From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin- Out Of The Film Noir Night- “Impact”

DVD Review

Impact, starring Brain Donlevy, Ella Raines, United Artists, 1949

…some guys, some tough customer guys, who would think nothing, nothing at all of rearranging your face for you, or run an off-hand sword through your heart just to see you bleed in primitive times, or today, today in modern times, what with everything all civilized and sewed up in those more physical fields, maybe cut your throat in the global financial markets, something like that, and laugh, laugh hard, when you come to his door asking for a dollar, but who will melt like butter if some femme fatale dame just whistles, or maybe just thinks about whistling. Go all to putty and so much purr at their beck and call.

Take Walter, yah, let’s take Walter, a big captain of industry in ‘Frisco town, widgets or something, in the film under review, Impact, a guy who would run you out of business and not look back to keep business up, keep production up, and, incidentally, to keep his ever-loving wife Irene in trinkets and toys. So naturally if she was a little out of sorts on any given day (most days) old Walter was at the ready to chase away her blues. Yah, Mr. Softy (a little inside coo-coo between our pair like a lot of couples but read Mr. Sucker, okay) would drop the daily production schedule, or fly forthwith (nice) out of a board meeting if his femme had the vapors, or the hint of such troubles.

But our teddy bear Mr. Softy had a problem, a big problem, his ever-loving Irene was two-timing him with some be-bop Jimmy, all hip suited out, a guy who knew all the angles, at least all the angles on how to get out of cheap street by latching on to Irene. Of course, old Irene had Mr. Jimmy on a string too and will have him too jumping through hoops at her first sign of the vapors. Now two-timing women (men too but this is about a woman), two-timing women in film noir anyway, have two choices- grab a divorce Reno-style and slide down to cheap street with fancy Dan Mr. Jimmy or take dear hubby Walter out of the picture permanently, yes, the big sleep, and then just spend her days with Jimmy (or the next best thing) counting up the proceeds from his estate. Guess which option Irene took.

Now here is something anyone, even a rookie at film noir, can take as wisdom from the ages, murder, murder most foul, is nothing for amateurs to fool around with. Leave such doings to the pros. Naturally Irene’s hare- brain scheme (hare –brain for openers for expecting hep cat Jimmy, maybe high on some goof balls, to stay calm enough to commit a capital crime and survive) breaks down in the execution. This caper was to involve Jimmy, posing as an Irene cousin needing a ride from ‘Frisco town east, to meet Walter in front of a Rexall drugstore in Sausalito, go from there to some convenient isolated spot along the highway after feigning car trouble and bop old Walter over the head hard, real hard. Done, well almost done, except two important factors, Jimmy didn’t hit Walter hard enough and Jimmy, damn those goof balls, wound up dead after colliding with an oil tanker truck during his get-away.

After Walter woke up (literally and figuratively) he finally figured out the score with Irene and it didn’t work in his favor so he drifted off east, east to Podunk Idaho where he, if you can believe this, started a new life as a lowly but very efficient auto mechanic for a good simple country woman boss, Marsha, and war widow (World War II if you are asking) who also became his new love interest. And Irene? Oh yah she was sitting a little peevishly in pre-trial confinement for the murder of her husband, her Walter. Ironic right, and served her right. Well almost. See Walter (and his country honey, after he tells her the skinny) cannot let even evil Irene step off for the big one since he is very much alive. So he returned to ‘Frisco town to face the music.

And here is the real beauty of all those evil femme fatales from Mary Astor (The Maltese Falcon) to Jane Greer (Out Of The Past) and their film sisterhood Irene in a fit of hubris (or maybe vapors) switched up on Walter and set him up for Jimmy’s death, Jimmy’s murder in her book. Beautiful. So Walter, as he must as a gallant, had to defend himself against a murder rap. And it really did look like he was going to take the fall. Not to worry though Irene will get hers, will get her just desserts. And what do you bet old Marsha will have tough guy Walter (or whatever little inside coo-coo name our pair like a lot of couples work out) jumping through hoops for her before things go too far…

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin- Peter Paul Markin’s Stew

                                                

 

Jesus, Peter Paul Markin was in a fine stew. I had, over the part forty plus years that I have known him since we first met on a Russian Hill park in San Francisco during the Summer of Love, 1967, seen him in a dither on many occasions, most not worthy of discussion, or mention, but this one was different. This was one of those furies that might not past, especially since it involved his very essence as he called it. A few weeks back on one lonely night he called me up and said he wanted to talk, talk seriously, which tipped me off that I was in for an earful. Later that night at the Surfside Bar over on Main in Ocean City after a few preliminary drinks he let go. For the next two or so hours he, calmly mostly, ran through his life time of grievances, tics, weird allusions and just plain funk on the subject of femmes, fatale or otherwise.  I tried to take notes as I as is my wont in these infrequent tirades but I make no claim that I got everything right. Here is the gist of his complaint:   

First off Markin (let’s leave it at that since I have already introduced his full name and that is what I have taken to call him of late since Peter Paul seems too ornate and his childhood Pee-Pee, well too childhoody) said he was tired, tired of remembering and writing about remembering that had been his lot for the past several years. On the top of that list was remembering writing and remembering, fatally remembering, those femme fatales that he was addicted to watching on old time black and white film noir flicks. He spoke of the addiction, of his self-imposed addiction, like it was a curse that had befallen him and that he, and he alone, needed to clear the memories of those ancient females who did what they had to do, including a little rough stuff, boom- boom rough stuff or a case of the run offs come hell or high water. See, he said, in those days, and maybe now too although frails (women in his old-time corner boy remembrance Billie Bradley working class Adamsville, Ma. projects days term) have their own dough more now, a woman had to look out for herself, especially working women who it didn’t take much to put on cheap street, walking some red light streets, or in some broken down wreck of a whore house working night to five (night to day) doing what they had tried to avoid doing  and so they had to take the main chance when they got it. Especially good- looking frills (another Billie-ism, okay) who maybe didn’t finish high school, maybe were faced with serving them off the arm in some cheap jack hash house, maybe charging a dime a dance in some clip joint, or maybe just avoiding the boss’ passes while taking dictation in some seventh floor seedy run down office building on the back streets of town peopled by in your face repo men, failed dentists, shady chiropractors, flim-flam insurance guys,  peeping tom gumshoes and assorted other low life but who had, well, had looks, and a certain way of carrying herself, but mainly the scent, that scent that told every guy, rich or poor, that here comes trouble and what are you going to do about it.     

Naturally when old Pee-Pee (his nickname from those Billie day neighborhoods and the last time I will use it here, sorry) got into second gear about femme fatales he (and I) knew that the subject of one Jane Greer would come up. I braced myself although I too could have recited the story he would relate chapter and verse. See I had seen (at his suggestion) Jane Greer in the 1946 classic Out Of The Past although he conveniently forgot that hard fact when he was in the stews. Of course Ms. Greer’s dilemma touched old Markin’s larcenous heart. Seemed that hard pressed drop dead beautiful working girl Jane (if you want to cut to the chase here and look the story up at its Wikipedia entry feel free to do so and as well get the character names because I am using their acting names here) was just the slightest bit trigger- happy and put a slug in her sugar daddy, one Kirk Douglas. She split but not without taking a fistful of his dough (Markin loved that part, the taking the dough “for services rendered” part and if you think about it whatever she did do she earned that dough, earned it the hard way).

Naturally one sugar daddy, one connected don (maybe connected, maybe a free-agent but with muscle and no scruples) did not get, or keep, his sugar by being a patsy, especially not to some twisted forty-five happy gunsel dame. So he hired gumshoe Robert Mitchum (and his partner) to get the damn dough, and bring milady back into the fold. And so the chase was on, well, almost was on because once old Robert got a look at her down in some dusty old Mexican cantina, no, got a whiff of that gardenia, or whatever perfume, even before she came through the door he knew he was hooked. Markin figured that Robert he had it figured that she would be a looker maybe he figured he could withstand that scent, and maybe the slow afternoon whiskies just got to him once he knew he had to have her. Hooked by a femme just as bad as a man can be hooked. So they ran away back to the states and lived happily ever after. Right?

No way. You forgot about Kirk and his little sense of manhood, and maybe Jane and her wants to. He sent the gumshoe partner off to get this pair and the partner does finally find them. Except then Jane’s little problem with guns came back into play. Boom, boom dead partner and she skipped town letting Robert play the fall guy, or at least a prime candidate for that distinction. But all came out well in the end, the noir end. Jane found her way, as a struggling girl must, back to Kirk. But Kirk would be well-advised to not turn his back even a quarter- turn when Jane had her wanting habits on.  In the meantime Kirk accidently found out where Robert was holing up, some Podunk town out on the edge of oblivion, they have a am not man powwow and Jane in one last gallant act shot Kirk in order to run away with Robert. But dear Robert had by then learned a lesson or two in life, kind of, and so he crossed up the deal. Crossed it up so bad that Jane, in one last blaze of glory, put a couple in Robert for double-crossing her. So in the end all three were RIP. "What a woman," Markin said almost in a sacred whisper before stating that, hell, he had told that story seventeen different ways, including having her cast as some avenging Madonna angel of the streets out to avenge the historic gash left by primordial man before the fall, and enough was enough. Yah, the stews.

Almost enough that is. Before I could get a yah in edgewise he was off on another femme binge this time whimpering about Miss Lana Turner, damn Miss Turner, who played some California (by way of Okie/Arkie dust bowl beginnings looking  some walking daddy to run rings around) tramp round-hell whore who picked up some gabacho old guy and who was serving them off the arm at his seaside diner when Mister John Garfield went left instead of right at the stop where he was left off by some hobo-saving trucker in The Postman Always Rings Twice. When our boy John saw her coming through the door, all dressed in white and ready, ready for anything, and started licking his chops he was doomed just like probably ten million Lana guys before him. Yes Lana had seen the dark side of life and she wanted her’s, wanted it all. And John bought into her dreams, or maybe just that jasmine scent that kept him awake every night until, well, just until. I told you he was hooked, hooked as bad as a man could be hooked, maybe even worst that Robert Mitchum. Jesus. So when dear Lana suggested that all that stood between them and happiness was old hubby the plan was hatched, hatched to perfection.  

Except don’t trust amateurs in the murder racket. This pair screwed up about

six-ways- to-Sunday, screwed it up so bad that it was only just when the deal went down that Frank, Frank was left alone to take the rap. Taking the rap and begging for long gone Lana’s smile up in some death row prison cell. The way Markin told it though was like Lana was another one of those  Madonna of the streets frails, some virginal vestige of all the bad that could happen to a woman and so she needed, more, she was entitled, to grab, and grab hard for whatever small solace she could dig out of this wicked old world. But Markin yelled, one of his very few outright eruptions, that he had done that story about eighteen different ways, including switching it up and having her as nothing but a money-grubbing man-hater, all men, maybe going back to some unspoken abusive father creeping up to her room time, and while Lana, and her ilk, deserved better that is the way that kind of story went. Basta,    

So finally he was done with the femme tale stuff, right? No, no way, he still had the trifecta to complete, the ankle bracelet story. Well that ankle bracelet doesn’t play much of a part in the story but that is what Markin always called it when he cornered somebody long enough to tell this tale this Double Indemnity plot line and how poor Barbara Stanwyck really did get the short end of the stick when all was said and done. Barbara needed dough, well she just needed dough, don’t ask the reason maybe just some deprived, depraved childhood or something. But what she really needed was a guy who could do some heavy lifting, was ready to jump hoops for her, and like it. Enter one Fred MacMurray who once he got a load of the ankle bracelet and looked up he was hooked, need I say it, hooked as bad as a man could be hooked and still breath. See Fred sold insurance, life insurance, with nice little riders for double indemnity, extra sugar, in case of some accidental death, like falling off the club car of a slow-moving train that fell from the sky. Manna, pure manna.

So Fred and Barbara were going to be on easy street after this little caper, no problems. Problem is the insurance company that Fred worked for had a tenacious fraud investigator, Edward G. Robinson (more frequently seen working the bang-bang bad guy, guys like mobbed-up Johnny Rico in Key Largo) who almost fouled the plan up except the pair start distrusting each other and saved him the trouble by shooting each other up, bang, bang. Yes, Barbara was a queen-sized femme maybe having had a hand in off-handedly knocking off hubby’s first wife to get to the prize and then tripping up poor Fred. But that crime doesn’t pay thing Markin complained of had been done by him about nineteen different ways, including the inevitable Eve substitute thing that he had a thing about, before. Enough of femmes, enough of driving guys crazy perfumes (or ankle bracelets, for that matter), and enough of guys trying figure them out. Including Markin.             

With those several mouthfuls you would have thought that Markin had exhausted his venomous ways. Had gotten his remembering hurts off his chest. No, not by a long shot. Once he had gotten film noir queens out of the way he was just getting up to speed. I will spare the reader a little eyesight though and summarize that he went through just about every frill that had done him wrong since about childhood. 

Some bath soap elementary school thing named Rosalind who turned on him because he didn’t have the right clothes or something the way he told it, some perfumed pre-teen named Maria who refused to take a “clipped” (stolen, petty larceny stolen with friend Billie) cheapo onyx ring as a sign of his eternal devotion, a couple of college girls who sounded to me like they were just doing it as a lark, one clearly just slumming before moving on to her dream stockbroker, more that I had previously known about south of the border senorita-led  failed drug deal stuff with a couple of dead hombres face down in some dusty Sonora back street, the usual three or ten failed marriage, live together, night together, week together things half the world has been through without becoming apoplectic  about femmes at sixty-something , and about six others that I couldn’t keep straight by the time the tirade ended. He even brought in Butterfly Swirl, a Botticelli-picture girl, that I had “stolen” from him out in San Francisco back in the ‘60s and how she dope smoked up the world and left him flat (neglecting to finish for me, although in the end she, Botticelli vision or not, left me for her old time golden-haired surfer boy back in Carlsbad). Then he finished up, finished up classic Markin, with this beauty- “What’s a guy to do when that scent gets to a man.” What, indeed. Jesus, the stews.

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin- Peter Paul Markin’s Stew

 

 

 

Jesus, Peter Paul Markin was in a fine stew. I had, over the part forty plus years that I have known him since we first met on a Russian Hill park in San Francisco during the Summer of Love, 1967, seen him in a dither on many occasions, most not worthy of discussion , or mention, but this was different. This was one of those furies that might not past, especially since it involved his very essence as he called it. A few weeks back on one lonely night he called me up and said he wanted to talk, talk seriously, which tipped me off that I was in for an earful. Later that night at the Surfside Bar over on Main in Ocean City after a few preliminary drinks he let go. For the next two or so hours he, calmly mostly, ran through his life time of grievances, tics, weird allusions and just plain funk. I tried to take notes as I as is my wont in these infrequent tirades but I make no claim that I got everything right. Here is the gist of his complaint.   

First off Peter Paul Markin said he was tired, tired of remembering and writing about remembering. On the top of that list was remembering writing and remembering, fatally remembering, those femme fatales that he was addicted to watching on old time black and white film noir flicks. He spoke of the addiction like it was a curse that befell him and that he, and he alone, needed to clear the memories of those ancient females who did what they had to do, come hell or high water. See, he said, in those days, and maybe now too although frails (women in his old-time corner boy remembrance Billie Bradley working class Adamsville, Ma. projects days term) have their own dough more now, a woman had to look out for herself, especially working women who it didn’t take much to put on cheap street and so they had to take the main chance when they got it. Especially good- looking frills (another Billie-ism, okay) who maybe didn’t finish high school, maybe were faced with serving them off the arm in some cheap jack hash house, maybe charging a dime a dance in some clip joint, or maybe just avoiding the boss’ passes while taking dictation in some seventh floor seedy run down office building but who had, well, had looks, and a certain way of carrying herself, but mainly the scent, that scent that told every guy, rich or poor, that here comes trouble and what are you going to do about it.     

Naturally when old Pee-Pee (his nickname from those Billie day neighborhoods) got into second gear about femme fatales he (and I) knew that the subject of one Jane Greer would come up. I braced myself although I too could have recited the story he would relate chapter and verse. See I had seen (at his suggestion) Jane Greer in the 1946 classic Old Of The Past although he conveniently forgot that hard fact when he was in the stews. Of course  Ms. Greer’s dilemma touched old Pee-Pee’s larcenous heart. Seemed that hard pressed working girl Jane (if you want to cut to the chase here and look the story up at its Wikipedia entry feel free to do so and as well get the character names because I am using their acting names here) was just the slightest bit trigger happy and put a slug in her sugar daddy, one Kirk Douglas. She split but not without taking a fistful of his dough (Pee-Pee loved that part, the “for services rendered” part).

Naturally one sugar daddy, one connected don,  did not get, or keep, his sugar by being a patsy, especially not to some twisted gunsel dame. So he hired gumshoe Robert Mitchum (and his partner) to get the damn dough, and bring milady back into the fold . And so the chase was on, well, almost was on because once old Robert got a look at her down in some dusty old Mexican cantina, no, got a whiff of that gardenia , or whatever perfume, even before she came through the door he knew he was hooked. Hooked by a femme just as bad as a man can be hooked. So they ran away and lived happily ever after. Right?

No way. You forgot about Kirk and his little sense of manhood, and maybe Jane and her wants to. He sent the gumshoe partner off to get this pair and he does finally find them. Except then Jane’s little problem with guns came back into play. Boom, boom dead partner and she skipped town letting Robert play the fall guy, or at least a prime candidate for that distinction. But all comes out well in the end, the noir end. Jane found her way, as a struggling girl must, back to Kirk, Kirk accidently found  out where Robert was holing up, they have a powwow and Jane in one last gallant act shot Kirk in order to run away with Robert. But dear Robert had by then learned a lesson or two in life, kind of, and so he crossed up the deal. Jane in one last blaze of glory puts a couple in Robert for double-crossing her. In the end all three are RIP. What a woman Pee- Pee said almost in a sacred whisper before stating that, hell, he had told that story seventeen different ways and enough was enough. Yah, the stews.

Almost enough that is. Before I could get a yah in edgewise he was off on another femme binge this time whimpering about Miss Lana Turner , damn Miss Turner, who played  some California (by way of Okie/Arkie dust bowl beginnings) tramp who picked up some gabacho old guy and who was serving them off the arm at his seaside diner when Mister John Garfield went left instead of right at the stop where he was left off by some hobo-saving trucker in The Postman Always Rings Twice. When our boy John saw her coming through the door, all dressed in white and ready, ready for anything, and started licking his chops he was doomed just like probably ten million Lana guys before him. Yes Lana had seen the dark side of life and she wanted her’s, wanted it all. And John bought into her dreams, or maybe just that jasmine scent that kept him awake every night until, well, just until, I told you he was hooked, hooked as bad as a man could be hooked, maybe even worst that Robert Mitchum. Jesus. So when dear Lana suggested that all that stood between them and happiness was old hubby the plan was hatched, hatched to perfection.  

Except don’t trust amateurs in the murder racket. This pair screwed up about six- way to Sunday, screwed it up so bad that it was only just when the deal went down that Frank, Frank was left alone to take the rap. Taking the rap and begging for long gone Lana’s smile up in some death row prison cell. The way Pee-Pee told it though was like Lana was some Madonna of the streets, some virginal vestige of all the bad that could happen to a woman and so she needed, more, she was entitled, to grab, and grab hard for whatever small solace she could dig out of this wicked old world. But Pee-Pee yelled, one of his very few eruptions that, he had done that story about eighteen different ways and while Lana, and her ilk, deserved better that is the way that kind of story went. Basta,     

So finally he was done with the femme tale stuff, right? No, no way he still had the trifecta to complete, the ankle bracklet story. Well that ankle bracklet doesn’t play much of a part in the story but that is what Pee-Pee always called it when he cornered somebody long enough to tell this tale this Double Indemnity plot line and how poor Barbara Standwyck really did get the short end of the stick when all was said and done. Barbara needed dough, well she just needed dough, don’t ask the reason maybe just some depraved childhood or something. But what she really needed was a guy who could do some heavy lifting, was ready to jump hoops for her, and like it. Enter one Fred MacMurray who once he got a load of the ankle bracklet and looked up he was hooked, need I say it, hooked as bad as a man could be hooked and still breath. See Fred sold insurance, life insurance, with nice little riders for double indemnity in case of some accidental death, like falling off the club car of a slow-moving train fell from the sky. Manna, pure manna. So Fred and Barbara were going to be on easy street after this little caper, no problems. Problem is the insurance company that Fred works for has a tenacious fraud investigator, Edward G. Robinson (more frequently seen working the bang-bang bad guy, guys like mobbed-up Johnny Rico in Key Largo) who almost fouls the plan up except the pair start distrusting each other and save him the trouble by shooting each other up, bang, bang. Yes, Barbara was a queen-sized  femme maybe having had a hand in off-handedly knocking off hubby’s first wife to get to the prize and then tripping up poor Fred. But that crime doesn’t pay thing Pee-Pee complained had been done by him about nineteen different ways before. Enough of femmes, enough of driving guys crazy perfumes (or ankle bracelets for that matter), and enough of guys trying figure them out. Including Pee-Pee.             

With those several mouthfuls you would have thought that Pee-Pee had exhausted his venomous ways. No, not by a long shot. Once he had gotten film noir queens out of the way he was just getting up to speed. I will spare the reader a little eyesight though and summarize that he went through  just about every frill that had done him wrong since about childhood,  some bath soap thing named Rosalind, some perfumed  pre-teen named Maria, a couple of college girls who sounded to me like they were just doing it as a lark, more south of the border senorita failed drug deal stuff, and about six others that even I couldn’t keep straight by the time the tirade ended. He even brought in Butterfly Swirl, a Botticelli girl that I had “stolen” from him out in San Francisco back in the ‘60s. Then he finished up, finished up classic Pee-Pee, with this beauty- “What’s a guy to do when that scent gets to a man” What, indeed. Jesus, the stews.      

 

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin- Johnny Shea’s Femme Fatale Moment

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the classic femme fatale film Out Of The Past to set the scene below.

Jim Sweeney was a great fan of 1940s and 1950s film noir, especially those that featured enticing femme fatales who knew, without lifting a finger sometimes, how to twist a guy in knots and make him like it without working up a hard breathe. He had been crazy for noir since he was kid growing up in 1950s Nashua, New Hampshire where he would go to the old Strand Theater (long since torn down) on Main Street every Saturday afternoon, sometimes with his boys, sometimes alone, although then he didn’t know femme fatale or film noir words from a hole in the wall. What he did know, and maybe only sub-consciously as he thought about it later when he discussed the issue with those same boys, was that dames, those femmes on the screen anyway, were poison, but what was a guy going to do when he drew that ticket. Take the ride, see what happened, and hope you drew a good femme.

Yes, Jim was a dreamer, a weaver of dreams, a sunny side of life guy, and that was why Billy Riley was surprised when he told him this story about Johnny Shea a few years ago, a guy Jim said put him in the shade for being crazy about femme fatales, and a guy who did not by any stretch of the imagination draw a good femme. Funny, Jim said, that back in the neighborhood corner boy young days, the days of hanging out in front of Joyce’s Variety Store over on Third Street in the Irishtown section of town down by the Merrimac River, Johnny would walk away when anybody spoke of what he called those mushy noir films. His thing was the sci-fi thrillers that scared everybody out of their wits thinking the commies or some awful thing from outer space, or both, was headed straight for Nashua, and would leave no survivors. It was only later, sometime in the 1980s when Johnny was down on his luck a little and happened to spend a spare afternoon on 42nd Street in New York City in the Bijou Theater where they played revival films, that he got “religion.” The film: Humphrey Bogart played his Sam Spade heart out to nefarious Mary Astor’s Bridget O'Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon and the rest was history.

Billy got to thinking about Jim’s story again recently as he had periodically whenever the subject of noir came to the surface. He was watching a film noir, Impact, a strictly B-noir as far as the story line went, but with a femme worthy of the greats like sultry Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity or coolly calculating Rita Hayworth in The Lady From Shang-hai. This Irene (played by Helen Walker) was nothing but a young gold-digger, strictly from cheap street, but she had a plan to murder her rich husband, some San Francisco swell, and run off with her boyfriend after he did dear hubby in. A scheme just like many dames have cooked up ever since Adam and Eve, maybe before.


Well things didn’t work out as planned, boyfriend (who acted like a hopped up junkie while he was on screen and may explain why things went awry) didn’t finish the job so hubby didn’t die but was just left in some sierra gully to croak, boyfriend carelessly got himself killed in an accident trying to flee the scene, hubby put two and two together finally when he woke up in that ditch and instead of heading back to ‘Frisco then tried to start a new anonymous life. Meanwhile sweet poison Irene was being held for his murder. She was all set to take the fall, to take the big stretch when, prodded by so “good” woman out in Podunk who had entered hubby’s new life, he decided to come clean. Our Irene then in a reverse twist framed, framed hubby big time, for the murder of her boyfriend. Beautiful.


That is why Billy always said that he would listen to a femme tale any time one passed his way. He only asked that the teller make it interesting and not too goofy. See goofy in Billy’s book was just like a million guys get with any dame under any circumstances. He only wanted to hear about guys; hard-nosed guys like Johnny Shea who had been around the block with a frail and lived to tell about it, and who got all tied up in knots about it and were ready to ask for more. Here is how Billy remembered Jim telling him his Johnny Shea story, maybe a little off after passing though double hearsay as they say in the courts but certainly with the ring of truth around it :

“He, Johnny Shea, Johnny Jukes, from the old neighborhood up in Nashua, was on record, maybe not a swear on the bible take it to court under oath type record but on record, as being very much enthralled by the bad femme fatales of film noir [of course now from a safe cinematic distance ]. Funny as a kid Johnny would go off the deep end when I mentioned some such film and walk away while I was telling the “lesson” I learned about women and life from a show I had seen at the Saturday matinee. But back in the 1980s when he would show up in the old town every now and then and gather the old corner boys around him he would go on and on about how, let’s say, Jane Greer in Out Of The Past off-handedly shot her kept man, Kirk Douglas (or did he keep her, a matter very much in dispute), then put a bullet or six in some snooping sleuth who crowded her just a little and for lunch, just for kicks, turned the tables on a guy, Robert Mitchum, a stray slightly off-center guy built to handle rough stuff if necessary who thought maybe he could help her out of a jam after he got a look at her and a whiff of that gardenia perfume or whatever she was wearing that made him crazy. Johnny would especially go into detail about how hefty Mitchum would sit around drinking in some dusty desolate cantina down in Mexico, maybe, Tampico, maybe Cuernavaca, he forgot, and who was putty in dear Jane’s hands when she walked through the cantina door. Yes, she was a stone-cold killer, blood simple they call it in some quarters, and Johnny couldn’t get enough of her.


On an off day, or when Johnny got tired of telling, and we got tired of listening, about some newly discovered move Jane put on after watching that film for the fifteenth time, he would go on and on about glamorous, 1940s glamorous (although maybe eternal glamorous when you look at her pin-up pictures even today) Rita Hayworth as she framed, framed big time, one Orson Welles in The Lady From Shang-hai just because his was a little smitten with her after smelling that come hither fragrance. She wanted the dough, all of it, from a rich crabby lawyer hubby and she wanted old Orson to work his shoot-out magic for her. Hubby dead and they off to spend the dough in some foreign port, maybe in Asia. Orson bought into the scheme, bought into scheme right up to his neck, and all the time she was setting him up for the gallows, soaping the rope as she went along. Old Orson just saved his neck in time, as happens sometimes in these things, but it was a close thing, and he would always wonder, wonder if he had played things a little differently that maybe they could have found some island some place. Yes, old Orson had it bad, bad as a man can have it for a woman. Damn that damn scent.

On other days Johnny might switch up and talk about good femmes, with kind of soft whisper, a soft forlorn whisper, like when his eyes would light up when he spoke of Lauren Bacall and about how she, rich girl she, with a doped-up, wayward, sex addled sister, tried to work both sides of the street in The Big Sleep. She soldiered for bad guy Eddie Miles for a while but when the deal went down she hungered for old Bogie (playing the classic noir detective Philip Marlowe) and switched up on old Eddie, switched him up bad which tells you even good femmes bear watching your back on. I could go on and on but you get the drift. Johnny was living something out in those films. But here is the clincher, Johnny’s wisdom about the bad femmes, which he never failed to bring up at the end of his spiel. He would say-“Yah, but see these guys had it coming because they went in with their eyes open, took their chances and took the fall, took the fall big time. And maybe in some deep recess of their minds, maybe like John Garfield in The Postman Always Rings Twice, they smiled, and would have done it the same way if they that never to be had second chance to do it over.” Pure sweet Johnny Jukes wisdom.

Like I said Johnny, whatever femme film plot line he was thinking of, always came back to that question in the end, the question of questions, the part about a guy taking a beating, taking it hard, and then coming back for more when the femme purred in his ear, or swayed some flash dress into the room or he smelled even a whiff, hell, a half whiff of that damn perfume which let him know she was coming. That part, that doing it again part, always got to Johnny. And this was no academic question, no noir theory, and no clever plotline about the vagaries of human experience, about how low you can go and still breathe. See Johnny had been there, had seen it all, and done it all and so he was haunted forever after about whether if she came through the door again, passed him on some haunted street again, drove by in some flash car again, he would also do it exactly like it was done before. Hell, enough of beating around the bush, let Johnny tell it the way he finally spilled one night up in Nashua after we had had a few, he was feeling a little low, and had his old time corner boys around him, and then you decide.

“I not saying Rosa, Rosa Lebron, was as hot as Jane Greer or Rita Hayworth, no way but she had her moments, her moments with me when she might as well have been one of those dames. I am not going to say exactly where we meet, or exactly under what circumstances, but it all came together down in sunny Mexico, down Sonora way back in the late 1970s when I was doing a little of this and a little of that in the drug trade. That will give you the idea why I want to be vague about my meeting up with Rosa, okay. This, by the way, was before it got real crazy down there a few years back with a murder a minute, some of it gang-related, some just pure batos locos craziness from the drugs and the dough. All hell craziness when some busted gabacho deal winds up exploding some whole dusty, dirty little bracero town, although even back then it was always a tight thing when you dealt with the Mexicans, and when you dealt with dope. Period. Sometime when I don’t want to talk about femmes I will tell you some back road, dusty trail stuff that will curl the hairs on the back of your neck and that was when things were “cooled out.” But back to Rosa.

See Rosa ‘s older brother, hey, let’s call him Pedro alright just to be on the safe side and just because it doesn’t matter what his name was as long as you remember this is about Rosa and her ways, was a primo “distributor” down Sonora way, mainly marijuana (or herb, ice, ganga, rope, hemp, or whatever you call it in your neighborhood) but as time went on cocaine (ditto on what you call it in your town, snow, little sister, girl), but a guy on his way up in the cartel, no question. That was when a little smarts, street smarts like a lot of Mexican kids had, and a little English which most didn’t, got you pretty far when the vast bulk of the trade was heading norte. So Pedro was no stinking little bracero always staring at you, staring through you really, looking like he would cut your throat for a dollar and change. I met Pedro through mutual business contacts in a New York City bar one night and that got us started on our business, our “nuestra cosa .”

One time Rosa came up with him and at first I thought she was his girlfriend because they seemed very close. Now Pedro wasn’t a bad looking guy but I didn’t figure he could have such a fox for a girlfriend, you know all dark skin, nice shape, black as night hair, dancing black eyes AND some scent some mystic Aztec, mestizo, conquistador, ten thousand year scent that distracted me from the minute she clasped my hand. (I found out later from her that it was made from some Mexican cactus flowers, I forget the name but I will never forget that scent, that first time, never). Let me put it this way and maybe you can look it up and get a photo to see what I mean she looked like that Mexican artist everybody talks about, that Frida Kahlo, the one that was married to the painter Diego Riviera, the dish with the one eyebrow, except Rosa had two. When you see that picture and think what that dame did to big time guys like Riviera and Leon Trotsky, the big Bolshevik revolutionary who went daffy over her, then you get an idea what Rosa was like. So when Pablo introduced me to Rosa as his sister I was relieved. Especially after she threw (there is no other word for it) those laughing Spanish eyes at me. She had me, had me bad from that moment.

I didn’t see her for a while, maybe a couple of months, although Pedro and I were doing a regular series of business transactions. Then, maybe it was late 1979 or so, I got a call from him to come down to Sonora for what he called a big deal. I showed up at the designated cantina, La Noche, on the main strip, a dusty old place then, maybe now too for all I know. And there was Rosa, all Rosa-like, dark, Spanish, those eyes, the fragrance, and dressed very elegantly in a very fashionable dress (so she told me later). She was the bait. And I bite. Pedro never showed that night, and it didn’t matter as Rosa and I drank high- shelf tequila (my first time, and like scotch and other whiskies there are gradations of tequila too), danced (even with my two left feet it didn’t seem to matter), and wound up at her casa (room). The rest of the night you can figure out on your own. What matters is the next morning, early; after I took a shower and was lying on her bed she asked me if I couldn’t do Pedro a favor. The favor: go to Columbia and bring back a load (twenty kilos, forty pounds) of little sister. In those days Pedro’s cartel was testing the route and having a friendly Norte Americano do the run, which at the time would have been unusual and would have faked out the cops, was seen as the best way to iron out the wrinkles. And, well, Rosa would go along too. Sold.

The first trip, and several after, was actually uneventful. Back and forth, sometimes with Rosa sometimes with another female “mule.” After a few months, maybe six, Rosa came up to my hotel room in Sonora one night crying, crying like crazy. She told me that she was being harassed and beaten by Pedro because he had started to “use” some of the product and would get all crazy and lash out at whoever was around. She also said he wasn’t all that crazy now about have a goddam gringo around now that things were already set up and that maybe it was time to terminate my contract. The clincher though was when she said right then and there she said she had to get out, get out before she was maybe killed by Pedro, or one of his thugs on his orders.

Maybe it was the tears, maybe it was that scent that always threw me off or maybe now that I knew the score it was flat- out fear that I would be found face down in some Sonora back alley waiting for some consulate officer to ship my remains back home but I listened to what Rosa proposed. The next shipment was our salvation; the forty of fifty pound of girl would get us a long way from Mexico and far enough away from Pedro that we could start our own lives. It sounded good, real good. The idea was to go to Columbia but instead of heading back to Mexico head to Panama, unload the dope in a new market, then catch a freighter to, to wherever, some island maybe. I was in, in all the way.

And it worked, worked beautifully. For Rosa. See here is how the deal really went down. We got the dope in Columbia okay, no problema as usual. And we did head to Panama and made the transaction there. Again no problema. Something like a quarter million in cash in the proverbial suitcase. Easy street. We were to catch a freighter, some Liberian-registered tanker, headed for Africa the next morning. That night Rosa insisted that we celebrate our “liberation” with some high-shelf tequila in honor of our success and remembrance of our first night together. We drank and made love like it was our last night on earth. And that was the last I saw of Rosa Lebron. The last of her but not quite of the story. After being drunk as a skunk and worn to a frazzle by our love-making (maybe drugged too, I don’t know) I was practically unconscious. The next morning when I awoke Rosa was gone. I frantically looked for her, checking every place including the tanker that we were supposed to take through the Canal. They had no reservations (under our aliases) for any gringo or senorita. No reservations for passengers at all. That’s when I started to panic (and to put two and two together). I couldn’t go back to (a) Columbia or (b) Mexico so I headed back to New York City on the sly. After a while I finally put the pieces together (or rather they got put together for me).

First Rosa was not Pedro’s sister but just part of his organization, his brother Pablo’s ex-girlfriend. It was Pedro who had put Rosa up to setting me up on that last transaction because he was feeling constrained by the cartel he was linked to and wanted to go out on his own. The quarter million (minus Rosa’s cut) would set him up just fine. The problem was that she ran out on Pedro too. It was Pedro (and you can read about it in the Mexican newspaper of the time when such incidents were fairly rare, unlike now) who wound up face down in that Sonora back alley for his lack of cartel spirit, twelve bullet holes in him. And Rosa? Nowhere to be found. Except here is the funny part, although I am not laughing, Pablo, Pedro’s brother and Rosa’s supposed ex-boyfriend was last seen in Sonora the day Rosa and I left for Columbia on that last easy street transaction. Yah, I was a chump but if you see her, her and her dancing eyes and that damn cactus flower fragrance, tell her I said hello. And tell her to remember that night she danced the dance of the seven veils for me because I sure do.”

[Jesus, this is a no-brainer. Of course our boy Johnny would do it over again. Just like that. Take it easy on the tequila next time though that stuff will kill you Johnny. Christ after hearing that story I might take a run at Rosa and that fragrance myself and I only like to watch femmes from the comfort of my living room or local theater-JLB]

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin- Johnny Shea’s Femme Fatale Moment

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the classic femme fatale film Out Of The Past to set the scene below.

Jim Sweeney was a great fan of 1940s and 1950s film noir, especially those that featured enticing femme fatales who knew, without lifting a finger sometimes, how to twist a guy in knots and make him like it without working up a hard breathe. He had been crazy for noir since he was kid growing up in 1950s Nashua, New Hampshire when he would go to the old Strand Theater (long since torn down) on Main Street every Saturday afternoon, sometimes with his boys, sometimes alone, although then he didn’t know femme fatale or film noir words from a hole in the wall. What he did know, and maybe only sub-consciously as he thought about later when he discussed the issue with those same boys, was that dames, those femmes on the screen anyway were poison, but what was a guy going to do when he drew that ticket. Take the ride, see what happened, and hope you drew a good femme.

Yes, Jim was a dreamer, a weaver of dreams, a sunny side of life guy, and that was why he was surprised when he told Billy Riley this story about Johnny Shea a few years ago, a guy Jim said put him in the shade for being crazy about femme fatales, and a guy who did not by any stretch of the imagination draw a good femme. Funny, Jim said, that back in the neighborhood corner boy young days, the days of hanging out in front of Joyce’s Variety Store over on Third Street in the Irishtown section of town down by the Merrimac River, Johnny would walk away when anybody spoke of what he called those mushy noir films, his thing was the sci-fi thrillers that scared everybody out of their wits thinking the commies or some awful thing from outer space, or both, was headed straight for Nashua, and would leave no survivors. It was only later, sometime in the 1980s when Johnny was down on his luck a little and happened to spend a space afternoon on 42nd Street in the Bijou Theater where they played revival films, that he got “religion.” The film: Mary Astor in The Maltese Falcon and the rest was history.


Billy got to thinking about Jim’s story again recently as he had periodically whenever the subject of noir came to the surface. He was watching a film noir, Impact, a strictly B-noir as far as the story line went, but with a femme worthy of the greats like sultry Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity or coolly calculating Rita Hayworth in The Lady From Shang-hai. This Irene (played by Helen Walker) was nothing but a young gold-digger, strictly from cheap street, but she had a plan to murder her rich husband, some San Francisco swell, and run off with her boyfriend after he did dear hubby in. A scheme dames have cooked ever since Adam and Eve, maybe before.

Well things didn’t work out as planned, boyfriend (who acted like a hopped up junkie while he was on screen and may explain why things went awry) didn’t finish the job so hubby didn’t die but was just left in some sierra gully to croak, boyfriend carelessly got himself killed in an accident trying to flee the scene, hubby put two and two together finally when he woke up in that ditch and instead of heading back to ‘Frisco then tried to start a new anonymous life. Meanwhile sweet poison Irene was being held for his murder. She was all set to take the fall, to take the big stretch when, prodded by the “good” woman out in Podunk who had entered hubby’s new life, he decided to come clean. Our Irene then in a reverse twist framed, framed hubby big time, for the murder of her boyfriend. Beautiful. That is why Billy always said that he would listen to a femme tale any time one passes his way. He only asked that the teller make it interesting and not too goofy. See goofy in Billy’s book was just like a million guys get with any dame under any circumstances. He only wanted to hear about guys, hard-nosed guys like Johnny Shea who had been around the block with a frail and lived to tell about it, and who got all tied up in knots about and were ready to ask for more. Here is how Billy remembered Jim telling him his Johnny Shea story, maybe a little off after passing though double hearsay as they say in the courts but certainly with the ring of truth around it :


“He, Johnny Shea, Johnny Jukes, from the old neighborhood up in Nashua, was on record, maybe not a swear on the bible take it to court under oath type record but on record, as being very much enthralled by the bad femme fatales of film noir [of course now from a safe cinematic distance ]. Funny as a kid he would go off the deep end when I mentioned some such film and walk away while I was telling the “lesson” I learned about women and life from a show I had seen at the Saturday matinee. But back in the1980s when he would show up in the old town every now and then and gather the old corner boys around him he would go on and on about how, let’s say, Jane Greer in Out Of The Past off-handedly shot her kept man, Kirk Douglas (or did he keep her, a matter very much in dispute), then put a bullet or six in some snooping sleuth who crowded her just a little and for lunch, just for kicks, turned the tables on a guy, Robert Mitchum, just a stray slightly off-center guy built to handle rough stuff if necessary who thought maybe he could help her out of a jam after he got a look at her and a whiff of that gardenia perfume or whatever she was wearing that made him crazy. Johnny would especially go into detail about how hefty Mitchum would sit around drinking in some dusty desolate cantina down in Mexico, maybe, Tampico, maybe Cuernavaca , he forgot, who was putty in dear Jane’s hands went she walked through the cantina door. Yes, she was a stone-cold killer, blood simple they call it in some quarters, and Johnny couldn’t get enough of her.

On an off day, or when Johnny got tired of telling, and we got tired of listening, about some newly discovered move Jane put on after watching that film for the fifteenth time, he would go on and on about glamorous, 1940s glamorous (although maybe eternal glamorous when you look at her pin-up pictures even today) Rita Hayworth as she framed, framed big time, one Orson Welles in The Lady From Shang-hai just because his was a little smitten with her after smelling that come hither fragrance. She wanted the dough, all of it, from a rich lawyer hubby and she wanted old Orson to work her magic for her. Hubby dead and they off to spend the dough in some foreign port, maybe Asia. Orson bought into the scheme bought into scheme right up to his neck, and all time she was setting him up for the gallows, soaping the rope as she went along. Old Orson just saved his neck in time, as happens sometimes in these things, but it was a close thing, and he would always wonder, wonder if he had played things a little different that maybe they could have found some island some place. Yes, old Orson had it bad, bad as a man can have it.

On other days Johnny might switch up and talk about good femmes, with kind of soft whisper, a soft forlorn whisper, like when his eyes would light up when he spoke of Lauren Bacall and about how she, rich girl she with a doped-up, wayward, sex addled sister, tried to work both sides of the street in The Big Sleep. She soldiered for bad guy Eddie Miles for a while but when the deal went down she hungered for old Bogie (playing the classic noir detective Philip Marlowe) and switched up old Eddie, switched him up bad which tells you even good femmes bear watching your back on. I could go on and on back you get the drift. Johnny was living something out in those films. But here is the clincher, Johnny’s wisdom about the bad femmes, which he never failed to bring up at the end of his spiel. He would
say-Yah, but see these guys had it coming because they went in with their eyes open, took their chances and took the fall, took the fall big time. And maybe in some deep recess of their minds, maybe like John Garfield in The Postman Always Rings Twice, they smiled, and would have done it the same way if they that never to be had second chance to do it over. Pure sweet Johnny Jukes wisdom.

Like I said Johnny, whatever femme film plot line he was thinking of, always came back to that question in the end, the question of questions, the part about a guy taking a beating, taking it hard, and then coming back for more when the femme purred in his ear, or swayed some flash dress into the room or he smelled even a whiff, hell, a half whiff of that damn perfume which let him know she was coming. That part, that doing it again part, always got to him. And this was no academic question, no noir theory, and no clever plotline about the vagaries of human experience, about how low you can go and still breathe. See Johnny had been there, had seen it all, and done it all and so he was haunted forever after about whether if she came in the door again, passed him on some haunted street again, drove by in some flash car again, he would also do it exactly like it was done before. Hell, enough of beating around the bush let Johnny tell it the way he finally spilled one night up in Nashua after we had a few, he was feeling a little low, and had his old time boys around him, and then you decide.

“I not saying Rosa, Rosa Lebron, was as hot as Jane Or Rita, no way but she had her moments, her moments with me when she might as well have been one of those dames. I am not going to say exactly how we meet, or under what circumstances, but it all came together down in sunny Mexico, down Sonora way back in the late 1970s when I was doing a little of this and a little of that in the drug trade. This was before it got real crazy down there with a murder a minute and some busted deal wound up exploding some whole dusty, dirty little braceros town, although it was always a tight thing when you dealt with the Mexicans, and when you dealt with dope. Period.

See Rosa ‘s older brother, hey, let’s call him Pedro alright just to be on the safe side and just because it doesn’t matter what his name was as long as you remember this is about Rosa and her ways, was a primo “distributor” down Sonora way, mainly marijuana (or herb, ice, ganga, rope, hemp, or whatever you call it in your neighborhood) but as time went on cocaine (ditto on what you call it in your town, snow, little sister, girl), but a guy on his way up in the cartel, no question. I met Pedro through mutual business contacts in New York City one night and that got us started on our business.

One time Rosa came up with him and at first I thought she was his girlfriend because they seemed very close. Now Pedro wasn’t a bad looking guy but I didn’t figure he could have such a fox for a girlfriend, you know all dark skin, nice shape, black as night hair, dancing black eyes AND some scent some mystic Aztec, mestizo, conquistador, ten thousand year sense that distracted me from the minute she clasped my hand. (I found out later from her that it was made from some Mexican cacti flowers, I forget the name but I will never forget that scent, that first time, never). Let me put it this way and maybe you can look it up and get a photo to see what I mean she looked like that Mexican artist everybody talks about, that Frida Kahlo, the one that was married to Diego Riviera, the one with the one eyebrow, except Rosa had two. When you see that picture and think what that dame did to guys like Riviera and Leon Trotsky, the big Bolshevik revolutionary who went daffy over her, then you get an idea what Rosa was like. So when Pablo introduced me to Rosa as his sister I was relieved. Especially after she threw (there is no other word for it) those laughing Spanish eyes at me. She had me, had me bad from that moment.

I didn’t see her for a while, maybe a couple of months, although Pedro and I were doing a regular series of business transactions. Then, maybe it was late 1979 or so, I got a call from him to come down to Sonora for what he called a big deal. I showed up at the designated cantina, La Noche, on the main strip, a dusty old place then, maybe now to for all I know. And there was Rosa, all Rosa-like, dark, Spanish, those eyes, the fragrance, and dressed very elegantly in a very fashionable dress (so she told me later). She was the bait. And I bite.

Pedro never showed that night, and it didn’t matter as Rosa and I drank high- shelf tequila (my first time, and like scotch and other whiskies there are gradations of tequila too), danced (even with my two left feet it didn’t seem to matter), and wound up at her casa (room) for the night. The rest of the night you can figure out on your own. What matters is the next morning, early; after I took a shower and was lying on her bed she asked me if I couldn’t do Pedro a favor. The favor: go to Columbia and bring back a load (twenty kilos, forty pounds) of little sister. In those days Pedro’s cartel was testing the route and having a friendly Norte Americano do the run, which at the time would have been unusual and would have faked out the cops, was seen as the best way to iron out the wrinkles. And, well, Rosa would go along too. Sold.

The first trip, and several after, was actually uneventful. Back and forth, sometimes with Rosa sometimes with another female “mule.” After a few months, maybe six, Rosa came up to my hotel room in Sonora one night crying, crying like crazy. She told me that she was being harassed and beaten by Pedro because he had started to “use” some of the product and would get all crazy and lash out at whoever was around. She also said he wasn’t all that crazy now about have a goddam gringo around now that things were already set up and that maybe it was time to terminate my contract. The clincher though was when she said right then and there she said she had to get out, get out before she was maybe killed by Pedro, or one of his thugs on his orders.

Maybe it was the tears, maybe it was that scent that always threw me off or maybe now that I knew the score it was flat- out fear that I would be found face down in some Sonora back alley waiting for some consulate officer to ship my remains back home but I listened to what Rosa proposed.
The next shipment was our salvation; the forty of fifty pound of girl would get us a long way from Mexico and far enough away from Pedro that we could start our own lives. It sounded good, real good. The idea was to go to Columbia but instead of heading back to Mexico head to Panama, unload the dope in a new market, then catch a freighter to, to wherever, some island maybe. I was in, in all the way.

And it worked, worked beautifully. For Rosa. See here is how the deal really went down. We got the dope in Columbia okay, no problema as usual. And we did head to Panama and made the transaction there. Again no problema. Something like a half a million in cash in the proverbial suitcase. Easy street. We were to catch a freighter, some Liberian-registered tanker, headed for Africa the next morning. That night Rosa insisted that we celebrate our “liberation” with some high-shelf tequila in honor of our success and remembrance of our first night together. And that was the last I saw of Rosa Lebron.

The last of her but not quite of the story. After being drunk as a skunk and worn to a frazzle by our love-making (maybe drugged too, I don’t know) I was practically unconscious. The next morning when I awoke Rosa was gone. I frantically looked for her, checking every place including the tanker that we were supposed to take through the Canal. They had no reservations (under our aliases) for any gringo or senorita. No reservations for passengers at all. That’s when I started to panic (and to put two and two together). I couldn’t go back to (a) Columbia or (b) Mexico so I headed back to New York City on the sly. After a while I finally put the pieces together (or rather they got put together for me).

First Rosa was not Pedro’s sister but just part of his organization, his brother Pablo’s ex-girlfriend. It was Pedro who had put Rosa up to setting me up on that last transaction because he was feeling constrained by the cartel he was linked to and wanted to go out on his own. The half million (minus Rosa’s cut) would set him up just fine. The problem was that she ran out on Pedro too. It was Pedro (and you can read about it in the Mexican newspaper of the time when such incidents were fairly rare, unlike now) who wound up face down in that Sonora back alley for his lack of cartel spirit, twelve bullet holes in him. And Rosa? Nowhere to be found . Except here is the funny part, although I am not laughing, Pablo, Pedro’s brother and Rosa’s supposed ex-boyfriend was last seen in Sonora the day Rosa and I left for Columbia on that last easy street transaction. If you see her, her and her dancing eyes and that damn cactus flower fragrance tell her I said hello. ”

[Jesus, this is a no-brainer. Of course our boy Johnny would do it over again. Just like that. Take it easy on the tequila though that stuff will kill you Johnny . Christ I might take a run at Rosa and that fragrance myself and I only like to watch femmes from the comfort of my living room or local theater-JLB]

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin- Johnny Shea’s Femme Fatale Moment

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the classic femme fatale film Out Of The Past to set the scene below.

He, Johnny Shea from the old neighborhood, was on record, maybe not a swear on the bible take it to court under oath type record but on record, as being very much enthralled by the bad femme fatales of film noir (of course now from a safe cinematic distance ). He would go on and on about how Jane Greer in Out Of The Past off-handedly shot her kept man, Kirk Douglas (or did he keep her, a matter very much in dispute), then put a bullet or six in some snooping sleuth who crowded her just a little and for lunch, just for kicks, turned the tables on a guy, Robert Mitchum, just a stray off-hand guy built to handle rough stuff if necessary who thought maybe he could help her out of a jam after he got a look at her and a whiff of that gardenia perfume or whatever she was wearing that made him crazy. Yes, she was a stone-cold killer, blood simple they call it in some quarters, and Johnny couldn’t get enough of her.

On an off day, or when he got tired of telling, and we got tired of listening, about some newly discovered move Jane put on after watching that film for the fifteenth time, he would go on and on about glamorous, 1940s glamorous (although maybe eternal glamorous when you look at her pin-up pictures even today) Rita Hayworth as she framed, framed big time, one Orson Welles in The Lady From Shang-hai just because his was a little smitten with her after smelling that come hither fragrance. She wanted the dough, all of it, from a rich lawyer hubby and she wanted old Orson to work her magic for her. Yah, but see these guys had it coming because they went in with their eyes open, took their chances and took the fall, took the fall big time. And maybe in some deep recess of their minds, maybe like John Garfield in The Postman Always Rings Twice, they smiled, and would have done it the same way if they that never to be had second chance to do it over.

Johnny, whatever femme film plot line he was thinking of, always came back to that question in the end, the question of questions, the part about a guy taking a beating, taking it hard, and then coming back for more when the femme purrs in his ear, or sways some flash dress into the room or he smells even a whiff, hell, a half whiff of that damn perfume which lets him know she is coming. That part, that doing it again part, always got to him. And this was no academic question, no noir theory, and no clever plotline about the vagaries of human experience, about how low you can go and still breathe. See Johnny had been there, had seen it all, and done it all and so he was haunted forever after about whether if she came in the door again he would also do it exactly like it was done before. Hell, enough of beating around the bush let him tell it and you decide.

“I not saying Rosa, Rosa Lebron, was as hot as Jane Or Rita, no way but she had her moments, her moments with me when she might as well have been one of those dames. I am not going to say exactly how we meet, or under what circumstances, but it all came together down in sunny Mexico, down Sonora way back in the late 1970s when I was doing a little of this and a little of that in the drug trade. This was before it got real crazy although it was always a tight thing when you dealt with the Mexicans, and when you dealt with dope. Period.

See Rosa ‘s older brother, hey, let’s call him Pedro alright just to be on the safe side and just because it doesn’t matter what his name was as long as you remember this is about Rosa and her ways, was a primo “distributor” down Sonora way, mainly marijuana (or herb, ice, ganga, rope, hemp, or whatever you call it in your neighborhood) but as time went on cocaine (ditto on what you call it in your town, snow, little sister, girl), but a guy on his way up in the cartel, no question. I met Pedro through mutual business contacts in New York City one night and that got us started on our business.

One time Rosa came up with him and at first I thought she was his girlfriend because they seemed very close. Now Pedro wasn’t a bad looking guy but I didn’t figure he could have such a fox for a girlfriend, you know all dark skin, nice shape, black as night hair, dancing black eyes AND some scent some mystic Aztec, mestizo, conquistador, ten thousand year sense that distracted me from the minute she clasped my hand. (I found out later from her that it was made from some Mexican cacti flowers, I forget the name but I will never forget that scent, that first time, never). And, so when he introduced me to Rosa as his sister I was relieved. Especially after she threw (there is no other word for it) those laughing Spanish eyes at me. She had me, had me bad from that moment.


I didn’t see her for a while, maybe a couple of months, although Pedro and I were doing a regular series of business transactions. Then, maybe it was late 1979 or so, I got a call from him to come down to Sonora for what he called a big deal. I showed up at the designated cantina, La Noche, on the main strip, a dusty old place then, maybe now to for all I know. And there was Rosa, all Rosa-like, dark, Spanish, those eyes, the fragrance, and dressed very elegantly in a very fashionable dress (so she told me later). She was the bait. And I bite.

Pedro never showed that night, and it didn’t matter as Rosa and I drank high- shelf tequila (my first time, and like scotch and other whiskies there are gradations of tequila too), danced (even with my two left feet it didn’t seem to matter), and wound up at her casa (room) for the night. The rest of the night you can figure out on your own. What matters is the next morning, early; after I took a shower and was lying on her bed she asked me if I couldn’t do Pedro a favor. The favor: go to Columbia and bring back a load (twenty kilos, forty pounds) of little sister. In those days Pedro’s cartel was testing the route and having a friendly Norte Americano do the run, which at the time would have been unusual and would have faked out the cops, was seen as the best way to iron out the wrinkles. And, well, Rosa would go along too. Sold.

The first trip, and several after, was actually uneventful. Back and forth, sometimes with Rosa sometimes with another female “mule.” After a few months, maybe six, Rosa came up to my hotel room in Sonora one night crying, crying like crazy. She told me that she was being harassed and beaten by Pedro because he had started to “use” some of the product and would get all crazy and lash out at whoever was around. She also said he wasn’t all that crazy now about have a goddam gringo around now that things were already set up and that maybe it was time to terminate my contract. The clincher though was when she said right then and there she said she had to get out, get out before she was maybe killed by Pedro, or one of his thugs on his orders.

Maybe it was the tears, maybe it was that scent that always threw me off or maybe now that I knew the score it was flat- out fear that I would be found face down in some Sonora back alley waiting for some consulate officer to ship my remains back home but I listened to what Rosa proposed.
The next shipment was our salvation; the forty of fifty pound of girl would get us a long way from Mexico and far enough away from Pedro that we could start our own lives. It sounded good, real good. The idea was to go to Columbia but instead of heading back to Mexico head to Panama, unload the dope in a new market, then catch a freighter to, to wherever, some island maybe. I was in, in all the way.

And it worked, worked beautifully. For Rosa. See here is how the deal really went down. We got the dope in Columbia okay, no problema as usual. And we did head to Panama and made the transaction there. Again no problema. Something like a half a million in cash in the proverbial suitcase. Easy street. We were to catch a freighter, some Liberian-registered tanker, headed for Africa the next morning. That night Rosa insisted that we celebrate our “liberation” with some high-shelf tequila in honor of our success and remembrance of our first night together. And that was the last I saw of Rosa Lebron.

The last of her but not quite of the story. After being drunk as a skunk and worn to a frazzle by our love-making (maybe drugged too, I don’t know) I was practically unconscious. The next morning when I awoke Rosa was gone. I frantically looked for her, checking every place including the tanker that we were supposed to take through the Canal. They had no reservations (under our aliases) for any gringo or senorita. No reservations for passengers at all. That’s when I started to panic (and to put two and two together). I couldn’t go back to (a) Columbia or (b) Mexico so I headed back to New York City on the sly. After a while I finally put the pieces together (or rather they got put together for me).

First Rosa was not Pedro’s sister but just part of his organization, his brother Pablo’s ex-girlfriend. It was Pedro who had put Rosa up to setting me up on that last transaction because he was feeling constrained by the cartel he was linked to and wanted to go out on his own. The half million (minus Rosa’s cut) would set him up just fine. The problem was that she ran out on Pedro too. It was Pedro (and you can read about it in the Mexican newspaper of the time when such incidents were fairly rare, unlike now) who wound up face down in that Sonora back alley for his lack of cartel spirit, twelve bullet holes in him. And Rosa? Nowhere to be found . Except here is the funny part, although I am not laughing, Pablo, Pedro’s brother and Rosa’s supposed ex-boyfriend was last seen in Sonora the day Rosa and I left for Columbia on that last easy street transaction. If you see her, her and her dancing eyes and that damn cactus flower fragrance tell her I said hello. ”

[Jesus, this is a no-brainer. Of course our boy Johnny would do it over again. Just like that. Take it easy on the tequila though that stuff will kill you Johnny . Christ I might take a run at Rosa and that fragrance myself and I only like to watch femmes from the comfort of my living room or local theater-JLB]

***Thoroughly Modern Miss Delysia LaFosse - Reflected

I have spent no little “cyberspace” ink in the recent past swearing off femme fatales in crime noirs, mainly crime noirs from their heyday in the 1940s and 1950s. I had grown tired, very tired, of two-timing dames (to speak nothing of those three, or hell more, timing frails) who saw nothing wrong, nothing in the world wrong, with off-handedly putting a couple of slugs in the likes of a prince valiant like Robert Mitchum as Jane Greer did in Out Of The Past just for trying to help her out of a jam, or seven. And him half-smiling, an ironic smirk really, half-wishing that finally just maybe he would be over her with those sweet embedded slugs. Ya, sure Robert, keep thinking she would ever loosen the claws she had into you. Sweet dreams, and RIP brother.

Or some half-addled, half-smitten, half-snake bitten, free-wheeling, half-mad poet fellow, blood cursed, irish blackie trying to shake off some tainted married woman and getting shook, getting square- framed, framed just for laughs to prove she could do it and slug-filled too. Framed hard right, framed hard left but framed and set up, with an invisible bulls-eye target right in the middle of his head, for the big house and the big tumble jolt without tears, or a look back, by a blond Rita Hayworth to Orson Welles in The Lady From Shang-hai (really not her color, blond, but that is a tale for another day and they don’t have to be blond to get to you in their clutches). And he, even after the mirror glass shattered, and he knew she was dead and gone and good riddance, would still remember, remember into old age remember, that first fragrance, some orchid scent, and that first look, some hidden larcenous look, as he walked along beside her and wonder where he had let her down. Have another shot, irish blackie, have one on me some cold dark night just before dream time.

Or, or, and just one last faint fragrance remembrance, this time maybe some blue dahlia scent or some oriental herbal splash, splashed on stone white-pancake faced killer in skirts who couldn’t play it straight for a minute and who just wanted her damn bird, and gold. And the stuff of dreams. And an off-hand slug in some desire belly on the way and falls, just not her’s. And not averse, not at all, to piling up the corpses high, to high heaven if necessary, to get them, the dreams that is, as Mary Astor did to dear, dear sturdy, worldly Humphrey Bogart, hell she even got to Bogie, in The Maltese Falcon. And he, hard guy, seen it all, done it all, will in fact spend many a long winter evening building a whiskey bottle pyramid to her, or that scent, always wondering if she had only played it straight for one minute what would have happened. But enough.

Fortunately after successful completion of the twelve –step femme fatale withdrawal program I am now cured, cured forever and a day, of those bad femmes. Jane Greer? I don’t believe I know the name. Rita Hayworth? Didn’t she marry some high sheriff over in Africa or something? Mary Astor? Is that some relative of John Jacob Astor? See, cured, fixed, done with all of that.

But what if, just for the sake of argument you understand, I had been on the wrong path, and got waylaid by those bad femmes. What about “good” femme fatales, or wannabes (from Pittsburg no less-pig iron steel provider to a hungry metal-craving world), who maybe are just a little screwy (okay, okay a lot screwy) and don’t even know how to handle a rod, or want to. Just men. And can warble you to tears when called upon. Well then fetchingly, and every other which way desirable, Miss Delysia LaFosse is just the type for you (and for me, especially sans those pistols that my, eh, advisors, have warned me off of ).

Rodded up, or not, Miss LaFosse knew one thing though, and knew it well in her time, in her post jazz- etched time, in her London just before the blitz 1939 time (and would have known it well in 1039 time and would know it well in 3039 time)- a girl has got to do what a girl has got to do. And while she may not have had a devil’s sinister heart she shared that truth with Miss Greer, Miss Hayworth, and Miss Astor. And so more than one man had to pay, pay the freight some way, if not with his life then still some way for that simple truth.

But even smart and wise girls from brawny Pittsburgh trapped in blitz-ready London can’t get things untangled all by their lonesome, especially screwy (if fetchingly so, okay) dames who are trying to work every angle by not working every angle and just letting thing fall where they will. What if all any self-respecting femme fatale, notorious for working the mantrap alone and net-less, really needed to stay away from hard guys, hard liquor, hard grifts, and mean streets was a sort of “fairy godmother” posing as a “social secretary” to work her plans. Especially if that social secretary was a wise and wishful aide, every way wise and wishful way. Then, my friends, you would have the substance of a plot for something of a little romantic comedy/social commentary/ nostalgia piece. And good PR for the femme fatale racket to boot.

And what if that good Miss LaFosse, aided by that help, not only untangled the little romantic triangle she had not worked every angle into with three beautiful young men who came of age after the war, the First World War that is, and who had “designs” on her free-wheeling spirit could sing your blues away. With no off-hand femme fatale gun play to “resolve” her fickle lifestyle dilemmas. Yes, what then. And I would not even be breaking twelve-step. Praise be.

***Out In The Torch Singer Be-Bop Blues Night- Blues Masters- The Women Hold Forth- A CD Review

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Billie Holiday holding forth, very holding forth on Stormy Blues.

Blues Masters: Classic Blues Women: Volume 11, various artists, Rhino Records, 1993

I swear, I swear on a stack of seven bibles, I am off, finally off film noir femme fatales after watching (or rather , re-watching) Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer, mainly Jane Greer, go round and round in the classic crime noir Out Of The Past. How could any rational man not think twice about following such femmes as Jane Greer’s Kathy who just happened to be a little gun happy (and a chronic liar to boot) who put a couple in Robert Mitchum’s Jeff after he did somersaults to try to save her bacon about six times. That’s gratitude for you.

Well, like I said I am off, done, finished with those two-timing dames, and good riddance. Now I have time, plenty of time, and my health to speak of blues in the night wailing female torch singers who, as far as I know, do not carry or do not need to carry guns, to do their business. Of course it was not big deal to change my allegiances because since I was a kid I have been nothing but putty in their hands for any torch singer who could throw away my blues with some sorrow laden tune.

Maybe it was in some back-drop Harvard Square coffeehouse in long mist time 1960s when I first heard such voices, first among them, Billie Holiday, late, early, whatever Billie Holiday singing of some man on her mind, mostly some no good man, some no dough man, who maybe took a couple of whacks at her for no reason, or just took her last dough to bet on that next sure thing…and happiness. Or maybe earlier when some home background 1940s we-won-the-war be-bop music filtered through the air my own childhood house from the local radio station playing Peggy Lee all Benny Goodman’d up, or Helen Whiting, or, or well, you get the drift. Stuff that would stop me in my tracks and ask, ask where did that sorrow come from.

Later, several years later, it blossomed fully when some now half-forgotten (but only half-forgotten) girlfriend gave me a complete Vanguard Record set of all of Bessie Smith’s recordings. Ah heaven, and ah the student neighbors who had to listen for half a day while I played the damn set through. So get it, get it straight I am a long-time aficionado of the genre and commenting on this Blues Masters CD about classic women blues singers is a piece of cake.

Strangely, although the bulk of the “discovered” blues singers of the folk revival minute of the 1960s were male (Mississippi John Hurt, Bukka White, Son House, Skip James, et. al) back in the serious heyday of the blues in the 1920s and early 1930s women dominated the blues market, the popular music of the day. And the women featured in this compilation were the most well-known of the myriad torch singers that lit up the concert hall, speakeasies and juke joints North and South. Mamie Smith, “Ma” Rainey, the divide Sippie Wallace, of course Bessie Smith, Ida Cox, Victoria Spivey (later to be one of the first women blues producers and record company owners), and Alberta Hunter are all rightfully and righteously here.

What, no Billie Holiday? Well yes she does Stormy Weather here so stay calm. I have singled her out because to me her voice, her phrasing, her half breath between notes is what torch singing was all about and all about whenever I felt (or feel) blue I just turned to Billie and she would sing your blues away (unfortunately not her own). Now if I could just get a torch singer who was also a non-gun- toting femme fatale I would be in very heaven. Ya, I know I said I was off femmes but what are you going to do.

***Out In The Two-Timing Femme Fatale 1950s Crime Noir Night- “Armored Car Robbery”- A Review

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the crime noir film Armored Car Robbery.

DVD Review

Armored Car Robbery, starring Charles McGraw, William Talman, Adele Jurgens, RKO Radio Pictures, 1950

Forget what I ever said about the classic two-timing femme fatales. And who knows maybe three-timing, or more. Once you go down that road what is to stop a dame, any dame , and why, at any small number when you are looking, forever looking, to step up in class, to latch onto the big dough guys who will take you out of the dime-a-dance scene you are mired in. So forget frails like Mary Astor in The Maltese Falcon who was ready to make any guy, any two guys for that matter, take the fall as long as she got her damn bird, and the stuff of dreams. With dough enough to keep her in style, and the small-time grifters off her back. Forget Rita Hayworth in The Lady From Shang-hai who had half the male world, the smart guys too, lining up to take the fall, and just ask where to take it until in the end even the smart guys cried “uncle.” Forget Jane Greer in Out Of The Past twisting up every guy in California, some smart guys too, and guys who supposedly knew what was what wound up hiding out until the coast was clear, maybe for about a century hiding out nursing their wounds , once she got done with them. And forget one more, just one more, that no femme list is complete without, Ava Garner trying to get some guy, her everlovin’ husband no less, some supposedly badass guy, to take the fall for her on his deathbed in the film adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s The Killers. Ya, forget them all as just slightly nervous misunderstood frills that had a couple of bad breaks along the way. Sweet little Yvonne (played by Adele Jurgens. Ya, I know, the name doesn’t exactly ring bells in the fatale world, good or bad)in this sleeper of a crime noir under review, Armored Car Robbery (Ya, I know as well, they seemed to have run out of interesting titles on this one) puts them all to shame. I might be over- touting the thing but hear me out.

Naturally no femme fatale worth her salt is driven by anything but the desire, the very strong desire, to get out from under whatever menial labor she is stuck doing, from serving them off the arm in some hash house to beating drunks for drinks and donuts in some two bit-bar fly scene. Yvonne here is strictly an independent operator working her fanny off (no pun intended) as a stripper ( maybe today the more politically correct term would be a sex worker, or some other more exotic description, although I am willing to stand corrected on that) in a low-rent Chicago burlesque house. Naturally such places, as Damon Runyon, Studs Terkel, and a few other guys have informed us, do not draw serious high-rollers or serious smart guys. So, through this and that, Yvonne winds up married, unhappily married as it turns out, to Benny who is nothing but a small-time grafter down on his uppers as the film opens. Strictly from Jump Street and strictly a guy who takes orders, not gives them.

And that is where this film gets interesting because while Bennie is nothing a but small-time hood he knows a certain smart guy, Dave Purvis (played by William Talman, probably better known as the ever-losing District Attorney in the 1950s Perry Mason television series and not a classic ladies’ man by any means which means he too has to keep grabbing dough), who has a plan, a big heist plan, which the reader can figure out from the title of the film, involves robbing, well, an armored car. Why? As the late old time yegg Willie Sutton has often been quoted as saying in all kinds of contexts –“that’s where the money is.” Big half a million dollar dough (big 1950s dough, now just tip money for the big guys). Bennie (and a couple of his confederates) are in, in to get under from under in the Yvonne department, to keep her in style, some style anyway. But here is the beauty of the thing, and what puts Yvonne right up there with the more well-known fatales, she is running around, married to Benny or not, running around no questions asked, with one Dave Purvis. See Yvonne knows what every true-blue two-timing femme fatale knows-go with the brains of the operation. And so her fate is set.

Of course even a kid wet behind the ears knows that the magic mantra behind every crime noir is that crime, well, crime doesn’t pay. The only difference usually is in what manner it doesn’t pay (and how bad the femme fatale makes some guy, or guys, fall). Here the heist gets blown by a simple call to the police by a witness. The stick-up (at a ball park during baseball season which is probably a separate chargeable crime itself ) is blown but not before a fatal shoot-out of a police officer in pursuit. Benny also gets shot-up in the melee. And that is where Lieutenant Cordell (played by ruggedly handsome, jut-jawed, and straight-as-an-arrow Charles McGraw with the perfect police officer’s face) comes in to see some rough-hewn justice is served. See the officer killed was his longtime partner and as we already know from detective Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon a guy has to do something about the murder of his partner, private or public cop. From there it is only time before Dave and Yvonne, once Benny expires from his wounds, are cornered in a dramatic airfield shoot-out. But here is the clincher- when Dave earlier , dough in hand, told Yvonne that Benny had gone to his just rewards she showed all the emotion of one who heard that a fly had been swatted dead. Didn’t I tell you she was poison? Ya, I did.