Word: inspector
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...enterprises launched in the hopeful '60s have been as successful as a square, spare gumshoe called Inspector Van der Valk. The humane Amsterdam police detective was the creation of Nicholas Freeling, a 45-year-old ex-hotel cook who put away his pots a decade ago and took to publishing suspense novels at the rate of one a year. Since then, Van der Valk has been probing characters, savoring cookery and solving crimes (mainly murder in high or low degree) around Holland and neighboring countries. Van der Valk books have attracted a steadily growing international audience and collected...
Wham-O. Even if Frisbee eventually becomes a professional sport, as some observers fear, there is still likely to be more money in selling the disks than in flipping them. Twenty-four years ago, a Los Angeles building inspector named Fred Morrison invented the Frisbee after studying the airworthy pie pans used by the now defunct Frisbie bakery company of Bridgeport, Conn. In 1956 he sold the patent on an improved design to the Wham-O Co. (those wonderful people who brought you the Hula-Hoop), and since then the royalties have been sailing in: about $800,000 to date...
...them explained their motives. Through the use of a series of "tapes" that make up the final report to the commissioner Mills is able to do the police in different voices: the cynic, the "book" man, the black who thinks of himself as "Negro," the Chief Inspector with a limited supply of courage...
...characters for us. Though it's true that Frenzy isn't really "about" anything (except, as with most suspense films, man against the modern world), all the main characters illustrate the notion that violent streaks and clandestine desires are natural and sometimes even make sense. The Scotland Yard inspector who sneaks his meat and eggs (to relax from his wife's humorously perverse French cooking) understands the embittered flyman who can so rage while talking to an unapproving ex-wife that he breaks a wine glass in his hand and does not feel the pain...
...acting is generally good. Jon Finch is strong and appropriately frenzied as the hero (who was a limping, balding, middle-aged fellow in the book); in a character created almost entirely by Schaffer, Alec McCowen scores as the civilized inspector who can't restrain his appetite...