Who among us, crime movie fans, wouldn’t want to see Agnes Moorehead and her sidekick traveling around and solving murders? Who wouldn’t want more of Denzel Washington as Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins?
Or follow-ups to “Gone Baby Gone” with more faithful versions of author Dennis Lehane’s complex characters, Boston private investigators Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro?
That’s the frustrating, never-gonna-happen discussion I’m hoping to draw you into today. Namely, the crime movie series that cried out to exist but do not. Hollywood made four dozen Charlie Chan movies.” Six “Thin Man” movies. Six “Perry Mason” movies in the 1930s alone.
And we get one lousy Hoke Moseley movie?
Star power in two movie eras
I’ll start with the oldest and in some ways most obscure of the crime movies that should have kicked off a series.
I’ve bugged my editors here at CrimeReads about a chance to write about “The Bat,” in great part because I found it so unexpectedly hit a sweet spot for a movie series that should have happened. Released in 1959, it was the fourth adaptation of “The Circular Staircase” by Mary Roberts Rinehart, who also turned the story into a play.
It’s practically an early movie version of “Murder, She Wrote.” Moorehead plays Cornelia Van Gorder, an author of mystery novels, who rents The Oaks, a rambling house in a remote town. She sets up residence with her assistant, Lizzie Allen (Lenita Lane), and like every good writer finds something, anything, else to do besides working on her latest book. In this case, Cornelia sets out to solve a mystery in the town: A terrifying killer nicknamed “The Bat” is stalking and killing people, ripping out their throats with his claws.
The movie has secret passageways and hidden rooms and startling attacks – the Bat at one point lets bats loose and Lizzie gets bitten – and plenty of “Old Dark House” and horror movie conventions. There’s Vincent Price, of course, acting all mysterious. And there’s a cool, jazzy score by Louis Forbes.
Yet the best part is Moorehead’s steely presence. She’s the heart of the movie and is great in the role. And the movie ends with one of my favorite tropes as Cornelia and Lizzie seem primed for another mystery.
Alas, it was not to be.
Only 13 years passed between “The Bat” and “The Hot Rock,” both films based on literary works by well-known authors. But there’s little common ground between the black-and-white, haunted house sensibilities of “The Bat” and the gritty modern-day feel of “The Hot Rock.”
But boy does “The Hot Rock” also have the star power. Robert Redford, in 1972 in some ways hitting the pinnacle of his early career, stars as John Dortmunder, recently released from prison and approached by his brother-in-law, Andy (played with unsettled charm by George Segal) about stealing an emerald from the Brooklyn Museum.
But this job is different: They’re to steal the gem for Amusa (the wonderful Moses Gunn), who correctly points out that the gem was stolen from his own people in Africa. So with Paul Sand and Ron Liebman joining the gang, they pull off the theft.
Badly.
Zero Mostel, Graham Jarvis and Charlotte Rae are part of the movie’s cast, if that gives any indication that “The Hot Rock” is a crime film with comedic overtones. And that’s no surprise, because the movie was scripted by the legendary William Goldman (“Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”) and based on author Donald E. Westlake’s series of 14 Dortmunder novels. The material was right there, begging to be picked up and used for at least a couple of other Redford vehicles. If only.
Gesundheit
Morton Freedgood was an experienced author who often wrote under the pen name John Godey. As Godey, his work included “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three,” a 1973 thriller that has taken on a life of its own, no doubt in part because of the 1974 film version starring another outstanding cast that includes Walter Matthau, Robert Shaw, Martin Balsam and Hector Elizondo.
“Pelham,” the movie version, is one of those great 1970s New York City thrillers that, much to the chagrin of the city’s fathers, captured the gritty feel of the metropolis. Director Joseph Sargent made the grimy, everyday settings – especially NYC subway offices and trains – feel dramatic and dangerous.
The plot is no doubt familiar after 50 years as a widely beloved film. Masked men enter subway cars and take hostages. They demand a million dollars be delivered in an hour or they will start killing passengers. Robert Shaw is in charge of the crew and he’s an obvious professional. Martin Balsam is a more whimsical crook whose sneezing is key to the movie’s resolution.
So many great actors worked in the movies of the 1970s it sounds ridiculous to say that Walter Matthau might be at the top of the heap with this role, but his simultaneously hangdog and bulldog performance as transit police Lt. Zachary Garber is almost without peer. Garber is profane and unpleasant and smart-alecky and funny and tenacious and he would be worth seeing in this movie even if the rest of the film were not great.
And how amazing would it have been to see Matthau return, a la “Die Hard’s” John McClane, in movie after movie?
Fred Ward: The Adventures Almost Began
The 1980s were an odd time. We wore pants made out of parachutes – that is what parachute pants were made of, right? – and all the hair products used contributed to 17 percent of the current disastrous state of climate change. (Yes, 17 percent. Look it up.)
And in the 1980s, Hollywood tried to make one of our best character actors into the stars of thrillers. Twice.
I cannot blame Fred Ward for either “Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins” or “Miami Blues.” I can’t blame Fred Ward for anything, really, considering the somewhat dumb intensity he brought to “The Right Stuff” and “Tremors.”
But would I have lined up for sequels to “Remo Williams” and “Miami Blues?” You bet.
“Remo Williams,” released in 1985, was based on the “Destroyer” series of paperback thrillers that were good reads but quickly lined the shelves of used bookstores everywhere. Williams was the hero of more 150 potboiler novels about a Newark cop whose death is faked so he can become a government agent. He is trained by Chiun, an aging martial arts master.
The movie made two big mistakes of hubris. One was casting Joel Grey, a Caucasian actor, as Chiun. The other was tempting the fates by including the phrase “The Adventure Begins” in its very title. Nothing like daring moviegoers and critics to say, “I don’t think so.”
In a story timed to the 1985 release of “Remo Williams,” the Los Angeles Times noted that the 42-year-old Ward was “the most interesting action star to emerge from the movies this year.”
Moviegoers didn’t find “Remo” interesting enough to buy tickets, however, and the adventure did not continue.
Five years later, Ward had what was potentially a more interesting role, playing police investigator Hoke Moseley in “Miami Blues,” released in 1990. Moseley is a character featured by Charles Willeford in four crime novels in the 1980s. Ward plays Moseley as old and beat up but dogged. He’s determined to bring crazy killer Junior (Alec Baldwin) to justice, but Junior is younger, in better shape and oddly cruel: After assaulting Moseley, he steals the aging cop’s dentures.
It’s too much to expect that audiences would embrace such an offbeat story and protagonist. But Hoke Moseley would be an ideal character to carry a streaming TV series now.
More devils, more blue dresses
I don’t think there’s any movie series that seems like as much of a missed opportunity for a film series as the adventures of Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins. The 1995 film, directed by the great Carl Franklin (“One False Move,” “Out of Time”) had the kind of cast that could put butts in seats: Washington of course, but also Jennifer Beals and especially Don Cheadle.
Washington played Easy Rawlins with the controlled intensity we’ve seen from him before but never get tired of. As a Black man in 1948 Los Angeles, he accidentally becomes an investigator and runs up against the hallmarks of a good PI story: threatening cops, a duplicitous dame, a world of trouble to navigate and secrets to expose.
Almost everybody’s favorite element of the movie is Cheadle as Mouse, Easy’s longtime friend who is as accomplished at meting out violence as all the great crime novel sidekicks, from Hawk to Clete Purcell or Joe Pike. Mouse is not as thoughtful and deliberate as Hawk and Pike of course. He’s more like Purcell from the Dave Robicheaux books by James Lee Burke. If possible, Mouse is more violent and more scary. He is the wingman Easy needs … if he can just keep him from shooting everyone.
The second “Equalizer” movie aside, Washington is not prone to making movies that set up sequels. He was probably even less inclined to churn out a series of movies going on 30 years earlier in his career.
But if he had … I would have dearly loved to see Washington and Cheadle in adaptations of some of Mosley’s 15 Easy Rawlins books.
More Patrick and Angie. Please
Lastly, anyone who’s read much of what I’ve written here on CrimeReads knows I have a mild obsession about author Dennis Lehane’s Boston P.I. book series about private investigators Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro. Well, mild perhaps isn’t the word. I discovered Lehane’s series back in the 1990s and ever since I’ve recommended them to anyone who will listen. Seriously, “A Drink Before the War,” “Darkness, Take My Hand,” “Sacred,” “Gone, Baby, Gone” and “Prayers for Rain” get my vote for the most remarkable series of crime novels ever. Lehane’s follow-up from 2010, “Moonlight Mile,” is good but not the equal of the first five books, but almost nothing is.
When I heard Ben Affleck was making a movie of “Gone Baby Gone” – sometimes the title commas are included, sometimes they are not – I was thrilled. I’d always pictured Affleck as Patrick and still do. I’d always pictures actress Toni Kalem as Angie. I have nothing against Casey Affleck and Michelle Monaghan, who were cast as Patrick and Angie in Ben Affleck’s film, released in 2007.
My biggest issue with the film is that it reduced Angie to a supporting character. Yes, it is definitely the case that the books are from Patrick’s point of view. But the movie relegated Angie to a secondary role.
But I still wish they’d made a series of Patrick and Angie movies and I would have been fine with Casey Affleck and Michelle Monaghan starring. What I wouldn’t give to see Patrick and Angie on screen, going head-on against corrupt politicians in “A Drink Before the War” or a manipulating mad man in “Prayers for Rain.” Not to mention a fully-fleshed-out portrayal of their psycho pal Bubba Rogowski.
As is the case with most of these exercises in wishful thinking, there’s still time for proper movie adaptations, or TV or streaming versions. In many cases, re-casting would be necessary. In others re-casting would be welcome.
But who else is down for Denzel Washington as a senior citizen Easy Rawlins? I know I’d watch.
