Tag Archives: John D. MacDonald

Fiction, Reviews

‘Barrier Island,’ by John D. MacDonald

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John D. MacDonald, who had a business degree, occasionally strayed from conventional mystery scenarios to write a business story. I don’t think Barrier Island was a publishing blockbuster, but MacDonald had the clout to get it published, and it’s effective.

Our hero is Wade Rowley, a real estate broker on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. He has a partner, Bern Gibbs. Bern is an old friend, but their different business styles (and willingness to skirt legalities) are beginning to strain their association. Wade is especially concerned about a recent deal Bern took them into with Tucker Loomis, a swashbuckling local property developer. Bern assisted Tucker with land purchases for an extravagant new development on a barrier island. But now the government is seizing the island for environmental protection, and Tucker is suing for lost profits. Wade has a sneaking suspicion that the whole thing was a scam from the start. Tuck Loomis must have known the island was fragile and unstable. He probably leveraged his assets to buy up the land cheap so he could profit big from the government settlement.

Wade goes to visit one of the “property owners” listed in the development records, and discovers that the man is both poor and a Loomis employee. So he goes to a friend in the government and gives him the information, just in case the whole thing blows up on them. When Bern finds out about that, they get in a fight and agree to dissolve their partnership.

But that’s all before a murder happens.

Barrier Island was John D. MacDonald’s last novel, published in 1986. It reflects the author’s long-standing concern for environmental preservation, as well as (I suspect) the influence of the “Dynasty”-style prime time soap operas that were popular at the time. There was the same fascination here with the lifestyles and peccadillos of the rich, but at its heart the story is a morality tale. All the main characters are fully fleshed out, and even when we don’t like them. we’re permitted to observe their motivations, which are not always base.

Barrier Island wasn’t John D. MacDonald at the top of his game, but he was incapable of writing a bad story. Cautions for adult situations.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Darker Than Amber,’ by John D. MacDonald

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She sat up slowly, looked in turn at each of us, and her dark eyes were like twin entrances to two deep caves. Nothing lived in those caves. Maybe something had, once upon a time. There were piles of picked bones back in there, some scribbling on the walls, and some gray ash where the fires had been.

Revisited another Travis McGee book by John D. MacDonald, because they never do get old. Darker Than Amber is one of the best, I think. The story works out as dark as the title promises, but that makes the moments of grace shine all the brighter.

Trav and his friend, the economist Meyer, are fishing under a bridge in Marathon, Florida when somebody drops a girl, wired to a cement block, off the deck above. Trav being Trav, he leaps into the water immediately, managing to get her back to the surface in time to save her life with artificial respiration.

She turns out to be a beautiful young woman named Vangie, but she’s no innocent damsel in distress. She’s a prostitute who worked her way up to a very nasty con game in which they not only robbed, but murdered, selected men. Because she experienced a moment of sympathy for one victim, her partners decided to kill her. But she’s “case-hardened,” as Travis puts it, and in the end she can’t be saved, either morally or physically. After a second murder attempt succeeds, Trav makes up his mind to balance the scales for her.

I first encountered Darker Than Amber in its movie adaptation, on TV (I reviewed that film here). The book, needless to say, is a lot better. What is portrayed as an extended, improbable slug-fest between Rod Taylor and William Smith in the film is in the book a very neat gaslighting sting that works, not perfectly, but well enough to satisfy the reader.

Darker Than Amber was published in 1966 and shows its age, but that’s part of its value, it seems to me. Trav’s sexual mores will satisfy neither today’s conservatives nor liberals, but they weren’t remarkable for his time – except perhaps for his admission that he can work up no attraction whatever to Vangie’s shopworn charms.

There’s a scene where a black character delivers a little lecture about civil rights. It must have sounded sophisticated at the time, but it too hasn’t aged well.

Still, that’s how the world looked in those days. The best thing about the book, as always, is Trav himself – he picks up the Philip Marlowe tradition of opening up to the reader about his inner life. But he takes it further. And the reader can’t help liking his self-deprecating manner.

Highly recommended. Cautions for mature subject matter.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Lonely Silver Rain,’ by John D. MacDonald

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So we went to take a look. It took an hour and forty minutes to get there, first south and then west. A lonely road on the edge of the Glades. Lumpy asphalt running string-straight through wetlands past wooded hammocks where the white birds sat on bare trees like Christmas doodads, thinking white bird thoughts.

As I think I may possibly have mentioned before, I’m a hopeless fan of John D. MacDonald, and especially his Travis McGee novels, about a Florida boat bum and “salvage specialist” who recovers people’s stolen property and keeps half the value as his fee.  The Lonely Silver Rain holds a special place in the series, as its 21st and final installment. It was published in 1985, and the author died the following year.

Trav gets a call from Billy Ingraham, an old friend who’s a millionaire and a widower, who recently retired, acquired a trophy wife, and had a yacht custom-built to his specifications. The boat had barely gotten in the water when somebody stole it. Billy has heard that Trav once found somebody else’s stolen yacht. Could he do the same for him? Trav explains that the first recovery was kind of a fluke, but Billy promises a generous finder’s fee. Helped by his best friend, the economist Myer, Trav makes a plan to use aerial photography and systematic analysis to try to find the needle in the haystack. And, to his own surprise, he does find it.

But when he boards the yacht, now abandoned in an isolated bay in the Keys, he finds it trashed, with three corpses inside. A young man and two young women have been tortured and murdered here. Trav recognizes the signs – this is a drug deal gone bad. This is nothing for outsiders to mess with.

Trav backs out carefully, covering his tracks, and phones the Coast Guard anonymously to alert them. Then he tells Billy to forget he was ever involved.

Too late, it turns out. One of the dead women was the daughter of a high-level Peruvian gangster. Someone has decided that somebody must be made to pay for the murders, and somehow they’ve identified Travis McGee as the scapegoat. He’ll have to either handle the problem or find a way to disappear forever.

I remember that, when this book came out, some reviewers commented on what they saw as a weary, graying quality. The author’s chronological plan was for Travis McGee to age at a somewhat slower rate than people in the real world. Under that plan, McGee was now middle-aged, but still had good years in him (though he worries now and then about losing a half-step). But MacDonald was approaching 70 himself at the time (which even I admit is old, though I’m older than that now), and he was clearly experiencing intimations of mortality. There’s even a fleeting moment in this book, a sort of throwaway scene, where Trav acknowledges the possibility of the Great Beyond sending us messages.

The Lonely Silver Rain may not be the top entry in the Travis McGee series, but it’s written with all the skill and craft of a consummate professional. Plus, as a special bonus, there’s an episode at the end that adds a (possibly unintentional but touching ) coda that rounds out a classic detective series rather nicely.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The End of the Night,’ by John D. MacDonald

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And I suddenly realized that I had gone well beyond the point of choice. Even if I changed my mind and decided to fall in step with everybody else, it was now too late. Only in the animated cartoons could a small creature fall off a mountain, look down, register surprise, and climb back up through the empty air to safety.

As great a fan as I am of John D. MacDonald’s work, there are some of his books I’m not going to read again. Some of them are his explicitly environmental stories – though much of what he says is true, especially in deploring the over-development of Florida. But in that regard I’m like the people who say, “My parents dragged me to church every Sunday when I was a kid, and I’m never going back.”

The other MacDonald books I avoid are ones that just left too intense an impression. Dark stories with dark accounts of the suffering of the innocent. MacDonald is never a slasher writer, but his very skill makes the sorrow and the pity harder to bear.

The End of the Night is a book I hadn’t read before now, and I won’t be reading again – for that reason alone. But it’s still an excellent story of its kind. Part thriller, part horror tale. Dark, but excellently done.

The End of the Night opens in a way that informs you from the start exactly what you’re in for. We read a description of the executions, by electrocution, of four young people – a quirky, maladjusted mastermind, a big, thuggish Hispanic man, a slatternly girl, and a nice-looking young man from a “good family.” We learn that they were captured in the midst of a multi-state murder spree during which they killed several men and kidnapped and murdered a lovely, wealthy young woman a few days before her wedding.

The story is told in the words of several story participants, but mainly through the self-conscious memoir of the defense attorney and the final written confession of the “nice” young man. Chapter by chapter the story unfolds, evoking a rising sense of horror in the reader.

I half expected this book to be a plain condemnation of the death penalty, but it’s more complex than that. Although we know the ending, the road to that ending includes more than one surprise. What look, to the modern reader, like echoes of the Manson Family killings are actually unwitting prophecy, as the book was published in 1960.

Recommended, with cautions for intense, mature situations.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Slam the Big Door,’ by John D. MacDonald

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“it’s like they say, a small world,” Jeranna said. They both stood and smiled at him. Though the mouths and the faces were in no way alike, there was a chilling similarity in the smiles. They looked at him with a kind of joyous malevolence, an innocent evil, like two small savage boys—one holding the cat and the other holding the kerosene.

Before he struck gold with Travis McGee, the great John D. MacDonald wrote a variety of novels in paperback. He could – and did – work in several genres, and some of the product is astonishing in terms of its market(s). Your average paperback in those days was full of sex and violence (though tame by our standards today), with a gaudy cover. Aimed at male readers (back in the days when men read books, just so long as they weren’t too highbrow).

But MacDonald smuggled some pretty impressive literature into that market. One of his best novels, I think, is Slam the Big Door, which was published in 1960, three years before Travis McGee appeared. It’s a kind of novel very few authors are able (or interested enough) to write – a business thriller.

Mike Rodenska first met Troy Jamison in a military hospital during the war. They bonded as only war buddies can. After the war, Mike became a successful journalist, while Troy went into advertising, also doing well. They lived near one another and socialized often, with their wives. Then alcohol and infidelity destroyed Troy’s career and marriage, and he wandered off to Florida, where he became a builder and married a second wife, a rich woman.

When Troy learns that Mike’s beloved wife has died of cancer, he invites him to come down and stay in their home. Heal up in the Florida sunshine. And it is good there.

But Mike suffers from “the Rodenska curse,” some character trait that impels people to confide their problems to him. And Troy, it turns out, has plenty of problems. He’s drinking again. He’s cheating on his beautiful wife. And the development project he’s sunk their money into is being nibbled away at by avaricious local real estate sharks – he and his wife could lose anything.

Mike can’t help trying to intervene, to save Troy. But can you help a man whose personal devils are driving him to self-destruction? They didn’t talk about PTSD back when Slam the Big Door was written, but that’s the problem here. There will be trouble. Trust will be betrayed, lives will be lost, but some kind of peace will be achieved in the end.

I was very impressed with Slam the Big Door. It demonstrated – it seemed to me – that MacDonald could have done anything he wanted to in the literary world. He could have been up there with Hemingway. But you know what? I think we would have lost something if he had. MacDonald elevated his genre – paved the way for other writers who aspired (and aspire) to produce genuine literature in the mystery/thriller form.

Another thing I liked about this book is that – although there’s a fair amount of sex – there’s no swinging philosophy apparent. Sex is taken seriously, and adultery condemned. I suppose that was just an expression of the times.

Also, Mike Rodenska is a really good point of view character.

In short, I highly recommend Slam the Big Door. This is a fine novel.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Girl, the Gold Watch & Everything,’ by John D. MacDonald

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“Sit over there,” she said, indicating a fake Victorian couch upholstered in shiny plastic under a fake Utrillo upon an imitation driftwood wall.

***

He was a loose, asthmatic, scurfy man with the habitual expression of someone having his leg removed without anesthetic.

If the lines above remind you a little of P. G. Wodehouse, I think that’s intentional. The Girl, the Gold Watch & Everything is a unique work in John D. MacDonald’s corpus – basically a sex farce wrapped around a lighthearted science fiction/fantasy plot. I loved it as a young man. Re-reading it now (I had a sudden compulsion to do so) I still found it amusing – though elements that troubled me on my first reading are even more troublous today, so much has the world changed.

Kirby Winter’s uncle Omar, eccentric Miami inventor and financier, has died, leaving his nephew in something of a pickle. Kirby is a presentable, rather dull young man whose main personal problem is utter shyness and panic in the presence of girls (generally with slapstick consequences). On his death, Uncle Omar left Kirby his pocket watch and a letter to be opened a year after his passing, and ordered all his records destroyed. Now his business partners and the authorities are looking for 12 million missing dollars, which Kirby was the last one to have in his possession. His (true) protestations that he’s been giving the money away to charities and the poor, on Omar’s instructions, are not believed. So the police are looking for him.

To his rescue – ostensibly – come sexy Charla O’Rourke and her slick brother Joseph, who offer Kirby a means of escape on their yacht. Before long, Kirby realizes that their plans for him are not friendly. They want to get him somewhere where they can torture him until he tells them where the money is.

Kirby escapes them, and through a couple chance connections ends up in a swinging Hollywood director’s vacant apartment. There – to his complete surprise – he finds himself in bed one night with Bonny Lee Beaumont, a free-spirited young stripper with whom he quickly falls in love. But Kirby is concerned about Wilma, Uncle Omar’s only other employee, who will certainly be another target for the O’Rourkes. His plans to rescue her seem hopeless, until he discovers the secret of Uncle Omar’s watch, a way to make time stand still. Literally.

The Girl, the Gold Watch & Everything is intended as a fun book, and it is. I loved it when I first read it (around 1980, I think). The central problem of the book is not in fact Kirby’s legal trouble, but his shyness with women. This appealed to me very much at that time in my life. But I had trouble with some of the practical gags in the book, employed as tactical diversions – particularly ones involving stripping women while time is stopped, so that they suddenly find themselves naked in public. That struck me as pretty cruel, even in those swinging times (though it’s Bonny Lee who usually plays the gag, which makes it a little less creepy). In today’s Me Too environment, of course, a writer couldn’t get away with that stuff at all.

The sex element in the book was generally more prominent than I remembered. Not explicit sex, but a fair amount of bed time and nakedness. Also a lot of Swinging Sixties pseudo-philosophy about how sex ought to be free and natural, untrammeled by traditional taboos and mores and legalities. That stuff was pretty much boiler plate in paperback literature at the time, but it has aged poorly. (Though I’m not sure things still weren’t better then than what we’ve got now.)

As an addendum, a TV movie was made of this book in 1980, starring Robert Hayes (of Airplane!), Pam Dawber (of Mork & Mindy), and Jill Ireland. The sex and nudity were toned down, of course, but what disappointed me was that they completely cut out what I considered the true heart of the story – Kirby’s overcoming of his shyness. This is precisely why MacDonald hated pretty much all filmed adaptations of his works.

In summation, I highly recommend The Girl, the Gold Watch & Everything as a light read for grownups – with cautions for vintage adult material.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Last One Left,’ by John D. MacDonald

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For half the journey she thought of Staniker. There had been just enough toughness, just enough greed, just enough brutality for him to manage it. But now his eyes were wrong and his mouth was changed. He had expended something he’d never regain. It was, she thought, like what happened to a man who experienced a truly professional, cold, savage beating. It left him with all those little apologetic mannerisms, bob of head, ingratiating smile, a wariness very like shyness.

On the long shelf of John D. MacDonald’s non-Travis McGee novels, pride of place must probably go to The Executioners, which would be filmed twice as Cape Fear. But The Last One Left must certainly rank high. It is complex, with many outstanding qualities, and only one small flaw that I can detect.

Sam Boyleston is a Texas lawyer. He’s principled and ethical. He’s also a hard man, rigid and impatient with human frailty. He can’t understand why his beloved wife has separated from him, taking their son, afraid that the gravity mass of Sam’s personality will warp the boy’s own nature. And he’s baffled by his sister’s decision to marry a do-gooder relief worker with no prospects of wealth. So he pressured them into a deal – they would spend a year apart, and he’d pay for the wedding. Jonathan, the young man, will work on one of Sam’s friends’ ranches, while Leila spends the year on a luxury cruise in the Bahamas with his friend Bix and his family, on their yacht.

How was he to know that Bix was using the cruise to smuggle payoff money to the islands? Or that Staniker, his captain, would get wind of the scheme and murder them all for the loot?

All Sam knows is that Staniker showed up marooned on an island, burned and dehydrated, apparently the last survivor. With uncharacteristic sentimentality, Sam bankrolls Jonathan in a quixotic effort to search for Leila in the islands and atolls, a project in which he has no faith. For his own part, he’s learned about the money. He’s going to find out who planned the murders, and when he knows, he’ll do whatever he has to do.

MacDonald was on top of his game when he wrote The Last One Left. This book is especially strong in terms of characterization. Sam Boyles is a familiar sort of MacDonald hero, a lot like Travis McGee except for a lack of self-awareness, but his journey to wisdom is fascinating.

Perhaps the most memorable character is Crissy Harkinson, the femme fatale of the story. I think she may be the most fully realized dangerous dame I’ve ever encountered in a hardboiled novel. She is at once fascinating, repellant, and oddly pathetic.

But for me the most interesting member of the cast was Sergeant Corpo, a brain-damaged war veteran hermit struggling to survive in a world he no longer understands. He wants nothing more than to do what’s right, and mostly he succeeds.

MacDonald himself must have had a fondness for this book, because he took the boat Munequita, which plays an important part in the plot, and gave it to Travis McGee himself in the books that followed.

I wasn’t entirely happy with the final payoff here. I considered that scene slightly rushed and dubious. But that’s my only complaint (except that there are intense episodes of bad things happening to good people, which is hard to avoid). The Last One Left is one of MacDonald’s best novels, and I recommend it highly. Cautions for mild sex and intense situations.

Oh yes, this Kindle version seems to be converted from a British edition, as Britishisms like “tyres,” “petrol,” and “aeroplane” are used. I’m pretty sure the original American edition did not have those.

Fiction, Reviews

‘A Tan and Sandy Silence,’ by John D. MacDonald

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But the Tibetan bar-headed goose and her gander have a very strange ceremony they perform after they have mated. They rise high in the water, wings spread wide, beaks aimed straight up at the sky, time and time again, making great bugle sounds of honking. The behaviorists think it is unprofessional to use subjective terms about animal patterns. So they don’t call the ceremony joy. They don’t know what to call it. These geese live for up to fifty years, and they mate for life. They celebrate the mating this same way year after year. If one dies, the other never mates again.

So penguins, eagles, geese, wolves, and many other creatures of land and sea and air are stuck with all this obsolete magic and mystery because they can’t read and they can’t listen to lectures. All they have is instinct. Man feels alienated from all feeling, so he sets up encounter groups to sensitize each member to human interrelationships. But the basic group of two, of male and female, is being desensitized as fast as we can manage it.

Got another deal on a Travis McGee book by John D. MacDonald. A Tan and Sandy Silence is, I think, one of the master’s best – a taut tale that borders on horror and reveals our hero at his most vulnerable.

Travis McGee, Fort Lauderdale “salvage specialist,” nearly gets shot one day by old acquaintance Harry Broll, a real estate developer who talks his way aboard Travis’ houseboat. He says he needs to find Mary, his ex-wife, to get her signature for an important real estate deal. He knows she’s been in touch with McGee, he says.

Travis is troubled by this occurrence in two ways – first, he’d never have allowed anybody to get the drop on him like that in the past. Is he losing his edge? Is he getting too long in the tooth for the business of recovering people and their property? Should he accept the offer of Jillian Brent-Archer, the lovely, wealthy English widow who’d like him to move onto her boat and be her constant escort? It would be a soft retirement, and not really all that demeaning.

Secondly, he realizes that Harry Broll was right about one thing – if Mary has disappeared, she’s probably in trouble. But if she was in trouble, she probably would have contacted McGee – which she hasn’t. So where is she?

Talking to Mary’s friends, Travis learns that she’s vacationing in Grenada. She sends postcards now and then. So everything’s all right, right?

But is it? McGee still isn’t sure. So he assumes a false identity and flies down to Grenada. Where he will encounter an evil that reminded me of the horrific “Un-man” in C.S. Lewis’ Perelandra. It’ll be a close-run thing, and the plot will require something fairly close to a deus ex machina to get our hero through this time.

John D. MacDonald was near the top of his game when he wrote A Tan and Sandy Silence (published in 1971). I’m not sure anymore (and I can’t find the reference) when it was that major literary critics suddenly decided it was okay to praise his work, but I know it was around the time this book came out. There were a couple fresh elements here – one is a fairly realistic description of head trauma and PTSD:

Forget the crap about the television series hard guy who gets slugged and shoved out of a fast moving car, wakes up in the ambulance, and immediately deduces that the kidnapper was a left-handed albino because Little Milly left her pill bottle on the second piling from the end of the pier. If hard case happens to wake up in the ambulance, he is going to be busy trying to remember his own name and wondering why he has double vision and what that loud noise is and why he keeps throwing up.

Another new element is that McGee makes some kind of resolution to change the way he deals with women in the future. But I never entirely understood what that meant.

Religion shows up a couple times; there are a couple pretty awful Catholics in this book, and a group of very nice Jesus Freaks (a brand new phenomenon just then).

A Tan and Sandy Silence is a harrowing book. It contains what I consider perhaps the most horrifying scene in the series. But it’s also engrossing and lyrical and deeply humane. Sometimes funny too. I recommend it highly. Cautions for adult themes.

Fiction, Reviews

‘On the Run,’ by John D. MacDonald

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“One man is a significant entity. A partnership halves that value. Three or more men, working together, diminish themselves to zero. Team effort is the stagnation of the race.”

As great a booster of John D. MacDonald as I may be, there are entries in his oeuvre that disappoint me. On the Run is one of those, but only because of how it ends – and I think I can guess why it turned out that way.

The titular man on the run in the story, Sid Shanley, is a used car salesman in Houston, living and working under an assumed name. He’s on the run because two years ago he discovered another man in bed with his wife and beat him brutally, leaving him permanently disfigured. The man turned out to be mobster, one inclined to hold grudges over far lesser insults. So Sid took to the road. It was easier to disappear back then than it is now, especially when you’re an orphan. Sid has a brother somewhere, but they’re not in touch.

But Sid isn’t as alone as he thinks. He doesn’t know he has a grandfather, a rich old man living in the town of Bolton out east. The old man is remorseful about the way he treated Sid’s mother, and he wants to see his two grandsons before he dies and leaves them his fortune. He hired a very smart, resourceful investigator to locate Sid, and it was done. He understands that Sid’s going to be hard to approach, so he sends his personal nurse, the lovely Paula Lettinger, as his emissary, carrying a memento he’s sure Sid will recognize.

After a difficult (and pretty weird) first encounter, Sid decides he can trust Paula, and they set off on a cross-country road trip back to Bolton. On the way they’ll discover that they’re made for each other. But as for the future – Sid can’t see how that could ever work out.

There’s a lot of sex in this book – not explicit, but as the focus of Sid’s and Paula’s relationship. Very sophisticated for the time, it all seems a little naïve today. And overdone.

Otherwise, the story goes along great until the very end, when the author clotheslines the reader, bringing the story to what was – for me – a most unsatisfactory conclusion.

But I suspect I can guess what happened to the story. On the Run was published in 1963, the same year the first book in MacDonald’s legendary Travis McGee series appeared. I’m guessing that McGee wasn’t the only series character MacDonald proposed to Fawcett Publications when they asked him to come up with one. I’m guessing that On the Run might have been the first installment in an intriguing series about Sid Shanley pursuing a vendetta against the mob. That would have justified the weird ending we face here.

But that series, if it was ever contemplated, never happened. So we’re left with a decent story that ends with a thud. I can’t really recommend it.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Murder For the Bride,’ by John D. MacDonald

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The temporary relief of the rain hadn’t lasted long. The thick heavy heat had spread itself over the city again, like a fat woman face down on a mudbank.

Another non-McGee MacDonald, an early one. I think Murder For the Bride is one of John D.’s less celebrated books, but I liked it fine.

Our hero, Dillon Bryant, is an oil engineer. When Murder For the Bride opens, he’s in South America on a job, thinking every minute about Laura Rentane, the beautiful woman he married just before he left the country. It was a whirlwind courtship, but she was the girl of his dreams. More than one friend expressed doubts about her character, but Dill wouldn’t hear of it.

Then a letter comes. Dill had better come home to New Orleans. Laura is in big trouble. When he arrives, he finds a police detective outside their apartment door. Laura is dead, he is told. Strangled with a length of wire.

Dill has to do something about it. He starts asking questions. The more questions he asks, the more he’s forced to realize that Laura lied to him. Her name wasn’t Rentane. She was older than she looked. Her background wasn’t what she claimed. When the FBI takes over her case, the cops toss Dill some clues, just to spite them. They think they know what Dill is likely to do, but they’re not prepared for how far he’s willing to go.

As in any John D. MacDonald book, the prose in Murder For the Bride is crisp and compelling. There’s just enough sex to satisfy the original paperback audience, which is pretty tame by today’s standards. And beneath it all, a story of integrity and coming of age.

As an added bonus, Commie spies are involved, and there’s no moral ambiguity in their depiction. This is anticommunism at its best, circa 1951.

Recommended.