Sometimes when I feel like a nostalgic trip down memory lane, I’ll pull out one of my favorite children’s books: Trouble After School, written by Jerrold Beim in 1957. A true classic, it’s the tale of an intelligent but slightly shy junior high school student named Lee, who feeling neglected by his parents, falls in with the wrong crowd, in particular a good-looking young fella named Terry, in a dark leather jacket, born on the wrong side of the tracks. Lee, who up until he’d met this intriguing juvenile delinquent, was a bit of a Mama’s Boy, now begins to pull pranks in school on other students, and to cut classes so he can hang out with Terry and his cohorts in petty crime. Pretty soon, Lee starts to dress like Terry, getting his parents to buy him a shiny leather jacket just like the one Terry has. It’s a case of hero worship — or more precisely, anti-hero worship. Terry represents exotic, hidden dangers and lawlessness. He’s the tough kid we are scared of, yet fascinated by.

Lee rationalizes Terry’s bad reputation because Terry’s mother had to stoop to cleaning houses to make ends meet. It’s a quintessential 50s juvie tale of yin and yang. Black and white. Good and evil. But it’s not always clear where the lines are drawn. The point of the book seems to be that there’s the potential for good in all of us, just as there is for bad. Lee is drawn to the rugged youth who winks at him all the time because he is lonely, and Terry sees something special in Lee despite his not being part of the gang. Even a hard-bitten old schoolmarm can see that there’s something else going on between the lines. Lee, who is called a “sissy” by Terry and his gang, yearns to be more of a man. So when he is transformed, due to Terry’s masculine influence, it is a rite of passage — a Cinderella tale as old as time, as when Terry first lays eyes on Lee in his new black leather jacket:

“Well, what do you know!’ Terry’s eyes gleamed approvingly. ‘You got one!’ Terry’s hand rubbed the black leather. ‘Boy, do you look great!

It would be hard not to read more into these subtly erotic lines. While pretty tame by today’s standards, this was hot stuff back when I read it in the early 60s. I know I am not alone in thinking this. When I’ve offered the book for sale on eBay I’ve received notes from buyers basically telling me the same thing. That this book meant more to them growing up than any other they’d read in school. We can all relate to the dilemma faced by young Lee. To be the goody two-shoes or the sexy cool kid, and the yearning some of us feel to taste forbidden fruit.

What’s remarkable about this book is that it seems to encapsulate so many of the trends of 50s youth culture. It’s not unlike Rebel Without A Cause in that Lee is similar to Plato, the Sal Mineo character, who falls madly in love with James Dean. But while that film was almost lurid in its depiction of juvenile delinquents and gangs (who risk their lives for hot rods and drag-racing), Trouble After School is as gentle as a cream puff. The story develops slowly with deft strokes, until one is completely swept up by young Lee’s struggles as he gropes his way to manhood. There are moments at the end, when Lee begins to assert himself and challenges Terry to reconsider the direction his life is taking, that are surprisingly complex for a teen novel.

I’d always been intrigued by the kind of man who could write such a sensitive book. The more I delved into Jerrold Beim’s career, however, the less I seemed to know. He was an enigma, a cipher. I’d mention his name to various book collectors or children’s book specialists and no one knew a thing about him, other than the long list of books he’d been credited with writing. Some of these books are now considered classics of children’s literature.

One or two were important milestones in the fields of fighting racism and freedom of the press. His book The Swimming Hole, with a cover illustration that showed a young white boy diving into a pool of water with his best friend, a black boy, caused a scandal at the time it was released. It was boycotted by the Ku Klux Klan. So was Two is a Team, which dealt head-on with issues of integration. Flood Waters dealt with the problems of building communities next to overflowing rivers; something that was not being discussed much in those days. Jerrold Beim was one of the first to confront these gnarly topics and he did it with a unique mixture of honesty and common sense.

To my jaundiced eye, however, there was always something slightly off-kilter and mysterious just under the surface about Jerrold Beim’s books. The titles struck a compelling chord. Beach Boy; Time For Gym; A Vote For Dick; Rocky’s Road; The Big Whistle; Jay’s Big Job; Blue Jeans; The Boy on Lincoln’s Lap; Too Many Sisters; Shoeshine Boy; The Swimming Hole. While there’s nothing at all off-color about the Ole Swimmin’ Hole — in fact it’s the epitome of a kind of lost innocence, as American as apple pie and Huck Finn — it’s also the place where boys would often swim together in their birthday suits, without any girls. It’s a private place of youthful adventure, the locus of adolescent curiosity and devil-may-care tomfoolery.

A good example of what I mean is the curious little book Jerrold Beim wrote called Kid Brother which at face-value seems innocent enough. But when you open its pages you find an illustration of a tyke with his hands tied behind his back, a slightly perverse grin on his very young face.

Is one reading too much into it in hindsight fifty years later? Could there have been anything untoward about such an image when the book was published in 1952? Probably not. I’m always reading too much into things. But that’s what makes it fun, and so bizarre at times. And there can be no denying that for me and others with similar sensibilities, Beim’s books touched a nerve. He often wrote about someone on the outside looking in, eager to be part of a community, but forever feeling like the “other.” On a small scale, his books were odysseys of the soul. I couldn’t help but wonder if they were a reflection of Beim’s own experience.

While Jerrold Beim was a prolific writer, churning out dozens of popular children’s books, some with his wife Lorraine Levy Beim, he also wrote short stories for the romantic pulps including Exciting Love and Gay Love. He also wrote under a pseudonym Neils Anderson, crafting even younger juvenile tales of lessons learned and problems solved. Jerrold Beim was indefatigable, but also a complete unknown quantity. He seemed to have completely stopped writing in 1957. Several of his books were republished over the years, but nothing new came from his pen. I wondered if like Eddie from Eddie and the Cruisers, he had “pulled a Rimbaud,” vanishing into the ether after years of success and fame. What on earth happened to Jerrold Beim?

Google searches and inquiries online provided scant answers. But recently, thanks to other online resources, I’ve managed to uncover a few shards of biographical information. First, Jerrold Beim was actually born Gerald Beim. His father Aaron Beim was an Austrian immigrant who moved to Newark, New Jersey around the turn of the century. Gerald was born in 1911. After high school, he got a job in a Newark bank. He was unable to afford college. He moved to a department store where he learned about marketing and sales. He soon relocated to Syracuse, New York and found work as an advertising manager in a large department store. It was in Syracuse that he met and married Lorraine Levy, his first wife. They were wed in 1935. After spending a summer on Nantucket writing, he decided to give up other lines of work. He sold his first short story to Cosmopolitan Magazine. By this time he had adopted the pen name Jerrold Beim, for reasons that are unclear. He and his wife moved to Mexico, then returned to New York City where they adopted twin sons, Seth and Andy. They soon had a daughter of their own.

While Lorraine wrote several books on her own (including Hurry Back, seen above) she worked best with Jerrold. In 1939 they wrote The Burro With No Name, based on experiences they’d had in Mexico, as well as Sasha and the Samovar (1944), an innovative look at Russian culture for young kids. Lorraine wrote for a radio quiz show, coming up with the questions asked to contestants. The name of the quiz show was not mentioned in a piece I read about her, but I assume it was Information, Please which ran for many years on radio and later switched to television.

But a deadly blow struck the family in 1952 when during a return visit to Mexico, a car Lorraine was driving became involved in a fatal accident. She and the Beims’ young daughter were killed. Jerrold Beim was devastated. He’d lost not only his adored wife, but his business partner. In many ways, she was the brains behind the publishing phenomenon they’d become. Jerrold eventually remarried and moved to Westport, Connecticut. His 1955 book Country School was based on one of the elementary schools in that town. For reasons that are not apparent, Jerrold Beim separated from his second wife, and raised his two sons on his own. His 1954 book, With Dad Alone, is a heartfelt tribute to raising his boys as a single father.

In a bizarre twist of fate, tragedy struck the Beim family a second time when a car Jerrold Beim was driving hit a patch of ice in March 1957 and skidded off the road in Westport, crashing down an embankment. The car flipped over, pinning Beim and his son Seth in the car. They were pronounced dead on arrival at the local hospital. Only young Andrew, who was home at the time, survived. Ironically, one of the last works Jerrold Beim had published was a cautionary kid’s tale called Thin Ice.

This horrible accident explains the uncanny silence since 1957, the year he wrote Trouble After School. While Beim’s books remained in print for several more years, his name gradually disappeared from recommended reading lists. It wasn’t until the revival of interest in African-American Studies in the 90s that people began to recall the books he’d written that were so far ahead of their time. And with the dawn of eBay and the internet, Beim’s books began to generate interest among collectors and former fans who recalled the impact his unusual little books had had on them.

I’ve managed to compile nearly a complete collection of his works. Some of the charm of them has to do with their illustrations. Louis Darling and Don Sibley are two of the stand-outs, as was Tracy Sugarman, who lived near the Beims in Syracuse. I think my most favorite of his books are Kid Brother, because it reminds me of my own sibling rivalry at home growing up, and Meet Sandy Smith, about an enterprising lad who makes his way in the jungles of urban life in New York City. And then there’s the hard-to-find collectors item: The First Book of Boys’ Cooking (1957) with “neato” pictures by Dick Dodge.

But of course the book I will always cherish is Trouble After School. It remains a kind of tabula rasa that captured the essence of my own junior high school experience, although in my case, there were several Terrys that came along to spice things up a bit and to remind me that life was not all about getting good grades and earning brownie points as teacher’s pet. There’s a lot to be said for veering a bit off the path now and then, if only to awaken aspects of one’s soul that have long lain dormant.

It seems hard to believe that F. Scott Fitzgerald, above, died 69 years ago today, on Saturday, December 21, 1940. The Winter Solstice. Fitzgerald’s obituary appeared in the New York Times on December 23, 1940, reporting that he’d had a heart attack at his Hollywood home two days before (it was actually his girlfriend, Sheilah Graham’s place). You can read it here.

Today such a delay in reporting the demise of a famous writer would be unthinkable. And I wonder if there had been an earlier edition, not included in the Times archives. It’s odd to think that Fitzgerald, who was only 44 when he died, never witnessed America’s entry into World War Two, or the dropping of the atom bomb. He was saved from the embarrassment of the McCarthy inquisition. But most of all, he mercifully did not have to witness the tragic death of his wife, Zelda, in a fire at the Highland Mental Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina eight years later. And one wonders what effect his unexpected death, so close to Christmas, must have had on his daughter Scottie.

Reading the obit now, I’m surprised by the dreary, somber tone of it. But one has to remember that in 1940 F. Scott Fitzgerald was practically forgotten. His legend was at its nadir, or to be more precise, non-existent. His best-selling first novel, This Side of Paradise, was just a fond memory, ignored by an entire generation that had followed its debut. The Great Gatsby, although critically well-received, had been a disappointment in terms of sales. The Times ended its memorial by quoting a line about a broken plate from Fitzgerald’s then-recent autobiographical essay from Esquire, entitled The Crack-Up. He was a shattered idol. A has-been. Fitzgerald famously remarked that there are no second acts in American lives. But he proved himself wrong, at least in the after-life. For it was not long after his death that people began to reconsider Fitzgerald’s legacy and his oeuvre. His unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon, would be published a year later, edited by his old Princeton pal Edmund Wilson, and in time a series of biographies reappraising his art and life would create an industry unto itself. In 1949, Hollywood paid him the honor of turning The Great Gatsby into a big, splashy film noir, with Alan Ladd in the title role.

Like Abe Lincoln, or Oscar Wilde, or Jack the Ripper, Fitzgerald continues to inspire endlessly groaning shelves of books dedicated to his memory and influence. In a way, academia has abducted Fitzgerald as their own, “the great American novelist,” and turned him into a factory through which countless scholars earn their tenure. Some of these books are hardly worth the paper they are printed on. Others are so obtuse and convoluted that reading the telephone book straight through would be more entertaining. Robert Sklar’s F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Last Laocoon (Oxford, 1967) is a case in point. Here’s a sample: “A process of becoming, a principle of growth in intellect and art, creates the form for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s development from The Great Gatsby to Tender is the Night; and the process of becoming, in its most cosmic sense, was on Fitzgerald’s mind when he returned east from Hollywood early in 1927 to take up the task once more of writing fiction.” One wonders what the “process of becoming” is in its least “cosmic sense.” And how does Sklar know what was on Fitzgerald’s imaginative plate in 1927?

But every now and then a work stands out. I’ve read about a dozen tomes about the Fitzgeralds over the past year, while conducting research into the Roaring 20s for a project I’m working on about my grandfather’s ex-wife, a famous Ziegfeld Follies showgirl named Jessie Reed (she died just before Fitzgerald in September of 1940). The Fitzgeralds epitomized the age of the flapper, of which Jessie Reed was a prominent symbol, the gold-digging showgirl — a type that fascinated F. Scott Fitzgerald. He even posed as one during his Princeton schooldays, above. Both Fitzgeralds adored the Ziegfeld Follies and often attended. Fitzgerald’s neighbor in Great Neck, Ring Lardner, worked on the 1923 show in which Jessie Reed starred. I combed books on Zelda alone (Nancy Milford’s biography, Zelda, although flawed, is still the best), books on the two of them (Exiles From Paradise, by Sara Mayfield; The Romantic Egoists), the latest books on the Fitzgerald Era (The Flapper by Joshua Zeitz), and books by people who simply knew the Fitzgeralds.

One of the best of these is After the Good Gay Times by Tony Buttitta, a bookseller from Asheville who befriended Fitzgerald during one of his tortured stays there in 1935. It involves a rather poignant affair between Fitzgerald and a “mulatto” prostitute. Buttitta, a press agent who does not seem to have written many other books, captures Fitzgerald’s voice in a way that I have not found in other books, and while one wonders just how he could remember so much intimate dialogue (he claims to have kept detailed journals), the book seems closer to the truth than many of the turgid, door-stop bios that have come along since. Another enjoyable exercise was Scott Donaldson’s 1999 book Hemingway Vs. Fitzgerald: The Rise and Fall of a Literary Friendship, a very revealing examination of their friendship, rivalry, homoerotic stand-off, and competing mythologies.

Now with the success of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (based on a rather flimsy little short story of his), Fitzgerald is very much back in vogue. I hear a bio-pic is in the works.

One of the most interesting books about F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald is not a biography at all but a novel — Parties: Scenes of Contemporary New York Life by Carl Van Vechten, above. Published in August 1930, Parties just might be Van Vechten’s finest novel. It does not have the insouciance of Nigger Heaven, nor the literary legerdemain of Peter Whiffle, His Life and Works, both works that I feel deserve a much wider audience and much more critical acclaim. But what Parties lacks in irony or ingenuity, it more than makes up for in wit and color. Set during Prohibition, when “cocktails” were all the rage (Van Vechten’s own were legendary), Parties is based in part on Van Vechten’s volatile friendship with Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. It’s a love letter to them but also a warning. And ultimately an unnerving premonition.

Hamish Wilding (the protagonist who appears to be modeled in part on Van Vechten himself) opens the novel by riding in a taxi with David Westlake (the Fitzgerald character). Both are unspeakably drunk. Westlake is telling Wilding that he’s just killed a man. Tellingly, there is blood “on his lips,” not on his hands. In the world of Parties, killing someone does not always mean murder or even manslaughter, but drowning someone in liquor. A moment later, Rilda Westlake (the Zelda character) calls to complain of having committed suicide (since she’s gotten terribly drunk.) Murder and mayhem are nothing compared to the assaults on their own sanity these characters indulge in. Van Vechten coyly captures the manic mood of the Jazz Age, and the high-flying narcissism (and alcoholism) at its core. (F. Scott Fitzgerald, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, below.)

But Parties is primarily a love story, first between David and Rilda Westlake, for whom fidelity is a curse as well as a bond (one they both take too seriously and too lightly). Everyone is jumping in and out of everyone else’s beds. But at its core, almost seeping in through the lines, is Hamish Wilding’s own erotic obsession with David Westlake: “Hamish invariably felt lost in the absence of David,” Van Vechten writes. At every turn, they are falling into each other’s arms: “David fell asleep, his head resting on Hamish’s shoulder.” Then moments later, “Hamish turned to discover David snoring at his elbow. David asleep this very early morning was not too pretty a sight. The blood had caked on his lip, his face and hands were dirty, his black, curly hair matted and untidy. Unaccountably here he was lying in Hamish’s bed, quite naked…”

David spends an awful amount of time in the nude on the pages of Parties. Van Vechten must have enjoyed picturing his pal Fitzgerald in such poses. Rilda, by contrast, is barely flesh and bones. She seems more a sylph-like spirit who demands attention and exudes ennui. In fact, Parties is a study in boredom and loneliness. This is one of those novels where everyone is “yawning petulantly.” It’s David who keeps the plot moving and who is the focus of Van Vechten’s penetrating eye.

Surrounding this star-crossed couple is a galaxy of wayward bohemians: a German Grafin who takes up with drug-addicts and goes slumming in Harlem; an eccentric hostess, Rosalie Keith, who throws the worst dinners in town; a devilish divorcée Mrs. Alonzo W. Syreno who seduces David on a transatlantic cruise; and Donald Bliss, the handsomest bootlegger in the Big Apple. In the midst of this parade of cock-eyed creatures, Van Vechten inserts an anthem to the sights and smells of Jazz Age Manhattan, a kind of “rhapsody in blue” in purple prose. It’s some of his best writing, pungent and eerily prescient.

Near the end of the novel, the gaiety takes a sobering turn. During a séance at Mrs. Syreno’s lavish apartment, a Negro clairvoyant “dressed in a blue serge tailored suit, with a blue felt hat and a beige blouse,” hisses at her hostess: “Shallow! Vain and silly. Mean little personality. No head. No heart. Nothing. Empty.” She then focuses her gaze on Hamish Wilding. “You do not know yourself,” she says to the Van Vechten character. “You don’t know where you are, or who you are, or what you are or what you want. You are not unhappy, you are miserable. You do not understand.” She seems to know more about Wilding’s feelings for David than he does, and sounds suspiciously, despite the Harlem garb, like Gertrude Stein, below, whose oracular pronouncements Van Vechten was the first to champion.

Then the seeress takes on the Westlakes. She looks at Rilda, who is studying her anxiously. The soothsayer cries out at her in a strong voice: “Fire and flame, blood. Spurs and instruments of torture. Whips and thorns. Burning at the stake is nothing to what I see. The Crucifixion is nothing to what I see. Torture for you. Torture for him. Fire and flames and knives and gutters running with blood…”  Considering that Zelda Fitzgerald would die in a horrible fire at the hospital in which she was confined in 1948, Van Vechten’s insight into the future here is uncanny. And almost too painful to read.

An acclaimed new novel, by Gilles Leroy, Alabama Song, written in French, recently won the 2007 Prix Goncourt. It delves into the courtship of Zelda by a very young F. Scott Fitzgerald at the time he was writing This Side of Paradise. I have not yet read it. And am wondering why it has not yet been released in an English edition.

The Fitzgeralds inspired another roman à clef, The Last Flapper by George Zuckerman (1969). The tag line on the mass-market paperback sets the tone: “Her madness inspired the Jazz Age… Her love destroyed a great writer.” (Most recent books, many of them feminist in nature, take the other side, arguing, often shrilly, that Fitzgerald ruined Zelda’s life and career.) Nearly forgotten today, this novel was a bestseller when it first appeared. The Necco-wafer remake of The Great Gatsby, starring the hopelessly miscast Robert Redford and Mia Farrow, had not yet graced the screen. Nor had the fad for all things relating to the 20s yet taken root. No, No Nanette’s revival on Broadway with Ruby Keeler was two years off.

Zuckerman, who wrote numerous Hollywood screenplays, capably evokes the madcap escapades of his “wild, crazy, drunken” couple, Rannah and Davis O’Donnell. But not without beating us over the head with it. 90% dialogue, the book is fast-paced, blistering, bitchy, almost chaotic. The writing is less Zeldaesque than Judith Krantz meets D. H. Lawrence. Here’s young Rannah masturbating to the image of her beloved Davis: “He hurt my mouth with kisses and crushed my breasts. I held him by his prick until I could hold him no longer. Then he became the forest beast with clawed feet and he ravished me with savage thrusts. The locomotive’s whistle screamed my ecstasy.”

Luckily for us, Fitzgerald himself never wrote prose like that. He may have written some pretty lame short stories just for the money — a fact he was the first to admit — but his novels have not lost any of their fire or polish or punch. There are passages in The Great Gatsby (1949 screen cap, above) that are as fresh today as anything ever written since. Richard Yates called it “a miracle of talent…a triumph of technique.” F. Scott Fitzgerald may have epitomized the spirit of his time, but his works will always remain timeless.

Last year at this time I posted a list of my favorite ten Christmas movies of all time. You can read it by clicking here. This year I thought I might make a list of the Ten Worst Christmas movies. But there are far too many for such a short list, including about a dozen recent holiday pictures starring such lackluster TV personalities as Tim Allen. Instead this year I want to showcase a picture I think just might qualify as the worst Christmas movie ever: MGM’s 1947 film noir fiasco, Lady in the Lake, based on the novel by Raymond Chandler.

Raymond Chandler? What could a legendary, ground-breaking novel by the American master of hardboiled mysteries have to do with Christmas? That’s a good question. The answer is, nothing at all. And yet MGM in marketing the film based on it first packaged it as a holiday flick, as if it were some nice family picture. How did this happen? Well, blame it on Robert Montgomery, the actor who directed it. He chose to restyle the story giving it a nonsensical Christmas twist, below.

Chandler’s novel is set in the summer when Californians are basking in the sun-drenched lakes up in the mountains. The Lady in the Lake, which came after The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely, is one of Chandler’s best novels. In it Chandler delved deeper than ever into the dark depths of grief, despair and corruption. It evokes Dashiell Hammett’s earlier thriller Red Harvest except it relies more on stylish “set-piece” murders and oozes a ghoulish Grand Guignol glamour all its own. Chandler’s rendering of the discovery of the eponymous “Lady in the Lake”’s corpse is one of the most gruesome depictions in American literature. It sent shivers up and down my spine when I first read it.

But the 1947 MGM flick turned the seasons upside down and set the story at holiday time in Los Angeles. The opening credits are played over a sickly sweet carol. The initial scenes transpire on Christmas Eve with garish holiday ornaments and badly-decorated Christmas trees thrown in to give the whole movie a cheesy Yuletide festive mood. Throughout the film choirs can be heard singing on the soundtrack, giving the movie a clumsy, sardonic edge.

No doubt the producers thought it a clever marketing tool but the end result is that the entire picture feels like a bad joke. And I’m not even talking yet about the ultimate gimmick of the film which was Montgomery’s directorial choice to film the entire thing from a first-person perspective. We never see the actor’s face, except occasionally when it shows up in a mirror. This “break-through” camera technique also appeared in Humphrey Bogart’s Dark Passage, later that year, to greater effect. In Montgomery’s picture, it’s interesting for about five minutes, but then becomes about as enjoyable for the viewer as wearing those silly paper glasses at a 3-D picture.

It’s a device that simply doesn’t work in telling a mystery story since there’s no suspense and we don’t care about any of the characters because we only see them through the narrator’s eyes. It’s flat, two-dimensional and ultimately boxes-in the story in cheap sets designed to accommodate the film technique. On top of this, Audrey Totter, who is always a hoot, gives one of the most over-the-top performances I’ve ever seen. She seems to be mocking Montgomery with her stylized camp line readings and facial mugging. (Audrey Totter, below, courtesy of Life.)

Worst of all, the centerpiece of the novel, the discovery of the bloated water-sogged cadaver in the lake, is glossed over in expository dialogue. We never even see Marlowe up at the lake. Small wonder considering it would have been frozen solid at Christmastime. That just underscores how appalling the script changes were. There are a few good scenes. I can’t deny that. The car accident, in which Marlowe crawls his way across the screen, has a certain ingenuity to it. And the way in which the brutally murdered body of the gigolo is revealed slumped in the shower is pretty innovative and daring for its day. But the fact that this gigolo is played by Chris Lavery as an effete Southern dandy, with a phony accent, rather than as the muscle-bound Italian Stallion in the novel further proves how wrong-headed and bizarrely off-base this adaptation is. Why all these changes? They took a brilliant novel that exposed the underbelly of corruption in California society and turned it into a schlocky whodunnit with all the subtlety of a Dick Tracy comic strip.

I’m not surprised that Raymond Chandler, above, a notorious curmudgeon who was hired to write the screenplay based on his novel, was disgusted by it and took his name off the picture. Very little of his original screenplay seems to have been used. The dialogue is beyond second rate. And the wisecracks and forced similes, which were Chandler’s calling card, are several grades below his usual amusing level.

I’ve always found Robert Montgomery to be a creepy actor. He often comes across as stiff and mannered, as if he had a crick in his neck, smelly oily hair and stale cigarette breath. He seems just barely able to hold back his contempt for his fellow actors. He was notoriously right wing in real life and it’s a miracle his daughter Elizabeth Montgomery turned out as “bewitching” as she did. He was a very lazy actor. There are some films where he seems to be sleep-walking his way through the part (sometimes, I heard, because he hated the script or the director). Well, he can’t use that excuse here. He is simply awful as Philip Marlowe. (Adding insult to injury, the character’s name is erroneously spelled “Phillip Marlowe” on the window of his office: see below).

Of all the bad Philip Marlowes on screen, and there have been several (Powers Booth anyone?) Montgomery’s is the absolute nadir. He makes Elliott Gould, who mumbled his way through Altman’s quirky yet unwisely revisionist The Long Goodbye, look like a genius in comparison. Ironically Chandler was a big fan of Montgomery’s work in Night Must Fall, a grim serial killer film set in England with Rosalind Russell in an against-type, non-humorous part. It’s a nifty little suspense thriller but Montgomery is the weakest link in it.

If Santa asked me what I wanted for Christmas, I’d have to say a lavish remake of The Lady in the Lake starring George Clooney as Philip Marlowe. (Keep in mind that Chandler himself said he always envisioned Cary Grant in the role). Charlize Theron perhaps as Adrienne Fromsett. Mark Ruffalo as Lt. DeGarmot. And Nicole Kidman as Mildred Haveland, the cold-blooded femme fatale who knows more than she lets on about “the Lady in the Lake”.