They're everything I ever wanted in a sock

The joke of The Perfect Murder (1988) is that it is neither. Then again, despite its production credit, neither is it a Merchant Ivory except in the sense that it was executive-produced by Ismail Merchant in Mumbai. Directed by Zafar Hai who co-adapted the 1964 CWA Gold Dagger-winning source novel with its author H. R. F. Keating, it is an endearingly unwieldy triple-decker of comedy, crime, and city symphony, not necessarily in equal proportions or even order of priorities, but in a film so lovingly dedicated to the significance of imperfection, perhaps to expect anything else would be, like the case that gives the story its aptly misleading name, upside down.

Take the plot, a rococo compendium of cases from a smuggling ring to an attempted murder to a lost item report which pile chaotically onto the beleaguered hero only to cross-link at the last minute into the pattern so beloved of classically constructed mysteries in which even the silliest and most discursive puzzle-pieces can find a home. Or don't, since its Chandleresque twists and turns serve just as well as the frame for an essentially hangout movie that makes as much time for a kidnapping of mistaken identity as for the lie detector of a Nandi bull. Brought to the screen for the first and only time in his forty-five-year career by Naseeruddin Shah, Inspector Ganesh V. Ghote of the Bombay CID is an everyman of detectives, concerned, harassed, and unassuming in the khaki of his policeman's uniform that gives him far less authority dealing with government ministers and affluent businessmen than he might wish in the pursuit of justice. His self-deprecating honesty carries him through professional pratfalls like arresting the colleague he was sent to collect from the airport and tenacious gambles like anticipating the secret of a monsoon-drenched chandelier, but can't do much about the mundane middle-class problems of his salary and his schedule. "At the moment I'm trying to save to buy a color TV." Especially facing an impatient ACP, the last thing this modest, apologetically persistent officer needs is a wild card in the delicate negotiations of his job and of course that's exactly what he gets with the arrival of Stellan Skarsgård's Axel Svensson, Sweden's contribution to an international study of comparative police methods who wouldn't last ten seconds in a Nordic noir. It is culturally clever, but also just fun that the criminologist from the global north is decidedly the sidekick of the adventure, a lankily cheerful add-on who can be distracted by the most routine details of life in modern India—the marigold-garlanded mahurat shot of a Bollywood musical, a saffron-swathed sadhu under the colonnade of the Taj Mahal Hotel—looking at all times with his wilted straw hair as though he's been pulled out of the laundry half-steamed. "I've been running since I came to this country." He messes about the crime scene quoting Hamlet in Swedish. He moons romantically over suspects and film stars and requires as dramatic a rescue as any damsel in distress. Just this side of a jam Watson, he isn't the total drag on the investigation that Ghote accuses on the sullen, tinderous afternoon their latest failure has left them uncharacteristically on each other's last culture-clashed nerves, but even after the rains have ecstatically broken and the whole back-to-front left-handed spanner of a case with them, he remains most valuable as the inspector's wingman, his flash-temper Viking-height backing up the Maharashtrian manners of Ghote as he holds his ground against official caution and unavoidable corruption and comes up at last with the colorfully elusive truth. "Upside down!" they salute the circumstances of their bonding, an affectionate in-joke now that Axel has fallen in love with the city in all its helter-skelter absurdity and Ghote has upheld the honor of its detecting. "Welcome to Bombay!"

Indeed, in the vibrantly semi-documentary photography of frequent Merchant Ivory DP Walter Lassally, The Perfect Murder is a love letter to Bombay on the verge of its millennial renascence into Mumbai, not merely in the historical tourist postcards of the Victoria Terminus or the Gateway of India, but the street-level flânerie which does not treat ironically a stately elephant proceeding with the rest of the rush-hour traffic down Marine Drive, a Lovemate local train rattling between the washing-strung frontages of chawls, the chlorine-blue of the swimming pool at the Oberoi Towers and the cupped hands of beggars thrust like razor clams through the sand of Chowpatty Beach. The flooded green of a lawn of black umbrellas under the monsoon's curtain has no less reality than the green baize of an office inside the liner-white block of Mantralaya. It earths the Dickensian tendencies of the human characters whom Ghote has to wend his dogged way among, inconveniently factual even at their most flamboyant. Amjad Khan pulls out the Sydney Greenstreet stops as the expansively blusterous and epicurean builder Lala Heera Lal while Madhur Jaffrey in two scenes as his imperious wife blocks even the mildest hints of questioning as keenly as crucible steel. "What a woman. She was all the time giving me the feeling of being without my trousers on." Approaching the rest of the suspicious household nets a varied array of deflection, obstruction, and wasted time from Sakina Jaffrey as the languid daughter-in-law, Dilip Tahil as her ostentatiously clubbable husband, and Nayeem Hafizka as the histrionic younger brother whose room is exhaustingly tacked with self-portraits as Sherlock Holmes and posters for Spellbound (1945) and Vertigo (1958), insisting on playing the proper part of a murder suspect all the while the victim who could be a witness lies shtum under medical care and Parsi prayers, Dinshaw Daji's Mr. Perfect. "This is the sort of difficulty you have in police work in this city. If only people would behave in a simple, reasonable, logical manner!" It's too much to ask of even the heroes of this caper, out of sorts, out of place, out of luck, splashed with Holi dye or literally losing their shirt. Spouses in real life, Shah and Ratna Pathak have fun with the fractious marriage of the Ghotes, which would be far less in the soup if he would just once come home from work on time; the wistful fantasy he builds of her as the tranquil, docile, ideal Hindu wife would swerve too close to a shrew joke except for the time he brings the rescued Axel home for supper and Pratima turns on the best-bangled, bindi-dabbed, lord-and-master act with cut-diamond sarcasm. To complete the family business, their infant son Ved is an early cradle-credit for Imaad Shah. The sun in the intermingled score of synths, sarangi, and tabla by Richard Robbins, Sultan Khan, and Zakir Hussein catches on fish-scale silver, mango-skin gold, the half-risen skyscrapers of a city pushing itself toward maximum. Keating who famously wrote the first nine Inspector Ghote novels without visiting India for himself makes his Hitchcock cameo at the international terminal, waiting to catch the next flight back to Europe.

It can be an awkward movie. Its mix of Englishes and untranslated Hindi is no strain to be immersed in, but the loose, improvisatory feel of much of its dialogue means it has no pacing to speak of even when it has to hit its marks of revelation and its tonal shifts are sometimes more collision than collage; it is refreshing to find a detective film without an exchange of gunfire, but it could have deleted one of its billboard-tearing, barrow-overturning chase scenes that never fail to leave a wackier level of disorder in their wake than the sufficient bewilderment of yet another investigative dead end. All the same, when Axel with his farewell gift of a kurta draped like a college sweater around his shoulders swings back at the gate to shout his characteristically no-chill support for Ghote across the crowded terminal, the viewer may regret that with an eventual twenty-five novels to choose from, there were not more screen translations made of these odd little mysteries, "altogether upside down." I watched this one because I was intrigued by its peripheral Merchant Ivory-ness in the same way as the occasional co-productions of Powell and Pressburger for other writers and directors and as was the case with Vernon Sewell and Gordon Wellesley's The Silver Fleet (1943), I did not regret its hour and a half of my time. I got its dead-out-of-print DVD out of the Minuteman Library Network since the quality of the version available on YouTube actually is ghastly even without the random audio drop-outs or the smear like tape across the lens. It deserves better, this sweet and slightly bemusing snapshot starring a pair of actors who have had my phone book recommendation for years. This welcome brought to you by my upside-down backers at Patreon.

The swallows have returned to Capistrano: last night there were three student parties on our street alone and a fourth around the corner. We are waiting to see if this weekend will bring a new installment of upstairs neighbors.

I opened the refrigerator door and the Brita pitcher fell off its shelf and disintegrated itself in several gallons across the hardwood, so the first thing I did within two minutes of getting up was essentially wash the kitchen floor. I spent the afternoon drying a load of towels and drinking cans of seltzer.

It jarred out of my head too much of the dream I had just woken up from, the slippage of a kitchen sink drama written by a less commonly revived playwright than Shelagh Delaney: a teenage girl and her father who was just about the same age when she was born and still has such a fecklessly fox-boned, adolescent look himself, the two of them as they knock about town, him getting into more fights than holding down jobs, always telling the secret histories of their city which sound half like industrial legend and half like he just made them up, are more often mistaken for a couple than his actual girlfriend with whom he seems to interact most in the form of sincerely less successful apologies. They are clearly each other's half of a double star, a nearly closed system without jealousy, only the exhilaratingly irresponsible habit of dodging the adult world as if it were the two of them against it. It is unsensationally apparent to the audience long before it would cross any other character's mind that in addition to his total improvisation of parenting, he is doing his damnedest not to pass on the next generation of his own implicitly incestuous abuse, which does him credit and gives him little help in figuring out how to support his daughter through a transition he never quite managed himself. Toward the end, it started to flicker between stage sets and the plain world, between rehearsals and history. "I won't meet you," I had to tell the actor, standing in between scenes outside the year of the original production, the same fragile shoulders and thistle-blond hair of his photographs in the role: he would be dead decades before I heard of the play, much less managed to track a copy down. I could tell him that his children had gone into the arts. Onstage she was outgrowing his frozen boyishness and if he could catch up to her, he would still have to let her go.

asakiyume linked Residente's "This is Not America (feat. Ibeyi)" (2022) and it made me think of Elizma's "Modern Life" (2025), both of which should come with content warnings for current events.

I have discovered that BBC Sounds became region-locked about a month ago, which means that one of my major sources for randomly discoverable audio drama seems to have spiraled down the drain. I am completely indifferent to podcasts. I am a simple person and just wanted to listen again to Lieutenant Commander Thomas Woodrooffe being just as lit up as the fleet.

It is no discredit to a warhorse of crime fiction like The Gaunt Stranger (1938) that its ending surprised me the most Doylistically. From my twenty-first-century vantage, it may be even more delightful than it would have played at the time.

My chances of coming to it unspoiled then, of course, would have been basically nil. It was the third screen and second sound version of its popular source material, the 1925 Edgar Wallace novel of the same name which had been definitively rewritten following its smash stage run as The Ringer (1926), so called after the alias of its central figure, the elusive master of disguise whose legal identity of Henry Arthur Milton has never helped Scotland Yard get a fix on his movements, his intentions, or his face. "Don't they call him the Ringer because he rings the changes on himself? Why, in Deptford they say he can even change the color of his eyes." What they've said for two years at the Yard is that he died trying to outswim a bullet in Sydney Harbour, but recently his reputation has disconcertingly resurfaced in the Karswell-like card accompanying the delivery of a wreath of lilies to a caddish crook of a London lawyer: "R.I.P. To the Memory of Maurice Meister, who will depart this life on the seventeenth of November. —'The Ringer.'" Copycat or resurrection, the threat has to be taken seriously. The smooth solicitor who doubles as an informer and a notoriously uncaught fence has on his hands, too, the suicide of the previous in his string of pretty secretaries, the Ringer's own sister. The forty-eight-hour deadline runs out on the anniversary of her death. Even if it's just some local villain trading on the scandal to raise a scare, the authorities can't take the chance of not scrambling round-the-clock protection for the victim-elect, devoting their slim margin for error to trying to outthink an adversary they have only the sketchiest, most contradictory clues toward, pointing as much to a runaround as to the unenviable prospect of the real, shape-shifting Ringer, who like all the best phantoms could be standing quietly at the elbow of the law all the while. "King Street! He'd walk on Regent Street. If he felt that way, he'd come right here to Scotland Yard and never turn a hair."

Properly a thriller rather than a fair-play detective story, The Gaunt Stranger has less of a plot than a mixed assortment of red herrings to be strewn liberally whenever the audience is in danger of guessing right; the tight cast renders it sort of the cop-shop equivalent of a country house mystery while the convolutions build to the point of comedy even as the clock ticks down to a dead serious stop. Christie-like, it has an excuse for its slip-sliding tone. Decent, dedicated, even a bit of an underdog with this case landed in his lap by divisional inconvenience, Detective Inspector Alan Wembury (Patrick Barr) sums up the problem with it: "If the Ringer does bump Meister off, he'll be doing a public service." The most extra-diegetically law-abiding viewer may see his point. With his silken sadist's voice and his smile folded like a knife, Meister (Wilfred Lawson) is the kind of bounder of the first water who even in nerve-racked protective custody, distracting himself from the pendulum slice of the hours with stiff drinks and gramophone records of Wagner, still finds time to toy with the well-bred, hard-up siblings of Mary and Johnny Lenley (Patricia Roc and Peter Croft), cultivating the one as his grateful secretary in brazen reprise of his old tricks and maneuvering the other into blowing his ticket of leave before he can talk his sister out of the trap. "Have you ever seen a weasel being kind to a rabbit?" Offered a year's remission on his sentence if he helps the police out, sarkily skittish second-story man Sam Hackett (Sonnie Hale) wants no part of this farrago of arch-criminals and threats from beyond the grave just because he once happened to share digs with the Ringer and drew the short straw of catching a more or less unobstructed view of the man; it accords him the dubious honor of the best lead on the case and he makes sure to state for the record as he resigns himself to the role, "Give my kindest regards to the Ringer and tell him I highly recommend rat poison." The audience might as well sit back and genre-savvily enjoy the ride. Should we trust the credentials of the glowering DI Bliss (John Longden), freshly returned from Australia on the supposed track of the Ringer's widow and grown such a mustache in his five years abroad that even his former collar doesn't recognize him until he's flashed his badge? Since the order for the funereal flowers was cabled from her stateroom aboard the liner Baronia, should we presume that Cora Ann Milton (Louise Henry) smuggled her living husband into the country or that she's the real mastermind of the plot against Meister, effectively impersonating her dead man to avenge his sister? The entrance she makes at the Flanders Lane station is as striking as her dark, insouciant looks or her American accent, too shrewd to be written off as a mere moll; stepping out of the mirror-door that leads so conveniently for a receiver of stolen goods down to the brick-arched river, she gives the locked-in lawyer the shock of a revenger's ghost herself. "Don't worry. I'm alone." Not only because one of his cherished classical records has played instead an ominous bulletin from the Ringer—a cold theatrical voice, as impossible to trace as greasepaint—the proceedings begin to take on a haunted-house quality, not unbefitting a film whose most important character heading into the home stretch is still Schrödinger's dead. At 71 minutes and fluttering out fast, rest assured it will not sober up too much for break-ins, fake-outs, or the dry commentary of Dr. Anthony Lomond (Alexander Knox), the division's irreplaceably cantankerous amateur criminologist who was introduced waving off a request for his medical opinion with the time-honored "Och, Wembury, I'm not a doctor, I'm a police surgeon. Call me in when he's been murdered." Grey-spry, he has a catlike habit of tucking his feet up on unexpected furniture, briar-smoking like a fumarole. Tragedy tomorrow, eccentricity tonight.

( You're the only doctor I've met who puts his faith in patent medicines. )

Despite its programmer values, The Gaunt Stranger has a quirkily important pedigree: in the clever titles of theatrical posters caught in a passing constable's torch-flash, I spotted Sidney Gilliat as the author of the fleetly tangled screenplay and Ronald Neame as the DP who made more out of low light than the studio sets, but did not realize until after the fact that it was the very first film produced at Ealing under the auspices of Michael Balcon. I had known it was the first screen credit of Alex Knox. I don't know what about his face made casting directors want to stick a mustache and at least ten years' worth of stage grey on it, but he was playing middle-aged again when he reappeared for Ealing in a small, astringent, bookkeeperly role in the next year's Cheer Boys Cheer (1939), now regarded thanks to its plot of a small traditional brewery wilily outwitting its heavier-weight corporate competitor as the forerunner of the classic post-war Ealing comedies. By 1940 he had been collected by Hollywood from Broadway and I don't see how not to wonder if under less transatlantic conditions he might have continued with Ealing into the '40's and their splendidly weird array of wartime films. Or pulled a John Clements and stuck for most of his life to the stage: I have been calling him a shape-changer because it was obviously one of his gifts and his inclination—and in hindsight, something of a joke on this movie—but it makes it very difficult to guess seriously where he could have ended up. In any case, the existence in this timeline of The Gaunt Stranger on out-of-print Region 2 DVD makes me all the more grateful that someone just stuck it up on Dailymotion. It's a modest B-film, not a mislaid gem, but any number of movies of that class have infinitely improved my life. The title pertains in no way to the action. "And don't be so darned sure there's nothing to be afraid of at Scotland Yard." This shadow brought to you by my pretty backers at Patreon.