ranting bigot stereotype. Brad Davis, as the second chief, also tears up the screen. The actor had a brutal, short life but maybe that’s what gave him the remarkable ability he shows here to channel darkness. His Chief Sonny Butts is the pluperfect lustful, hateful bully. Keith Carradine is also creepily effective as Foxy Funderburk, the man who was denied the job of Chief and has been nursing a grudge ever since.

Chiefs (miniseries) - Alchetron, The Free Social Encyclopedia

Chiefs does suffer a bit from scattered flaws. At least one scene in each episode rings false, and some other dramatic moments that are ultimately effective nonetheless have contrived set-ups. Ageing a cast almost 40 years when of course not every actor is the correct chronological age when you start is a formidable challenge, and at times the makeup technicians don’t quite meet it. None of these peccadilloes are fatal to enjoyment, but collectively they keep Chiefs in the realm of excellent TV mini-series rather than letting it soar to Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy-level heights.

If you want to enjoy this high-quality production beware the many chopped up versions that are floating around (e.g., the 200 minute VHS release). The full-length version of course requires a bigger investment of time, but the compensation is handsome indeed.

Categories
Drama Mystery/Noir

The Web

When I was in graduate school, I shared an apartment with a fellow student who was also a film buff. One night we were watching television and saw a commercial announcing that our cable provider would soon start carrying a channel called “American Movie Classics”. We sat there mesmerized as the advertisement trumpeted that the new service would start with a series of films with Barbara Stanwyck, followed by a run of Cary Grant movies, and then a Gary Cooper retrospective.

We sat in stunned, dry-mouthed silence for a moment, until I said “Well, we’ve got to make a decision: do we cancel cable or drop out of graduate school so that we have more time for old movies?”.

My roommate responded immediately: “Totally drop out of graduate school”.

We resisted somehow, despite becoming AMC addicts and later TCM addicts. One joy of these channels was re-watching old favorites, but a distinct pleasure was viewing a quality film that had somehow been lost — not generally remembered, not listed in most film guides, but still able to entertain an audience if ever it were rediscovered. One such movie with which I had the latter experience is The Web.

This 1947 film, which is also shown under the title Black Velvet, is a nicely crafted noir featuring Edmond O’Brien as a dedicated, hard-charging young lawyer named Bob Regan. Regan falls under the spell of wealthy corporate powerhouse Andrew Colby (Vincent Price) and his sultry secretary/mistress Noel Farady (Ella Raines). He begins working for Colby on what seems a simple assignment, but it quickly takes a violent turn that draws him into a web of murder, intrigue and lies. He is meanwhile attracted to Noel, and she seems to reciprocate, but only to a point because Colby’s hold over her is strong. Meanwhile, hard-nosed police lieutenant D’Amico (William Bendix) watches over the developments with suspicion, and wavers between acting like Regan’s friend and his enemy.

The Web (1947) | It's a double-cross – a triple murder, with ...

Many people only know Vincent Price as “the King of the Grand Guignol”, but he had a fine career in Hollywood before all those scary movies. Otto Preminger’s excellent Laura is probably Price’s most widely-respected non-horror role, but he’s even better here: Silky smooth, handsome, assured and at the same time devious and dangerous.

Ella Raines is also at the top of her game, exuding a Bacall-esque sassy/tough sexuality as she is torn between the two leading men. O’Brien gives an appealing and believable performance as a man in way over his head, and Bendix plays the tough cop memorably as a sort of wiser older brother (and for once in a film noir, the cops are actually smarter than the hero!).

To be an all-time noir classic, The Web would have needed slightly tighter pacing and more quotable lines of dialogue, but it’s still an entertaining, well-made film that with the aid of cable classic movie channels (God Bless ’em) has been re-discovered by a new generation of viewers. Make yourself one of them.

p.s. Another too often forgotten film with a superb non-horror turn by Price is Samuel Fuller’s The Baron of Arizona.

Categories
Action/Adventure Drama Mystery/Noir

Bend of the River and The Naked Spur **Double Feature**

Caftan Woman: The James Stewart Blogathon: Bend of the River (1952)

Nobody can hate like a good man, and maybe that’s why Jimmy Stewart was so magnetic and moving in the hard-bitten Westerns he made with Anthony Mann after World War II. Stewart was a huge star at the outbreak of the war, during which he served with distinction. When the All-American, gee-whiz nice guy every dad hoped his daughter would bring home returned from military service, he was different, the country was different and his films didn’t do great box office. He might easily have appeared on a few TV shows and then drifted into retirement, as did many stars of his generation.

But two magnificent directors saw other qualities in Stewart, including a capacity for rage, bitterness, grief, longing, cynicism and violence. One of them remains famous (Hitchcock), the other, sadly, has mostly been forgotten. His name was Anthony Mann, and you could summarize much of his ouevre worse than saying it was “film noir goes west”.

Their first collaboration, the 1950 movie Winchester ’73, remains famous today because it was a massive hit that revived the then somnolent Western genre. It’s entertaining on any dimension, but for Stewart fans it’s particularly fascinating to see the darkness in his acting. When Stewart’s grief-ridden character (Lin McAdam) mashes Dan Duryea’s face into the bar and painfully twists Duryea’s gun arm, the rage in Stewart’s eyes is frightening; Duryea looks scared that Stewart is really going to hurt him.

The next two Mann-Stewart collaborations are somewhat less known today, which is too bad because they allow Stewart to go deeper into less seemly human emotions. They also both deliver thrilling action scenes. I offer them here as double feature recommendation: 1952’s Bend of the River and 1953’s The Naked Spur.

Western Noir: James Stewart in BEND OF THE RIVER (Universal ...

In Bend of the River, Stewart plays Glyn McLyntock, a former Kansas raider now helping a family of good-hearted pioneers settle in Oregon. They know nothing of his past, but slick gunman Emerson Cole (Arthur Kennedy) who becomes attached to their party, does. Cole too seems to want to go straight, and helps defend the party as they make their perilous journey. The pioneers warn McLyntock that a bad man is always bad, and therefore Cole cannot be trusted, but McLyntock knows that he himself needs redemption just as much as Cole does. Ultimately, the pioneers are betrayed by unscrupulous villains, and Stewart, with his old violent nature returning, must try to settle the score.

As foils, Kennedy and Stewart play off each other effectively, and Rock Hudson also does well as a (ahem) charming dandy from San Francisco (Rock liked to watch his own movies with gay friends and laugh at the subtext — they must have chuckled here when he tells a smitten young woman to go away because he wants to be with the men). The violence is extreme for the early 1950s, with dozens of people being wounded or killed on screen. What is unfortunately not out of place in the early 1950s are some mercifully brief but still off-putting scenes with Stepin Fechit as a stereotypical African-American character. But to close on a positive note, the scenery is gorgeous and everyone seems to know how to handle horses and guns, including during the climactic shootout.

The Naked Spur features another psychologically damaged Stewart character who cannot accept that what is lost is lost forever, no matter how much vengeance you take. With able assistance from Mann and two other noir icons (Ralph Meeker of Kiss Me Deadly and Robert Ryan of The Set-Up), Stewart delivers a cowboy movie with psychic weight. The film’s emotional dynamic is the reverse of Bend of the River. Instead of a once bad man trying to be accepted by good people by showing how good he is now, Stewart plays a once good man telling good people that they should not accept him anymore. That’s what makes Stewart and Janet Leigh’s heartfelt closing scene a knockout.

In addition to being a movie star and director, Clint Eastwood is a student of film history, and I am going to give him the last word on the multi-talented, multi-dimensional Jimmy Stewart:

Categories
Action/Adventure Drama Romance Science Fiction / Fantasy

Excalibur

As a filmmaker, John Boorman really goes for it. He has an idiosyncratic perspective on the diverse material he films, and carries it to the limit. Sometimes this has led to abject disaster (e.g., the incomprehensible, pretentious and unintentionally risible Zardoz). But more often than not Boorman’s courage as a filmmaker has resulted in fresh, exciting cinema, such as Point Blank, one of the very best films I have recommended on this site. 1981’s Excalibur is almost as strong and every bit as original as that classic.

Excalibur re-tells the hoary tale of King Arthur, his wizard/mentor Merlin, his knights of the round table and his tragic love triangle with Guinevere and Lancelot. Boorman keeps roughly to the classic Malory version of the story, but tells it in his own inimitable way, with bloody battles, plenty of sex, and even at times a bit of camp (some of the over-the-top moments may have drawn a few chuckles that Boorman didn’t intend). Excalibur illustrates beautifully how a talented artist can breathe new life into familiar material.

The most memorable character in the film is Merlin, played with gusto by Nicol Williamson, who gives the most eccentric portrayal of an Arthurian Wizard since John Cleese essayed Tim the Enchanter. His Merlin is a cranky, cryptic, wise and powerful oddball who alternates between helping his human charges (First Uther Pendragon and then his son Arthur) and upbraiding them for their frailties. The film develops his rivalry/romance with Morgana le Fay more than has any other Arthurian adaptation, which was a wise move given that the ageless and subtle actress Helen Mirren is on hand to play the enchantress who longs for King Arthur’s downfall.

The production values are spectacular and the battle scenes feel real. Rather than people leaping around in plate mail whilst nimbly fencing with longswords, the combat is often slow and clunky. Indeed, the actors visibly strain under the weight of their weapons and armor. Also to admire: Future superstars (Patrick Stewart, Liam Neeson) giving solid performances as knights. Cherie Lunghi and Nicholas Gray also register as the doomed lovers Guinevere and Lancelot, and it’s a shame their film careers didn’t take off after this movie was made.

Ultimately of course, this is Boorman’s movie, and whether it captivates you or not depends directly on whether you are willing to travel along with him as he develops his personal vision of Le Morte d’Arthur. Most viewers will find that while there are a few bumps on that journey, it’s an immensely rewarding trip with one of Britain’s great filmmakers.

Categories
Comedy

Raising Arizona

Edwina’s insides were a rocky place where my seed could find no purchase

In terms of dialogue in American film, we are a long way from Preston Sturges and Ben Hecht. Between the audience becoming younger and the market more international, artful talking has largely been replaced by car chases, explosions and slapstick. Yet in their second film, the amazing, Sturges-loving, Coen Brothers somehow managed to write a passel of quotable lines combined with car chases, explosions and slapstick. The result was zany comic brilliance: 1987’s Raising Arizona.

The plot: Sad sack, inept criminal H.I. McDunnough (Nicholas Cage) thinks his life may be turning around when he weds a no-nonsense police officer named “Ed” (Holly Hunter). But when they discover she can’t have children, they despair for their future. However, a prominent local family is blessed with quintuplets….surely they wouldn’t miss one if someone happened to steal it?

The dialogue, as in other of the Coens’ films (e.g., O Brother, Where Art Thou?), is funny precisely because the quasi-Biblical sesquipedalian lines are voiced by characters who have room temperature IQ. This is coupled with Barry Sonnenfeld’s manic, delightfully silly camerawork, Wile E. Coyote-level chase sequences and WWF-style fights. The over-the-top-and-then-some style of the humor didn’t completely click with audiences and critics at the time, but the film has since accrued deserved respect as a minor classic of comedic cinema.

Nicholas Cage apparently didn’t get along with the Coens on the set and his acting is one-note here (They found their perfect star later in George Clooney). But Holly Hunter, in her career breakout year, is both hilarious and sympathetic throughout. I would put her performance here in a tie for her best ever (along with her star turn as a not entirely different character in The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom). In supporting roles, Trey Wilson does rapid fire dialogue as well as Jimmy Cagney, and Sam McMurray gets big laughs as Hi’s boss, a would-be wife-swapper who keeps trying to to tell Polack jokes, but is too stupid to remember the punchlines.

I discovered the Coen Brothers by accident, in an art house theater that was showing a new low budget film made by two unknowns. That film was their superb tale of murder and intrigue, Blood Simple. I am given to understand that they decided in their second time out to make a film that was utterly different from their first in all respects. That showed some artistic courage, and my oh my was it well-warranted.

p.s. Look fast for a reference to my favorite film, Dr. Strangelove, during a scene in a men’s restroom.

Categories
Action/Adventure British Mystery/Noir

The Blue Carbuncle

Christmas time is here, happiness and cheer, fun for all, that children call, their favorite time of year!

Mine too, not least because there are so many enjoyable Christmas films to recommend, including an episode from Granada Television’s justly revered Sherlock Holmes series: The Blue Carbuncle.

Eccentric, unstable, dashing Jeremy Brett, whose acting (as Edward Hardwicke put it) contained “a whiff of the Edwardian” was an inspired choice to play Holmes in this handsomely produced series. David Burke makes a fine, gentle Dr. Watson in the early episodes, succeeded by an equally good Edward Hardwicke as a flintier sort of Watson in the latter part of the series. The Blue Carbuncle features Burke as Watson, and the byplay between the actors is a marvel, bringing out the warmth of their friendship yet also Holmes’ tendency to talk down to Watson, sometimes with marked asperity.

The plot: It’s Christmas time in London, though the scowling Countess of Morcar is unhappy (Rosalind Knight, putting just the right undercurrent of humour into an overtly Scroogish performance). She finds Christmas a chore in any event, but even moreso when her precious gem, the blue carbuncle, is stolen! Meanwhile, Commissionaire Peterson (Frank Mills) brings a goose to Holmes with a strange story of how he has seen a man lose his treasured Christmas dinner. Through an ingenious series of deductions, Holmes sees that the two mysteries may be connected, but he must race against time as an innocent man (Desmond McNamara) has been framed for the crime, leaving his struggling wife and children in agony as the holiday approaches.

As with the series as a whole, the original material is treated reverently, with many lines lifted straight from the text and the climactic scene nicely staged to match Sidney Paget’s drawing from the original Strand magazine publication of Doyle’s story. And the Christmas spirit is everywhere, in the incidental Victorian-style music, set decor and story elements. Not generally thought of as a Christmas movie, The Blue Carbuncle is a fine appetizer for your family by the fire, before you tuck into your own Yuletide bird.