Black Gate

There I was, writing along on a A (Black) Gat in the Hand post on a movie version of Jim Thompson’s After Dark, My Sweet, for this week’s column. I also re-read the book, and I was up to my elbows in bleakness and inevitable disaster. Because, you know: Jim Thompson. Then, an article came across my FB feed, and yet again – “Ooh. Bright, shiny object!”

Tony Hillerman is one of my all-time favorite writers. The Fly on the Wall is in my Top Ten Novels list. His tales of Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee, members of the Navajo Tribal Police, earned him the honorific of Mystery Writers Association of America Grand Master. He wrote eighteen Leaphorn and Chee books between 1970 and 2006, before passing in 2008. I wrote a three-part series here at Black Gate about Hillerman and his duo. If you’ve not read the series, you’re missing out on one of the best police procedurals out there.

The Navajo Tribal Police books have been adapted to the screen four times, with some success, but also a feeling of ‘What if?’’ The product deserved more attention. And now, they’re about to get it!

Robert Redford was responsible for three movies which aired on PBS. He was also executive producer The Dark Wind, which went direct-to-DVD in America. He’s involved again, along with Graham Roland, George R.R. Martin, and AMC. And this looks promising. It appears that Dark Winds will be a multi-season effort if it is successful. Season one will be six-episodes, based on the third novel, Listening Woman.

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You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.” – Phillip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep

(Gat — Prohibition Era term for a gun. Shortened version of Gatling Gun)

I decided to kick off this year’s A (Black) Gat in the Hand run with a look at a stellar issue of Black Mask. And the March 1, 1932 one was a knockout. Note the catch phrase on the cover was “Detective, Western, Stories of Action.” Just two issues prior, in January, the cover illustration featured a cowboy wielding a pair of six shooters. Even with non-Western stories from Erle Stanley Gardner, Raoul Whitfield, and Stewart Stirling. The shift towards hardboiled had been made, but the Mask was still appealing to other pulp genres. Competitor Dime Detective had only started up the month before.

But man, the March issue delivered hardboiled like a tommy gun, backed up with a pineapple through the window. No, not the kind of pineapple they use in Psych (great show!). I will argue that it was one of the best Black Masks ever. Considering that there is no Hammett story, it’s a bold claim.

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One-Armed Swordsman (Hong King, 1967)

Though visionary director King Hu established the elements of the modern wuxia, or Chinese historical swordplay film, it was fellow Hong Kong director Chang Cheh who really took the ball and ran with it. He followed hard on Hu’s Come Drink with Me and Dragon Inn with his own wuxia action movies and quickly became one of Asia’s top-grossing directors, with a style that drew on Hu but also Japan’s Akira Kurosawa, America’s Sam Peckinpah, and Italy’s Sergio Leone. After about a dozen swordplay films, he turned to unarmed martial arts, helping to define the burgeoning kung fu film genre. All told, he made over ninety films for Hong Kong’s Shaw Brothers studio and was a major influence on later directors such as John Woo, Robert Rodriguez, and Zhang Yimou. Let’s take a look at his first three wuxia films, each of which builds on the stylistic advances of the previous.

One-Armed Swordsman

Rating: ****
Origin: Hong Kong, 1967
Director: Chang Cheh
Source: 88 Films Blu-ray

King Hu reinvented the modern wuxia film in 1966 with Come Drink with Me, then left the Shaw Brothers film factory for Taiwan. But the Shaw Brothers had another top-notch action director in Chang Cheh who began his own series of historical martial arts movies with One-Armed Swordsman, which broke new ground with its dynamic and colorful swordplay and was an even bigger hit in Asia than Come Drink with Me.

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The Fall of the Roman Empire (USA, 1964)

Big-studio Hollywood historical epics had a good run, arguably starting with the films of Cecil B. DeMille in the Twenties, flourishing throughout the Fifties and peaking around 1960 with grand features like Ben-Hur (1959) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962). But in the early Sixties the theater-going public seems to have lost their taste for big epics, right about the time those same epics began letting them down, either becoming unbearably ridiculous in their depictions of other cultures or bogged down in turgid self-importance. Actors like Charlton Heston, who’d made a career out of swaggering through ancient and medieval studio sets with a sword on his hip, gave historical epics one last go and then shrugged and reinvented themselves as Seventies action stars.

The Fall of the Roman Empire

Rating: **
Origin: USA, 1964
Director: Anthony Mann
Source: Genius Products DVD

A grand historical epic, from the producer and director who’d made El Cid (1961), starring Sophia Loren, Christopher Plummer, Alec Guinness, and James Mason, with cinematography by the great Robert Krasker and action scenes directed by Yakima Canutt, in the same late Roman setting as Ridley Scott’s Gladiator (2000). What could go wrong?

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