Author: Not Alison

Thundercats (1985-1989)

~ Not Alison ~ Leave a comment
inner cover of the Thundercats complete series DVD set

I watched the original Thundercats series as it first aired, and it was a major part of my childhood—or at least the first season (65 episodes) and the “Thundercats Ho” movie/episodes (introducing Pumyra, Lynx-O, and Bengali) were, because while I watched and rewatched and rewatched those, the episodes that came after kind of fell by the wayside for me, unseen except in fragments. I think what happened is that the first season was in reruns for a long time, and before the new episodes began airing, the show had moved to a time slot earlier than I got home from school and I didn’t bother setting the VCR to record them—and might not have realized there were new episodes until I’d already missed a lot.

I didn’t see the second half of the series until it was released (slowly) on DVD. I recently watched everything again with a complete-series box set of DVDs, making absurdly elaborate commentary notes on nearly every episode.

Here I’m offering my general overview, an examination of the pilot (“Exodus” and “Unholy Alliance”), and in a separate post my own personal recommended episode order for viewing the series. Maybe someday I will also post those episode commentaries, but for now I’ll avoid the temptation.

(I’ve never seen any of the 2011 version of Thundercats, but I just possibly might have bought one or two of the toys when they appeared.)

Idiosyncrasies

Officially, according to the show, people from Thundera are Thunderians. I say and write Thunderan because there’s really no reason at all for that extra i.

I call Willa’s domain the Treetop Queendom, not Kingdom. There are emphatically no men there, that’s rather a defining feature, and Willa is never called a king.

I accept the spelling S-S-Slithe as official based on the packaging of the LJN toys, and yet the toy line also said Ben Gali (two words) and I treat it as a single word, Bengali.

In my comments I don’t italicize the names Feliner or Ratstar out of laziness, even though these are ships and the names really should be in italics.

An Overview

The opening sequence is simply gorgeous animation. This is some of the best animation you could see on U.S. television in the 1980s. It still looks amazing today, jaded as we might be.

Watching the series at other times it bothered me that various Thunderans would not immediately recognize the Sword of Omens and understand Lion-O’s authority because of it; but in fact it is built into the very first episode that the Eye of Thundera is largely a secret, perhaps thought of as a myth, and even the nobles don’t know about it. Jaga has carried the Sword openly in the past, we learn, but apparently without people understanding what it was. The Sword is not a symbol of the ruler of the Thundercats; it is not being passed down to Lion-O from his father. It may be quite rare, or even unique, for the lord of the Thundercats to have it, something called for only by the extreme circumstances they find themselves in.

In many episodes it helps to assume that the Sword not only warns Lion-O when a Thundercat is in trouble but also mystically persuades him of which direction to go, whether he recognizes the location in the vision or not.

The setting is called Third Earth. I have always understood this as meaning a future epoch of the earth’s history—this is the third major stage of the earth’s life. Whether we ourselves are First Earth or Second Earth is unclear. Perhaps the age ending with the extinction of the dinosaurs marked the end of First Earth and we are in Second Earth. If so, the change from Second to Third is not as total or traumatic as the move from First to Second. There has been some continuity from our age to the future time of the Thundercats, such as human beings in Willa’s Treetop Queendom or the Berserkers, along with Mumm-Ra’s pyramid and some other ruins and relics.

It’s possible, though, that “Third” might have nothing to do with time periods or stages; maybe it’s just attached to the name because Earth is the third planet from the sun.

We know the Berbils came from another planet. We assume the Wollos, Bulkans, Trollogs, and other species are native to Third Earth, though it’s not necessarily the case.

It may help to assume that when we see English printed on the screen, this is just a concession of the animation for us the viewers, and the real text is actually some kind of galactic common script, spread far and wide including Thundera, Second Earth, the galactic police force, and any of old earth’s former colonies. The spoken language, too, must be some kind of common speech that even Warrior Maidens and Berbils use (although the Berbils may’ve been on earth long enough to take up the local language).

A few episodes feature nameless hench-Mutants, “extras” doing gruntwork in Castle Plun-Darr or guarding (and inevitably chasing) prisoners. However, it’s fairly clear overall that the intended situation is for S-S-Slithe, Jackalman, and Monkian—at some point joined, inexplicably, by Vultureman and a couple of times bullied by a visiting Ratar-O—to be the only Mutants left active on Third Earth. (My own attempts to explain this discrepancy away are in my comments below on “Unholy Alliance” and “Spaceship Beneath the Sands.”) The beautiful opening at the beginning of every episode shows numerous Mutant foot soldiers, but this represents a scene from the very first episode, before the Mutants’ ship got buried in the sand. Viewers could be misled by this into thinking hench-Mutants were still around, and I strongly suspect that some of the show’s writers were also fooled.

One of the statues in Mumm-Ra’s crypt represents something like a vulture. But whoever drew the main shot of this statue, the image that gets repeated over and over throughout the series, got the foreshortening wrong. Instead of a bird with a beak, it looks like this is some fantasy creature with no mouth and no chin, just a wrinkled neck between eyes and collarbones, and it irks me every time I see it.

In the early episodes Lion-O is sometimes overbearing and pompous and too proud and caught up in the image he thinks “the Lord of the Thundercats” ought to convey—all of which is exactly, precisely how a child in an adult body who’s suddenly been tossed into royal leadership with little preparation and everyone depending on him, plus receiving a set of completely new, unexpected super-Thunderan powers, would behave.

Mumm-Ra is honestly quite scary. Whether mummified or powered up, he is not a tame or amusing character, and the people making the show did not soften him up to make him nonthreatening. (Or if this is the softer version, the original must have been horrifying.)

Exodus

The first two episodes aired originally in a one-hour block; in reruns, this block was split into “Exodus” and “Unholy Alliance.” Together these episodes deliver a lot of the setup of the series (although you need to add on “Berbils” [ep. 3] and “Slaves of Castle Plun-Darr” [ep. 4] to get most of the main pieces in place).

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There’s a great deal the first episode doesn’t tell us.

Why does Thundera explode? Was it a geological catastrophe? An accident of Thunderan technology? A deliberate attack by enemies? (Way, way, way down the line the series will address this.)

We don’t know exactly what is going on between the groups, but it’s clear the Thunderans are familiar with the Mutants as a threat, and a frequent one (Panthro: “Always those blasted Mutants!”), although here the Mutants might be no more than opportunistic space pirates. Later in the series we see there must have been some sort of ongoing conflict, because otherwise the Thunderans would not be stealing plans for Plun-Darrian war machines. But how severe is this conflict? (Later events will suggest that the moons of Plun-Darr are within orbital range of Thundera, at least entering that area after the planet’s end. So the Mutants may come from a place fairly close by.)

We also don’t get much explicit information about the group surrounding Lion-O. We get the idea that “Thundercats” are a specialized, elite group among the Thunderan population, and these few on the flagship are called nobles. But we aren’t told more than that.

It’s possible Cheetara, Panthro, and Tygra are the heads of their clans, the highest of the nobility aside from the lord himself. But one would expect the heads of the clans to be older and married and have children—although it’s possible they do have families, placed on other ships to maximize the chance that someone will escape to rebuild. And it may also be that the older, more mature heads have already been killed in a conflict with the Mutants, and these relatively young adults have taken over the leadership of the clans earlier than they normally would, much the way Lion-O does when the planet explodes (with his father apparently on it, as we see later in the series).

But I happen to think that as the episode opens there are living clan heads on other ships, in other places, and this group of Thundercats was selected because they are in their prime and Lion-O will need fit, active, physically strong protectors in the hostile galaxy. It may well be that one, two, or all three are in line to be clan heads in the future, and it was decided to get this group of nobles bonded with Lion-O now in preparation for that future, even if the elders should survive.

That leaves Wilykit and Wilykat, brother and sister, twins. Why choose two children instead of a strapping adult at the peak of her or his physical abilities?

For one thing, they represent a different kind of ability than speed and strength; it is not for nothing that in the future Anointment Trials theirs will be a test of cunning. That too will be needed in the dangerous refugee future. But I rather think this emphasis on cunning and wit and stealth and tricks is found throughout their clan; lacking the speed of cheetah-types or the strength of panther- and tiger-types, their branch of Thunderan people will traditionally rely on less bodily means for defense and offense. (I’m supposing that each clan is made up of Thunderans of a particular cat-type, which is purely speculation.)

Kit and Kat are quite competent and capable, as they prove repeatedly, but they’re not entirely responsible and their judgment is sometimes weak, as they prove repeatedly. Maybe in this case there really is no one else from their clan to send. There may be a head of the clan, however, either too aged to take part in guarding Lion-O or too busy scrambling to meet clan responsibilities shouldered too soon because the previous head was killed. But it shouldn’t be overlooked that they are the same age (so far) as young Lion-O, and a desire to give him someone his own age to relate to might have been a factor.

Both Wilykit and Wilykat are sent, instead of simply one clan member, for several reasons:

  1. They work best as a team.
  2. They are young, and the leaders were concerned one might not be enough, although the pair might do the job of one adult.
  3. They’re facing devastation and extreme loss, and more than any of the adults they are going to need someone close and familiar and offering connection to their old life in order to deal with the emotional toll of what’s ahead. (It also seems that Panthro, Cheetara, and Tygra are already friends and comrades before this mission, which is less likely to be true of the two young Thundercats.)

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When the Mutant attack begins, the framing is such that we the audience may not realize the ship being hit is a different one than the main characters are on. I expect this was deliberate.

There is no explanation given for why the Mutants don’t attack the ship again while the Thundercats are in stasis. The reason for S-S-Slithe’s retreat from the Sword chamber is shaky enough that it’s hard to believe they flew away without any effort to track where the Thunderan ship went. It’s true they must have been out of immediate range, or else the Thundercats would not have dared go into stasis. But it’s hard to believe that the Mutants totally lost the ship and it took them that long to find it—unless the Thunderan flagship had some kind or electronic cloaking/stealth/scrambling technology (and they hadn’t employed it in the first place because the lesser convoy ships lacked that technology, so what was the point; or the technology can’t be activated close to a planet; or, since the planet was exploding the Mutants knew the flagship would be leaving and were waiting to spot them visually without sensors).

One explanation is that something hugely important and significant was going on that claimed the Mutants’ attention—something that could not wait. They had a sense of where the Thunderan ship was heading, estimated that the Thundercats would have to go into suspension, and decided they could come back for the Sword later after this huge situation had been dealt with. It didn’t take the Mutants years to find the Thunderan flagship, it took them that long to deal with their own near-hand crisis, then put themselves in stasis and fly out to follow the ship.

The initial episode implies that Lion-O grew to physical adulthood because the suspension capsules allow some aging—which naturally leads to the question of why Wilykit and Wilykat didn’t grow the same way. The traditional answer is that although Lion-O explains it as the natural functioning of suspension capsules, he’s jumping to conclusions and in fact his capsule was malfunctioning slightly due to damage inflicted during the Mutants’ attack on the ship. His capsule allowed a little more aging than it should have, but the other Thundercats’ capsules were apparently in regular working order.

The Unholy Alliance and Spaceship Beneath the Sands

When Mumm-Ra sinks the Mutants’ ship in the sands, we know there were other Mutants on board. Because it’s a spaceship, it’s airtight and has its own oxygen supply, so the burial itself would not have killed anyone. The ship may have had working suspension capsules, but otherwise the crew members would have spent a good bit of time alive down there squabbling over food reserves until either they ran out of water; they killed each other off in fights; or whatever ruined the ship let the sand pour in.

The Mutants’ spaceship was whole when Mumm-Ra sank it. Had it been on the surface, erosion could easily have eaten away the hull, but it was buried and should have been protected. Yet when it reappears in “Spaceship Beneath the Sands” it isn’t whole. Are we to assume the sands shift enough to wear giant holes in the buried ship, or is there some sort of creature down there that eats metal?

Possibly some Mutants actually survived the entire time of the ship’s burial but were too weak to come out when the ship resurfaced. S-S-Slithe and the others—eager to fly out and fight with their newly reclaimed vehicles—just left them there for later and dragged them to Castle Plun-Darr between episodes.

OR

When the ship was buried the Mutant crew decided to go into suspension instead of starving slowly, and when S-S-Slithe, Monkian, and Jackalman entered the wreckage they did see the sleeping Mutants but ignored them for the present. The trio went for a test ride of the vehicles before coming back, waking everyone up, and ordering the newly awakened henchmen to haul all the salvageable equipment to Castle Plun-Darr.

OR

The Mutant troops were in stasis, and the main trio did wake them up right away, then (between onscreen scenes) gave them directions to Castle Plun-Darr and ordered them to move all the usable equipment while they (the three leaders) took off on the vehicles to go attack the Thundercats right away. (This would, if nothing else, keep the Cats busy while all the equipment was being taken to the castle.)

One of these scenarios would account for the presence of Mutant extras in other episodes. And yet different episodes also make clear that the Mutant leaders are alone. So what happened to the nameless troops? Why do they disappear and reappear?

Maybe S-S-Slithe liked to put them in stasis when they weren’t needed, so he wouldn’t have to feed them, but at some point something went wrong and they expired without being woken up.

Maybe some of them were made to serve as crew on the Ratstar and more were killed off each of the many times it crashed. (The ship couldn’t be kept in operation entirely by two or three people on the bridge, right?)

Maybe the show is too kind to show us that any time a hench-Mutant got caught spying on Willa’s Treetop Queendom, the Warrior Maidens did away with him and their numbers gradually dwindled.

Maybe the Mutant trio used the hench-Mutants as messengers to Mumm-Ra when they had something unpleasant to say, and such messengers didn’t come back.

Certainly any dangerous job would be assigned to an underling, and that may have steadily eroded the supply of underlings, who couldn’t be replaced by reinforcements.

Reflections: King Kong (1933)

~ Not Alison ~ Leave a comment
photo of the cover of the Warner Archive Collection blu-ray edition of the original King Kong film

I’ve seen the original, the 1976 version, and Peter Jackson’s 2005 remake. The best special effects are in Jackson’s version, not surprisingly, but in most other ways the original King Kong is superior to its later imitators.

And in fact the original’s special effects are far better than what you should expect from 1933. Willis O’Brien not only made supposedly impossible shots possible, he turned a monster into a character.

The Premise

In all the versions I’ve seen, the King Kong story has at its center a preposterous notion: that a gigantic gorilla has any interest in a human woman except perhaps as something to chew and swallow. 

One of the many remarkable things about the film is that it doesn’t simply ask you to believe that an ape is interested in a woman, it shows you that Kong cares about her, and you believe it.

And yet you can’t justify Kong’s interest in any natural way. Yes, for a moment or two maybe Kong would be curious about this odd creature, bleached white unlike all the other humans he’s seen, puzzled enough to pause and poke at her before deciding what to do—but the answer, reasonably, would have to be either “eat” or “throw away as too risky to eat.” But you don’t have much of a movie that way, so you simply have to go with the idea or give up.

Unless we invent a story nowhere hinted at in the film that as a baby, Kong was cared for by a human woman—it would not be a white woman, but an islander—after his own gorilla mother was killed (presumably by a dinosaur). If infant Kong was nurtured by a human woman, up to the point where he could fend for himself in the wild, or maybe when that woman was herself killed somehow, then he could indeed have some obsessive (completely non-sexual) desire to possess and be around a human woman. The fact that Ann is white would be little more than a temporary distraction—him thinking, Okay, she looks a little weird, but, all right, no, this is basically the same as the mother-creature. Carrying Ann back to his lair and setting her up on a ledge would then be the same thing he’s done with all the “sacrificed” women over the years. He brings them home and dimly expects that they will fill the niche his foster mother once did, satisfying a garbled psychological need.

(Just think—that kid at the orphanage in Cider House Rules might’ve been on to something.)

Each woman would last a while but eventually expire—maybe he fails to feed her properly or she accidentally falls off the ledge or he picks her up too roughly or she fails to meet his expectation somehow so he gets mad and smashes her. The only thing unique about Ann’s case is that this time people come after her, armed with guns, gas bombs, and little concern for consequences.

Racism

Viewers today ought to be prepared to face head-on the issue of racism in King Kong.

Most immediately evident are the islanders, presented in stereotypical ways with appearance, customs, and actions probably chosen to signal “primitive.”

But it’s fair to note that many of the condescending and bigoted things the movie tells us about the islanders (like the idea that they’ve been degraded and lost the civilization that the wall-builders possessed) come out of the mouths of white men thoroughly ignorant of their history and culture, and we can easily suppose that what we’re hearing is the result of these men’s own biases, arrogance, and sense of cultural superiority, not anything remotely like an accurate assessment of the islanders.

In other words, we can often pin the racism not on the movie itself but on the characters, and observe that they are being people of their time, idiotically spouting things they don’t know because it suits their hyper-inflated ideas about white culture. Instead of pointing at the islanders and saying, “Wow, they’re savage!” we can point to Denham and the sailors and say, “Wow, they’re clueless and prejudiced!” if we choose to.

Logically the people of the island ought to be Pacific Islanders, or conceivably Indigenous South Americans, and not Africans, but the movie seems to have relied largely on African American actors to play these parts (and maybe a few white men painted to look black). In some shots the filmmakers have apparently made a special effort to emphasize people’s hair and facial expressions in ways that are brief but cringeworthy.

On the other hand, note that the islanders are entirely ready to throw spears at Kong and fight him, hopeless or not. They are not trapped in any superstition about the sanctity of an “ape god” as we might expect to find in a movie of this era. They know very well Kong is a threat and that he is not so sacred they must be passive before him.

Also some of the shots of islanders facing Kong have clear parallels in the shots of New Yorkers facing him. Kong reaches into a two-story hut to pull out a nameless victim; Kong reaches into a hotel window to pull out a nameless victim. Kong throws a hut wall that lands on islanders in the foreground; Kong throws an awning that lands on New Yorkers in the foreground. Kong puts an islander in his mouth; Kong puts a businessman in his mouth. The island defenders hurl spears; the city defenders fire pistols. There’s no difference in bravery or panic or commotion, only a difference in technology.

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Charlie the Chinese cook speaks in stereotypical language, and his role on ship is subservient, but in his actions and behavior he’s never a caricature or a joke. In fact when he finds a pivotal clue he immediately knows what to do and correctly takes the initiative without hesitation or doubt, setting in motion the next portion of the plot. He’s a capable, intelligent individual, not just a servant to white people.

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In addition to all that is Kong himself. Yes, he’s a gorilla, not a human being, but the racist comparison of Africans and African Americans to apes has a long history, and this is an ape with an obsession for a white woman, and such obsession is another old racist trope. You can watch and enjoy the movie on its surface terms without getting the idea that Kong symbolizes black men or a black man, but when you’re aware of racist slurs and imagery it’s hard to believe the filmmakers weren’t playing with this notion on some level, though it would be more as a way to heighten white viewers’ anxiety than as any kind of direct allegory or analogy. (There’s no reactionary social message here like you can find in Pierre Boule’s Planet of the Apes novel or the movie[s] made from it.)

King Kong doesn’t try to tell us what the islanders are thinking when they go out of their way to sacrifice Ann. Viewers may assume—and may have been expected to assume—that it’s because her whiteness makes her a “superior” sacrifice, but this is hardly a necessary conclusion. It may simply be that since the outsiders ruined the first ceremony, one of the outsiders should become the replacement sacrifice. Maybe the islanders also thought that although this woman looked bizarre to them, Kong might like a little variety, and it meant no one from their own community needed to die.

On the other hand, we do not actually know that this is a human sacrifice meant to appease the giant ape; for all we know, the local woman who was nearly delivered to Kong was being punished for some terrible deed, and that gong they rang to summon him was sounded only when they happened to have a capital punishment to mete out.

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In any case we ought to marvel at and respect the resilience, ingenuity, and intelligence of the islanders and their ancestors for creating a viable human community in such an intensely inhospitable place.

Natural History

It is hard to imagine any natural history that would allow giant gorillas to develop on an island populated by dinosaurs, even if we accept giant gorillas as biologically possible. (There was, at least, gigantopithecus, apparently a massive prehistoric orangutan.) I would propose that the dinosaurs, reptiles, and insects are native to the island but gorillas are not. Giant gorillas, let us imagine, are native to some other island (or mainland) and were brought to Skull Island by the humans who journeyed there—possibly as a necessary condition for settlement. It may be that without giant gorillas protecting them they would not have been able to establish a community in this hostile place. Suppose that these humans had tamed giant gorillas in their previous home, and brought several along as breeding stock, but at some point in intervening history the gorillas became feral and mostly died out, leaving Kong as probably the last survivor.

Miscellaneous

You’d think the path to the captive sacrifice would already be clear of trees, unless it has been a LONG time since the last one.

Most of the time when you use a dummy for a human body it looks silly, as when the brontosaur-type lake creature grabs people in its mouth. But when Kong shakes the men off the log and the “bodies” land on the rocks below, the limp, flailing limbs kind of work, uncomfortably.

Kong has brute strength, but he doesn’t defeat a tyrannosaur with that. He wins by using intelligence and skill, able to outfight his deadly opponent with dodges and wrestling moves.

Ann screams too much (with provocation, yes), and you can see that some of this has been added to the soundtrack when Fay Wray is not mouthing any screams.

Kong’s scale is inconsistent. How big IS he compared to a human being? His size shifts around even on the island.

I’m pretty sure that instead of skirting around Kong and climbing down a cliffside on a vine, I would go back the way I came, on foot.

It’s not really clear how Kong locates Ann in the city. How does he know what building to look in? Was he able to track Driscoll-taking-Ann just as Driscoll tracked Kong-taking-Ann?

In 1933 I’m not sure I would expect a police chief to think of airplanes without prompting from a civilian.

Kong is tough. It takes repeated passes of those planes shooting him before he starts wobbling even a little.

Notice there is not the slightest hint in this film that Ann feels any sympathy for Kong or is sorry for him being killed. There are, though, displays of Kong’s tenderness towards her and maybe even a recognition—at the end when he picks her up the last time—that he should set her down so she won’t be harmed, regardless of what happens to him. And even if Ann is terrified or traumatized, we the audience sympathize with Kong. We have seen him as a feeling, living being with yearning and regrets and anger and posturing and curiosity, and we can be sorry that things turn out the way they do.

Les Miserables (1985 musical)

~ Not Alison ~ Leave a comment

Every time I listen to the soundtrack of the Les Misérables musical I am reminded why I don’t listen to it more often: it’s emotionally devastating. For every “Master of the House” or “Little People,” there are three other songs ready to grab the organs in your chest and twist.

The story, both novel and musical, is full of loss, heroism, nobility, viciousness, love, sacrifice—over and over, willing sacrifice.

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When I listen to songs from Les Misérables, I find the music overlaid with words and images from the original book: a hand outlined in a muzzle flash; a chair moved farther and farther away; a branding iron picked up willingly; a doll as big as a child; a nun who has never told a lie; the fate of a town after its major employer flees; climbing over a garden wall and finding someone you once helped; a foot immovable on a child’s coin; Friends of the A-B-C; a life wrecked because a manager was certain of what a moral man like the mayor would want; the fortune of “Madamoiselle Euphrasie Fauchelevant”; the Thénardiess; calling out “Father!”; émeute.

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I love the lyrics “For the wretched of the earth / There is a flame that never dies,” a statement with two meanings that are entirely opposite yet wholly compatible.

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It’s a hard thing to hear in a time when terrible things are happening that feel out of our control, and we desperately want to do something to stop them, but a core idea in the Les Misérables musical is that you won’t solve social evils behind the barricades with rifles and revolution but will make more difference by helping the people in front of you.

The way to save the world, says Les Miz, is by doing good for other people around us; it is as simple, and horrendously difficult, as that.

That is not permission to give up trying to change unjust laws and replace unjust structures, but such things are usually determined at levels we can’t directly affect, democracy or not. There’s only so much we can do.

It is just as important to carry out mercy and compassion and forgiveness within the space we occupy every day.

The Big Sleep (1946): The Missing Chapter

~ Not Alison ~ Leave a comment

In honor of Thanksgiving tryptophan, I’m pulling this Big Sleep reflection from my personal archives. I wrote this back in 2015 after seeing the movie for the second time.

Perhaps the most famous story about the making of the Humphrey Bogart movie The Big Sleep is the unsolved puzzle of who killed chauffeur Owen Taylor. Brody seems genuine in his surprise at the idea of a second murder being laid at his feet. Eddie Marrs didn’t do it (or order it done) because he really didn’t seem to know about Geiger’s death until confronting Marlowe in Geiger’s house, and therefore would have no reason to harm Taylor. Karol the punk kid might have done it, believing that Taylor had killed Geiger, but if that’s the case what made him change his mind later and (incorrectly) blame Brody and kill him?

Actually that’s a valid question regardless. The day after Geiger’s murder, Karol is helping Brody clear out Geiger’s shop—but later guns down Brody, apparently as revenge. So maybe Karol was merely playing along with Brody long enough to get his departed boss’s affairs in order . . . or maybe Karol didn’t blame Brody until Marrs just happened to point Karol in that direction. Or maybe Carmen, vexed at not getting her way in Brody’s apartment, broke away from her sister and immediately called up Karol (knowing how to contact him through their long association via Geiger) and pinned the blame on Brody. Perhaps Carmen had even brought along Karol to begin with, to act as backup in case her attempt to retrieve the photos went wrong.

So it’s possible Karol killed Taylor (sure Taylor had killed Geiger) and then was later misled into thinking Brody was really the one who killed Geiger.

I can work out a better answer, though.

Agnes did it. Or had a hand in it. For reasons of her own she was tailing Brody that night and saw Brody knock out Taylor and steal from him; but Brody left thinking Taylor was still alive. Checking up on Brody’s actions, she found Taylor dead or near death and decided to take care of the evidence and set up the car-crash-into-the-ocean scenario.

It might go something like this:

Joe Brody wasn’t much of a man, try as she might to change this fact, but Agnes needed him. Not needed him in the cheap and helpless way of a desperate magazine heroine, like a sap, but in the practical way, the way a carpenter needs a hammer, as a tool to build the thing she needed, and who cared what happened to him after that, she could always get another at any dime store. They were common as dirt.

So it wasn’t out of sentiment or grief or anything so childish as jealousy that she was tailing her man that night, driving around in her own car, a car he’d seen her in a hundred times before but which he never once noticed following him around all evening, he was just that stupid; no, it was pure, unvarnished self-interest that kept her on the road, carefully hanging back just the right amount to keep him in view without drawing attention to herself. She had an idea the fool was getting sweet on that spoiled rich floozy Carmen Sternworth, the one he was so eager to blackmail, and she needed to know if that was true so she could make the proper plans to snip the bud off that flower before it bloomed.

It would not do at all if Joe Brody turned his head to another woman at this point. All her schemes depended on him being completely nuts about Agnes herself.

They ended up at the Geiger house—no surprise. Pretty soon the money-bleeding floozy showed up too—again, no surprise. Life was sure a kick in the teeth—Agnes had always had to scrap and scrape for every last nickel, every red cent, despite how tough and smart and careful she was, but here was this walking store-window dummy without a brain in her head or a rat’s worth of sense, floating around high and carefree just because her daddy happened to have a ton of money. It was unfair, that’s what it was, that the stupid and worthless ended up wealthy while the harder you worked and the more you deserved a good shot the faster life seemed to knock you down the ladder before you could get anywhere. This time it looked like that shove was going to come, as it so often did, in the form of a man who did you wrong just when things were about to go right.
<Agnes leaves her car to spy from a better position; soon there is a gunshot, a scream, a flash; the chauffeur flees; Brody chases him; Agnes needs time to get back to her car but eventually finds Taylor in the car; Brody has already left, but she goes to the car window to see what’s happened>
The heap of humanity slumped over the steering wheel made a moan—maybe its last. She’d seen plenty of men get whopped in the head in her day, and knew sometimes you made it and sometimes you didn’t. Even the blows that didn’t take you right away could still do you in before you ever woke up enough to know it. Was this going to be one of those times?

Agnes watched for a long moment, trying to decide what to do. Nobody was around to see, but at the first sign of anyone approaching she would scream. An easy story, especially for a woman, who would naturally be believed: she’d seen the car, parked in an odd place, and gotten out to see what was wrong, then stared at the man in shock until finally finding her voice. No trouble making that one stick, the way she’d lay it on if a witness appeared.

Then the man in the driver’s seat had a convulsion—almost too small for the word, more like a shudder and a tremble—and wheezed once, then never again.

Yes, he was dead, all right, and Brody had killed him, though the idiot didn’t know it. Knowing someone was alive when you left him won’t keep judge and jury from hanging you once they’re sure you’re the one who whacked him. But any business like that would get in Agnes’s way even more than a wandering eye and a useless heiress might. She wasn’t sure if anyone could tie Brody to the dead man or not, to point the investigation in his direction, but no need to take chances.
<Agnes gets the car to the right place, sets it up to roll to the pier, and leaves>
Just like a man not to clean up his own messes. And just like a woman, too, to clean it up for him and never even say a word to let him know what she’d done. You didn’t get any gratitude when you were a woman—either they didn’t know you’d done anything at all, because they were stupid, or they knew it but just took it for granted, smug and sure in their misbegotten belief that that’s what women were around for anyway, to clean up so men wouldn’t have to.

Well, just you wait, Joe Brody, Agnes thought to herself with a smile, I’m gonna clean up all right!