peteg's blog

Stop-motion. IMDB trivia suggests it was made to try out "the Israeli-Australian co-production agreement". Set in an apartment complex that is generic enough to be anywhere. The Australian voice cast is great. Heavy themes given twee treatments that avoid any real engagement. There is skill in and a unique aesthetic to the animation, albeit one that I did not enjoy much. I struggled to get through it. Directed by Tatia Rosenthal from her own magpie assembly of some of Etgar Keret's short stories.

Simon Foster saw it at the Sydney Film Festival. The characters are distinctly Aussie. "Rosenthal’s commendable but coarse characterisations are a visually unappealing collection of lost souls, their plights made all the more difficult to embrace due to the blank, shallow stare and lifeless rigidity of the faces at key moments." Margaret (four stars) and David (three-and-a-half stars). He didn't warm to it. Paul Byrnes found an oddball charm that passed me by. Inevitably compared with Mary and Max (2009).

A Jane Adams jag from Kansas City (1996). She has even less to work with here. Written and directed by Paul Schrader.

Willem Dafoe led as a listless, stalled drug dealer who has been clean for a couple of years. He's in what initially looks like a three-way with boss lady Susan Sarandon and smarmy David Clennon which turns out to be less than that. Waylaid by memory and dreams of do-overs, what do you know, long-lost-love-of-his-life Dana Delany (sister of Adams) returns out of the blue. Her character in the ensuing scenes is discontinuous, which just maybe was intended to show that she wasn't functioning too well. (Sarandon's character was similarly all over the map but at an executive level.) This being NYC, there's a serial killer (I think), a sanitation strike and an accurate psychic.

Sam Rockwell is so young here. The heavy duty soundtrack by Michael Been is overwrought. Humourless.

Roger Ebert: four stars. Vincent Canby was far less convinced. IMDB trivia: "The film briefly shown on TV in Ann's home at the beginning is Kenneth Anger's cult movie Scorpio Rising (1963)."

Altman completism prompted by the realisation that he pulled a good cast. He directed and got some help from Frank Barhydt (Short Cuts (1993)) with the script.

It's early-1930s in Kansas City, where Altman was from. Jennifer Jason Leigh donned her hard-moll armour in the lead, much like she did in The Hudsucker Proxy (1994) but less effectively. Her man Dermot Mulroney (mostly inert) fell afoul of Harry Belafonte's gang and an excess of verbiage resulted. For reasons incompletely revealed she then spent most of the runtime with laudanum sniffing/swilling Miranda Richardson, dragging her from one location to another, perhaps because Julianne Moore was too busy to appear here. Steve Buscemi had a very minor role as an organiser for a get-out-the-vote Democrat machine. Jane Adams (Happiness (1998)) played a very proper steward of young women in trouble.

The whole show is sliced up with footage of a jazz concert that looks like it went for days. Ultimately it and the efforts of the cast are squandered in an underbaked neo-noir that needed more oomph than its apparently real-world antecedents could supply. The project is of the same kind as other navel-gazing self-absorbed nostalgia efforts like The Fabelmans (2022).

Roger Ebert: three stars. Stephen Holden: it's not Nashville (1975).

Glenn Kenny's review (at the New York Times) made me hope I was in for some Scottish quirk ala Bill Forsyth (That Sinking Feeling (1979), Gregory's Girl (1980), Comfort and Joy (1984)): perhaps something beautifully spooky like Andrina (1981) with maybe a mermaid or two like Local Hero (1983) and some of that ingenious muddling-forward that leaves everyone happy or at least bemused. And perhaps an era-defining soundtrack. But things aren't so original or gentle these days. In two sittings due to it being pro forma.

The setup has sister and brother Gayle Rankin and Grant O'Rourke as the last residents on remote "Auk Island" who the local council needs to move on for reasons withheld. (Apparently the film was actually shot in the Scottish Highlands and not on an island.) Domhnall Gleeson is dispatched and proves susceptible to their overtly weird charms, just as they are mesmerised by his recycling of recent popular culture. The plot goes entirely predictably and so it all comes down to how much you enjoy the colour.

The result put me most in mind of the less successful Kiwi comedies of the last decade (The Breaker Upperers (2018), Jojo Rabbit (2019)) with simplistic and not very sympathetic humour. The kooky "traditions" reminded me of Midsommar (2019). The references include The Arabians Nights, Trainspotting, Lord of the Rings, Hitchcock's The Birds. It is indeed fanfic. Harry Potter is conspicuous in its absence, presumably for legal reasons.

The soundtrack is often very obtrusive. The jittery camerawork was a chore.

Louis Paxton's highest-rated effort at IMDB is the short Neville is Dead (2020) which also stars Grant O'Rourke who co-wrote it. The novelty is that a young boy has an imaginary father who indulges his every wish. But the setup quickly devolves into a Wolverine-ish agonised invincibility that shows the boy to be a sadist. It seems that Paxton does not know how to steer his premises away from the derivative.

Adrian Horton at the Guardian: two stars. Aggressively quaint, "difficult to settle into for anyone with an aversion to twee."

Probably eventually inevitable having read the book (2008). Adapted and directed by Ramin Bahrani (2nd Chance (2022)) for Netflix.

This version struggles to convey the interiority of the main character (Balram, ably played by Adarsh Gourav) as he behaves obsequiously in most scenes; his sly scheming is confined to a very few big moves and emotional explosions. Rajkummar Rao and Priyanka Chopra Jonas as his employers/masters, freshly returned from the USA, are a coarse mix of credulity and hand wringing. Some stuff is omitted, like the details of how elections are rigged. There are many subtle self-references such as Balram not recognising his nephew/cousin. "Locusts" was apparently preferred at time over "cockroaches" as the slur for the lowborn. Having Aaron Wan play Wen Jiabao in a brief scene towards the end was a poor idea.

The acting is good, the cinematography effective, the direction works and there's still enough humour, so I conclude the faults lie in the adaptation: the characters are too shallow. But somehow the script got Bahrani an Oscar nomination. At times it reminded me of Winterbottom's Trishna (2011).

A.O. Scott drew the obvious comparisons with Slumdog Millionaire (2008). Seongyong Cho at Roger Ebert's venue.

Kindle. And yet more mid-century pulp. This one is more hard boiled, more explicitly violent (with a fair bit of man-on-woman violence) but still coy on the sexy bits. The plot is chaotic, often tending to random as the leading man tears up a Texan oil town that has grown more quickly than the law can regulate. None of the characters are deeply drawn or make a lot of sense; at least four are interchangeable Country Club stereotypes of intemperate greed, and all the ladies need men other than the ones they have. Things get a bit screwy at times but too often I felt like Davis was just circling back to the same situations. He implied there was an arrangement of wives that may've worked for everyone (at least the men) but just let that dangle.

Goodreads. Apparently did the rounds of the blogosphere after it was reprinted in 2010.

My first time around with writer/director Ingmar Bergman. #241 in the IMDB top-250, at least until the next round of comic book movies. The IMDB grab for this movie has always sounded so intriguing:

A knight returning to Sweden after the Crusades seeks answers about life, death, and the existence of God as he plays chess against the Grim Reaper during the Black Plague.

but the bulk of the runtime dances around these issues to the extent that I found this misleading. The film assumes a Christian ontology and disposition which seems at odds with a personified Death. Even allowing for that I did not understand why, if you're supreme-being curious and given sufficient reasons to suspect that your time is up, you wouldn't hurry to meet your maker. Moreover demanding sensory evidence of the transcendental reeks of category error. What is served up is a lot pontificating, mostly about women, sex and why the Creator is so elusive. It feels pre-modern in its exploration.

Structurally things start out media res and Bergman takes his time establishing most of the above quote. His knight was a very young Max von Sydow, Death Bengt Ekerot. Gunnar Björnstrand as the knight's squire opines at length. I kept waiting for it to kick into gear but all I got was distraction and evasion, an inarticulate fear of death. There is a fair bit of man looking at the world, woman looking at the man.

Roger Ebert: four stars as a "great movie" in 2000. His writeup is more about Bergman's career though. Bosley Crowther at the time.

Unrewarded curiosity about what Jean-Louis Trintignant did after Z (1969). Also an Angie Dickinson jag from Dressed to Kill (1980). She played the wife of L.A. mafioso Ted de Corsia who had more interest in his son Umberto Orsini. Outside hitman Trintignant executed his task just fine but was surprised when a mostly non-speaking and overly inert Roy Scheider tried to execute his. The former was fortunate that Ann-Margret (Carnal Knowledge (1971)) was at such a loose end that she offered to move to Paris with him.

IMDB trivia claims that the French crew — co-writer/director Jacques Deray, co-writers Jean-Claude Carrière and Ian McLellan Hunter — came to the city for another project that didn't happen, and so opportunistically dashed off a script in 12 days. It's essentially an exploitation piece, in love with yank tanks like Melville was but at least here the streets are made for them. The strong cast cannot make up for the disjointed script; there are several stretches of tedium, especially the car chases.

The daytime cinematography was fine but the street scenes at night were very poor. There was the odd inventive image, like the corpse at the funeral parlour. Talia Shire (Connie Corleone) got the Anjanette Comer role there. It does somewhat function as a time capsule for seedy L.A. at the time, much like Whore (1991) did.

A grab from this was included in Boorman and the Devil (2025) as evidence of how Hollywood took more risks during the new wave. I mostly wanted to see what Christopher Walken did early on in his career. Also for Sean Connery. It proved impossible to care about his romance with Dyan Cannon (Deathtrap (1982)) whose time ran out. Martin Balsam does some solidly fruity work. Directed by Sidney Lumet from a script Frank Pierson (Cool Hand Luke (1967), Dog Day Afternoon (1975)) derived from Lawrence Sanders's novel of the same name.

Connery apparently spent a decade in the can as a favour to the mafia (I think). He quickly gets bored with not having money and invests an excessive amount of time organising a heist: he aims to empty out an entire apartment block. The second half shows how that unwinds. But perhaps the point of it all was to observe all the surveillance (on film and audio tape) from a wide variety of interested parties, albeit to no particular end.

The mafia connection was entirely dispensable. The setting and its denizens reminded me of Rosemary's Baby (1968). In its favour was the casting of Margaret Hamilton (the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz (1939)) alongside Judith Lowry as a sort of Statler and Waldorf pair who provide some very amusing commentary on proceedings. They should have built the movie around those two.

Roger Ebert: three stars. Roger Greenspun at the New York Times. Both enjoyed Alan King's mafioso.

Kindle. More mid-century pulp. Written in the style of The Catcher in the Rye (1951). A bloke from the wrong side of the tracks discovers that basketball is a path to small-time riches and dolls. Watch out for those small-time hoods! Well-executed as far as it goes but it didn't aim to go far: everything was entirely predictable, right down to his time in college where a working lady's time tracks his prospects. Or schedule, in their preferred locution. There's not a lot to recommend it.

Goodreads.

John Boorman's output is a bit all-over-the-shop; from the accessibly mainstream (Deliverance (1972)) to the amusingly fruity (Zardoz (1974)). Some projects may've functioned if better assembled (Excalibur (1981)). This is a doco by David Kittredge about the making of Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977).

Having seen none of the franchise and with no interest in it whatsoever was no liability in enjoying the ruefulness on show here. The shoot looked suitably crazy and the claims of supernatural interference are as overheated as everything else. Most of the talking heads (including Louise Fletcher, Linda Blair, Stephanie Zacharek and Boorman himself) say interesting things. (The other, younger directors are mostly filler.) They assert the obvious about the deceased: Richard Burton was a limited actor ("dead from the neck down") with a great voice. The budget limitations caused them to draw inspiration from Black Narcissus (1947) and shoot on sound stages, but it seems the really exciting stuff was shot on location, including the roof of the Warner Bros skyscraper in NYC. Someone claimed that some of Ennio Morricone's score wasn't even music.

Kittredge pumps up Boorman's tyres a bit too much; he is indeed visually creative, wildly so, but his movies tend to philosophical incoherence. This is observed here implicitly by everyone piling on Rospo Pallenberg for not improving the situation. The concept of audience-independent filmmaking doesn't strike me as of much concern now given the huge reduction in the costs of production. Kobek's take on Kenneth Anger is a superior work on that front.

Ben Kenigsberg at the New York Times: justice for the heretic. Peter Sobczynksi: "the Boorman film is a stone-cold classic and this is a hill that I am willing to fall upon." He claims that Boorman's crazypants cinema had a revival in 2026. More dished dirt at the film's IMDB trivia page. There is a grab of Friedkin mouthing off in this doco but I can only imagine how much better it would've been if they'd been able to interview him too.

A pointer from Peter Sobczynksi's review of Verity (2026) and some Brian De Palma completism. Notionally a psychosexual/erotic thriller and it is indeed prurient and lurid, ploughing the track for not only Basic Instinct (1992) (amongst many others) but also The Silence of the Lambs (1991).

The movie is split into halves with a thick seam in the middle, bridged somewhat by Michael Caine's shrink in one of his blander performances. The first is languid, focussing on clotheshorse/socialite/housewife Angie Dickinson (Rio Bravo (1959)) who is all hot and bothered in NYC. The scenes of her looking for some attention in an art gallery mostly work before it degenerates into a slasher. Last/call girl Nancy Allen (the Mrs De Palma of the day, The Last Detail (1973), Robocop (1987)) takes over and proceeds to run around trying to crack the case while avoiding the same fate. The late exposition dump was very unwelcome, as was the concluding "it was only a dream" bookend scene. Somehow she (and De Palma) didn't go all Mrs Robinson (1967) over gifted geek/mama's boy Keith Gordon.

Dickinson got the harder task and the better end of the movie, but her efforts to draw attention to the fine details of her activities (the frustrated discarding of a lonesome glove, a missing wedding ring, a letter diagnosing VD) seem misplaced in this very unsubtle production. Getting bored with what I was shown (so many scenes linger, trying to amp the tension) I started to wonder if De Palma wasn't also trying to play identity games ala David Lynch's far superior Mulholland Drive (2001). But the ladies are all blondes.

Roger Ebert: three stars. De Palma was trying to mime the Hitchcock style. Vincent Canby. IMDB trivia. Enough body doubles to confuse everything.

Inevitable as it's Looney Tunes. Essentially a joke-conceit — Wile E. Coyote gets fed up with the failure of Acme's devices and sues them — overstretched to feature length. The cartoon parts are generally funny but the human elements are poor: Will Forte as a loser, ambulance-chasing lawyer, John Cena as a high-level Acme functionary, Lana Condor as something relatable for Gen Y or Z or alpha. Eric Bauza's voice work is nowhere as good as Mel Blanc's; Bugs Bunny just didn't sound right at all, so much so that I'd've preferred something generated by AI. And surely the Road Runner does not say "beep beep".

Even the source material by Ian Frazier stretched the joke too thin. James Gunn, Jeremy Slater and Samy Burch did the overstretching in the writers' room.

Jason Di Rosso interviewed director Dave Green, focussing on how the movie was sprung from the Warner Bros purgatory. Peter Sobczynksi: it's not Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988). A movie about the release of this movie may've been more fun. And so on, way beyond my attention span.

A jag from Falling Down (1993) via Ebbe Roe Smith who acts here. Written by Daniel Petrie Jr. Directed by Jim McBride.

Lead Dennis Quaid is a slightly bent police lieutenant in New Orleans. The only available woman in town, Ellen Barkin (Tender Mercies (1983), Down by Law (1986), Sea of Love (1989)), works for the D.A. and has reason to suspect that the cops are in on a mafia/wiseguy murder or two and a heroin stash. Ned Beatty got the John Goodman role, an amiable police chief, leaving John Goodman with little to work with. Things generally go as they must in a winsome, comedic mode. It's a bit Howard Hawks with Lisa Jane Persky doing the Hildy role well enough that I wish she'd been the focus. There's so much mumbling that I missed boatloads of dialogue and most of the character's names. Barkin is game but not my idea of a good time. She's at her best when she's chewing some man out. There are some funny bits but I felt I was more laughing at than with.

Roger Ebert: four stars. Clearly I missed the depths, the eroticism and the characterisation. Vincent Canby was far less convinced.

An improbable jag via screenwriter Norman Wexler from Saturday Night Fever (1977). He got some help from Gary DeVore in adapting a story by Luciano Vincenzoni and Sergio Donati. Directed by John Irvin whose CV is littered with dreck like this with the singular redeeming exception of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1979). Ill-advised Arnie completism.

Ex-FBI agent Arnie is tasked with cleaning up the Chicago mob. The setup makes a minimal amount of sense but soon enough the filmmakers fumble the plot. It has no redeeming features.

Roger Ebert: one-and-a-half stars, presumably because he could laugh at the Chicago settings. Vincent Canby: Arnie is the thinking kid's Stallone.

A Frederic Forrest jag from a sneaky rewatch of The Conversation (1974). Directed by Joel Schumacher (A Time to Kill (1996), some ill-advised Batmans, etc.). Written by Ebbe Roe Smith.

The central conceit was to give the Los Angeles of the day a big broad unsubtle serve, and as such it functions as a time capsule. Michael Douglas led. As a fed-up veteran he went looking for his inner Matthew Modine/Vincent D'Onofrio in an effective, bland and just sometimes explosive performance much like what he did in The Game (1997). Barbara Hershey was his placeholder ex-wife, Lois Smith fine as his concerned mother. Robert Duvall ran on a parallel track, a cop on his last day who is married to Tuesday Weld, to whom time has not been kind. Her histrionics are somewhat amusing. Rachel Ticotin, radiant as Duvall's ex-partner/protege/daughter surrogate. Forrest played the surplus store operator that Chef may've become if he'd made it, and of course he doesn't make it. Dedee Pfeiffer is soaked when Douglas shoots up her burger joint.

Douglas's straight walk from somewhere west to Venice Beach reminded me of Dustin Hoffman's in Straight Time (1978) and more figuratively Burt Lancaster's swim. He decided he's not going to take it any more. The racism lacked the cutting edge of Spike Lee's east-coast Do The Right Thing (1989); here the "Korean" shop keeper is deemed insufficiently white to escape Douglas's rampage. The ganglands were better observed in Boyz'N'Hood (1991) and Venice Beach by White Men Can't Jump (1992). There is a minor-note No Country for Old Men (2007) ruefulness in the Douglas/Duvall pairing. Cliches abounded.

Roger Ebert: three stars. Some easy scapegoating here but he'd prefer you to blame Wall Street. Vincent Canby also noted the similarities with The Swimmer, albeit the John Cheever original. Valentino D. Harrison, the kid who instructs Douglas on how to use the missile launcher.

Kindle. A valiant and entertaining effort to pick at the seams of Gupta's financial shenanigans. Barry does not get to the nub and can't really as the corporate structures are too opaque and public accounts too inadequate. Perhaps half draws on Duncan Mavin's Pyramid of Lies (2022) about Lex Greensill and the collapse of his financing bromance with Gupta. Quite often some diagrams would've helped to make the money and notional ownership structures clearer. Some chapters malfunction; chapter 23 Sanjeev's Last Stand is a theatrical take on some court proceedings, which is jarring after the 10,000 foot view of the financial dealings we got up to that point. I think he could've dug into the InfraBuild situation some more.

In any case I was less interested in Gupta per se and more about what's happening with the steelworks at Whyalla. Barry interviewed the S.A. Premier Peter Malinauskas and minister/righthand man Tom Koutsantonis but did not interrogate their version of events. For instance, did it make sense to bet the state's energy storage/green steel transition on Gupta in February 2024, knowing what was known then? (Greensill's operation had collapsed in 2021, for instance, and Gupta was already zombie-shuffling funds amongst related entities, sucking funds out of InfraBuild and the Tahmoor Colliery.) Have they sold the generators from the hydrogen plant yet? And how much was spent on not getting the blast furnace going again? (It was already struggling in March 2024 after Gupta's operators reduced production too much.) Why has the sale date slipped from the end of September 2026 to the end of the year or perhaps March 2027? Barry observed but did not dig into KordaMentha's rushed sale of the steelworks to Gupta in 2017 — a decision that Koutsantonis claims here he did not like but could not influence — and provided us with no reason to believe they'll do a better job this time around. Barry is keen to moralise over Gupta's appropriation and misallocation of Other People's Money (and fair enough too) but gave the politicians and administrators too much of a pass.

Obviously the story is not yet complete; Barry updated a chapter recently with more details about the lawsuits over the insurance on some relevant delinquent financial instruments. It reads like the purest farce. The snail-paced UK Serious Fraud Office investigation into GFG is apparently still live. Tahmoor has been sold to a consortium including M Resources who is one of the final two-or-so bidders for the steelworks. (Does their proposal to generate hydrogen and solid graphite from natural gas make sense for anyone other than Santos? Does their technology scale? Is their financier Golden Energy and Resources sound?) And of course Gupta is still out there somewhere making promises that some choose to believe. And so on and on.

Goodreads. Barry visited Whyalla a couple of months before the steelworks got sent into administration in 2024. (This formed one chapter of the book.) Reviews are legion but do not grapple with the flaws. Most witlessly cheer on the government intervention. It is all very fascinating.

Prompted by Dwight Garner's review of a collection of Nik Cohn's articles and a sense of eventual inevitability. Englishman Cohn wrote the source material (Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night (1976)) that Norman Wexler (Serpico (1973)) massaged into a script that John Badham (WarGames (1983)) directed.

John Travolta's first big-screen splash, and it got him a deserved Oscar nom. The dialogue is mostly very amusing but he and it are let down by a scenario that struggles for plot when it should've settled for character and scene: disco and the Bee Gees, they speak loud and clear, then and now. It does function as a time capsule for some part of Brooklyn and the graffiti-encrusted subway that only our main man is brave enough to use. The elements of romcom involving dream-dancer/girlfriend Karen Lynn Gorney (David and Lisa (1962)) provide little heat or light, unlike the polyester suits. Brother Martin Shakar pulling the ripcord on the priesthood seemed totally irrelevant.

The cinematography is generally fine in mostly a realism style, out on the streets, but flags in the discotheque: the lights at the same height as faces erase features and there are too many shots from below that occlude the important stuff.

Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars at the time and four stars as a "great movie" in 1999. This was Siskel's favourite film; Ebert keeps circling back to La Dolce Vita (1960) as some kind of biographical touchstone. Janet Maslin. IMDB trivia: instant retro. Who even knew there was a sequel (1983)? Directed by Sylvester Stallone! — one star from Roger Ebert.

Samantha Morton completism. On the pile since forever, mostly because I've struggled to get started with all of Lynne Ramsay's movies; this was the first I managed to get all the way through. She directed a screenplay she co-wrote with Liana Dignini based on Alan Warner's book with the same title (1995). Prompted by Jason Di Rosso's mention of a a new book by Anwen Crawford on this movie.

It's Christmastime in or near Glasgow and some people have seen enough of those. Morton responds to her boyfriend's departure by going out partying with her bestie Kathleen McDermott. After recovering she decides to pirate the manuscript of his novel and spend his money on a jaunt to Andalucía, Spain but not before slicing up his mortal remains. Finally, a use for the great Scottish outdoors! The packaged tour encourages industrialised, putatively hedonistic but actually just bad behaviour; McDermott takes to it like a thawed-out fish but Morton seems mostly disconnected until she encounters a boy who has also lost someone. There's a scene that I took to be a homage to Manuel from Fawlty Towers (~ 1975). Morton drags McDermott up the coast a bit where they're sort-of running the bulls. A publisher comes through with more money than Morton could ever dream of but the bestie cannot imagine leaving Glasgow. Morton departs, alone.

Morton's character is deliberately underexplained, which would have been fine if she exhibited a bit more of the quiet/internalised desperation about her Scottish situation that came out in one line about how many years she has until she can draw a pension. Mike Leigh did a better job on that front in All or Nothing (2002); perhaps I was insufficiently sympathetic to track the subtleties here. McDermott mostly just giggled all the time, a good time girl who also lacked character development. She's more rusted on to Glasgow but we're not shown why; her excitement at the prospect of an Englishman coming to visit her suggests she should also be eyeing the exits. One thread is how money cleaves people from their situations and generally decreases social adhesion.

The camerawork is often very jittery, trying to evoke some urgency from outside the frame when there is or could be enough going on within it. At other times it superbly captured some messy and/or sublime imagery. There is a lot of unselfconscious nudity. I missed a fair chunk of the dialogue, at least sometimes due to the sound mix. I didn't find it all that emotionally involving, which was perhaps the point.

Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars and an inaccurate review. A Critic's Pick by Elvis Mitchell. The source novel "felt like an answer to Irvine Welsh's book Trainspotting (1993)". (Women are from the west, men the east?) "A nihilist road movie." And some hefty caveats. Stephanie Zacharek at length. That shot of Morton on a balcony against this expanse of Spanish hotel is very striking. All claim the boyfriend's suicide is selfish but it did provide Morton with the means to escape and start her own life.

A brief review of Crawford's book by Geordie Williamson.

Kindle. More mid-century hardboiled pulp noir. Short punchy sentences. Third person. Little humour. The action starts in Chicago but doesn't loiter. The author implies that the University of Chicago is close to Division (where I used to live) but it isn't. Riding the rails, like Scarecrow (1973) to some small-town shenanigans in Ohio, near the border with Michigan, where all the ladies would be rich if only someone let them. (This jag made little sense as the protagonist claimed to be aiming for Mexico.) The main thread is essentially Lolita (1955). It is emphasised that the bloke's cognition is failing due to lust and a lack of sustenance which is just to say that the plot got weaker. The mystery parts mostly consisted of withheld information that is not very imaginative. I couldn't believe this guy was the brains behind the prison break at Joliet.

Goodreads. Apparently (re-)published alongside Chaze's Black Wings Has My Angel (1953).