The Weight of Worlds – Greg Cox

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Greg Cox, Science Fiction, Star Trek

Pocket has such a wide ranging Trek program that I don’t buy a lot of the books anymore. Being an original Trekkie/Trekker, I limit myself these days to original series novels. With the new film this year, the publishing program is lousy with TOS novels. Greg Cox is one of my favorites(his Khan trilogy is a particular favorite) and THE WEIGHT OF WORLDS does that for which the TV series was always good: disguising commentary on real world events as science fiction.

The Ilatl open a dimensional rift and invade the Federation. They come through at The Ephrata Institute, a think tank on a remote planet, with their Crusade to bring their Truth before it’s too late. Whether we want it or not, their religious fervor demands they convert us by whatever means necessary in order to save us by their version of the end of time. It matters not whether we want it. They will force it on us by fair means or foul. And their foul means is a gravity weapon that can increase one’s attraction many fold or get rid of it all together.

When the Enterprise responds to an emergency SOS, Kirk and Spock find the inhabitants, scientists, artists, thinkers, in the midst of a new fever. The two officers are taken through the rift to Ialat to face the God-King. There they learn there is an underground aghast at what the priest have done to the sciences in their zeal to “save” the many races in this new dimension. They work from that side as the Enterprise is under attack in our dimension to be taken so that the Truth can be spread throughout. They never developed space travel, believing they were the only race. Finding a new dimension populated by uncounted races has warped the priesthood’s psyche and sent them on their impossible mission.

Author Greg Cox makes use of Uhura and Sulu more so than the series ever did. Set during the original five year mission in those last two years never shown on TV(reference is made to shows from all three years as events in the past.

A good one. Available HERE.

Two Rode Together(1961)

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Jimmy Stewart, John Ford, Richard Widmark, Shirley Jones

John Ford is probably the most celebrated western film director of all time. He won four Oscars as best director, though he didn’t receive one for my favorite of his westerns, THE SEARCHERS starring John Wayne.

 

Never one to repeat himself, he was hesitant to direct this film which covered the same themes as The Searchers: returning white captives from Indian control. It’s said he did it for the money($225,000 and ten percent of the profits). His relationship with Stewart was less than cordial. The actor insisted on wearing a beloved cowboy hat that he’d worn in seven previous westerns and Ford hated the hat. Stewart won that battle, but lost the next time they worked together(the second of three pictures) when he wore no hat at all in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.

Stewart plays small town Marshal Guthrie McCabe,  a man who’s quite mercenary and has his own little empire going. A hundred a month and ten percent of the business profits of the woman,  Belle Aragon(Annelle Hayes), who owns most of the town and has designs on McCabe.

Richard Widmark is First Lt. Jim Gary, the cavalryman who’s a friend to McCabe. He’s assigned to bring McCabe to the fort by Major Frazer(John McIntire) for a proposition.

White families who’s children had been take by the Comanche over the years were demanding the army get the back. The army couldn’t go in without breaking the tenuous treaty, so the idea was to send McCabe who’d had dealings with Chief Quanah Parker(Henry Brandon) before. Mccabe wasn’t happy. He was to get Lieutenant’s pay for the job, eighty dollars a month.

He goes about it from a different angle, interviewing the white families and extracting what he could get out of them, which doesn’t set well with the Major or his friend Gary. McCabe doesn’t care. Shirley Jones is  Marty Purcell there with her father. Her little brother had been taken when he was five, twelve years before.

In one moment of drunken rage, McCabe tell them exactly what to expect, especially Marty’s brother. He would be a full out Comanche now, English forgotten, name forgotten, family forgotten.

Jim Gary gets ordered to accompany McCabe on his mission. And since soldiers were forbidden, he was suddenly a deserter and should he not return, the record would stay that way.

The two men make it to the village and find whites there. Two refuse to leave: a sixteen year old taken when she was nine and with two children and an older woman who didn’t want her pious husband and two sons to know she was still alive.

Two were returned with them: a young boy about seventeen, Running Wolf(David Kent) who fit two descriptions of boys taken and had to be tied to his horse and an Hispanic woman, Elena de la Madnaga(Linda Cristal), the wife of Stone Calf(Woody Strode).

Neither captive does well in the white world. The boy is shunned by one family, costing McCabe a thousand dollars, and the other couple, the McCandlesses, William(Cliff Lyons) and Mary(Jeanette Nolan), take him. The father knows he’s not their boy, but Mary had slid her mental faculties since that long ago abduction and he wanted to give her some peace. All she could se was her little boy, not the Comanche warrior before her, and it didn’t end well.

 

The boy was really Marty’s brother, a fact revealed at the bad end when he heard a music box he’d loved as a five year old and Marty had kept as a remembrance ever since.

Elena was looked at as something horrible by the “good” white women at the fort and McCabe gets his chance to tell the lot of them off at a dance one night when they ask embarrassing questions and force their husbands not to dance with her.  You know how it ends. can’t have a film without  a little romance.

TWO RODE TOGETHER was based on the novel Comanche Captives by Will Cook.

Liked this one a lot.

A number of other actors, familiar faces, appeared in this one. Andy Devine plays a sargeant. Harry Carey, Jr. and Ken Curtis(pre Festus) paly a pair of drunken brothers whose mother refused to leave the Comanche camp and preferred to be thought dead.

 

 

 

The Devil On Chardonnay – Ed Baldwin

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Boyd Chailland, Ed Baldwin

Air Force captain Boyd Chailland gets pulled back into a mission. His previous success, THE OTHER PILOT, marked him as a man who got things done. Tough things.

An outbreak of Ebola in an isolated African village brings WHO officials. It’s obvious that someone has beat them there. Someone in a hazmat suit that took samples of the virus.

Next a transmission is picked up from an island in the Seychelles, a frantic cry for help, that they’d screwed up.

Boyd is in charge of the team that goes in to check it out. Labs were burning, a dead body sitting on the beach, one shot twice, and a number of dead monkeys. A notebook with the body on the beach spelled it out. The two men had been hired to grab a sample, develop it into something more, along with a vaccine. Now it was out there in someone’s hands for what purpose no one knew.

The trail leads Boyd to a banker in Charleston, South Carolina, an old world French banker(whose family had been in the business for hundreds of years), and a sailing boat called The Chardonnay owned by the French family’s granddaughter.

Sailing boats are a bit outside Boyd’s wheel house, being a fighter pilot by trade, but he takes to it as he goes undercover.

Author Ed Baldwin has delivered another fine thriller full of action and colorful characters from all over the world. I learned a few things, details about stuff I only had a cursory knowledge of, and he kept me rolling over the pages in this second Boyd Chailland thriller.

I’m ready for the next one. The Devil on Chardonnay can be had at a fine price.

Overlooked Movies: Arizona(1940)

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Jean Arthur, Overlooked Movies, Warren William, western, William Holden

Jean Arthur is Phoebe Titus, an ambitious pioneer woman with long range plans and William Holden is Peter Muncie, a drifter who happens into Tucson in the Arizona territory where the pair meet. Phoebe is making a living making and selling pies. But her long range plan is to own the biggest cattle ranch in the territory. Muncie is taken with her and begins a courtship, plunking a banjo and serenading her one night. She becomes quite taken with him as well.

Because there’s a freight operator, Lazarus Ward(Peter Hall) gouging folks, Phoebe teams up with general store owner, Solomon Warner(Paul Harvey), to start a new freight company that will offer fair prices. Phoebe wants Muncie to head up the four wagon train for them, but he has other ideas. He has a yen to see California and has joined a wagon train headed west. he promises when the wanderlust is done he will be back.

She’s not happy.

In the next year that passes, the Union troops pull out to head East to join in the war with the south, the Confederacy briefly takes control before pulling out, and a man named Jefferson Carteret(Warren William) shows. Carteret is sort of an early version of a carpetbagger, out to make easy money on the backs of people that work for theirs. He ends up partnering with Lazarus Ward.

A troop of Union soldiers pull in from California and Muncie is a sergeant with them. His hitch is almost up and he’s now ready to settle down. Phoebe is still interested, but is taken with Carteret as well.

Phoebe has already started building her ranch and increasing her freight business. She lands a contract with the army delivering to them, temporarily derailed by Carteret and Ward’s efforts to paint her as a Confederate sympathizer, then she plans to send him to Nebraska to buy five hundred head of cattle with fifteen thousand she’d saved. Just before he’s to leave, three outlaw break into her home, blow the safe, and take her money.

Stuck now, she’s visited the next day by Carteret with an offer to loan her the money, with suitable interest of course, and her ranch and freight business as collateral. Not suspicious that he would suddenly have the money to get her out of the spot all of a sudden, a man never seen doing anything but hanging out at Ward’s bar., she finally realizes what the truth must be.

Ward and Carteret are determined that Muncie will never get back with the cattle. We get an Indian raid and a stampede in the midst of it, then the pair are married and Muncie goes looking for Carteret as soon as the wedding is over. He asks Solomon to open his store where Phoebe can wait while he takes care of business. Carteret has murdered everybody that can prove anything and is ready for the showdown.

I liked the way they handled it. At the general store, Phoebe, in her wedding dress, is ordering supplies for the ranch in the middle of gunfire we here, flinching with every shot. I suppose it was because she was the big star of the film. Holden was a mere stripling of twenty-two at the time of the film. Arthur was forty.

Pretty good film.

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