ZERO FOR CONDUCT (1933)

We see two boys, Colin and Caussat, on a train heading back to boarding school. They're high-spirited, playing little pranks on people, but at school, they are tamped down by administrators. The two boys bond with another student, Bruel, to become ringleaders in a movement of, if not outright disobedience, then slight disruption of the rituals and rules of the school. Tabard, a younger boy, develops a special relationship with Bruel; that relationship is frowned upon by some teachers, though the science teacher himself shows an interest in Tabard. The new class monitor, Huguet, becomes friendly with the boys as a kind of Pied Piper figure, occasionally amusing them with his Charlie Chaplin imitation and taking them into town on Sundays. Small acts of rebellion grow: the boys turn over a bed with a teacher sleeping in it; twice, Tabard tells a teacher he’s "full of shit"; a food fight breaks out over the constant diet of cooked beans. Finally, an innocent but anarchic pillow fight breaks out one night (pictured), played out partly in slow motion with pillow feathers filling the air, and the next day, during the celebration of Commemoration Day, with several dignitaries present, the four boys barricade themselves in the attic, raise a skull and crossbones flag, and throw trash from the roof.

This 45-minute film, directed by Jean Vigo, is less a coherent narrative (though there is a developing throughline) than a series of impressionistic vignettes, some realistic, some less so. One can easily see how this influenced Lindsay Anderson’s IF, a much later film about boarding school revolutionaries, although this film's anti-authoritarian tone remains light compared with the later film's sex and violence. The endings of both movies feature authoritarian celebration disrupted by students, though in IF, there is a vision of bloodshed rather than pillow feathers and trash. In 1933, the threat of anarchic behavior by children was enough to get the film banned in France, though today this movie seems almost sweet and wholesome. Though this is a sound film, the dialogue is fairly sparse and not terribly important to the story, with the exception of Tabard's scatological outbursts. Though the teachers and the headmaster, a cranky bearded dwarf, are presented as rigid and oppressive, they mostly aren't seen as cruel so much as petty and ineffective. The most startling scene is not one of rebellion: at one point, a teacher catches a boy drawing a mocking picture of him which comes briefly to animated life. In its own way, the ending is almost as surreal as the ending of IF, and I was left wondering if indeed the entire last few minutes are real or just in the boys’ imaginations. Jean Daste (Huguet) played the lead in Vigo’s L’ATALANTE, the only feature length film that Vigo made in his short lifetime. French title: ZERO DE CONDUITE. [Criterion Channel]

FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE SPACEMONSTER (1965)

In a spaceship, Nadir, a bald alien who looks a bit like Dr. Evil with Spock ears, assists the Princess, buxom and glittery, in her plan to kidnap women from Earth to repopulate their dying planet (both pictured at left). They shoot an Earth missile out of the sky, but at Cape Kennedy, NASA goes ahead with plans to send an astronaut, alone, to Mars, despite the missile failure and despite receiving signals from space that may or may not be from intelligent beings. The astronaut, Frank Saunders, is not known to the public, and during a press conference, he suddenly freezes up and has to be taken from the room. We then discover that Frank is a cyborg, a robotic being created with body parts, being sent on this mission to minimize harm to humans. In a lab, doctors peel back his hair to adjust the wiring in his head, and he's ready to blast off. But the aliens shoot the rocket down over Puerto Rico and Frank manages to parachute to safety. The alien ship lands and one the aliens tries to kill Frank but only succeeds in damaging him, leaving him with half of his face exposed as metal and wire. He wanders around the island on a fairly harmless rampage, referred to by one of the earth scientists as "an astro-robot without a control system." The scientists go to Puerto Rico and two of them, Adam and Karen, spend a few minutes idly tooling around on a moped, accompanied by a pleasant mildly jazzy love song. They eventually find Frank hiding in a cave and Adam manages to fix his wiring just enough so he'll follow instructions. In the meantime, the aliens attend a pool party and kidnap all the women (and later, Karen) and get them on their spaceship. Frank gets to the ship, frees the women, and battles the aliens and their secret weapon, the title spacemonster, named Mull. The ship is destroyed along with Frank, and the credits roll with Adam and Karen tooling around San Juan on the moped again, apparently having fallen in love.

Where to start? First, I have to say that I didn't really like this movie but I kinda loved it, or maybe vice versa. That title (the posters turn "Spacemonster" into "Space Monster," but it's one word in the opening credits) conjures up low B-movie delights, and there are several. The monster's body is covered with cheap looking carpeting passing as fur. The makeup on Frank's face in the last half (at right) is pretty good, and in the first half, he is handsome in a mannequin-looking way, appropriate for a cyborg. The first few minutes of the movie seem to promise a high camp delight: Nadir looks like Mike Myers' Dr. Evil, talks in a lightly mincing fashion, and stares at people as though he is bit psycho. (The actor, Lou Cutell, did a lot of TV and is maybe best known as the proctologist in the Seinfeld "Assman" episode.) The princess looks like Liz Taylor as Cleopatra dressed in shiny red plastic, even though the movie is in black & white. (The actor, Marilyn Hanold, was a chorus girl and Playboy playmate.) But the movie cannot live up to its opening and the campiness soon turns into Z-movie schlock: cheap sets, bad acting, inept editing, tons of stock footage, padding shots of Cape Canaveral and San Juan, and not enough background actors—at an important press conference announcing the Mars mission, there are only four reporters. The only actor of note is James Karen (Adam) who does the best he can as a fairly unheroic hero; he went on to a long career as a character actor in movies and TV, and like Cutell, he made a Seinfeld appearance. Nancy Marshall, as Karen, isn't bad. Robert Reilly gets Frank's artificial look down pat, but after the first twenty minutes, is mostly just a wandering lug who fails at conjuring up the Frankenstein monster. He did not have a long career in acting.

So the Frankenstein connection, monster or doctor, is rudimentary—Adam does take ownership credit for creating Frank, and Frank stumbles around threateningly a couple of times and does kill someone—and the Spacemonster, before the climatic fight, is just glimpsed. That final fight is a bad movie classic moment—Frank and Mull punch each other, wrestle a bit, and otherwise are seen in blurry closeups doing what we're not sure. The background score consists mostly of average-sounding AM pop music. The pool scene has couples clustered around the end of a pool, with close-ups of unappealing asses shaking to the music. Most critics assume the alien planet to be Mars, but it's not identified in the movie. In the credits, the Princess is named Marcuzan but she's never called that in the film. So what did I like about this? Well, I loved Nadir and the Princess in their camp moments, and I actually liked Frank, both as an emotionless fake astronaut and in his later monster face makeup. The closing credits roll over Adam and Karen riding through San Juan and they look happy to be doing so, which made me happy. This was director Robert Gaffney's only feature-length film. There are reports that the movie was originally intended to be a sci-fi spoof, maybe in a Plan 9 way (and it does feel like a 1950s movie dug up in the 1960s) but except for the scenes in the spaceship, it's not. Still, by God, I had fun watching this and might just watch it again sometime. [YouTube]

BLIND CORNER (1964)

aka MAN IN THE DARK

British Paul Gregory is a pianist who has gone blind and, turning away from ambitions to write a concerto, becomes a successful composer of pop tunes—we hear a couple of them performed by singer Ronnie Carroll, and Paul is invited to the recording sessions to do some fine tuning. His wife Anne, though on the surface a devoted helpmate, is having an affair with Ricky, a struggling artist. Anne talks Paul into commissioning Ricky to paint her portrait, which allows her to spend large chunks of time canoodling with Ricky. She would like to divorce Paul, feeling only pity now for her husband, but she's used to a moneyed lifestyle which she would lose. Mike, Paul's friend and agent who is no friend of Anne's, reluctantly tells Paul that he saw Anne and Ricky looking awfully cozy together at a restaurant, wanting Paul to hear it from him before he hears it as gossip. Paul investigates, making plans to divorce and disinherit her, while Anne decides that maybe it's time to get rid of Paul in a different way: murder. As Paul is known as a heavy drinker, she tries to talk the reluctant Ricky into getting Paul drunk and pushing him off their balcony. Joan, Paul's secretary, who is a little in love with him, helps Paul investigate and, from a hiding place in the apartment, sees Anne and Ricky kiss in front of Paul. One night, Ricky finally agrees to kill Paul and heads to his apartment, but a major plot twist puts all arrangements in doubt.

Generally this is a by-the-numbers B-thriller with a nifty twist that makes it memorable. Most of it takes place in just two or three settings (Paul's small but nicely appointed place, Ricky's shabbier place, a recording studio) but that's not a liability here. I like that Paul is not portrayed as a saint; he's a little cranky at times but not enough to make him unsympathetic. He's well played by William Sylvester, an American actor who became something of a jack-of-all-trades type in British B-films. He's handsome and stoic and plays blind well. Barbara Shelley is nicely low-key as the adulterous schemer, and the handsome Alexander Davion (Ted Casablanca in Valley of the Dolls) is similarly low-key as the reluctant pawn in Anne's game. The small cast is capably rounded out by Mark Eden as Mike and Elizabeth Shepherd as Joan. Ronnie Carroll was an Irish singer who had a few Top 40 hits in the U.K.; his songs are bland and pointless and he has nothing to do with the plot. There is a short scene in the apartment at night that uses a gimmick that was better utilized a couple years later in Wait Until Dark. Directed competently by Lance Comfort who made a string of eleven B-films between 1960 and 1965. Overall, this was another nice discovery courtesy the YouTube algorithm, probably brought to my attention because I'd seen a couple other William Sylvester movies recently. Pictured are Shepherd and Sylvester. [YouTube]

BLACK GRAVEL (1961)

In Cold War-era West Germany, the town of Sohren is home to an American Air Force base. The presence of the Americans in restaurants and bars and whorehouses has helped boost the town’s economy, and now as the base expands, the construction business is also growing. Robert drives a gravel truck and participates in a scheme to steal shipments of gravel from the base into the black market. In the opening scene, we see a driver accidentally run over a dog, and Robert dumps the dog's body in the gravel—though nothing would have brought the dog back, it's still a fairly brutal scene, and there will be a callback to this scene later. Robert discovers that the wife of a newly arrived American officer is his ex-mistress Inge, and that the dog was hers. In the past, Robert told Inge that love is "a fairy tale told to keep us stupid," but now he's interested in starting things up again, especially as Inge is unsettled in her marriage—her husband cares more about his career than their relationship. Lying about the possibility of the dog still being alive, Robert leads her on and gets her involved in his life. Robert's American airman friend Bill is romancing a local girl, Anni, with the two planning on going away together to Canada. One night, Bill and Elli are having a midnight makeout session in the woods, and Robert and Inge accidentally run over them. Robert pitches their bodies in some of the gravel being used for extending runways on the base. Soon, Robert is tangled up in two investigations, one looking for the black market gravel and one looking into the whereabouts of Bill and Elli. Eventually, it is assumed that the couple have defected to East Germany, but when the Americans decide to run some tests on the new gravel beds to detect any defective spots, Robert realizes that this will certainly uncover the bodies, and he might wind up implicated. Tragedy follows.

This is a strong and bleak German film noir with a well developed plot, interesting characters, and an excellent lead performance by the gruffly handsome Helmut Wildt as Robert (pictured). Despite the character's poor choices, we generally sympathize with him even as we may not exactly like him. Ingmar Zeisberg is fine as Inge, and the supporting cast is OK, though the German actor Hans Cossy isn't terribly convincing as the American major married to Inge. If you want to, you can dig into the various situations here and read into them commentary on Germany trying to build a new nation without fully dealing with their Nazi past, but on just a surface level, the plot is resonant enough. A controversial scene in which an older German man (and still a Nazi at heart) calls out the Jewish owner of a nightclub was misunderstood by German censors and was cut from the original release print. The very bleak ending was also softened, but neither move helped the film at the German box office. The current print I saw on TCM (also available on Blu-ray) is the original uncensored version. I highly recommend this to fans of noir, melodrama, international cinema, and just plain good movies. German title: Schwarzer Kies. [TCM]

THE BEACH GIRLS AND THE MONSTER (1965)

Marine scientist Otto Lindsay lives in a beach house on a small cliff overlooking a surf beach. His son Richard used to help him in his work with marine mutations but Richard is tired of a life of all work and no play so decides he's going to play as much as he can, with his girlfriend Janey and the surfing gang that gathers on the beach every day. He also resents his young and trampy stepmother, Vicky. The house is full of resentment. Otto resents his son's search for freedom and fun. He is also beginning to resent Vicky who is spending more time out of the house socializing (with other men, as we find out and as Otto suspects). Vicky resents Otto's single-minded zeal for his work. Everybody seems a little resentful toward Otto's assistant Mark who has been living in Otto's house since he got a permanent limp from a car accident caused by Richard. All this is laid out in the first half of the movie but the film begins with the promise of its title quickly fulfilled. Several bikini-clad beach girls are dancing to a song called "Dance, Baby, Dance" (co-written by Frank Sinatra Jr.!). One of them, Bunny, pulls a prank on her boyfriend Tom by sprinkling sand on his hot dog (literally) and running away. Hiding near a cave, she is attacked by a monster, pop-eyed and covered with seaweed, and clawed to death. The police take a cast of strange footprints found in the sand to Otto and he thinks they look like they belong to a giant mutated South American fantigua fish. 

We then witness some of the psychodramas detailed above play out. Otto lashes out at his son's friends, referring to them as "loafers and tramps." Mark's hobby is clay sculpture, mostly of bosomy females. Mark thinks a bust he made of the late Bunny as a naked mermaid would be an appropriate gift for Bunny's parents and somewhat bizarrely, Richard agrees. Vicky poses for Mark's latest sculpture but rebuffs his romantic intentions, saying "Did you think I’d make love to a cripple?" Richard shows Mark a few minutes of surfing footage (to pad out the film to a little over an hour). Vicky rather brazenly heads out on a date with a man named Paul. The kids, apparently done mourning Bunny, have a midnight beach party dancing to their own guitars and bongos, singing a song called "Monster in the Surf," accompanied by a lion puppet named Kingsley. I am not making any of this up. Later that night, the monster strikes again, killing Tom, with the kids blaming Mark because he finds the body on the beach. Vicky gets home from her date and the monster claws her to death. Then Mark, sort of on the run from the cops, finds a huge rubber monster mask in the house.

Actor Jon Hall, B-lead in a number of exotic adventure movies of the 1940s, stars in this as Otto and also directs. Critics tend to lump this cheapie in with THE HORROR OF PARTY BEACH from the year before, and there are certainly similarities, but this film, despite many weaknesses in writing and acting, is a notch better. If nothing else, the score, a mix of surf music and slinky jazz, and written by Sinatra Jr., is pretty good—"Dance, Baby, Dance" is still in my head as I write this. The monster looks exactly like a big phony rubber outfit, but as we discover, it's supposed to. The beach boys and girls are peppy and attractive. The two young leads, Arnold Lessing as Richard and Elaine DuPont as Janey (both pictured at  right), are good, balancing out a bit the somewhat tired performance of Hall and the occasional overacting of Sue Casey as Vicky (who went on to a surprisingly lengthy career which included a small role in 1999's American Beauty). Mark is played adequately if a bit uncomfortably by Walker Edmiston, who had a career as a voice artist and children's TV show host. Another draft of the screenplay wouldn't have hurt. The character of Mark, who at various times comes off as suspicious, sweetly innocent, and a little pervy, could have used some fleshing out. Otto, who is not important to the plot until he is, is a big zero. The motivations of the killer are left unexplored. Vicky is really the most developed character because the young frustrated trampy wife is such a cliche. It's amateurishly filmed but taken for what it is, a Jon Hall vanity project (I assume since he starred, directed and did the cinematography), it's empty-headed fun. Pictuerd top left are Lessing and Edmiston. [YouTube]

THE PHANTOM EMPIRE (1935 serial)

Gene Autry is a singing cowboy radio star who performs a daily show at 2:00 at his Radio Ranch, a family vacation resort. He and his band the Radio Riders play songs and perform short western dramas (which, even though the show is broadcast over the radio, they act out as though they could be seen by an audience). Autry's contract stipulates that he must broadcast every day or forfeit the show, in which case he would lose the ranch. A kids' fan club, called the Junior Thunder Riders, led by teenagers Frankie and Betsy, have meetings in a barn and adopt a slogan, "To the rescue!" which they cry out when they jump on their horses. Their name comes from a mythical group of horse riders who might still exist. Autry finds a small figure of a robed rider which is said to be an artifact of "antediluvian Americana" which may be evidence of the myth. Professor Beetson and his men arrive looking for the fabled lost city of Mu which is said to contain fabulous riches. Aware of Autry's contract, and wanting to empty out the ranch so his men can dig for Mu, Beetson kills Baxter, Autry's ranch partner, and frames Autry who goes on the run. Helped by Frankie and Betsy, Autry still manages to do his 2:00 broadcast each day from hiding. As it happens, Mu lies far beneath the Radio Ranch's land, is called Murania by its residents (forced underground thousands of years ago by glaciers) who are ruled by a strict queen, and its riches are huge deposits of radium which the Muranians have used to create wondrous inventions, including boxy (and rather clumsy) robots to perform manual chores. Queen Tika despises the world above and wants to keep Murania hidden at all costs—we see that the Muranians on horseback are the original Thunder Riders of myth, and they still ride when Murania is threatened. Autry is now sought by three parties: the professor and his men, the police, and Queen Tika who worries that the popularity of Radio Ranch will lead to her land being exposed. 

The year before the first Flash Gordon serial came this forerunner, an amalgam of adventure, western, fantasy and sci-fi. Oddly, once it gets going, it works. Gene Autry (pictured above left) plays himself, a real-life singing cowboy radio star who would eventually appear in dozens of B-westerns and record many hit songs, including the holiday tunes "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" and "Here Comes Santa Claus." In this, one of his earliest films, acting is not his strongest talent, but I was surprised how appealing he is: he's not bad looking, his persona is one of a likable everyday sort of fellow, and once the fisticuffs get going, he acquits himself nicely (probably with the help of a stunt double), though there are noticeably fewer fistfights here than in the average serial. His delivery occasionally verges on amateurish, with frequent over-enunciating of words and some pacing problems, but some of the other actors have the same problems, especially Dorothy Christy as Queen Tika. She artificially overacts like crazy but is effective once in a while. By far, the strongest actor here is Frankie Darro (as Frankie). Seventeen when he made this film, he was a very busy child actor, having appeared in over twenty movies before his appearance here. He’s handsome, can be both cocky and personable, and is a fine actor. It's said that his small stature (5 foot 3) was an impediment to leading man roles, and he was often cast as a jockey. His co-star, Betsy King Ross (Betsy), pictured with Darro at right, is not nearly as good, but to be fair, she only made three movies; she was better known as a horse riding champion and that talent is put to good use here. I enjoyed the antics of Smiley Burnette and Peter Potter (billed as William Moore) as Oscar and Pete, comic relief band members who wind up joining Autry and the kids in their adventures. 

At four hours (12 chapters), this doesn't feel overly long, only getting repetitious in the last few chapters. The adventures take place in varied settings: at the ranch, in the surrounding desert, and in the underground land of Murania, effectively produced mostly with the use of miniatures and matte shots (see left). A form of television is used throughout as a way for Queen Tika to keep track of the outer world in general and Gene Autry in particular, though it's never explained where her dozens of cameras are located. Among the cliffhangers are a literal cliffhanger, a downed plane, and radium ray guns. Though Autry and the Junior Thunder Riders are the central heroes, our sympathies for other characters shift on occasion. The queen is over-the-top evil and wants to have Autry killed until she changes her mind (not due to romantic feelings but out of practicality). Her assistant Lord Argo is secretly fomenting a revolution, and is responsible for saving Autry from the Chamber of Death, but later becomes dangerous to all. (Autry's resurrection is an interesting scene; apparently he actually dies, and when the Reviving Machine brings him back, he spends several seconds babbling nonsensically in the Language of the Dead.) The boxy robots are unintentionally amusing until Oscar and Pete disguise themselves as robots and engage in some slapsticky humor. It’s pretty fun to see the Junior Thunder Riders yell their slogan in unison and take off for a rescue. There are a few songs, including a novelty number about the animals on Noah's Ark. The plotpoint about having to broadcast every day is downright silly, but does provide an occasional deadline that forces Autry to race against the clock. The print on the Alpha DVD I watched is not in great shape, but I have not heard of the existence of a restored print yet. Somewhat primitive but recommended for serials fans. [DVD]

THE CURSE OF BELPHEGOR (1967)

A dance troupe is rehearsing a new ballet work inspired by worship of the legendary demon Belphegor, with the stage dominated by a large golden statue of the demon. Unsettling things begin happening. First, a set decorator standing on a ladder is spooked by the sight of a figure dressed like Belphegor and falls off the ladder to his death. Next, people on stage hear weird music coming from the statue followed by a voice predicting a series of deaths: the two theater owners, Garnier and Hubert; the writer Olivier; and the director Fred. Other characters we meet include the star, an old comic relief stage manager, and Garnier’s ward Roger. The troupe carries on and the opening goes off well, but late that night, Garnier is stabbed to death on the stage by the demonic figure, someone wearing a Belphegor mask with gold-painted hands. The cops investigate but the predicted deaths continue. Roger, who falls under suspicion because he stands to inherit the theater, gets involved with a female reporter named Claude and the two wind up at a sprawling but abandoned farmhouse where they are tortured by supersonic sound waves and held by the Belphegor figure who plans to burn them to death with a flamethrower torture device before he kills the star onstage at the climax of the ballet. I'm fairly certain that the above summary is accurate, but there is more to it than that, and I had problems following the narrative. Things get a bit convoluted with some secondary plotpoints I was unsure about: one of the characters is gay (I'm not even sure which one, maybe Fred) and has a male lover he calls Kitty, and another character is caught stealing documents, possibly in a blackmail attempt. 

The main problem: the print of the movie I saw on YouTube, supplied by Culture Tube, is in French with an English dub done by AI, and the dubbing is awful. The mouth movements are rarely matched, but that is the least of the problems. All the voices, even the older people, sound like those of bored twenty-somethings and the dialogue is frequently rushed and blurred, causing me to miss a fair amount of the story. I suppose it's better than having no English at all (the subtitles supplied were in French) but I hope this doesn’t become a trend. Because of this, I can't really judge the acting. Maurice Sarfati (Fred, pictured above right) and Noelle Noblecourt (Claude) are attractive and energetic but for the most part I can't reliably match cast names to characters. One that I could, Paul Guers as Fred, reminded me of Kier Dullea. The Belphegor figures, both the human and the statue, are effective. The somewhat unsatisfying ending seems to promise a sequel that never came. The name Belphegor was used in a famous French novel and silent serial from the 1920s but this has no relation to that. I might watch this again if a properly dubbed or subtitled version becomes available. [YouTube]

OUTSIDE THE LAW (1956)

Berlin, 1946. Johnny (Ray Danton) is in his last few days with the postwar American occupying forces. Back home, he was a convict who, along with his prison buddy Harry, was given a chance at freedom by joining the military. One night, Harry says he can't join Johnny for a beer; we then see Harry approach two men in a car and give them a package. He clearly expects some money from them but what he gets is a bullet that kills him. Not long after this, a glut of counterfeit money starts showing up in the States, and treasury agents think that Harry was involved in a counterfeit ring. When Johnny gets to Los Angeles, he is approached by T-Man Maury Saxton to help investigate with the promise that his criminal record will be wiped clean. The problem is that this necessitates him working with his father Alec (Onslow Stevens). The two have a stormy past but Johnny agrees to the job. They know the paper used for the near-perfect bills comes from Seattle, and as they narrow down the possible local purchaser, Johnny's mission is to get close to Harry's widow Maria (Leigh Snowden) to see if she knows anything. Johnny and Maria hit it off and he finds out that the two had a hasty marriage in the States before Harry went overseas and she really barely knew him. But she's friends with a shady character named Don Kastner (Grant Williams) who seems neurotically jealous of Johnny. At Papa Gomez's restaurant, Johnny and Maria have dinner and grow close, with Maria remarking on Johnny’s "deep, warm, lonely eyes" and they share a kiss. Papa Gomez lets Don know (the two have a connection that is not clear to us yet), and that night Don and some thug friends break into Johnny's apartment. The thugs beat the shit out of Johnny while Don stands in the dark with an excited leer on his face. Alec has singled out the Philip Bormann import company as the likely supplier of the counterfeit paper, and it turns out that both Maria and Don work there. Johnny heads to the office to punch out Don. When Johnny’s dad figures out that Johnny is serious about Maria, he tries to take him off the case, but Johnny won’t rest until justice is served. 

I am pleased yet again with another B-movie discovery from the 1950s. Some call this noir, but it's not, with Johnny’s criminal past being the only noir element. It's a crime film which borders on hard-boiled, largely because of the ass-kicking Johnny gets. It's a good scene, made memorable by the almost lustful look in Don's eyes. Grant Williams (Don), pictured at left, is best known as the Incredible Shrinking Man, and though he's good in that, this is probably his best movie role—he was also a detective in the Hawaiian Eye TV series. Don is a slimy, passive, neurotic bully and Williams brings him vividly to life. The handsome Ray Danton is just as good in the lead (he's in almost every scene) but less showy role of Johnny. The treasury agents are a homogeneous bunch of white men in suits, acted in appropriately low-key fashion, but Onslow Stevens does manage to stand out as Johnny's father. Though the father-son relationship remains thorny, there is the promise of reconciliation in the final moments. As often happens in these films, the leading lady (Leigh Snowden, pictured at top with Danton) is underserved by the writing but she does work up some chemistry with Danton. I like that the father and his colleague Maury (Judson Pratt) have enough of a friendship presented that you could almost imagine a buddy movie centering on the two of them. Raymond Bailey (Mr. Drysdale on The Beverly Hillbillies) is solid as the suspicious Philip Bormann. I fear overselling this—it's no timeless classic, but I sure enjoyed it as a Saturday afternoon B-film. Online critic Colin Edwards says the movie is nothing special but is a professional and "efficiently well-made piece of entertainment" and what's wrong with that? Directed in a non-fussy manner by Jack Arnold (Shrinking Man, Creature from the Black Lagoon). [Blu-ray]

JUNGLE GODDESS (1948)

In South Africa, pilot Bob (Ralph Byrd) is having a drink at Portugee Joe's when the club's singer (after singing a particularly draggy torch song) flirts with him, calling him "sweet but dangerous." Bob's flying partner Mike (George Reeves) enters the bar with a possible job for the two of them. A wealthy Johannesburg man has just died, and there's a search on for his daughter Greta who vanished years ago after a plane crash. A big reward has been promised to anyone who can find the missing heiress. Bob and Mike decide to try and soon, flying over Zambezi territory, they spy the wrecked plane and land. As they start to trudge through the jungle, a group of spear-carrying natives surprise them and Bob shoots one of them dead. The two are captured and brought before the queen of the tribe, who happens to be the long-lost Greta (Wanda McKay). Though Greta can release Mike, the tribe wants Bob to pay for his crime, and he is held to be executed in a week's time under the next full moon. In flashback, Greta explains what happened. In September of 1939, Greta, a student at a New England girls school, decides to fly home to Johannesburg before war tensions increase, but war is declared during the trip. Mechanical problems (or weather problems, it's not clear) arise and the plane crashes, with Greta the only survivor. Wandering through the jungle, she is approached by some natives "in an attitude of worship," and when Greta is able to nurse a sick girl back to health, she is acclaimed as leader of the tribe. In the present, Greta confides in Mike that she has a plan to free both of them if they will take her with them—she and Mike are falling in love. In the meantime, Bob, not aware of these plans, is working with Greta's handmaiden Wanama to escape on his own, and maybe going a little nutty in the process. When Mike tries to stop him, they engage in furniture-destroying fisticuffs during which Bob accidentally shoots another native. Mike, Bob and Greta get away, followed by an angry group of natives who don't want their queen to leave. After a nighttime rest stop, and an early morning fistfight involving unresolved tensions, Bob steals a compass and sets out on his own to find the plane. With the natives in hot pursuit, will any of them get out of the jungle safely?

George Reeves never quite made it to the rank of movie star, though he did find fame as TV's Superman in the 1950s, but I've always liked him in B-films. Action hero, romantic lead, villain, he could do them all. He's handsome, hunky, and charming with a glowing smile (or a nasty sneer when playing a baddie), and he's the main reason to watch this cheapie jungle melodrama which suffers from a lack of: character development, action, beefcake, cheesecake, or real danger. Actually, Ralph Byrd (Bob) is pretty good, too. He was famous as Dick Tracy in movies and serials, and he was fine in the one Dick Tracy movie I saw. Here, he's good looking (though coming in second behind Reeves) and moves convincingly from nice guy buddy to nervous breakdown heavy. I guess we're supposed to dislike him since he kills a native, with seemingly no remorse, but as he explains, all he saw was a bunch of guys coming at him with spears and he acted without thinking. Wanda McKay is terrible; how she wound up with over fifty movie (almost all of them low-budget works) and TV credits is beyond me. She looks the part but when she speaks, it's all downhill. I've seen her in a handful of films and I've never thought much of her. A more energetic woman who could actually act (Maria Montez, Dorothy Lamour, Evelyn Ankers) might have lifted this picture up a bit. Of course, the writing is also at fault—at one point, a radioactive rock called Karnacite is discovered and talked about, but that plot element comes to nothing. Greta's flashback was a noble attempt at character building, but it also comes to nothing. The plane crash, filmed with miniatures, is poorly staged, and the stock footage of jungle animals is completely irrelevant. And yet, I wound up with a bit of affection for this movie, partly since it re-introduced me to Ralph Byrd. Pictured at top are Byrd and Reeves; at left are McKay and Reeves. [DVD]

THE TELL-TALE HEART (1934)

The first sound film version of the famous Edgar Allan Poe short story does a little bit of expanding from its source to reach a length of about an hour, but it does it in ways that feel organic to the story. We begin with a man (Norman Dryden, pictured) in an asylum cell, drawing large eyes on the walls, giving the room an almost expressionistic look. His parents died when he was young and he became a sensitive artist, subject to attacks of catalepsy, becoming unresponsive and staring into space. He lives in a house with an older decrepit man (John Kelt) whom he simply refers to as a friend. The man has a bulging eye which Dryden fixates on, claiming it casts a blight on his life. But Dryden manages to have a girlfriend (Yolanda Terrell). We see the two spending a day in a park; as they stroll among the trees, Dryden sees imaginary eyes up in the branches, but is eventually distracted by kissing Terrell on a log and canoeing down a river. Kelt watches them from a bridge, not creepily but in a sweet paternal way. The rest of the film plays out like the Poe story: the boy can't escape the old man's peering eye and loudly beating heart, and one night he is driven mad and kills the man in his bed and buries him under the living room floorboards. Two policemen get reports of screams, and when they investigate, Dryden invites them in and assures them that the screams were his own from having a nightmare. But as the three enjoy a drink, Dryden cannot escape the loud beating of the old man's heart, which of course is all in his head, and he tears up the floor to expose his crime.

This low-budget film hasn't gotten a lot of critical attention, and most online viewers criticize it for being cheap and boring and slowly paced. But to me, the film feels like an artsy avant-garde experiment. The sets are definitely cheap but their stark look creates a nicely creepy atmosphere. The riverside scene is beautifully shot and contrasts well with the look of the rest of the film. Even the amateurish acting, disliked by most critics, adds a surreal tone to the movie; Kelt made a handful of appearances in silent movies, but Dryden and Terrell did not go on to carve out acting careers. Dryden in particular is disliked by current viewers, but I think he gives an effective performance in keeping with the austere look and feel of the film. I've reviewed two other versions of the film, one from 1941 which is twenty minutes and mostly narrated, and one from 1960 which is a full-length expansion of the story. All three versions held my interest and are worth seeing, especially for Poe fans. Directed by Brian Desmond Hurst who later directed the Alastair Sim Christmas Carol movie. This was retitled Bucket of Blood in the States. [YouTube]