JUST THE WAY YOU ARGYLE

Your Humble Narrator is back in the Valley after a quick trip to the Arthur Lyons Film Noir Festival in Palm Springs, California, where I caught up with this 1948 artifact:

The Argyle Secrets--William Gargan, as a wisecracking reporter, is beset by a variety of sinister types, from a femme fatale to a southern dandy with a swordcane to a politely murderous continental gent with a towering henchman. The McGuffin they're all after is an album containing a list of corporate bigwigs willing to play either side of the Allied or Axis fence, depending on who won World War II.

The writer-director is the great Cyril "Cy" Endfield, adapting his own 1945 radio play The Argyle Album from Suspense on CBS. The film version feels, indeed, like little more than an illustrated radio play, with narration and energetic rapid-fire dialogue powering its 65-minute running time. The characters spew detailed exposition at each other even while they're trying to kill each other.

Even with his face bruised and his hair mussed from the various beatings he endures, Gargan is jolly company in the lead, and the supporting cast is a joy: Jack Reitzen as the southern fop, Marjorie Lord as the mendacious beauty, Ralph Byrd as the disapproving police detective, Peter Brocco as one of the shady cronies, and Sgt. Schultz himself, John Banner, here trim and dapper, as the principal bad guy. In a supporting role is a young Barbara Billingsley, and if you've ever wanted see Mrs. Cleaver take a punch right to her adorable kisser, this is the picture that will fulfill your wish.

As with El Vampiro Negro at last year's festival, the restored print of this movie shown at Palm Springs is another collaboration between UCLA Film and Television Archive and The Noir Foundation, and like the Argentine film, The Argyle Secrets looks like a million bucks onscreen. Catch it if you get the chance.

While in Palm Springs, I enjoyed lunch at Sherman's Deli, egg salad and chopped liver on rye...

...dinner at Kalura Trattoria, tortellini panna rosa...

...then back to Sherman's for breakfast, eggs benedict with nova lox...

Yummy.

I also made a pilgrimage to my beloved roadside dinosaurs at Cabazon. When I was there in October they were painted Flintstones-style, with T-Rex as Fred and "Dinny" the sauropod as Dino. This week they were painted to extoll love and peace...

Hard to argue with that. But I'd like to see the Cabazon Dinos painted blue and yellow, maybe with a sunflower on T-Rex's chest...

ROADSIDE SCHOLAR

The Wife, The Kid and I spent the weekend before last in beautiful Palm Springs, so that Your Humble Narrator...

...could check out and review a couple of fascinating obscurities at the Arthur Lyons Film Noir Festival at the Camelot Theatre on Baristo.

On the way, we stopped in Quartzsite, Arizona, at Reader's Oasis Books...

...where I had stopped in May of 2019 in hopes of interviewing the celebrated "Naked Bookseller" Paul Winer, only to find the place closed and learn, upon calling his wife Joanne, that Winer had died in a hospice in Yuma just a couple of days earlier (here's the Phoenix Magazine story I wrote about him at the time). This time, I found the store open, and Joanne sitting disconsolately in the doorway, but alas, the place was without electrical power, and the books seemed dusty and dry. Heartbreaking. Nonetheless, I left with several volumes, including a Western paperback called The Man From Padera, by cowboy star Rory Calhoun.

Then we stopped for gas at Chiriaco Summit, California, and paid a quick visit to "William the Conqueror" (Patton's dog) at the Patton Museum there...

In Palm Springs, we had several fine meals, including lox and eggs at Sherman's...

On Saturday, after dropping the ladies off to shop at the outlet malls just west of Palm Springs, I headed back to the incredibly windy exit at Cabazon to visit my beloved roadside dinosaurs (famously featured in Pee-Wee's Big Adventure) to find they had been painted in Flintstones style...

Oh the indignity. "Dinny" looks rather irritable about it...

I went into the gift shop inside Dinny's belly to see if I could establish if the dinos are still under occupation by the anti-evolutionist crowd, and rather to my surprise, could find no evidence of it. There were no books, brochures, tracts or signage to that effect that I spotted, just standard toys, shirts, etc. It made me wonder if, maybe, the owners found their anti-evolutionist views bad for business and decided to self-suppress them, at least in the gift shop. 

In any case, sculptor Claude Bell's bas-relief depictions of earlier humans, which suggest a belief in evolution, may still be seen in the interior walls...

Outside, there's also this snake sculpture...

...and the huge, dinosaur-adorned sign of the Wheel Inn Restaurant...

It's now closed, alas, but I would have eaten there if it wasn't.

On the ride home we stopped in Quartzsite again for gas, and saw still more fauna I would like to have adopted...