The Dusty Bookcase

16 March 2014

The Erotic Mordecai Richler

Son of a Smaller Hero
Mordecai Richler
New York: Paperback Library, 1968

Related posts:

The Pornographic Edna Jaques

The Erotic Brian Moore

The Homoerotic A.E. van Vogt

Harlequin: The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name

Suggestive Harlequins: A Romantic Threesome

Selling ~~From a Sea~~ She'll Only Drag You Down

14 March 2014

Selling Intent to Kill… Tueurs à gages, really

A few final words about Jack Cardiff's Intent to Kill. Blame 20th Century Fox; its poster for the French release fairly demands comment.

Let's begin with the title, which is nearly identical to Tueur à gages, that given the French release of This Gun for Hire. I won't blame the powers at the time; Tueurs à gages is not only appropriate, but a more exciting title than Intention de tuer.

But what to make of "La lutte sans merci de 'SCOTLAND YARD' contra les TUEURES A GAGES"?

Scotland Yard doesn't figure in the film. Why would it? Not one scene takes place off the Island of Montreal. "La lutte sans merci" is limited to one man, Det Sgt O'Brien of the RCMP, played by Montrealer Paul Carpenter. He doesn't even appear until the second half of the film, when he's assigned to guard the intended target. O'Brien spends most of his time making smalltalk at the nurses' station.

"Do the Mounties always get their man, like they say?"
"Well, they got me."

This is not to say that O'Brien isn't effective. Screenwriter, Jimmy Sangster, may have been British, but he has the Mountie apprehend the hired killer in typically Canadian fashion.

"I'm Detective O'Brien, sir… RCMP."

O'Brien does indeed get his man, in the shoulder, just as the other assassins move in.

Not one of them carries a rifle, as they do in the French poster. They don't wear hats, either, which leads me to wonder if it was O'Brien's suit that had the French recast him as a member of Scotland Yard.

"You don't look like a Mountie."
"I left my horse outside."

That's it. You'll hear no more from me about Intent to Kill. Promise.

Tueurs à gages, on the other hand…

10 March 2014

Brian Moore's Forgotten First Feature: Montreal and Scattered Thoughts on a Film I've Now Seen

It sure been a hard, hard winter, my feet been draggin' 'cross the ground. And so I hibernate, sleepily absorbing what I can of the world outside. Last weekend it was Intent to Kill, the screen adaptation of Brian Moore's disowned thriller of the same title, sent my way by Noah Stewart of Noah's Archives.

In January, I wrote a bit about the film, the first of six features based on Brian Moore novels, suggesting that screenwriter Jimmy Sangster had been quite faithful to the original. Back then I had nothing to go on but the trailer.

Turns out I was right, though the opening sequence is incongruous. We begin with an ambulance racing along what was then Dorchester Boulevard. Destination: Dorval Airport.

Once there it picks up Juan Menda (Herbert Lom), president of an unnamed South American country, who hopes that Montreal brain surgeons will save his life. The shots that follow – which have nothing whatsoever to do with the book – capture a good deal of a city that is more than half a century gone.

At one point the camera swings past one of my old student apartments, but I won't trouble you with things sentimental. Look! There on the left! Those are McGill's Roddick Gates!

As in Jésus de Montréal – The Greatest Canadian Story Ever Told – the ambulance takes a false route. In this film it ends up at the Montreal General Hospital, which serves as a stand in for the fictitious Canadian Neurological Institute.

Three men intend to kill in Intent to Kill, but they aren't the only villains. In book and film selfish wives betray spouses. Margaret McLaurin (Catherine Boyle), pressures her doctor husband Robert (Richard Todd) to abandon his practice for a position in London working for one of her many paramours.

"I can't stand it here. I loath it. I hate Canada!"

Femme fatale Carla Menda (Lisa Gastoni), the president's beautiful wife, sees the desperate attempt to save her husband as an opportunity to sleep with an old flame who is now ambassador to Canada. Though they never meet, Carla and Margaret have something more than their adulterous ways in common:

"I hate this country. It's so cold."

The cheating wives can't stand the winter and hate Montreal. Margaret refers to the city as a "Siberian wasteland", as her haunted husband Robert McLaurin walks the streets trying to clear his thoughts.

The man even walks to work.

Here young Dr Robert passes the Windsor, the very hotel at which the assassins are staying.

The first of all the grand Canadian hotels, the Windsor closed its doors when I was a teenager. I have my doubts that its bar was as depicted in the film.

That's a young Jackie Collins at right in one of her few screen roles.

Most of the interiors were shot in London, and the exteriors in Montreal. I'm left wondering about this scene in which Finch (Warren Stevens), one of the hired killers, stops to make a phone call.

It's beautifully filmed – as you'd expect in a movie directed by Jack Cardiff – but is something not a bit off? Montreal's Strand was on St. Catherine Street, which seems awfully narrow here. I don't remember the theatre at all, probably because by the time I was old enough to go to the movies it had been transformed into a porn cinema called Pigalle. The building was torn down in 1973 to make way for the Centre Capitol.

I like to think that Intent to Kill showed there – sometime between Rodan and Use the Back Door.

A warning: Jack Cardiff's Intent to Kill is not to be confused with the straight-to-video 1992 Traci Lords vehicle of the same name.

Related posts:

Murderers Move in on Montreal… Again

Brian Moore's Forgotten First Feature:
Speculation and Scattered Thoughts on a Film I've Never Seen
Selling Intent to Kill… Tueurs à gages, really

07 March 2014

A Dozen Duddys

Who's the dishevelled kid with the map? Why it's Duddel, Max Kravitz's boy. You know him – he's Simcha's eynikl. At least that's how British illustrator Bernard Blatch imagined him on the jacket of the 1959 André Deutsch first edition of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. Did Coca-Cola and 7 Up pay for product placement?

After Anne Shirley, I don't think there's a character in Canadian literature that has been drawn, painted, photographed and filmed quite so often as the lead in Richler's breakthrough work. And why not? Duddy is so large that Richler himself couldn't confine him to one novel.

Sixty-five years later, the Blatch cover remains the best, though I have a real soft spot for the 1964 British Penguin that belonged to my father.

Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964

The Brits do Duddy best, but their fellow Europeans fail. Just look at De Leejaren van Duddy Kravitz, the 2000 Dutch translation, which casts the boychick as a Weimar Germany cabaret performer.

Amsterdam: Muntinga, 2000

The German, Die Lehrjahre des Duddy Kravitz, places our hero somewhere in Europe, far from Montreal and the Laurentians.

Frankfurt: S. Fischer Verlag, 2007

We don't actually see Duddy on the cover of L'apprendistato di Duddy Kravitz, the Italian translation, but it would appear he's manning the cash at an American liquor store.