MUTE WITNESS is the novel upon which the Steve McQueen film BULLITT was based. One of my all time favorite McQueen vehicles(yes, I said that), if not his best, I lost count long ago how many times I’ve watched it.
It’s been quite a few years since I read this one, the first novel, of three, that featured Lt. Clancy, the only name in the novel. In looking around for this post, I learned it was originally intended that Spencer Tracy was to play the role and play it pretty much straight from the novel. When he passed away, McQueen moved into the role and the changes began.
They pretty much stuck with the plot of the film. A mobster is murdered while being guarded by the cops. The officious D.A.(played by Robert Vaughn) is miffed when the cop hides the body, allowing everyone to believe he’s still alive as he hunts for the killer.
The differences:
As I mentioned earlier, Lt. Clancy(no other name) is the name of the cop instead of the McQueen’s Frank Bullitt. The action is moved from New York to San Francisco for the movie. There’s one subplot dropped for the movie. Clancy is pretty much a loner in the novel and Jacqueline Bisset plays the invented girl friend in the movie.
And there’s no car chase in the novel. That was to ham up the movie and was used as the way to deal with the killers which was in the subplot dropped from the novel.
This was more of a mystery than an action piece. The book seems to be out of print and copies are hard to find and expensive. There are copies of the British movie edition(retitled Bullitt) reasonably priced for a used copy. The best deal though is here for the Kindle.
The editing of the car chase scene is a fantastic piece of work that won Frank Keller the editing Oscar despite a few amusing things. Scenes were shot from several angles simultaneously, resulting in the same dark green Volkswagen appearing four times and, though I have yet to spot it, a Thunderbird three times. I’ve always maintained that five hubcaps came off the Charger during the chase, though others disagree, while admitting scenes at various points show different hubcaps missing. Two of each car were used in the shooting that took four weeks.
My favorite shot is when Bullitt has used his knowledge of the streets to lose the Charger and the two hoods are driving around looking for him. A shot of the rear view mirror shows McQueen’s Mustang topping the hill behind them now.
The driver in the scenes was the actual stunt driver that did the driving, which resulted in him doing the same for a chase in THE FRENCH CONNECTION.
Finally, you just know I had to include the car chase. This was the best clip I could find, slightly edited and with different music. Just click on the Watch on You line.
I had some thoughts of including BULLITT on Todd Mason’s Overlooked Movies Tuesday, not so much overlooked as ignored by the younger moviegoers of today. You know, if it wasn’t made it the last ten years, it’s no good. I have a nephew, who’s thirty-one, something of a Mustang enthusiast, that I thought might like it. “Meh, Fast and Furious was better.”
The post title says it all. Frank McCourt is out and Magic Johnson is in. Magic’s group paid a hefty price, two + billion dollars, far putstripping the previous highest price for a sports franchise. The only reservation I see is allowing McCourt to keep the parking lot. I would have made sure he didn’t have any more money coming in off the Dodgers. That’s why the fans stayed away in droves the last couple of years. He’d raped the franchise enough, no one wanted to put another dollar in his pocket. A once proud team, one of baseball’s corner franchises was reduced to a pale shadow of it’s former glory.
He should have been separated completely from it. He had to sell.
We fans will have to settle for this I suppose.
Leno made a joke about it last night that I liked. He spoke of Magic’s competitive nature. He said it was on, that Larry Bird had bought the Boston Red Sox. Hah!
Geiger’s life began when the bus driver shook him awake. He didn’t know who he was or remember anything about his past. He got his name, as in counter, from a poster for a book on the works of artist H. R. Gigir, the e added because he liked the look.
In the years since that beginning, he’d forged a business, Information Retrieval. You see, Geiger had a unique talent. He could recognize a lie the instant it was said.
With his partner, Harry Boddicker, they specialized in getting things found out. Harry ran the website, judged the contacts, and arranged for the “Jones” to be brought to their facility. There Geiger used his talents to learn the truth, whatever the customer wanted found out. What he did might be called torture by some, but it was less that than the idea of it.
Geiger did have some rules though. He didn’t question anybody that had had ever had a heart incident, he didn’t question anybody over seventy-two, and he didn’t question kids. If the client wanted his information ASAP, that was a case-by-case judgment on Geiger’s part.
So when the new client wanted an expensive painting recovered as soon as possible, Geiger agrees to see the Jones. Things get crossed up when the client delivers a twelve year old boy, saying the father had bolted and the kid probably knew where he was. He even offered an extra five thousand cash. When Geiger refused, the client promised to take the boy to a competitor, one who had no rules and didn’t mind, even relished, a little blood.
Geiger did the only thing he could under the circumstances.
He clocked the client and ran with the boy.
That’s when Harry and he found out just how dangerous thsi client was. It soon became apparent that whatever information he wanted, it had nothing to do with a painting. They needed to find out exactly what was going on here to protect the boy and themselves.
If that was even possible.
A truly original protagonist with a lot of problems of his own. And those bits of his past were starting to emerge even as he runs around trying to solve the current mess.
I liked this one. Mark Allen Smith looks to have a bright future in the thriller business. THE INQUISITOR can be ordered here.
Back with another of those movies just not quite bad enough to fall into the so bad they’re good category. In watching this film, I was amazed at just how bad it actually was, when I’d hoped for one of those goofy fifties films I so love. Other than the one brief moment of a fight, all the characters did was stand around talking. It’s also the second film in a row I’ve highlighted that opened with a montage of mushroom clouds(A Boy and His Dog is vastly superior of course) and somber words about the atomic war.
Ninety-two percent of the human race was destroyed and the robots were developed to help the human race survive. No mention of how lucky it was that, in the surviving eight percent, were enough brilliant scientists to come up with the robots, enough materials to build this gleaming new world, hell, enough artisans to build the world. Even with all that, the birthrate drops every year. The human race is dying.
It’s sufficient time past that unfortunate war that, by now, robots were being designed and built by other robots. They had their own temples, really charging stations, that humans weren’t allowed to enter and the Father-Mother, the massive computer that handles all that and directs all robots.
Cheap sets, a lot of drapes hanging around, generic jump suits for the humanoids, old rebel caps. It was filmed in color unlike a lot of this type film at the time. They did manage to land two “names,” though in the twilight of their careers. Hal Mohr had two Oscars to his credit. He was the cinematographer. During the thirties and forties, Jack Pierce was a well known makeup artist, creating the iconic designs for Frankenstein and the Bride of Frankenstein.
There’s a radical group of racist humans, The Order of Flesh and Blood, opposed to the human looking robots. The others don’t bother them. They maintain the humanoids are out to destroy the human race and refer to them as “clickers.” They are lead by The Cragis(Don Megowan, one of two actors I recognized in this mess), Captain Kenneth Cragis. He learns early in the picture that his sister has formed a rapport(like a marriage) with a “clicker,” an embarrassment to him.
A renegade scientist, Doctor Raven, an old man working with the humanoids has developed a process to take the memories of a human recently dead and transfer them to a robot body, called a thalamic transfer, dubbing them R-96s. The law maintained the robot’s intelligence level couldn’t be above an R-46. He begs them to kill him when the Cragis and his band were breaking into his home. He then reappears later in the film as a younger version, his memories planted in an android body.
I thought I knew where this one was headed and was partially correct, though they did have one surprising revelation for me.
And though his name is never mentioned, they do make a nod to Asimov’s Laws of Robotics. When a robot kills the human, Doctor Raven, violation of rule one is mentioned.
In the course of just a couple of hours, laid out in the film, the Cragis meets his sister’s best friend when he goes to try to talk her out of the rapport, leaves with her, falls in love after one kiss, and talks of marriage. All in the middle of the night.
The second actor I mentioned was Dudley Manlove(what a last name; did that say something), one of the Humanoids and one of the stars of my favorite bad movie, PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE. And with that Ed Wood reference, I’ll mention that one reviewer on IMDb classified Wood as a more esthetically pleasing director than this mess’s Wesley Barry. How’s that for a recommendation?
A lot of bad acting, cheap sets, and a fairly boring script add up to a rotten movie. At least for me. Some reviewers actually liked this, calling it a “minor” classic. Really minor I think.
1: Mute Witness – Robert L. Pike: I had this one once, or rather the tie-in edition for the movie, BULLITT. Where it went, Lord only knows. Pike is, of course, better known as Robert L. Fish.
2: Bladerunner 4: Eye and Talon – K. W. Jeter: way back in the years, Jeter wrote three sequels to the Movie Bladerunner. They combnined elements of both the movie and the Dick inspiration, DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP? This fourth volume was never published in the States. Now I have it, which means I’ll need to reread the whole series to get caught up.
3: The Shop(ARC) – J. Carson Black: Ex-Navy SEAL Cyril Landry works for the shop. He kills people that need killing. He begins to wonder why these people need killing and starts to investigate. Across the country, Detective Jolie Burke is investigating the murder of the town’s police chief. Their paths inevitably cross and the pair team up.
4: Desert Drop(ARC) – Rex Kusler: Alice James and her partner, James Snow, of the James and James Agency, get involved in Alice’s past. A long lost sister phones out of the blue, her father left when Alice was just six months old, forty years before, and wants to meet. Along the way, she disappears. And then the phone call comes. A $150,000 in hundreds or she dies. No cops. Since their mutual father is rich, no problem. The money is dropped and Alice and Jim race to pick her up at the drop off point, Alice talking to her on the cell the whole time. Only when they get to the spot, they find a body wrapped in plastic and the M.E. later says it’s been dead a week. Who was the woman Alice talked to on the phone? And who was the partner they only heard through a phone distortion device? As they get into it, ugly things in Alice’s family start to emerge.
5: The Destroyer: Savage Song(ebook): – Warren Murphy: our two favorite heroes are back from a three year absence in this new novella. Remo and Chiun are sent to keep the country’s latest singing star alive, Madame Googoo, and Chiun is in love. The biting humor, and satire, are again in full flower on this, skewering real life figures in today’s pop culture, the author’s only criteria being the pompous and stupid. A welcome return(back up a post for the review).
As long as Remo Williams had known Chiun, the Master of Sinanju, he had had his obsessions. Barbra Streisand, soap operas, the newswoman Cheeta Ching, Judge Jenny. He’d soon move on to the next one.
So when the two assassins are ordered to protect America’s latest singing sensation, the blond-haired Madame Googoo(yes, who you think it is), Remo was not surprised, well not to much, to learn she was his latest in a long line. There’s even a couple of other “older” popular singers raked delightfully over.
Everyone’s favorite heroes return in this new novella and, as usual, author Warren Murphy spares no one his wit, skewering everyone, whether it be politicians, entertainers, or writers, the only qualification for his rapier being “pompous,” stupid, or both.
It was a disappointment for me a few years back when the series ended, done in by a long run of uninspired novels, before Warren Murphy and James Mullaney took back the reins to save it. A bit to late though. Here’s hoping this new series of ebooks catches on and we get many years of more tales. They’ve been favorites of mine from the beginning.
It can be ordered HERE. If you’ve never tried a Destroyer tale before, here would be a good place to start. Murphy and his sons, through their Ballybunnion Books, have taken over the ebook publishing of the older novels, promising reformatting to relieve some problems, and I guarantee if you try this one, like the old Lays Potato commercial that says “Bet you can’t eat just one,” you try one Destroyer, you will want more.
THE NAME OF THE GAME IS DEATH falls into the same class as Richard Stark’s Parker. It was published the same year as THE HUNTER(not sure which was first), but didn’t become a series character until years later. In the 1962 edition, his name was Chet Arnold and Earl Drake was a cover name. When he returns in ONE ENDLESS HOUR, he’s known strictly as Earl Drake.
Drake has been described as a “callous and completely amoral character” by Anthony Boucher.
The bank robbery went south fast. Earl and his partner Bunny had to kill a guard that got brave. When they exited the bank, they found the kid they’d recruited as a driver had panicked when the shooting started and got out of the car to open the passenger doors for them. He ends up getting shot by another guard, Earl takes one in the shoulder as he kills that guard and dives in the back seat while Bunny takes the wheel.
Once they escape, plans have to change. Earl needs to get the wound taken care of and sends Bunny on ahead to Florida after taking a few bundles of twenties. He’s to send a thousand a week to general delivery to Earl Drake(he has ID in that name).
Then Earl goes to ground and gets the wound taken care of by a doctor he makes sure is alone, then kills him, making it look like a robbery.
Two weeks later, when he’s recovered a bit, he picks up two envelopes with the cash. The next week a third arrives. The fourth week, no envelope, just a telegram advising a bit of trouble, “Will call when it’s safe.”
Earl knew then that something was wrong. The telegram wasn’t sent by Bunny. You see, Bunny was a mute, from an accident that took out his vocal cords.
He takes off for Florida to find Bunny and the money and whoever was responsible for the likely death of Bunny.
The early part of the novel sketches some early events that show the kind of man Earl Drake would become. A fat kid at a pet show enticed his bulldog to kill ten year old Earl’s pet kitten. Earl beat the crap out of him every day, pursuing him until he caught him. He couldn’t be stopped.
His father beat him. It didn’t work. The father of the fat kid bought him another kitten. It didn’t work. He returned it to the store and politely told the owner to return the money to the father. He continued to beat the kid.
The family eventually moved out of town.
His only soft spot is for animals.
This is the only book in the series I own and have read. Research shows after a few books, the character began to soften, eventually becoming a spy.
You know that old saying: write about what you know. Richard Prosch does that. In a manner of speaking. He’s a Nebraskan and the stories in MEADOWS FORD BLUES are set in the small Nebraska town of the title.
It’s one of those small towns where everyone knows everyone else and often knows too much of your business. I know because I grew up in a town very much along those lines.
The characters here are mostly ordinary folks, all sorts of jobs(well, excluding the hit man returning home for a job), everything from cop to waitress to farmer.
The time frame for these stories cover a lot of years and mostly in the cold, wet winters. As Bill Crider says in his brief introduction, bad things happen in Meadows Ford, in the past, the present, sometimes overlapping. You’re never quite sure what’s happening, a good thing, keeping one engaged in the smoothly written prose.
A couple of these stories I was familiar with, though Prosch makes note in the acknowledgments of some changes. It’s been awhile since reading them the first time so that was fine. While remebering them a bit, the endings still came as a surprise.
A fine collection. As has become my habit, I read them in the early morning hours over coffee, a nice combination, satisfying all my senses.
Another connection to my growing up years was one character prominent in a story, a 1968 Camaro. One of that same model played a prominent part in my life for a few years just after high school and brought a smile to my face when I got to it.
The stories in order:
JOLLY’S BOY
THE DEAD HAND
SEASON OF ICE
FOOL ME TWICE
MEADOWS FORD BLUES
PRETENDING
SEA OF RED
CHESTER DOKES
Richard Prosch presides over his blog, MERIDIAN BRIDGE, a spot I drop into on a regular basis. Links to MEADOWS FORD BLUES and his previous ebook, a collection of western stories, DEVIL'S NEST are here.