nazi alert: nation of islam propagandist Spite Lee and a White fellow nazi named Alan Fox set to grind the greatest police procedural ever into the ground: King’s Ransom, aka High and Low, by Salvatore Lombino; it’s a must not-see!

[“Dr. Mabuse, Parts I & II: See Both Complete, for Free, and Without Commercial Interruption, at WEJB/NSU.”]

By N.S.

Today’s pr “thing” from the hollywood reporter says nothing about the original story.

Salvatore Lombino (12926-2005) was, to my knowledge, the father of the American police procedural. In 1959, he wrote King’s Ransom, about a shoe executive (Douglas King) in a non-descript city who, on the verge of a hostile takeover of his company, in the face of his cut-throat rivals/colleagues, sees his world turned upside-down.

Early in Lombino’s career, a literary agent advised him to change his name to something less ethnic, and so he adopted numerous pseudonyms, above all, two: Ed McBain and Evan Hunter. He used Ed McBain mostly for a series of dozens of police procedural novels, all set in the 87th Precinct. Most other novels and screenplays he wrote as Evan Hunter.

A cut-throat master criminal (in his own mind), Sy, has the perfect plan and the perfect machine to set it into machine. He has a sonar-type gizmo to let him follow all police radio transmissions. His plan is to kidnap King’s son, and force the old man to give him everything he’s got.

Sy has two accomplices: Eddie Folsom, whom he met in the joint, and the latter’s voluptuous, stunning, bleached-blonde wife, Kathy, who was not along for the ride, but went who along with what she thought was something else—a bank job.

What Sy’s accomplices do not know at the beginning, however, is that Sy plans on killing EVERYONE, after, that is, raping Kathy. Kathy, Eddie, the kid.

Why are you sperlin’ everything, Stix?! I’m not.

I’m talking about King’s Ransom, which Spite Lee has surely never read, and has probably never even heard of.

Somebody sent King’s Ransom to Akira Kurosawa, who fell in love with it. He completely identified with Douglas King, who had started working at the shoe factory as a young apprentice, and learned every aspect of making shoes—fabrics, stitching, glueing, dyeing.

After the war, Kurosawa studied art, and then learned the movie business as an apprentice assistant director. He learned art direction-set decoration, editing, cinematography, wardrobe.

There’s a passage early on in High and Low (1963), in which the protagonist, Toshiro Mifune, recites, word for word, the passage from the novel, about the shoe executive learning his trade from the bottom up.

Kurosawa and his co-writers came up with a major switch on the novel. They cross-pollinated Lombino’s chief villain with Norbert Jacques’ German master-criminal, Dr. Mabuse!

A major theme in Kurosawa is the role of intelligence in society, and showing how each figure in the drama uses his brain. For instance, an old train worker explains to the detectives how he could figure which train model made a certain distinctive sound, when it passed through a station.

There’s no place for that in any American city today.

There’s also some charming comic relief, such as when an old supervising detective who could be made as a copper a mile away, tells his handsome, young partner, “Hey, be careful not to look like a cop.”

nazi Spite Lee’s White screenwriter, Alan Fox, made a name for himself writing a “controversial” play, safe spaces, in 2019. “Controversial” means pc. Fox wrote a ludicrously unbelievable story, in which we’re supposed to believe that a black adjunct instructor up for a tenured professorship is fired for assigning a writing project, in which his students must justify slavery. A japanese girl objects.

Lee is wasting the talents of Denzel Washington in the starring role. I’m guessing he’ll play a crime-fighting genius who has had to contend with racism his entire life.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/denzel-washington-spike-lee-high-and-low-1235819694/