Apologies to DAD but none of the Baroque we’ve not seen many times was available, so a film seemed the way to go … an early one from the Conway Falcon series:

“Tom Lawrence gets off to a good start on his own as he wakes up with a hangover but with a sexy Latino lady standing over his bed. Mia Bruger is her name and she tells the Falcon of her concern for her missing brother. He meets her later to discuss the matter but someone knocks him out. He wakes up later on a country road in the backseat of his car with little knowledge of where he is.

When he is arrested for a bank robbery and a murder, Lawrence works out that he has been set up and goes on the lamb to solve the crime and why he was set up.

In his first film on his own, Tom Conway opens with a typically suave turn in bed, hungover from his night on the town and waking with a beautiful woman in his room. From here the plot moves well to set up the mystery. It isn’t a gripping thriller but it holds the interest by having enough going on and sufficient plot twists occur to help keep the pace up throughout.

Much more enjoyable than the previous entry (Falcon’s Brother) in this regard, the film is well written and well delivered.

After a so-so start in the last film, Conway seems like he was made for the role and within a few seconds of the first scene he is into it and great fun. His detecting skills are on show and he mixes them well with a debonair delivery and screen presence, the memory of Sanders slipped from my mind. Hilliard works well alongside him but, unusually for the series, there are quite a few strong female performances from Randolph, Gibson and Corday.

After Lefty in the last film we get Goldie returning but this time played by Edwards. It is a basic turn and not as funny as I would have liked. Better comic support value comes from the pairing of Clark and Gargan (straight man and stupid man respectively); the simple comic scenes involving them are not imaginative but they do provide a few laughs.”

……

The writing of a script, story, screenplay, whatever

… maybe just a novella.

Having watched the film above … look, it did the promised job, the review I felt was fair, it was clear how they wanted the episodes to go, as with The Saint, as with James Bond … but there are also major failings in general with formulae.

• First is that men and women are quite different … ask a man to write a woman, ask a woman to write a man … it’s fraught unless they’re a) working together or b) are some of the few who can write for both sexes. I feel Christy could, Wodehouse could not, Dorothy L. Sayers could not.

• Second is where to place each in history. In 1943, it was the near omniscient action man … by the 1990s, they were wanting the imperfect man and kickbutt superwoman … today, it’s obnoxious how the man is portrayed … only a deluded female could want those “heroines”. Somewhere on that continuum, from 1943 to the present, there was a happy medium for each protagonist.

• To cut to the chase, once the culture in which they operate in the tale is established … somewhere, culturally, back in the day … after landgirls became adept at most things, plus men were jacks of all trades, both fell for the other easily enough, then we need to build the male protag and female protag.

• The male protag was well educated for a start … rode, rowed, played rugby, cricket, sailed, knew a certain amount about cars, wrote verse and prose, could compose a song, passably danced, knew something about tech, was able to find solutions, was not impossibly intelligent, just enough, had flaws, was accessible, was not smug, was gentlemanly … all this was as we were educated in my day, could hold a knife and fork, open a door for a lady etc. etc. … then it’s the female.

• The female is often so badly written, from demure damsels in distress to kick butt feminazi dreams … somewhere inbetween are the females I personally know … we have two at this site who can hold their own and these are the ones I’ve based my female characters on. Also well brought up, adept at so many skills, expect the man to do others … on X there are other ladies who are just that, though sassy and feisty too. Next … the test:

• In my long book, at one point, our female protag is lured out to a car by subterfuge, three men are in it, she’s used to this as her gals’ section know how to neutralise with pencil thin tranquiliser dart. She disarms the one on the back seat one side, grabs the gun, shoots the other, shoots both in the front. Strings are pulled to get her off back in Paris … they were naughty boys from another section and Them didn’t want it known. But she was shaking after it … she had vulnerabilities, was real … and that’s how the character was formed … I backwrote from there.

• Rather than blissful love in a cottage, they know they just need to support one another, having tense and terse moments along the way, plenty of intim moments to ease it all along. Temptations, yes. I’m aware not all like Christie but in Tommy and Tuppence, she got close, though she often made Tuppence insufferable and Tommy too much of a klutz. I’m thinking the writer needs to extract ego from the two protagonists. In the film above, the gf is just right but he’s a smug prig in my eyes, as faithless as a … as a faithless person.

• Story arc … MMutR has this as one of his main gripes in series … someone new on the block wants to force the arc, change it, which viewers detest, and the writer has invented backstories which just don’t sit well. Avoid.