Muckle Flugga: The Brink and Back

 

 

MUCKLE FLUGGA (2026)

By Michael Pederson

Faber, 303 pages

★★★★

 

Muckle Flugga is one of the summer’s most-anticipated novels. Written by Michael Pederson, it qualifies as his debut as his well-reviewed Boyfriends is viewed as autobiographical, as it deals with real people and Pederson is a major character.

 

Before going any further, let’s deal with the title. It’s Old Scottish by way of Norn, the ancestor of numerous Scandinavian languages. It’s the name of a real lighthouse island 3km north of Unst and is part of the Shetlands, though some maps skip it as it’s been uninhabited since 1995. This part of the world is better understood by looking at a globe. You’ll notice that Norway is closer to the Shetlands than Scotland’s capital of Edinburgh. Shetlandic culture features a mix of Scandinavian and Scottish. In Scots, “muckle” (or “mickle”) means large or much. Flugga, on the other hand, could mean insect, a craze, a fishing lure, or a bowtie! For reasons beyond my linguistic understanding, put together they mean “big steep-sided island.”

 

The waters surrounding Muckle Flugga are treacherous; they are where the North Atlantic and North Sea collide. In 1854, a lighthouse was built by engineers David and Thomas Stevenson to guide sailing ships and avoid tragic accidents. Thomas was the father of author Robert Louis Stevenson. Until it was automated, a lighthouse keeper and his family lived on Muckle Flugga, a lonely existence, especially in winter when the weather dictated supply boat schedules. Pederson employs a few novelistic embellishments in Muckle Flugga: a mysterious castle-like complex slowly going to ruin and a guest house for the occasional birdwatcher.  For the most part, Muckle Flugga and the nearby Outstack are home to puffins, otters, seals, guillemots, fulmars, and the occasional fox.

 

In the novel, it is the home of a character known simply as “The Father” and his 19-year-old son Ouse (rhymes with booze). The Father is a strict disciplinarian and hopes that Ouse will be a “wickie” (lighthouse keeper) someday, just as his father and grandfather had done. “The Mother,” as she’s known, died years ago and The Father has not recovered from his loss. Ouse is educated (homeschooling and occasional trips off island), but there are gaps in what he learned. Although Robert Louis Stevenson died in 1894, but Ouse religiously reads Stevenson and carries on a dialogue with him. A ghost? Vivid imagination? “Figgie” is the only other regular on the island. She is quite pretty and captains the supply ship. She’s attracted to The Father, but he’s too blind to see it.

 

Muckle Flugga is thrown into a stramash (chaos, upheaval) with the arrival of 25-year-old Firth, a putative birdwatcher from Edinburgh, but actually a depressed young man who plans to brood at the end of the world and then kill himself. The Father takes an instant dislike to Firth, who becomes the foil for some of the novel’s funniest sequences. They are essentially Scottish versions of the old jokes about city slickers and (perceived) bumpkins. One incident involves Firth’s first encounter with Cullen skink (a fish bread bowl), and that’s enough for Father to dismiss Firth as a fool.

 

Ouse does not. Firth is a font of information about his travels and a companion to whom Ouse can show off the islands. Ouse indirectly gives Firth a reason to live. Firth detects Ouse’s inner brilliance, his painting skills, and his seldom-spoken desire to see more of the world. Given that Muckle Flugga uses this Stevenson epigraph– “…to be what we are and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.”–you can see where this is going. But the novel’s mystery lies in what is not said or explained. There is homoerotic frisson between Ouse and Firth, but is this a love affair without sex? A paean to wildness? A middle finger to Father’s stern Calvinism? Manipulative opportunism? Motives are left to the reader, which can be frustrating.

 

Muckle Flugga has gathered some heavy-hitter endorsements. Author Ian Rankin called it a “fever dream,” former First Minister for Scotland Nicola Sturgeon thinks it’s an important book, and filmmaker Alan Cumming praised its “rococo prose.” There’s no doubt that Pedersen can write; though just over 300 pages Muckle Flugga has an epic feel. Pedersen is a heralded poet and brings those skills to bear in gorgeous prose salted with Scottish dialect. As in all dreams, the open question is: whose dream?

 

Rob Weir

Decades Later, Sue Grafton Novels not as Snappy

 

 

 

 

H Is for Homicide (1991)

By Sue Grafton

Bantam Books, 287 pages.

★★

 

Crime writer Sue Grafton passed away a few years back. Grafton’s father was a mystery writer, but she was influenced by Ross Macdonald, considered one of the old-school hard-boiled masters of gritty urban crime novels. She was one of the first “modern” practitioners of that genre, and famous for her alphabet murder series beginning with A Is for Alibi (1982). She made it to Y Is for Yesterday (2017), which was published the year she passed away.

 

I moved on to writers who interested me more, but when presented with a free copy of H Is for Homicide, I decided to see what I thought after nearly two decades. Her protagonist was Kinsey Millhone, variously a private investigator and an insurance fraud agent. The latter is her role in H Is for Homicide. She’s a no-nonsense woman who can pass for a working-class lout or an independent feminist. Bear in mind, though, that her feminism was of the 1980s Second Wave variety. She had no trouble telling off someone who thought they had power over her, but she was keenly aware that women could still get into trouble if they pushed too hard.

 

In H Is for Homicide Kinsey works with but not for California Fidelity (CF), which is in an uproar because its new office is VP Gordon Titus, an efficiency expert with a reputation for gutting offices and making the remaining staff work harder. Kinsey’s track record is solid, but she doesn’t report to CF; she merely rents office space and takes on jobs when she’s low on cash. That’s her current status, but she deliberately antagonizes Titus to let him know she doesn’t have time to be interviewed to see if she “fits” in the new model, which has nothing to do with her. However, when handed an obvious attempt to defraud insurance firms, Kinsey hits the streets of Santa Teresa. (It’s a made-up suburb of Los Angeles, so pick one.) She’s looking for Bibianna Diaz, a Latina, whose claim looks nearly identical to others. Kinsey teases her hair, wears cheap bling, and plays the role of looking for an apartment in Bibianna’s neighborhood–once she finds it. That alone takes detective skills.

 

Kinsey is soon paling about with Bibianna in sleazy, hand-on-women’s-butts clubs with names like The Meat Locker. It’s obvious that Bibianna’s claim is a fraud, but an LA police detective convinces Kinsey to help him break a larger fraud ring in which people like Bibianna are paid pawns. Bibianna, though, is worried about the sort of ring that brides wear. Kinsey-as-Hannah Moore learns quickly that the petite Bibianna is deeply in love in Jimmy Tate. Uh oh; Kinsey went to high school with Jimmy and knows of his brief police career. Luckily both wait for an opportune moment before getting the lowdown. Jimmy does love Bibianna–the two are secretly married–but Raymond, a Hispanic gang leader, wants Bibianna to marry him. A shoot-out outside the club in which one of Raymond’s men is killed ends up with Hannah and Bibianna in a car. They are being rushed off for their “protection,” though they are virtual hostages of Raymond, a large Doberman, and a few gang members. Raymond dotes over Bibianna and can’t understand why she isn’t as affectionate as a future bride should be.

 

Kinsey/Hannah learns how the scam works. A network of drivers around Los Angeles daily crash their “new” cars into others and make it look as if the other person is at fault. They get their insurance information, fill out forms, and use doctors, pharmacists, and physical therapists who are in on the scam. It works because most insurance companies aren’t LA-based. This is an easy nut to crack, if Kinsey can get away. Not as easy as it sounds. She can’t get use of a phone to call back up, and doesn’t know for sure where she is–certainly not a part of LA you’d want to be! Kinsey decides to get on Raymond’s good side by becoming one of his “drivers.”

 

Grafton takes us through the LA underbelly 1980s-style. The book is fast-paced, but Grafton’s “modern” detective novel lacks the bite of more recent fiction. Kinsey is a smart aleck, but she’s no Spenser. Likewise, the bad guys often come off only half as tough as they talk. As a hard-boiled novel, this one from the ‘80s has a lot of runny yolk.

 

Rob Weir

Who Will Know the Bluenose in the Sun?

  

 

 

Last weekend Emily and I saw the “Tall Ships” as they sailed into Boston Harbor. In 1976, I witnessed the first Tall Ships celebration in Baltimore, but I can’t recall much. You’d think I’d remember something like that, but Popeye the Sailor Man, I’m not.  (Toot toot!)

When friends envied me for seeing the ships in Boston, I smiled. In all truth, they’re not all that interesting if you’re a landlubber. By the time they come into close view their sails are struck because, well, they use wind power and you can’t approach a harbor that way. We could have seen them in full sail had we been on one of the Harbor islands, but that would’ve entailed arising at a time officially known as “Stupid Early” to make the 2-hour drive to a parking garage, grab the subway to Haymarket, and sprint to the ferry landing.

Plus, having seen “schooner” races, we know that sailing ships move slowly. Even “clipper” ships don’t go faster than 22 knots, which is 25 mph for fellow landlubbers. In Massachusetts, we drive faster than that in school zones. (I don’t mean nearby the school; I mean in the hallways.) I put “schooner” and “clipper” in quotes because they’re all just “boats” to me. I don’t sail, don’t like being on boats, and when forced aboard I think of all the sea shanties that commemorate wrecks. I had nightmares for a week after reading Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm. The thought of being hundreds of miles out to sea is that of pre-Columbian flat-earth mariners who marked the edge of the world with: “There be monsters.”

I’m not knocking those who enjoy sailing. I do wonder, though, why so many devotees have repeated the joke about the two best days of a sailor’s life: the day they buy a boat and the day they sell it. Whadda I know? I thought that a capstan was where you hung your beanie-copter and a barque something dogs do. But my eyes tell me it takes a lot of skill to sail a small craft, let alone one of those huge boats in the distance that made me grab Emily’s hand and cry, “We’ve only got half an hour to get out of here before the pirates land and commence pillaging.”

One ship, though, made me grin so hard my ears were hidden: Bluenose II. It’s a rebuild of the first Bluenose, which is legendary in Canadian history. It was a fishing schooner launched in 1917 from Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. It also raced and captured the first Fisherman’s Trophy by beating an American ship. Its crew held on to that trophy for the next 17 years, until engine-powered ships made sails obsolete. The Bluenose then plied the Grand Banks, a fish-rich region whose precise boundary between Canada and the U.S. remains under dispute.  

As you can imagine, anytime Canada bests the U.S. in anything, it’s a moment of pride. The Bluenose is commemorated on the Canadian dime, paintings, posters, stamps, legends, and a song written by Stan Rogers. He’s one of my all-time favorites. Bluenose I met a sorry fate. It was sold in 1942, was wrecked on a reef off Haiti in 1944, broke apart, and sank. No one died, but no one knows its exact location either, though many have tried to find it. Bluenose II was built in 1963, but had to be completely rebuilt between 2010-13. The steam-ferry and a catamaran between Bar Harbor, Maine, and Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, has sometimes borne the name M.V.* Bluenose, but few would confuse those boring boats with the real thing. (Even worse, the catamaran is infamous for its malfunctions.)

We were near the Charlestown section of Boston Harbor where Bluenose II put up its canvas to turn around. As it sailed by, people cheered and shouts of “We love Canada!” rung out. The crew was elated and began dancing and waving. It was a beautiful moment.  

Emily and I still dislike boats, though we’ve been on many.  We hope to get back to Prince Edward Island, but we will drive through New Brunswick–motto: “The Most Boring Province in All of Canada”– and drive across the Confederation Bridge. Apologies to all who love to sail, but being atop water makes me hum Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”

 

Rob Weir

* MV simply means motor vessel.

 

Untamed Coast: Mystery and Thriller in Alaska

 

 

 

UNTAMED COAST (2026)

By Kevin C. Morris

Ballantine Books, 304 pages.

★★★★★

Available after 9/1/26

 

I have not yet been to Alaska, though I had an Alaskan friend when I was in grad school. She told me that it’s a hard place to live, but that once it gets in your blood, it doesn’t let go. I reckon that’s why it holds a reputation as a refuge for those who keep to themselves, value independence, and prefer to live in the rough. Still another friend spends part of her summer volunteering at Katmai National Park and tells me that words and pictures cannot do Alaska justice.

 

Author Kevin C. Morris takes us there in Untamed Coast, a debut novel that reads like it came from an experienced hand. It is at once, a mystery, a thriller tour through Southeast Alaska, women’s fiction (if there is such a thing!), a tale of missed signals and healing, and a wrong that took 80 years to resolve. Morris jumps us between three different time periods: 1938, the 1980s, and 2017. In the last of these, Marco(ni) Franco is along fishing from his boat Radio Flyer. Pay attention to names in this novel, as about the only thing Morris throws away are fish entrails before their cleaned bodies are tossed into the onboard freezer. Marco is one of those people who moved to Alaska to work out anguish of his wife’s death six months earlier. He’d be a recluse were it not necessary to interact with those at bars, equipment stores, and boatyards.

 

Morris doesn’t mechanically divide his novel into three separate periods; he trusts readers to connect the dots. The 1930s were part of the Great Depression. A man named Joe Baxter lives alone in Radioville, a communications island. His day job lies on a nearby island where miners pan for gold that will never be theirs. At the end of each day, Joe collects and tallies the gold the miners found. Security is tight and the boss’ network lets him know if anyone shows up trying to assay gold. Joe holds his job because he is scrupulously honest–until he’s not! Joe, Sam, and the oily Virgil hatch a scheme, though Joe also “banks” some gold in a unique depository.

 

In the 1980s we meet Anya, who’s not so sure about Alaska. She has known comfort, but she cut that possibility by marrying a loser. He didn’t seem that way at first to anyone except Anya’s parents, but he jumps from scheme to scheme and makes a hash of each. He has run up a large debt and convinces Anya to move to Alaska. Alas, he drinks heavily and violently abuses Anya. Try as she will, Anya can’t avoid being beaten–until she does!

The sections on the 1980s and 2017 allow plenty of space for Morris to expound upon the vastness of Alaska and its dangers. Radioville was abandoned in 1938. Bill Bryson once said of Australia that there were more things there than can kill you than anywhere else in the world. Alaska would probably rank a close second. Those who fish its waters generally pack a survival suit, but some never put them on because for much of the year the suits would not prevent hypothermia. We also read of abrupt killer storms; unpredictable calving glaciers; on-land carnivorous brown bears, and wolves; and winter snowfalls that can crush or asphyxiate the unprepared. Yet, when an old pal from Marco’s earlier life visits, the boat tour to which he is treated seems like an icy magic kingdom. By the time they enter a narrow passage near Radioville and Chichagot Isalnd, where miners once toiled, though, Marco’s friend is pretty sure that they are going to die in the rough seas, wind, and ice. Marco says otherwise, but he knows that there is a distinct possibility of that.

 

Radioville is the novel’s key. Marco once picked up an SOS on an obsolete radio band while fishing nearby, a woman calling for help. Who and where is she? No one else heard it and the Coast Guard has no reports of a distressed boat or missing person. Has the cold and grief made Marco as daft as some say he is?  

 

What a series tales Morris weaves. And weave them he does! Remember that Morris doesn’t throw anything away. A few readers have criticized the novel’s feminist ending, but I think they failed to connect a few dots.

 

Rob Weir

 

#UntamedCoast #NetGalley

 

Colorized photo; Film in B & W

 

 

SUNSET BOULEVARD (1950)

Directed by Billy Wilder

Paramount Pictures, 110 minutes, not-rated

★★★★★

 

Sunset Boulevard is a masterpiece. The Hollywood Establishment hated it when it first came out, but not because Billy Wilder directed a bad film; many thought Wilder had disgraced Hollywood. That was certainly the opinion of director/producer Louis B. Mayer. In other words, it rang too close to true. (When Mayer made an insensitive remark, Wilder told Mayer to commit an act which is physically impossible.) Time’s verdict is that Sunset Boulevard is among the greatest films Hollywood ever made.

 

Early cinema was silent until 1929, when The Jazz Singer added the term “talkie” to the lexicon. What happened to all of the actresses who never transitioned to sound? Think of such famous names as Clara Bow, Mary Pickford, Pola Negri, and Norma Shearer. Even the principal character’s name, Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), was a mashup of silent stars Norma Talmadge and Florence Desmond. Swanson, of course, jumped at the part when offered as she was among the old stars put out to pasture. Was the picture a film noir, a searing drama, a black comedy, a period piece, or a faux biography? The best answer is to say Sunset Boulevard was all of those things.

 

The eponymous street was where oodles of silent stars built elaborate mansions. In the film, Desmond resides in a sprawling Neo-Renaissance/art deco estate occupied by just Norma, a pet chimpanzee, and her devoted butler Max von Mayerling (Max von Stroheim). Our first look at it is of murdered writer Joe Gillis (William Holden) lying face down in the swimming pool. Gillis is also the film’s narrator, though we don’t know from where, as he tells of the six-months before he became dead in Desmond’s pool! He suffered from writer’s block, took a drive, got a flat, and wandered into what he assumed was an abandoned property. He is stopped by Max, but Norma thought Joe was the underkeeper for her deceased chimp and is ushered into her presence. It takes Joe a moment, but recognition led to one of the most famous exchanges in movie history: “You’re Norma Desmond. You used to be in silent pictures. You used to be big!” She frostily replies, “I am big, it’s the pictures that got small!”

 

Joe hasn’t written a decent script in so long that his bank account is as dry as Death Valley. Before he knows what hit him, he’s in Norma’s employ, living in her home, trying to find time to write, and feeling creepy about the attention Norma sheds on him, not to mention that she thinks that Joe’s writing the part of Salome for her new film for Cecil B. DeMille. In private Joe calls her the “waxworks,” but he has no idea what’s next.

 

His eye is focused on Betty Schaefer, an aspirant screen writer dating his friend Artie Green (Jack Webb). Betty also thinks that Joe’s recent scripts are horrible, but with Artie traveling a lot, she needs a mentor to get her started, and she’s kind of falling for Joe. That too is bad news, as Norma has come to think of Joe as her late-in-life suitor. Though it revolts him, Joe becomes a de facto gigolo who shares Norma’s bed. When he tries to let her down easy, Norma slashes her wrists and becomes more and more delusional, even to the point of driving onto the Paramount lot to visit DeMille to discuss her role as Salome. (Paramount really only wanted to rent her 1929 Isotta Fraschini automobile.) Joe is trapped and returns to her boudoir.

 

Seldom has delusion and mental decay been so raw on the screen. Swanson’s performance is now recognized as a tour de force. The film garnered 11 Oscar nominations and won just three, but it truly a case of a movie that, despite its period-feel, has weathered better than it was received. Hedda Hopper’s customs were equally effective; she dressed Swanson in what might be called shabby elegance. Her garb was deliberately outdated, but just barely so. DeMille, Buster Keaton, Harry Warner, and gossip columnist Hedda Hooper played themselves, which lent the verisimilitude that so troubled Mayer. And check out the cinematography of John Seitz, who gave the film its noir gloss.

 

By the way, the butler did it, just not what you think he did. What more can one say about a film that concludes with another unforgettable line: “I’m ready for my closeup, Mr. DeMille.”

 

Rob Weir

A Tax on Dreams and a Very Unusual Movie

 

 

 

 

 

STRAWBERRY MANSION (2021)

Written and Directed by Albert Birney and Kentucker Audley

Music Box Film, 91 minutes, Not-rated

★★★

 

Strawberry Mansion is a film so bizarre that it makes Hundreds of Beavers seem like a documentary of the fur trade.  It is the brainchild of Albert Birney and Kentucker [sic] Audley and you can take your pick of what category into which to plug it: science fiction, comedy, surrealism, fantasy, or a warning shot across the bow. Unless you were at Sundance in 2021 or in one of the 27 theaters that screened in during its 11-week run, you’ve not seen it. It made just $54,762 during those 11 weeks and the only thing we can definitely say is that it is indeed an independent film. I can’t imagine taking any attempted synopsis of this film before a group of high-roller producers.

I don’t mean to imply I didn’t like it; it’s more a case of not having the foggiest idea of how to explain it as I’m not sure what just happened on my screen. The year is 2035 and the government has figured out how to tax people’s dreams. The film blurs the line between dreaming and being awake. Early on we see James Preble in an entirely pink room: walls, furniture, cups, utensils…. An obsequious pink-suited man called Buddy (Linas Phillips) comes bearing a bucket of Cap’n Kelly’s Chicken and a tall cup of Red Rocket Cola. He tries to entice James to try a chicken and gravy milkshake and, heaven help him, James likes it. What in the name of Col. Sanders is going on? Buddy reappears from time to time, always with chicken and cola to make James believe that he is James’ only friend. Is he, or is a glad-handed Satan as ad man?

James is a dream auditor. By 2035, all our dreams are recorded on a small stick that can placed into a computer to determine how much tax is owed. James is dispatched to the home of an old woman named Arabella–call me “Bella –Isadora (Penny Fuller), who lives alone with her turtle “Sugar baby,” and has not submitted her dream stick or paid her dream tax in quite some time. She lives a quirky remote home, the movie’s titular Strawberry Mansion, and Bella immediately offers pie and a place to stay while James does his audit. James tells Bella that she is supposed to keep track of all her dreams and she smiles and says she has; it’s all stored on tapes: cassettes, VHS, Betamax, reel-to-reel…. Stacks and stacks of them. To make sense of them he has to don a cross between a diving helmet, the head of a 1950s robot, and Australian bandit Ned Kelly’s iron mask. But James keeps seeing things: a young version of Bella, human-like creatures covered by green foliage, and occasional scarier images.

James learns from Bella that she and her late husband discovered that advertisers figured out how to infiltrate our dreams. Imagine if you were in the middle of a very pleasant or terrifying dream that was interrupted by commercials! Bella also recounts that she and her husband built a device to shut off the commercials. What happens next is so weird you’ll need to remind yourself that it might be dream logic. James will spend what seems like years being on a desert island with Bella, losing her, and seeking her. They will dine in a restaurant with a frog waiter, run away from Buddy, and then lose each other for “years” when James appears as a ship’s commander whose crew consists of two life-sized talking rats named Richard and Marcus. From time-to-time James encounters the terrifying Blue Demon. The Demon, like the Rats and the Frog wear what appear to be papier-mache heads. Getting hit on the head with a bowling pin presage some of these… what? Dreams? Shifts of reality? When he finds Bella again, she has to remove all the greenery he has acquired as one of the grass/foliage figures that line her property.

Is James some sort of chosen one to save humankind from rampant commercialism? Just a nerd who got in the way? A figment of his own imagination? There is an explanation of sorts and a possible happy ending, but who’s to say whether it’s just another flight from reality? Don’t ask me! All I can say is that Strawberry Mansion is my new standard of a weird movie.

 

Rob Weir

 

Rob Weir

Fallen Angel (1945): A Blend of Good and Silly

 

FALLEN ANGEL (1945).

Directed by Otto Preminger

20^th Century Fox, 97 minutes, not rated.

★★ ½

 

There are at least three other movies titled Fallen Angel, but his one is from 1945, just as World War II was ending. In American mythology, the troops came home to a booming economy. That’s not so; it took several years for the economy to convert to peacetime use. Fallen Angel stars, Dana Andrews as Eric Stanton, a veteran but also a drifter. He jumps on a bus headed for San Francisco, but is booted out in the small town of Walton, California, as he can’t afford the entire fare.

 

Stanton decides to stay in Walton for a while, because he’s a grifter as well as a drifter. He enters Pop’s Eats and bums a meal from Pop (Percy Kilbride) and overhears him telling Mark Judd (Charles Bickford), an ex-New York City policeman now working in Walton, that he worries about where Stella (Linda Darnell) might be. Judd tells Pop and others in the greasy spoon diner not to fret because Stella is a free spirit who will appear when she feels like it. Sure enough, the lusty Stella comes waltzing in as if nothing is out of the ordinary. She’s quite a looker, but is not impressed by Eric’s pick-up banter. Eric nonetheless identifies Stella as flirtatious and licentious, so he is not deterred by her rejection.

 

Eric needs money. At this point of the film, we have a drifter pursuing a femme fatale, classic film noir material. Alas, Director Otto Preminger stuck too carefully to the forgettable novel from which the script devolved. A contrived set-up leads Eric to the Faye sisters. He encounters Joe (Olin Howard) the “drummer” for a mentalist/fortune teller, but he’s a poor salesman. Eric grabs some tickets and hands out some for free, gambling that word of mouth will swell the box office. He’s right, but he also has to convince “Professor” Madley (John Carradine) to jazz up his show. Madley’s performance is trite, but when channels the spirit of Abraham Mills, everyone is drawn to his instant séance, as Mills was a beloved mayor and the richest man in Walton.

 

Eric continues to see Stella, but so too do other men (single and married). The implication is that Stella is also a hooker, but Eric finds himself falling for her. Stella’s morals aside, she has a clear goal; she wants to marry a handsome man who can provide her with a home of her own. That’s not Eric! He’s making some money from the professor, but not enough to buy a house. Eric tries another scheme to make money. The séance attracted the attention of Clara Mills (Anne Revere), the eldest daughter of the late Abraham Mills. She doesn’t think much of Eric, but his goal is to marry Clara’s younger sister, the naïve June (Alice Faye), the heir to most of the Mills fortune. If he can marry June and gain access to some of her dough, he can divorce her and provide for Stella. Sure enough, June is swept off her feet by the smooth-talking Eric. Their honeymoon evening is not exactly poems and flowers. Eric waits until June is asleep and goes to Stella. Big mistake!

 

That very evening, Stella is murdered and nearly every man in Walton who dated Stella, including Eric, is a suspect. Judd tries to beat a confession out of Dave Atkins (Bruce Cabot but he’s not Judd’s real target, and Eric knows it. He convinces June to flee with him to a dingy hotel room in San Francisco until he can work out who killed Stella. You might think that June would give him the bum’s rush, but she actually loves Eric.

 

Again, Preminger waded into water so shallow that Eric’s revelation of the true killer would scarcely get your feet moist. Preminger had a hard time getting this film made. Andrews was not his choice for leading man, but Alice Faye had been a big musical star for 20^th century Fox and wanted him. She was also promised she could sing a torch song for the film, but it didn’t make the final cut. Nonetheless, Faye called the shots, which perhaps explains the film’s unevenness. Andrew is actually very good as Eric, but so many things were over the top that we think of the film that could’ve been rather than what was.

 

Rob Weir