TARGET FOR KILLING (Der Geheimnis der gelben Moenche, 1966)

Manfred R. Köhler's "The Secret of the Golden Monks" plays out like a hybrid movie, part Bond-inspired Eurospy action, part Edgar Wallace inspired plotting as befits the film's largely Germanic origin. While there's an unavoidable acknowledgment of the Cold War, with emphasis on both sides' dabbling in the paranormal, it's a crime story at heart. Stewart Granger, who seems to be having a good time howevermuch he despised the genre stuff he made in the Sixties, is James Vine, introduced meeting cute with a pretty girl, Sandra Perkins (Karin Dor), whom he recruits into helping him land a jetliner after the crew (including pilot Klaus Kinski) ditch it, their plan being to crash the plane with no survivors.

Kinski & Co. work for "the Giant" (Kurt Jurgens), whose inner circle includes a vaguely Asiatic hypnotist and the sadistic female operative, Tiger (Scilla Gabel). While they've collaborated with the Eastern bloc, their motives now are purely mercenary. The Giant has been hired by Sandra's uncle (Adolfo "Largo" Celi) to kill her for reasons that become clear only when Uncle himself is captured and put to the torture. It turns out that he wanted Sandra dead before she could come into her $70,000,000 inheritance, which would fall to him as her guardian. It occurs to the Giant that with a hypnotist at hand, he could get Sandra under his power and have control over her fortune rather than take whatever pittance Uncle had offered him. An interesting aspect of this otherwise unambitious story is how nearly all the villains are looking to get out of the game. The Kinski character is a particularly reluctant villain and ends up sacrificing his life to save someone else, while the Giant himself longs to retire on the proceeds of this last big score. There's something almost noirish about that, amid all the Eurospy trappings from the golden monks of the German title occupying an old cathedral to the inevitable storming of the villain's headquarters and the slaughter of his singularly incompetent troops -- the sort who'll descend an exterior staircase without cover to engage with the troop climbing upward, rather than rest on their high ground.

When it really counts, James Vine saves the day with timely explosives and by turning a mirror on a hypnotist. None of it can be taken very seriously and no one on screen really does, possibly excepting future Bond-villain Jurgens, whose low-key, businesslike villainy can be taken as a refreshing departure from genre cliche or the work of a bored performer. Granger is never less than a pro and seems to do a fair amount of his own fighting, and his apparent willingness to get into the spirit of the proceedings helps make Target For Killing a mostly pleasant diversion for an hour and a half or thereabouts.

Pre-Code Parade: HOT PEPPER (1933)

Marine Corps Captain Jim Flagg (aka "the Admiral" or "His Flagship") and Sergeant Harry Quirt were created by Maxwell Anderson and Laurence Stallings for the 1924 play What Price Glory? The 1926 film version, directed by Raoul Walsh and starring Victor McLaglen as Flagg and Edmund Lowe as Quirt, was a blockbuster hit, in part because of the implicit invitation to lip-read dialogue far more risque than you could read on the intertitles. By the time Walsh made a sequel, The Cock-Eyed World, in 1929, talkies had arrived and there was no more silent subtext; you had to take the characters at face value. This, too, was a hit, and Walsh, McLaglen and Lowe carried on with 1931's Women of All Nations, which saw the boys fightin' round the world. Fox Film went to the well one more time, without Walsh, in 1933, finally rising to the challenge of what to do with Flagg and Quirt as civilians. John G. Blystone directed, and not badly, while a team including Dudley Nichols came up with the obvious solution to the big question. Flagg and Quirt would become gangsters.

There's an oddity in the billing, with female lead Lupe Velez, playing the title character, wedged in between top billed Lowe and third billed McLaglen -- though as you'll see in our movie ad, in some places Velez was the main attraction. Of course, women always did get between Quirt and Flagg but the hierarchy seems odd since Victor McLaglen is sort of remembered today while Edmund Lowe almost certainly isn't. Anyway, the boys are finally going to try their luck in civilian life. Quirt gets a head start by cheating Flagg out of a bankroll with loaded dice, but to be fair Flagg forced the dice on him, thinking that simpleton Olsen (the ever-enigmatic El Brendel) would carry fair dice but not knowing that Quirt had gifted Olsen the loaded pair. Three years later, despite this setback, Flagg has become a successful, limo-riding bootlegger with a chain of speakeasies and floozies on each arm, while Quirt is a shabby schmoe who nearly gets run-over by his old buddy's Olsen-driven vehicle. It develops, however, that Quirt is a master shakedown artist, taking advantage of the gullibility of gangland by flashing novelty-store badges, first at Quirt and then at crooked card player Trigger (Boothe Howard), in anticipation of big bribes.

Flagg soon has a bigger problem than Quirt. A stowaway on one of his rum-running ships can get him in trouble with the immigration authorities, who seem more threatening at least in this gangster's mind than all the enforcers of Prohibition. The stowaway is Pepper (Velez) in full spitfire mode, which is pretty much what you need to deal with such master mashers as Flagg and Quirt. Once Quirt gets wind of this situation it's just one more thing he has on Flagg, but he's willing to take a chance on Pepper in more ways than one. Stealing her away from Flagg, and tricking his erstwhile buddy into a short stay in jail, Quirt gets into the niteclub business with Pepper as his star attraction, even though the place has a French theme. Pepper puts on quite a show, pretty much giving Quirt a lap dance right in front of an irate Flagg, who's returned expected elite treatment but is getting set up for another rip-off. Alas, Quirt can't flaunt his triumph for long; he's tipped off by a war-buddy turned cop that there's going to be a clean sweep of all the speakeasies the next day, but before he can think of selling out he has to deal once and for all with both Flagg and Trigger, who still wants the ten grand Quirt took from him earlier in the picture. At first Flagg is willing to let Trigger give Quirt the works, but some Marine instinct kicks in and he can't allow his comrade in arms to be treated that way. This sets up a climactic brawl in which Flagg, Quirt, Pepper and Olsen lay waste to a small army of gangsters with more chair shots than an ECW wrestling show.That leaves only the matter of who gets Pepper, but when the boys decide to settle it peacefully with a coin flip, Pepper decides she doesn't want either of them. "You can't have this head or this tail," she says of herself before storming off. With Repeal imminent, as the film accurately prophecies, there's nothing left for Flagg and Quirt but to revert to warrior ways. They hire out to the Chinese army, ending the film on a slightly embarrassing note with the burlesque assertion that "Ah, Nuts" and "Ah, Phooey" are legitimate drill commands in Chinese.

In its amoral exuberance Hot Pepper is a textbook pre-Code picture, with Velez putting it over the top not only with her lap dance but also with an earlier scene where she seduces Flagg with a protracted striptease on a long, winding staircase, stepping out of frame to let the next bit of scanties come sliding down the bannister. As Flagg and Quirt McLaglen and Lowe are pretty much the definitive ball-busting frenemies, as purely comic a team as the Marx Bros. or Wheeler and Woolsey yet clearly capable of murdering all the competition in that category with their bare hands. You rarely ever see movie clowns so convincingly thuggish apart maybe from the Fast and Furious films. With those two and Velez dominating the action El Brendel is kept to an endurable minimum and the film is more enjoyable as a result. Strange, then, that while McLaglen and Lowe teamed up for several more films this marked the end of Flagg and Quirt (on screen at least; the actors recreated the characters on radio) until they were rebooted by John Ford in 1952. Maybe, as the end of Hot Pepper suggests, there was nothing more to be done with the characters but throw them back into the military milieu; and maybe Fox lost the rights to the characters. Whatever the studio execs were thinking, it probably was for the best because with Hot Pepper as a representative vehicle it's hard to imagine what would have become of Flagg and Quirt in the era of Code Enforcement, except to guess that it would not have been good.

KNIFE OF ICE (Il coltello di ghiaccio, 1972)

For four years, and over four films, erstwhile Hollywood "Baby Doll" Carroll Baker was the muse of Italian director Umberto Lenzi. Knife of Ice was the last of their collaborations, and apparently an effort by the producers to get in, quite late, on the Edgar Allan Poe racket. The title is allegedly rooted in a Poe line describing fear as a "knife of ice," but if you google that phrase and the name Poe, all you get are references to the Lenzi film. Whatever. It looks like they took footage from Francesco Rosi's Moment of Truth to lend a touch of morbid spectacle to the opening credits as Baker's character, Martha, watches a bullfight. Lenzi spares Baker a trip to the dubbing studio this time by making her character a hysterical mute, traumatized since childhood by the death of her parents. I suppose it's because she's not deaf that she's never learned sign language, communicating instead mostly by pantomime, sometimes by writing notes, and on the telephone by rapping on the mouthpiece in a manner presumably intelligible to her intimates. She receives a gift in the form of a recording she made as a little girl, a morbid recitation about a trial and execution. In short order, people around her start dying.

Il coltello is more a whodunit than a giallo, as there are no setpiece kills. Rather, bodies are found after the fact and clues collected mostly pointing toward some local Satanic cult. When an irreverent hippie is caught skulking around he looks all too guilty, but as the killings continue he proves a red herring. There are more likely suspects, according to movie logic, in Martha's inner circle, from the family doctor to an uncle with eccentric scholarly interests. Martha herself seems to be losing it, constantly flashing back to eyes watching her and the friends and loved ones she's lost, as someone finally comes for her.

Who done it? Could it be Satan??? 

There's some nice suspenseful business toward the end as Martha, feeling threatened, tries to make noise to get the attention of a motorcyclist, only to have the sounds drowned out by his revving engine. As clutching hands close in on her, Martha finally screams, and for a moment I thought the film was going to prove a tremendous fakeout with people pretending to be murdered so the poor woman could get her voice back. It turns out, however -- take this as a spoiler warning -- that the restoration of Martha's speech is only a side effect, the real purpose of the final attack being to take the true murderer into custody. You see, Martha didn't like it that some people could speak while she couldn't and so, possibly unbeknownst to herself, she occasionally killed them, including a beloved niece. She could confess all this in writing, so the only benefit of getting her voice back is that now, apparently totally bonkers, Martha can recite the bit from her childhood recording. None of this explains why someone had to come at her like a strangler, but the idea there, of course, is to fake the audience out one more time. In the end, Knife of Ice is mainly an exercise in audience manipulation and misdirection. While handsomely directed, its gimmickry renders it little more than a trifle that will certainly disappoint anyone expecting stronger stuff from Lenzi.

Too Much TV: CLOAK AND DAGGER (2018 - ?)

The catastrophic failure of The Inhumans was the effective end of Marvel Studios' relationship with the ABC broadcast network. As Agents of SHIELD limps to its conclusion next year, Marvel seeks new small-screen fields to conquer, placing Runaways on Hulu and Cloak and Dagger on Freeform, the former ABC Family Channel and long-longago Christian Broadcasting Network.   Freeform targets a young adult audience and Cloak and Dagger fits that demographic quite snugly. Showrunner Joe Pokaski pretty much recreates the characters from scratch, their origin little resembling the 1980s comics written by credited creator Bill Mantlo.  Pokaski's work on Heroes has more immediate influence on the story and the tone of the show as the young protagonists struggle to figure out exactly what they've become, not to mention why.

Ty Johnson (Aubrey Joseph) is a private-school basketball player still haunted by the officer-involved death of his older brother on the docks of New Orleans. Tandy Bowen (Olivia Holt) is a drug-addict dropout grifter still haunted by the death of her father, a scientist for the Roxxon corporation, during a major New Orleans storm. These tragedies are simultaneous, and the kids first meet when Ty, trying to recover his brother's body, ends up rescuing Tandy from her father's submerged car. Something else happened that night that only becomes apparent when  the kids become teens and meet again. Ty can teleport, often involuntarily, and can project an extra-dimensional darkness that can consume people. Tandy can make daggers of pure light appear in her hands for stabbing or throwing. She can also access people's innermost hopes and ideals when she touches them, while Ty can access their deepest fears and darkest memories. When the kids touch, their powers can complement each other or they can blast each other in opposite directions. Initially suspicious of each other, they find themselves inexorably drawn together to solve the mysteries behind their loved ones' deaths and the industrial accident that, by one account, has made them the latest in a long line of tragic saviors of New Orleans.

As a teen-hero show Cloak and Dagger is much better than Fox's The Gifted, which is too enamored and yet too aloof from X-mythology for its own good. The early confusion of the young heroes is a welcome change from the glib knowingness of most superhero TV as Ty and Tandy try to figure things out with nothing like the typical hero support network. The young actors (both are 20) convincingly portray Ty's earnest anxiety and Tandy's naive cynicism. The writers do a decent job of slow-motion world building in their isolated corner of the Marvel universe, though they sometimes overdo the folkloric angle. The scenes with Ty's girlfriend Evita (Noelle Renee Bercy) and her voodoo-priestess aunt (Angela Davis) are heavyhandedly on the nose in a way that most of the show is not, while one whole episode practically beats us over the head with "hero's journey" archetyping as Evita attends a class on Joseph Campbell. All too many hero writers have been influenced by Campbell and Campbell-influenced English classes, but none have ever acknowledged it so brazenly. The archetypal stuff feels superfluous when the show has more interesting and obvious areas to explore, from the murderous doings of Roxxon to the the apparently systemic corruption of the New Orleans police department which chews up and spits out any officer that might grow friendly toward our heroes.  As far as super powers go, for the most part the show presents them in interesting ways that emphasize how disorienting they are to their users. It's only with the first season finale that we seem to reach a creative or budgetary limit as the kids have an uninspired running battle with rage-virus victims and combine their powers in some murky way to save the city. Cloak and Dagger will be better off not reaching beyond its grasp next season, nor repeating Heroes' fatal sophomore jinx. This show is at its best when it looks at ominous conspiracies from the limited but awakening perspective of youth. It should not try to grow up too fast.

SWORD OF SATAN (Nemuri Kyōshirō 6: Masho-ken 1965)

Raizo Ichikawa played the Japanese pulp hero Nemuri Kyoshiro in a twelve films for the Daiei studio between 1963 and his 1969 death from liver cancer at age 37. The Kyoshiro films (marketed in the U.S. as "Sleepy Eyes of Death") aren't as well known worldwide as Daiei's beloved Zatoichi series. That may be because they don't have as simply grasped a gimmick as "blind swordsman," and it may also be because, at least as far as the U.S. and Europe are concerned, there's something xenophobic about Kyoshiro's origin story. A typical wandering "rogue," his father was a "lapsed Christian" who apparently went to the dark side and performed satanic black masses. In Adventure, the sixth film of the series, we see Kyoshiro kill a lapsed Christian who uses the black mass as a cover for abortions. It's the sort of stuff that may make western audiences uncomfortable, but it's not the main story of this particular picture.

In the main story, Kyoshiro is propositioned by a prostitute who wears a Noh mask. He learns that she is a fallen aristocrat and spurns her advances. When he learns later that she has killed herself, he blames his own bad karma, due to the circumstances of his birth, for her sad end. He becomes embroiled in the fate of her young son, raised by a carpenter's family but now in line to inherit a rich fief. Needless to say the typical greedy local clan leader wants control of the boy and the fief, caring little what happens to the carpenter or for what the boy really wants, but Kyoshiro intervenes, fulfilling whatever debt he may owe to the suicide by making sure that her son can choose his own future. At the same time, he has to fend off repeated attempts on his life by Orin (Michiko Saga), the sister of a bandit Kyoshiro had killed a few films earlier. Orin is ineffectual but persistent, attacking with shuriken,snakes and much more, and for a time joins forces with the evil clan until she discovers the limits of her own villainy while holding the boy hostage.

Ichikawa gives Kyoshiro an almost self-pitying quality covered by his dedication to honor and righteousness. Between this film and the first in the series, The Chinese Jade, which I saw many years ago, I didn't get much sense of the hero's character beyond being a hero, but I give the actor credit for a heroic presence. Nemuri Kyoshiro may simply not be as well-developed a character as Shintaro Katsu's Zatoichi is. By comparison, Kyoshiro is more gimmick than character. The defining thing about him is his special sword attack, the "full moon cut," which in this film's climactic fight with the typical honorable-but-fighting-on-the-wrong side samurai looks more like cheating than skill, since sunlight reflecting from the hero's blade nearly blinds his enemy. Kyoshiro's running fights with flunkies are more one-sided but are more impressively staged with long horizontal tracking shots through a forest. It's all for a good cause, I suppose, and my criticisms aside I found this Kimiyoshi Yasuda film (he directed many Zatoichis as well as Daimajin) entertaining. I may just be easy to please when it comes to jidaigeki movies, but Daiei's programmers are consistently well made, in my experience, and this one was no exception.