King's Highway pt. 81: End of Watch

"He'll look up how to change it on the Internet. You can find anything on the Internet, he has discovered. Some of it is helpful. Some of it is interesting. Some of it is funny.

And some of it is fucking awful."

So, Stephen King released his latest last month. I won't bury the lede - I wasn't too enamored with either it or the Hodges trilogy that it concludes. As a novel, I thought it was a decent X-Files episode - or CSI two-parter, if you don't include the paranormal shenanigans in End of Watch - if you replace Mulder and Scully (or whomever) with three much less interesting characters.

That's the short of it. But I'm not here to tell you it's crap or any other hyperbole. I'll put it to you this way: if you liked Mr. Mercedes and/or the revelation that Brady had psychic powers in Finders Keepers, odds are you'll enjoy End of Watch. 

As for the long of it, after I finished reading I looked around the net for reviews. Most of them baffled me. Here's the New York Times:

"There are many stereotypical themes and devices in crime fiction: righteous cops shooting a criminal at the novel’s end, gender constructs salvaged from another age, invincible heroes and so on. End of Watch is burdened by none of them."

I don't know... here's a partial list of some stereotypical themes and devices that pop out to me: the serial killer who yells "Control!" and "Darkness!" to a row of computers; the serial killer who even verbalizes to his captured prey that "What this is about is control!"; everything about Brady for that matter, even the psychic powers if you open up the comparisons to other King books that is, not all-crime-fiction; the autistic-savant computer genius/ pop culture referencing awkward sidekick; hell, even the basic premise of the retired guy called out by a case from his past. Granted some of those are from Mr. Mercedes, but my point is End of Watch is far from unburdened with stereotypical themes and devices, in crime fiction or King-fiction.

But really, it's that "open up the comparisons to other King books" that is the kicker. There's precious little that's new in End of Watch, and what is new feels more like someone went back through the book and added a bunch of #hashtags and #teachablemoments (assault rifles, trans and gay teens - the scene where the gay teen shoots himself and the homophobic Dad "screams like a girl" is just cringeworthy - ad hominen cop shooting, racist microaggressions, etc. I'd like to think that someone did go back through back through the book with such aims in mind, but it's unfortunately plausible that King - going only by his Twitter feed and random statements to the press, including describing the mood of End of Watch as a reaction to the election cycle - did it all by himself. You can almost hear his media-of-choice playing over his shoulder and the sound of the keyboard. 

Kirkus starts off their review with "You know it’s a politicized time when the bad guy in a King novel loses points not strictly for being evil but for 'living like Donald Trump.'" And it's true, but it fails to mention how forced the observation is where it appears in the book. I object to it not for likening the presumptive GOP nominee to a mass murderer faking mental illness for dipomatic immunity and ass-wiping privileges. Hell, I'm an Under the Dome fan (the novel), and the political allusions in that are way more damning. It's just that the narrative stops too many times to let a different narrative drive. And there's just already too goddamn much of that in the world.

He's even said what inspired him was the election season, which is interesting because I couldn't help but feel King was commenting on the Bernie/Hillary soap opera currently bewitching his fellow Dem voters when Pete discusses his partner's gendered motivation for career advancement over being "real po-lice."

Anyway. Okay so it all wasn't for me, and I've grumpy opinions. BFD. I was heartened, though, to discover this Kemper guy's review on Goodreads. And if you'll forgive me, I'll just reproduce portions of it here - with commentary - then call it a night.

"Uncle Stevie tried his hand at doing a straight up crime thriller with Mr. Mercedes, but I found it to be a painful slog of poor plotting, uneven pacing, and a main character who came across as a reckless and irresponsible jackass. Finders Keepers had a pretty decent concept, but again it’s biggest flaw revolved around Hodges himself because he was almost completely irrelevant to the story which again highlighted that King struggles with mystery novels."

Agreed on all counts.

"Now here in the third book King has thrown in the towel on trying to write a straight-up action thriller/ detective novel and gone back to his roots with a villain who has psychic and telekinetic abilities. By introducing spooky powers King doesn’t have to rely on trying to put together a logical chain of events that depend on characters reasonably deducing things or behaving rationally. Instead, he can have them following hunches and feelings, and the supernatural element keeps him from having to twist the plot into pretzels to make it all work. Like a lot of King novels most of the characters also seem to have an uncanny knack for guessing at what's happening elsewhere which seems more acceptable with all the bizarre stuff going on."

This is an interesting observation. I've recently reread a whole bunch of King - The Tommyknockers, It, The Stand, From a Buick 8, and The Shining, to name them - and the sudden-acquisition-of-psychic-insight has really had me shaking my head. Where it works, it works; where it seems intrusive, there are usually other problems going on, narrative-wise. End of Watch is definitely in the latter category.

"So what you end up with is a trilogy that started as a very flawed crime thriller, had a second book with zero impact on the main story, and then goes paranormal in the third act with only some minor hints dropped in the previous book that it’s coming."

 

"The only reason to like these three books being stringed together is if King managed to make you love the main character, Bill Hodges, and his two assistants/friends. I didn’t. I mean, I really didn’t. When he wasn’t hiding critical evidence and inspiring a maniac to seek new levels of carnage Hodges came across as this bland, grandfatherly figure. Mostly he exists to ask tech questions of his younger colleagues who seem to look up to him for some reason. I never really buy him as a tough ex-cop, and he sure as hell isn’t a brilliant detective."

Again, agreed on all counts. And beyond Hodges and the other Finders Keepers personnel, Brady is a terrible character. He's worse than Henry Bowers on my personal list of King villains, not so much a character but a psychic toilet King fills with various projections than flushes for paragraph after paragraph. But more importantly, he's just implausible. And the character plays to King's worst tendencies - we don't have to ask why he makes the mistakes he does, despite demonstrating already-hard-to-swallow foresight, because he's crazy, because he hates, because banality of evil, etc.

King has created many memorable villains but more than a few poorly drawn ones; Brady might be the worst yet. 

"I’m left thinking that it would have been better for Uncle Stevie to just do this basic story as one book which could have been easily accomplished. Here's how: a cop stops a mass murderer and gives him brain damage in the process. After the cop has retired he hears about weird deaths surrounding the comatose patient and investigates. Hilarity ensues. Finders Keepers also could have been a better stand-alone book without trying to cram it into this narrative.(...) It really should have been one or two good Stephen King novels vs. two-thirds of a very flawed crime trilogy that Uncle Stevie tried to salvage by going weird in the last one."

That's pretty much all I have for you. I wish I liked it more but what can you do.

Two last things:

- Brady's telekinesis reads like an idea discarded. Nothing is made of it, it's simply a gateway to the whole Zappit-mind-control thing. Maybe he didn't have the latter in mind when he wrote Finders Keepers? The King Method working against him, perhaps? Still, at this point, why change lanes, seriously. And

- Pete is reading Inside View in one scene.   

(From The Night Flier.)

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Next: Best of King's Mini-Series 

Women's Prison (1955)

Tonight!

(1955)

Helene, convicted for the accidental vehicular manslaughter of a child, and Brenda, habitual ward of the state returning for a new stretch, are escorted by a kindly matron to their new home: the women's prison.

(L to r) Kindly escort, Helene, Brenda.

This particular women's prison is separated from a men's prison only by a thick wall and heavy guard. The do-nothing supervising warden Brock (Barry Kelley, last seen in these pages in The Asphalt Jungle) lets his sadistic second-in-command Amelia van Zandt rule the women's prison with a heavy hand, despite the frequent objections of Doctor Crane.

(L to r) van Zandt, Brock, Dr. Crane.

While Brenda seems almost happy to be back in prison, Helene is ill-suited for life inside. While her husband fights to reduce her sentence on the outside, van Zandt subjects her to the standard ritual for all new inmates under her watch: 

two weeks in solitary quarantine.

When Helene cracks completely, Dr. Crane manages to get her switched to the infirmary, a move that sets he and van Zandt on a collision course

The more experienced inmates (principally Brenda and three others: Mae, Dottie, and Joan) try to protect Helene, but soon another drama unfolds. Joan's husband Glen is imprisoned on the other side of the wall, and he knows a secret way into the lady's laundry room. 

He surprises her there, and they embrace suggestively.

When it looks like one of the matrons is going to discover them, Brenda intentionally burns her hand to cause a distraction.

That's a pal.

The suggestive embrace leads to some hot laundry room prison sex (only suggested of course, in true 50s fashion) and Joan becomes pregnant. After she faints on a work detail, Dr. Crane discovers the truth, and Glen is called before the warden. 

He's willing to do whatever he has to not spoil Joan's chance for parole, but the warden decides to play hardball.

He gives van Zandt one week and carte blanche to uncover how Glen got into the women's prison.

Uh-oh.

She beats the pregnant Joan into a coma, and Dr. Crane moves her into an oxygen tent. When the other inmates hear the news, they take matters into their own hands. Things go rather fast and furiously from here to the end of the movie, but it plays out more or less how you'd expect: 

The ol' fake a stomach cramp and grab the guards and keys trick.

Followed by taking the ladies' warden hostage.

Meanwhile, Glen's got his hands on a gun and is out for blood.

(Nice symmetry with the padded solitary room from the beginning.)

A good bit of tear gas later, order is restored, the wardens are brought up on charges, and Helene's early parole is secured.

The End.

Okay, so as you may have noticed, this isn't exactly a film noir. It's packaged as one on the Bad Girls of Film Noir DVD (which sounds awful, I know) I own, but this is more or less just a black-and-white entry in the Women's Prison genre. (Minus a lesbian angle and exploitative shower scenes.) In 1955, this genre barely exists. It's interesting, though, how many tropes of the genre as it exists today (Orange Is the New Black, though I haven't actually seen it, but from the reviews I've read) are on display in Women's Prison:

THE CAST

The "bad girl" in question on the Bad Girls of Film Noir DVD mentioned above is apparently Cleo Moore, who plays Mae. But the villain and gravitational center of Women's Prison is undoubtedly Ida Lupino.

Lupino was coming off the collapse of her and former husband Collier Young's independent production company (for which she directed a good run of films, of which I've only seen "The Hitch-Hiker") and was returning to being in front of the camera after being behind it for so long.

She stayed in front of the camera for two more decades. (L, early photo; R, with Shatner in The Devil's Rain.)

Howard Duff, her real-life husband at the time of filming Women's Prison and until the early 80s, plays Dr. Crane (relation to Frasier unremarked-upon as near as I can tell). Their marriage was a tempestuous one, and this gives the scene where the doctor tells van Zandt that the reason she runs the prison the way she does is because she's a sexually frustrated psychopath some fun context. 

Not that I am in any way implying Ms. Lupino was a sexually-frustrated psychopath. I just mean for Old Hollywood Camp value.

Phyliss Thaxter plays Helene, and while she's perfectly fine, her character recedes into the background for the more interesting parts of the film. Jan Sterling and Cleo Moore play Brenda and Mae, respectively, and they get most of the film's most notable lines and scene-stealers. 

Both were under contract  but "failed to launch" as the studios' go-to blonde bombshells. (The wikipedia scuttlebutt indicates they lost those roles to a young Kim Novak.) P.s. I can't seem to resize this pics on the right, sorry about that; I tried to enlarge the ones on the left to match them but then the whole thing is just way too big. #BlogginProblems

Vivian Marshall gives quite a memorable performance as Dottie, but it doesn't appear she was in all that much. That's too bad. She's something of the feminist heart of this film - don't take my word for it, of course - and displays clear talent for impersonations, among them Bette Davis, Tallulah Bankhead, and - as will come in handy in the prisoners-take-over-the-prison portion of the film - a spot-on Ida Lupino.

There's a small role for future Academy Award nominee Juanita Moore. And Joan's virile husband Glen is played by Warren Stevens, i.e. Rojan.

"We conquer. We RULE."

I promise that the next Friday Night Film Noir entry will be more traditionally film noir-y. Only a few left on our list to cover! Though - I might just add more, haphazardly, from here on out. That seems to be the Dog Star Omnibus way. 

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