Movies and books

IMPACT (1949) stars Brian Donlevy as a tycoon who survives a murder scheme by his wife and her lover, then realizes that staying dead will result in the law taking revenge on his wife for him. When grease monkey and new love interest Ella Raines convinces him to step forward and tell the truth, however, his wife twists the facts to “prove” Donlevy murdered her lover out of jealousy. A good drama, with Charles Coburn as a sympathetic detective, Anna May Wong as a key witness and Philip Ahn as a scholar; this would double-bill well with Fritz Lang’s Fury, which also has a suppose dmurder victim let his killers twist slowly in the wind. “No, he did not show any signs of amnesia.”
PURLIE VICTORIOUS (1963) is the filmed version of Ossie Davis’ stage comedy (the musical version made some years later was the first Broadway show I ever saw), starring Davis as a wannabe activist trying to liberate his backwater community (“When they had the big bus boycott, he boycotted mules.”) by convincing local power broker Sorrell Booke (who now comes across as Boss Hogg’s nastier brother) imposter Ruby Dee is entitled to a a $500 inheritance. Like most filmed stage plays, this doesn’t make a perfect transition to the screen, and, of course, it’s no longer the contemporary satire it once was. Still, Davis’ performance is terrific (I don’t remember seeing him do comedy before) and the supporting cast includes Godfrey Cambridge as a faithful servant (Booke: “When the senator said the oldfashioned Uncle Tom was no more, I told him about you.”) and Alan Alda is Booke’s left-wing son. “Someone besides the Supreme Court has to take a stand for the Negro race!”

EYE OF THE ALBATROSS: Visions of Hope and Survival by Carl Sarafina come off as if Sarafina were using the nominal subject—albatrosses and their struggle to survive in a world of increasing oceanic pollution and drfit lines— as the excuse for a travelogue, as he visits not the breeding grounds of the outer Hawaiian islands but Wake Island and Alaska; even the albatross’ life cycle comes across as a travelogue of sorts. The result was, I skipped a lot of this, but the stuff that was really about albatrosses was quite fascinating (did you know an albatross can live more than 50 years and travel more than three million miles?)—which is better than I usually find “pretext for travelogue” nonfiction (I’ve read quite a few I fit in that category).
SHARPE’S REVENGE: Richard Sharpe and the Peace of 1814 shows the vagaries of memory—my memories of Sharpe’s marriage in the later Sharpe’s Devil were completely off, so I was quite surprised how the romances in this one turned out. That aside, this is a very good entry as the French spy Ducos settles his account with Sharpe by framing him for theft and murder, only to find, of course, that Sharpe isn’t so easily settled. Also interesting on the history—I had no idea Napoleon folded so quickly, which makes me wonder what the world would have made of the war if we hadn’t had the climactic battle of Waterloo when Boney returned.
THE CASE OF CHARLES DEXTER WARD has Lovecraft at his most antiquarian with the constant emphasis on Providence history, architecture and sightseeing—regardless of which, it’s darn good reading as the eponymous protagonist dabbles in things that we were not meant to know, unleashes an ancestral horror and undergoes a mysterious attack of insanity (“He seemed fully intelligent but oddly unaware of simple facts about the modern world.”). While this shows a lot of HPL’s standard elements (such as the curse of having evil ancestors) it’s much closer to straight horror than the Cthulhu Mythos would be; a fine job, in any case.
KING RAT was China Mieville’s first novel, the protagonist of which discovers after his father’s murder that his bloodline links him to the title ratlord, who plans to manipulate him into settling the king’s old score with the Pied Piper (“You’re rat and you’re human—he can’t make both dance at once.”). Good (the Piper is an impressively demonic entity) but far below Mieville’s later work—he doesn’t capture London anywhere near as vividly as his fantasy city New Crobuzon, though that may be a generational thing; there’s a lot about clubs, DJing and sampling in here that just didn’t interest me.