Joe's View

Carolyn Hart has proven herself to be an heir to Agatha Christie in two long-running mystery series that are models of great plotting as well as acute studies of the psychology of murder.
Hart made her name with the “Death on Demand” series revolving around the proprietress of a mystery book store on a small island off the Carolina coast.
She then added a second series about a retired journalist named Henrie O. whose crime-solving-while-traveling adventures recall such Christie classics as “Evil Under the Sun” and “Murder on the Orient Express.”
The books have brought Hart millions of devoted readers and several major crime-writing awards, including the Agatha, the Anthony and the Macavity.
Hart has often suffered from being labeled as a “cozy” writer within the crime genre — a tag that lazy reviewers and book store managers apply to any mystery that doesn’t include torrents of blood and explicit sex and profanity — but Hart’s books are too sophisticated and too well-written to be lumped with the saccharine Jessica Fletcher knock-offs.
The writer has just launched a charming and daring new series that takes her into the realm of the supernatural without any loss of Hart’s story-telling abilities or understanding of the emotions that swirl around a violent crime and its aftermath.
“Ghost at Work” (William Morrow) introduces us to Hart’s latest sleuth, Bailey Ruth Raeburn, who just happens to be dead.
What might sound like a crazy idea for a series turns out to be a thoroughly delightful book in the vein of “Topper” or “Heaven Can Wait.”
Bailey is as funny and as down to earth as Hart’s other series heroines but in the course of solving her first case she also takes us on a mind-expanding journey into what we might find in the place she now calls home: Heaven.
Reading the book I thought of that great old Hugh Martin and Timothy Gray tune — “Home Sweet Heaven” — from “High Spirits,” the Broadway musical adaptation of Noel Coward’s “Blithe Spirit.”
The ghost Elvira sings of the joys of her new home in lines like: “Caruso sings there/Salome swings there” and “No angel choirs/but we have stereo/and merry open fires” and “It would really bowl you over/Watching Casanova/Try to flirt with Gertrude Stein.”
In “Ghost at Work,” Bailey takes us to an similarly enchanted but recognizeable place where she is able to catch up with long-departed notables like Barbara Stanwyck, imagine herself in any beloved earthly locale, and attend classes in any subject that interests her.
Still, Bailey is thrilled to get her first assignment back on earth and back in her beloved Adelaide, Oklahoma, where she is sent to help a minister’s wife who will most likely be charged with murder if the cops find a dead man on her property. Kathleen is innocent but has a pretty solid motive for wanting the man silenced.
Bailey is given a list of rules she must follow on her return to Oklahoma — including “Avoid public notice…
Become visible only when absolutely essential…Make every effort not to alarm earthly creatures…(and)
Information about Heaven is not yours to impart. Simply smile and say, ‘Time will tell.’”
In addition to its marvelous experiments in crime fiction form and content, “Ghost at Work” has given Hart the chance to set a mystery in her home state of Oklahoma; the writer’s affection for the place and the people comes through on every page.
Once Bailey arrives in Adelaide, the book presents us with a wonderfully satisfying mystery — there is a long list of possible suspects and lots of twists on the way to the final chapter — that lives up to the high standards of the other Hart novels.

You never know what you’re getting into when you pick up a show business memoir.
Some are unreadable.
Some are so egotistical and/or vitriolic that you end up hating the author (and yourself for wasting so much time).
Every once in a while, however, a superior example of the genre comes along — the Lauren Bacall and Mia Farrow books come quickly to mind.
But, Christopher Plummer’s new book, “In Spite of Myself” (Knopf) is in a class by itself.
Unlike some premature memoirists — who put out their first “book” in their 30s or 40s — Plummer has lived a full life and career worth writing about. A stage and screen star for more than a half-century, Plummer has earned the right to tell his story because he has triumphed in classic stage roles in New York, London and his native Canada and has proven himself to be an extraordinarily durable and powerful film actor.
The star has worked both sides of the show business fence — the high art of Shakespeare and the other great stage writers and the slightly lower art involved in being a jobbing film and TV actor.
Many actors tend to get a bit soft and sentimental as they age, but Plummer has stayed as sharp as a tack into his 70s, giving spectacular late-life performances such as his Mike Wallace in the Michael Mann film “The Insider” (1999) and a towering Lear at Lincoln Center two seasons ago.
I’ve had the pleasure of talking with Plummer a few times over the years — a recent interview will run in this Sunday’s Arts & Travel section of The Connecticut Post — and know him to be a wonderful story teller.
“In Spite of Myself” reveals Plummer to be a terrific writer who takes us through the highs and lows of his career with an unflagging sense of humor and a down-to-earth style that draws the reader right in (the 648 pages race by).
Of course, there are full acounts of such famous Plummer projects as “The Sound of Music” (1965) — which he has come to admire after dissing it in the years right after its huge success — and his key stage triumphs in the Archibald MacLeish-Elia Kazan collaboration “J.B.” and “Barrymore.”
But what I really love about the book is the way that Plummer tips his hat to the other actors who have played important roles in his life and career. Jason Robards and Julie Harris are just two of the legendary performers who are featured prominently and Plummer also took the time and space to remind us of such lesser known (and long gone) stage greats as Edward Everett Horton and Kate Reid.
“In Spite of Myself” takes us back to a halcyon era on Broadway in the 1950s when plays were as important as musicals and Plummer spent countless nights carousing in theater district bars with scintillating folks like Elaine Stritch, Jack Warden and Ben Gazzara.
There are several chapters that Plummer could have expanded into small books, especially his funny and scary account of the chaotic Russian production of “Waterloo” which he worked on with Rod Steiger in the late 1960s.
Another memorable chapter is devoted to Plummer’s experiences starring in one of the biggest and most expensive epics in movie history — “The Fall of the Roman Empire” (1964) which failed at the box-office in spite of awesome sets and costumes and a cast that included Sophia Loren, Alec Guinness, James Mason and Omar Sharif.
“In Spite of Myself” is a very big book, but I was still sorry to reach the last page.

Tonight at 7, I’m hosting a “Critic’s Choice” screening of the wonderful 1970 Francois Truffaut drama, “The Wild Child,” at the Avon Theatre Film Center in Stamford.
What makes the night really special is the fact that Avon programmer Adam Birnbaum has lined up a new 35mm print direct from its recent revival at Manhattan’s Film Forum.
In this age of increasing home viewing of new films and classics — and video projection in some theaters — it’s great that there are still places to see films projected on a large screen. Film may be an increasingly archaic “delivery system” for movies, but it was the way motion pictures were shot and screened for the first 100 years of the medium’s history.
Truffaut’s cinematographer Nestor Almendros won a prize for his gorgeous black-and-white work from the National Society of Film Critics in 1970 and if you attend tonight’s screening you will see why he got the prize.
“The Wild Child” tells the true story of a boy who was found living like a wild animal in a French forest in 1798. A doctor named Jean Itard took on the mammoth task of “civilizing” a child who had been abandoned for unknown reasons several years earlier.
Some critics compared the film to Arthur Penn’s “The Miracle Worker” — about the relationship between Anne Sullivan and her famous blind and deaf student Helen Keller — but Truffaut saw the picture as a companion piece to his debut film, “The 400 Blows,” released 11 years earlier, which was about a rebellious urban “wild child” based on the director’s own turbulent youth.
The material demanded an extremely natural performance from the gypsy child Jean-Pierre Cargol. Truffaut decided the only way he could guide the amateur actor was to play the doctor.
“I feel that if I had turned over the role of Dr. Itard to an actor this would have been, of all my films, the one that gave me the least satisfaction, because I would have had no more than a technical job,” Truffaut wrote after finishing the film.
Actually, Truffaut was so effective in front of the camera that a few years later Steven Spielberg hired the great director for a role in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”
(The screening of “The Wild Child” will be at 7 p.m. The Avon Theatre Film Center is at 272 Bedford St. in Stamford. For more information call 967-3660.)

“Scarface Nation” (St. Martin’s Griffin) is a brief but insightful book about the enormous cult that has formed around the 1983 Al Pacino-Brian DePalma kitsch extravaganza, “Scarface,” in the 25 years since it debuted.
The gangster drama is not quite in the so-bad-it’s-good class of “Valley of the Dolls” (1967) or “Mommie Dearest” (1981), but it too is embraced by fans for its craziest excesses.
Al Pacino’s performance as the Cuban gangster Tony Montana is one of the greatest scenery chewing displays in movie history — on a par with Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford and Patty Duke as Neely O’Hara in “Dolls.”
Some critics charge Pacino with racist stereotyping, but the movie wouldn’t be remembered today without the star’s manic and hilarious performance — if you don’t respond to what Pacino does as Tony, you won’t respond to the movie that barely contains his star turn.
Tucker writes about Pacino’s slightly sheepish acceptance of the “Scarface” cult. No other movie the actor has ever done has elicited such fan devotion and that has to be slightly bizarre for a man with “The Godfather” and “Serpico” and “Dog Day Afternoon” on his resume.
In 1983, “Scarface” created something of a scandal with its over-ripe dialogue, suggestions of extreme violence and depiction of the cocaine explosion of the late 1970s and early 1980s. “Scarface” received some respectful reviews, but was also vilified by cultural icons such as Kurt Vonnegut who stormed out of a pre-release celebrity screening.
Tucker points out that the film struck a nerve in the entertainment industry because of its focus on cocaine which was then causing so much trouble in Hollywood (the late 1970s were marked by wildly out of control productions such as “New York, New York” and “1941” where drug use reportedly played a role in mammoth cost overruns and narrative incoherence in the finished products).
DePalma and screenwriter Oliver Stone were viewed as bad boys telling tales out of school by some industry insiders who knew of Tony Montana-style monster addicts within their own community.
“Scarface Nation” is a tad skimpy in terms of bang for the buck — the type is huge and there are only 267 pages of text — but it is a valuable reminder of how slightly trashy movies can inspire the most devoted followings.

A very entertaining documentary about the dangerous “space race” competition between the U.S. and the Soviet Union — “Sputnik Mania” — debuted on The History Channel Saturday night (with repeats set for Dec. 15 at 8 a.m. and 2 p.m.)
Filmmaker David Hoffman takes us back to the near-hysteria in this country after the Soviet Union launched the first satellite, Sputnik, into orbit on Oct. 4, 1957.
A sense of jubilation around the world over man’s first big step into outer space almost immediately turned to international anxiety over the military implications of Sputnik’s launch.
Sputnik was an incredible scientific and technological achievement — one that paved the way to today’s global communication via satellite — but it also raised the spectre of a too-quick-to-halt nuclear war in which the bombs would be delivered via missile.
Hoffman takes us back to the beginning of an era baby boomers will remember well — the feeling in the early 1960s that the end of the world was a real possibility because of proliferating nuclear weapons and rising tensions between the world’s two major super powers.
Then Senator Lyndon Johnson compared the launch of the Soviet satellite to Pearl Harbor and within a year a Gallup Poll showed that 60 percent of the U.S. public believed nuclear war was inevitable and that it would kill 50 percent of the country’s population.
Hoffman shows how Hollywood shifted from nuclear mutation monster movies (such as the 1954 classic “Them!”) to pictures about the aftermath of nuclear war (1959’s “The World, the Flesh and the Devil” and “On the Beach,” among them).
In this still nervous post 9/11 environment, it is easy to forget the even greater nuclear war fears that reached a peak in the Cuban missile crisis of October, 1962.
Fortunately, wise and stable leaders like President Eisenhower did their best to find positive aspects of the satellite race between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.
Ike insisted that our new space agency — NASA — would be a non-military branch of the government and he used one of our first satellite launches to broadcast a message of peace from outer space.
“Sputnik Mania” shows us how the Soviet triumph pushed our government to get its act together, setting the stage for President Kennedy’s 1961 pledge that we would send a manned space ship to the moon by the end of the decade.