SHADOWS OVER SHANGHAI (1938)

During the Chinese-Japanese war, at the Woosung Refuge for War Orphans in rural China, Irene, a teacher, wishes that the world's populations could all get along like all the children do. Of course, as soon as she says this, a group of boys begin fighting, causing the old guy who runs the place to chuckle knowingly. Hearing a biplane buzzing past, she sees that it's her brother Peter, who frequently stops by when he's in the air. (We never really know what he does; is he a military pilot or a courier or just a recreational pilot?) This time, however, he zooms on by, being chased by another plane piloted by a villainous looking fellow in a goatee named Sargoza. Peter is shot down and Irene, discovering the wreckage, pulls him out, injured but alive. He gives Irene a half of an amulet and asks her to sail for San Francisco and deliver it into the right hands; when matched with the other half, it will free up five million dollars donated by a Chinese-American family for the Chinese to spend on munitions. She immediately heads for Shanghai to catch a ship that is evacuating foreigners. Meanwhile Sargoza has followed her and tries to kidnap her off the street in broad daylight. She is saved by photographer Johnny McGinty, but doesn't stick around to thank him. As it happens, Peter has sent Irene to rendezvous with a man named Barclay, and McGinty is an old pal of Barclay's, so fate throws them together again. McGinty is planning on catching the next ship out and says he will accompany her, but she needs a passport to get on the ship and doesn't have one. (I note here that we never find out what nationality she is; she looks like an all-American gal but has a slight unidentifiable accent.) Barclay suggests that she and McGinty get married so she can get on the ship with him, then get it annulled in San Francisco, so they do. He also agrees to hide the amulet in his camera case. Here, the story begins to fall apart before our eyes. In addition to Sargoza (a former Russian embassy worker who is out to get the money for himself), a Japanese official named Yokahama is now on their trail, apparently also after the amulet half. Irene gets an incense burner as a wedding gift and they decide to hide the amulet in there, but then they don't. Irene is told that because of new rules, being married to an American will not be good enough to get her on the ship (but at the end, she gets on anyway). Finally, in a spectacularly anti-climactic ending, Roosevelt bans all shipments of munitions to countries at war, so all this effort has been for naught. Or maybe not all the effort: it seems that McGinty and Irene enjoy being married after all (though she has given no sign of that at all) so they head off to San Francisco as a happy couple.

Yeesh! This movie is a bit of a mess. It's a Poverty Row production, and the script and acting problems inherent in such films are magnified here. The sets and costumes are plain and cheap looking, the plot logic is lacking, and the acting is just bad all around, with everyone seeming tired or bored. I have never liked James Dunn (McGinty); he always comes off as weak and unlikable (except in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn for which he won a supporting actor Oscar in 1946) and he's no different here. The man hasn't an ounce of romantic chemistry in him. His left arm is injured and out of commission, and the only reason for this plotwise seems to be that it's a good excuse for McGinty's bosses to send him back to America for a desk job. (I wondered if Dunn's arm had been injured in real life, but I couldn't determine that.) Lynda Grey (Irene) is drab and wooden. Ralph Morgan (Barclay) is, like Dunn, an actor I have never warmed to. He is always stiff and free of charisma. But of the three leads, he comes off the best, perhaps because he is basically a peripheral character who operates as a key to certain plotpoints. Robert Barrat, a respectable character actor with over 150 credits on IMDb (I know him mostly from westerns and crime movies), gives by default the best performance, though his role as Sargoza is one-dimensional. Edward Woods (Peter) shows promise, but vanishes after the first ten minutes, though we are given to understand that his character survives his injuries.  Unless like me you enjoy trolling through the YouTube algorithm suggestions for little-known B-movies, there is no reason to watch this. It's not painful, but it's not interesting or fun. Pictured are Grey and Dunn. [YouTube]

HOLIDAY FOR SINNERS (1952)

It's Mardi Gras in New Orleans and we see lots of celebrating revelers, except, as a narrator tells us, down "narrow streets where the bands and cheering were barely heard." Down one of those dark alleys, a handsome priest (Richard Anderson) visits a tenement apartment where a worn out young doctor (Gig Young) has been attending to a dying man. The priest performs last rites and the two, boyhood friends, chat on the way out about the future. Anderson is sure that the diocese will fund a new neighborhood clinic, but Young, no longer very optimistic, has accepted a research position in India, and his girlfriend (Janice Rule) has tentatively accepted his offer of marriage. At his apartment, Young, who owns a pet monkey, is visited by an older blustery but broken down boxer (Keenan Wynn) who is going blind with little hope of a cure, and trying to get $1500 that his former manager owes him. The manager, however, claims that Wynn has gone batty and should be institutionalized. Soon, Anderson finds out that the church has put off investing in a new clinic. One more character is introduced: a reporter (William Campbell) who takes advantage of Wynn's situation to get a headline. These sad lives intersect, leaving at least two dead by the end, but a glimmer of redemption remains.

This gloomy melodrama has some good performances and some nice location shooting in New Orleans (though the overall look of the film is dark and claustrophobic) but ultimately has nothing special going for it to distinguish it from other B-range dramas of the era. Part of the problem is that there isn't a compelling main character. Young is the one who is central to all the stories, but he has little charisma and from the opening he comes off as beaten down and disillusioned. He and Anderson and Wynn are supposed to have been childhood friends but they don’t really come off as strongly connected. Wynn gets lots of critical praise, but to me it felt like he was chewing scenery occasionally, and his character is a self-defeating, sometimes obnoxious mess. Anderson, Campbell, and Rule give the best performances. I could take the gloom and sadness if I cared about the outcomes of any of the character plotlines, but I really didn't. Pictured are Anderson and Young. [TCM]

A VERY MISSING PERSON (1972)

Westering (Ray Danton) is the leader of a small new age cult who lives on a houseboat and plans to take his followers to a faraway island and start the colony of New Eden. But we know he's a bit too slick and handsome (and horny) to be genuine—he is in the process of dumping his current mistress Eve for a woman who calls herself Sister Isabelle. The group comes to the attention of Inspector Oscar Piper (James Gregory) when a banker asks for assistance in finding Lenore, a runaway heiress, last seen in a hippie van heading out to join a commune. She is needed to attend to various financial matters and Oscar, head of the homicide department, says they will do their best to return Lenore to "the bosom of her bank." Technically, the case is not part of his beat, but his sort-of girlfriend, retired teacher Hildegarde Withers (Eve Arden), eggs him on to let her investigate, with travel assistance from her handsome young neighbor Aloysius Fister (Dennis Rucker); he drives a motorcycle and she rides in the sidecar. Charmed by Hildy, the hippies let her on the boat and she is witness to the death of Westering when he drinks a glass of wine poisoned with arsenic. Now that there has been a mysterious death, Oscar can get involved. He believes that the trip to an island would never have happened because the boat isn't seaworthy. Soon, they discover that Sister Isabelle is Lenore, so she's a suspect, as is Westering's wife Aleatha (Julie Newmar) who runs a fancy French restaurant, doesn't belong to the cult, and claims not to have been bothered by Westering's affairs. Hildegarde also discovers that the restaurant has a supply of the wine that was poisoned. A mysterious middle-aged hippie named Onofre, who was planning a rival cult, is also a suspect—Hildegarde calls him Rasputin because of his long hair, long beard, and flowing robe. Lenore, who may be in danger because of her money and her status as mistress to the dead man, lives with Hildy temporarily which allows Aloysius to flirt a bit with her, as well as be her protector. Another death or two is in store before Hildegarde figures things out.

If you've been a long time reader of my blog, you might remember Hildegarde Withers as the main character in a handful of 1930s mysteries based on a series of books by Stuart Palmer. Her best portrayer, Edna May Oliver, played her as a prickly, aloof spinster who carries on a mildly flirtatious relationship with Oscar. In this movie, based loosely on a posthumously published novel that was finished by another author, Arden plays Withers with no hint of spinster and just a little hint of prickliness. But the character never quite gels and she winds up feeling like a poor fit for the hippies & drugs milieu into which she is thrust. James Gregory, immortalized as the cranky Inspector Luger in TV's Barney Miller, is certainly cranky here, but not as charming as James Gleason was in the 30s movies. He has little to do and maybe because of this has zero chemistry with Arden. This may be an idiosyncratic observation of mine, but both actors have very distinct and mannered performing styles—Arden drily overemphasizing her dialogue and Gregory growling his—and the combination got irritating after a while. Aside from the TV show Our Miss Brooks, Arden was not usually a leading lady, and her delivery may be why. Danton has dark charisma here but he's not around long. Rucker, as Hildy's boy pal, looks like a TV version of Robert Redford and is quite good, giving a well modulated performance that gives us a rest from the more dominating tones of the leads. Robert Easton looks appropriately unappealing as the rival cult leader, Julie Newmar is not convincing as the suspicious widow, and Skye Aubrey is bland as the heiress. You may recognize Bob Hastings (Carpenter in McHale's Navy, Kelsey the bartender in All in the Family) and Pat Morita (from The Karate Kid movies) in supporting roles. A big clue to the killer's identity is provided by Hildegarde when she notes that a supposed suicide note is fake because the uneducated writer of the note properly used a semi-colon—nice that they worked in a nod to her teaching days, far-fetched as it is. This was a pilot, like the 1972 Hound of the Baskervilles, for a TV series of rotating detective shows. Much as I usually like Arden, I don’t know that I would have kept watching these. Pictured are Arden and Rucker. [YouTube]

DON'T MAKE WAVES (1967)

A drifter named Carlo (Tony Curtis), who has all his possessions in his car, parks along a coastal hillside California road to admire the view and sees Laura (Claudia Cardinale), a beautiful young artist, throwing a fit about her ruined painting. When she gets in her car and pulls out onto the road, she accidentally drags Carlo's car out as well. It goes rolling down the road, eventually crashing in front of Laura's car and catching fire. Laura takes him back to her Malibu apartment to search for her insurance papers but she can't find them so she invites him to stay the night on her fold-out couch. In the night, Carlo is awakened by a knock at the door from Rod (Robert Webber), Laura's "patron” (in her words) and owner of a swimming pool company. He's married but because his wife is a sickly invalid, he can't get a divorce. Carlo and Laura try to explain their situation, but when Rod says he believes them, Laura gets pissed off that he believes such a crazy story. Carlo agrees to sleep on the beach overnight, and the next morning, he awakens in the midst of a bunch of surfers and beach bums. A gorgeous young woman who goes by the name Malibu (Sharon Tate), a skydiver who spends most of her beach time bouncing on a trampoline, saves Carlo from drowning. Carlo immediately falls for her, though she already has a boyfriend, a sweet but dumb muscle hunk named Harry (David Draper). All the main characters have been introduced, although later we meet Rod's wife Diane (Joanna Barnes) who is most definitely not a sickly invalid, and from here the movie takes off into total craziness and I found events difficult to follow. But at heart, this is an old-school screwball comedy and despite many crossed connections, everyone (quite improbably) winds up happy at the end.

Critical response to this movie is split between those who love it (including, oddly, Leonard Maltin who gives it three stars) and those who hate it. My feelings aren't strong enough to be called love or hate—it's more that I tolerated it enough to stick with it to the end. My problem is that it moves so quickly from one utterly unbelievable situation to the next that it was hard to follow with any precision. At one point, a character played by Mort Sahl basically gives Carlo a hillside house and a fancy car, and I never quite figured out why. Carlo, blackmailing Rod with the knowledge about his healthy wife, gets a job as a pool salesman for Rod and one of the more coherent scenes involves Carlo selling a pool to Jim Backus and his wife, playing themselves. Backus breaks into his Mr. Magoo voice for Carlo, saying, "Friends love me at parties!" It helps that the actors throw themselves into the material with straight faces, even though I suspect that some of them had no more idea what was going on than I did. Tony Curtis, at the center of the movie's madness, is actually the weak link, seeming to be particularly at sea, but he is surrounded by strong supporting players. Cardinale, speaking in a thick accent that I found hard to decipher sometimes, mostly busies herself by being in constant motion, and Tate does the opposite, looking bored. But Webber and Barnes manage to feel like real characters, as does Draper, who in real life was a famous bodybuilder who was Mr. Universe at the time of filming. Perhaps he's not acting at all, but he at least seems natural amongst all the artificial folks around him. Edgar Bergen has a droll cameo as a horoscope writer who goes by the pen name Madame Lavinia and who reiterates the advice of a chiropractor friend of Harry's that "sex steals away strength like a thief in the night." The finale, which involves the slow destruction of the hillside house in a mudslide, is fun and impressively pulled off. At one point in my notes, I wrote, "This was made by Martians who had no idea how Earthlings behave." Another thing that put me off is the huge amount of post-dubbing of dialogue which frequently acts as a distancing device for me. The natural sound scenes are so few that they stand out. A novelty for sure, annoying at times but watchable. Pictured are Draper and Tate. [TCM]

SHORT CUT TO HELL (1957)

In Oakland, California, a young totsy walks into a hotel room occupied by young tough Kyle (Robert Ivers, pictured) and his cat. She has flirting on her mind, but he shoos her away and eventually heads downtown to the city engineering building where he calmly shoots a building inspector and his secretary who were about to expose some shoddy engineering problems in city buildings. He steals incriminating documents, then visits a man named Bahrwell who takes the documents and pays Kyle for the killings. But then Bahrwell double crosses Kyle by paying him in bills which have serial numbers which he has reported as stolen to the police. When he tries to pay his hotel bill with the bad money, he is reported but gets away before the cops can catch him. Looking for revenge, he hops a train to Los Angeles where Bahrwell's company is located. Also on the train is Glory (Georgann Johnson), a nightclub singer who happens to be dating Stan (William Bishop), an Oakland cop. Kyle tries to steal a five from Glory's purse; she catches him but takes pity on him and they start to bond. Bahrwell is also on the train and reports Kyle's presence to the police. They stop the train, but Kyle and Glory get away. In Los Angeles, A.T., Bharwell's boss, gets involved, as does Stan. After a series of captures and escapes and chases, Kyle and Glory end up trapped in an aluminum factory, finding refuge in an unused bomb shelter, leading to a climax that satisfies both the audience and the Production Code.

This is based on the 1942 noir film This Gun for Hire, itself based on a novel by Graham Greene. It’s a B-film adaptation, directed by James Cagney, who gives a brief on-screen introduction praising the two stars, both newcomers, neither of whom would go on to great heights. Indeed, Ivers seems to be sleepwalking through his part, but I realized eventually that this was a legitimate interpretation of the character—he unemotionally tells Glory about his various hit jobs but gets emotional when he has to kill a cat in the bomb shelter that could give away their location. Johnson is OK but has little charisma, though she does develop a believable chemistry with Ivers. Bishop gets top billing as Stan the cop and he's fine, but we don't really get to know him. Jacques Aubuchon, channeling the better Sydney Greenstreet, plays Bahrwell with some gay subtext (at one point, he claims to be a show tune fan), and Richard Hale plays A.T. as an evil Mr. Potter from It's a Wonderful Life. Cagney's direction is a bit slack until the end when the climax works nicely. No classic but interesting in fits and starts, and it's a legit film noir. [Blu-ray]

NAKED ALIBI (1954)

Bakery owner Al Willis (Gene Barry) is being held on suspicion of involvement with a series of robberies. The drunken Willis loses control and punches Lt. Parks who punches him back. The department is skittish because of current headlines concerning police brutality, so Joe Conroy, the chief investigator (Sterling Hayden), lets Willis go. In the middle of the night, Parks is shot dead on the street and the cops chase down Willis, who claims he was in a neighborhood church at the time. Despite Willis seeming to be an upright citizen and family man, Joe is convinced that he's guilty. When two other cops who were involved in Willis's interrogation are killed in a car bombing, Joe goes after Willis but a journalist gets a photo of Joe manhandling Willis and he is kicked off the force. Joe hires a private investigator to follow Willis 24/7, which spooks Willis enough that he goes on the run to Border City (i.e., Tijuana) where he hangs out with his mistress Marianna (Gloria Grahame), a second-rate club singer. Now we see what Willis is really like: he practically assaults Marianna backstage, and when he kisses her, he thrusts his whole body against her, over and over. By now, Joe is also in Border City and when he gets rolled by three thugs and knocked unconscious, he is taken into a boarding house where, coincidentally, Marianna also lives. She and a friendly lad named Petey take care of him. Joe doesn't tell Marianna about his mission, but soon he sees her with Willis, and she finds a photo of Willis in Joe's possession. The climax occurs back in California when the destiny of the three main characters plays out.

This little-known film noir doesn't have a great critical reputation because the direction of Jerry Hopper is seen as weak, especially in dialogue scenes. But though the film does bog down a bit at times, I liked it quite a bit. Interior scenes may be unimaginative, but exteriors, shot by Russell Metty (who photographed a wide range of films such as Touch of Evil, Flower Drum Song, Written on the Wind, Spartacus and Thoroughly Modern Millie), are beautiful noir scenes of shadow and light, as pictured above (though the location shooting in Tijuana, which might have been done by a second unit man, leaves something to be desired). The three central performances are all great. Hayden excels as the restless, obsessed cop who presents a deceptively laid-back demeanor. Not a pretty boy, he is beefy and rawly attractive, and Grahame is his equal as a sexy woman a bit past her prime, seemingly unable to imagine a romantic life in which she is not abused. Gene Barry is a revelation; I think of him as an average, tamped-down guy in his famous role on Burke's Law, an actor I might occasionally accuse of phoning in his performance. But here, once we know his character is guilty, he gives a violent, unhinged performance that is, at times, scary. Some critics think he overdoes the psycho aspect of his character, but I think he's spot on. The shots of him banging disturbingly against Grahame while kissing her are startling. The general story line is predictable, and the final chase scene goes on a bit too long, but otherwise this is a noir that is a notch above average. My favorite line: Grahame, to Hayden, "I don't understand you and you don't understand me—we got a lot in common.” Thank you again, Eddie Muller, for showcasing this on TCM's Noir Alley. [TCM]

I MET HIM IN PARIS (1937)

Kay (Claudette Colbert) is a New York department store employee who is on her dream trip to Paris, alone without her pleasant but boring boyfriend (Lee Bowman), where she hopes to let loose and possibly disgrace herself. In the hotel bar, she asks for an English speaking waiter, who arrives saying, "You have the ask to wish for me your pleasure?" She meets two buddies, frivolous playboy Gene (Robert Young) and struggling playwright George (Melvyn Douglas), who squire her around the city. Gene falls for Kay, and George, knowing that Gene is married (though unhappily so), acts as their chaperone. When Kay suspects that George thinks she will give into Gene's advances, she insists that the three head off to a ski resort in Switzerland where she will prove that her relationship can stay platonic (so much for possibly disgracing herself). George has also fallen for Kay and he privately warns Gene to take it easy or he will spill the beans about Gene's marital status. They each get their own room and spend days indulging in various winter sports, but eventually George proclaims that he is in love with Kay and can't be a chaperone anymore. That's when Gene's wife (Mona Barrie) shows up; she's there to tell him that she has finally agreed to a divorce, but Kay, learning the truth and pissed off at both men, goes back to Paris alone where she finds her boyfriend had arrived, worrying that she will not remain faithful to him. Gene and George soon show up in Paris, and it looks like Kay is going to have to choose between a man who distrusts her, a man whom she cannot trust, and a man who broke his chaperone promise.

This is a fairly mild romantic comedy; it wants to be a legitimate screwball comedy but it's not paced quickly enough and occasionally seems rather labored. It feels at times like a squeaky-clean version of Noel Coward's DESIGN FOR LIVING. The dialogue is snappy: at one point, Douglas says to Bowman, "Drink your martini before I hit you over the head with it"; Douglas calls bobsledding "a pleasant form of suicide." The actors are fine, especially Douglas and Bowman, though I missed the spark of pro screwballers like Cary Grant or Irene Dunne. However, I quite enjoyed the location shooting at the ski resort (with Idaho standing in for Switzerland). It's effective to see the actors' breath in the cold and to see them do their own ice skating. The bobsled sequence is genuinely exciting; Colbert falls off her sled and has to be nimble to avoid being hit by the next sled. As with most screwballs, character motivations are often weak or downright silly—it's not clear why Douglas doesn't tell Colbert about Young's wife right away. The way the three stars are billed will tell you who Colbert winds up with, but I was kind of pushing for her to get back together with Bowman. Amusing and worth a viewing for fans of classic-era comedy. Pictured are Bowman, Young, Colbert and Douglas. [Criterion Channel]

OLD LOS ANGELES (1948)

Los Angeles, 1848. Outlaws are on the rampage, attacking gold miners and hunters and blowing up dams. Prospector Larry Stockton sends a letter to his brother Bill, a former U.S. marshal, about their troubles, asking Bill to join him. But shortly after, crooked Johnny Morrell (John Carroll) forces Larry and his partner to sign over their claim to him, then he shoots them both dead. Bill (Bill Elliott) and his buddy Sam (Andy Devine) ride into town and when they discover that Larry is dead, they vow to hunt down the killer. Among the folks they run into: Savarin (Joseph Schildkraut), a seemingly respectable bar owner who is the secret head of the outlaw gang and who's trying to get control of as much land as possible; Marie, a singer and girlfriend of Savarin's; and Johnny and his gal Estelita. Bill starts a flirtation with Marie who only wants to marry Savarin because of his money. While a group of citizens gather to repair the dam that the outlaws blew up, the outlaws raid a cattle ranch. But Savarin's gang is still interested in the dam because there is supposedly a vein of gold buried there. Soon we're not sure who is on what side: Marie, Estelita and the town's marshal (Grant Withers) may not be what they seem to be on the surface. At the climax, there is tragedy but justice is served. Bill "Wild Bill" Elliott was in over 200 movies, most of them B-westerns. This is the first starring vehicle of his that I've seen. He comes off as a bit of a stick here, but he was certainly popular back then. Better are the handsome John Carroll (usually a B-hero, here a villain) and Joseph Schildkraut who was seen more often in character parts in A-films (THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER, THE LIFE OF EMILE ZOLA). Old reliables Grant Withers and Henry Brandon (as Larry) are fine, but the females are rather bland. Catherine McLeod (Marie) is best known as the daughter with the headache from the 1960s Anacin ad who yells, "Mother, please, I'd rather do it myself!" (Am I the only person around who remembers these ads vividly?) Estelita Rodriguez (Estelita) married her co-star Grant Withers a few years later. The plot is perhaps a bit more complicated than the norm for a B-western, but overall it's not particularly memorable. Reissued in the 1950s as California Outpost. Pictured are Elliott and Carroll. [TCM]

JUNGLE MAN (1941)

We meet Betty and her father William indulging in the upper-class joy of watching a yacht regatta when her fiancé Bruce announces that he and his buddy Andy are soon heading to Africa in search of the lost City of the Dead. Betty wants to go along for the excitement and, as her father's brother James is a missionary over there, they both decide to go. In Africa (after a few minutes of stock footage of hippos and crocodiles and snakes and zebras) we see Father James conferring with Bob, a research doctor who is on the verge of finding a cure for the dreaded malaka fever. When our American visitors arrive, Betty is nearly attacked by a leopard which Andy shoots, and a little later, Bob saves her from a lion. (Despite Betty coming off as strong-willed, she spends most of the movie screaming for someone to save her.) James is happy to see his brother and niece, and Betty seems happy to make the acquaintance of the handsome Bob, something which triggers a bit of jealousy in Bruce. Rounding out the group are Buck, the nervous nelly comic relief, and James' pet tiger Satan. After Bruce and Andy set out for the lost city, Bob gets news that a shipment of his fever cure has gone down with a sunken ship off the coast, just as an attack has broken out in a nearby village. He and Betty go to the village to tend to the sick as Bruce finds the lost city and snaps lots of photographs. When Bruce and Andy return to the village, Bruce has malaka fever, so Bob decides to head to the coast to try and salvage the sunken serum. He does, but on his return, Betty has the fever as well. Can Bob save them?

One of the things I liked about this and that separates it from the average jungle melodrama of the era is that there is no villain, no bad guy actively trying to sabotage either the city seekers or the doctor. Also, despite the title, there is no real Tarzan figure, though there is a former Tarzan actor, the hunky and stoic Buster Crabbe, as Bob (pictured) who, while never donning a loincloth manages to get shirtless a couple of times. It was fun to see him co-starring with Charles Middleton as Father James; their previous work together was as good guy Flash Gordon and bad guy Ming the Merciless in the Flash Gordon serials—and Middleton is passive and laconic here, looking nothing at all like Ming. Sheila Darcy makes for a colorless Betty, just as she made a colorless Dragon Lady in the Terry and the Pirates serial. For the record, Weldon Heyburn and Robert Carson are OK as Bruce and Andy, though Vince Barnett has the sadly thankless part of Buck who meets an unhappy end, rare for comic relief characters. I liked seeing the City of the Dead, which was actually the real life Angkor Wat temple in Cambodia. Other viewers have noted that it feels like stock footage fills up almost half of the movie's one hour running time, but such footage is par for the course for a B-adventure film of the time. Best exchange: Bob, as he prepares to give Betty the serum, "You’re my first guinea pig"; Betty, "It's nice being your guinea pig." I liked this, but it's pretty much for die-hard B-jungle film fans (or Buster Crabbe fans) only. [YouTube]

TARZAN AND THE TRAPPERS (1960/1966)

We are told that in Africa, Tarzan "befriends the weak, helps the distressed, and enforces the jungle's primitive code of justice." Tarzan, Jane and Boy live a seemingly idyllic life up in the jungle treetops, with their pet chimp Cheeta whom we see save a napping Jane from a snake. Tarzan hears a local tribe sending drum messages to warn others about a trapper in the area. Schroeder, collecting animals for circuses, accidentally wounded a native, and now he has killed an elephant and captured its orphaned baby. Tarzan frees the baby, but when Schroeder comes across Boy and Cheeta, he grabs them, holding them hostage so Tarzan will let them escape. Tarzan, however, jumps on a giraffe, calls on the other elephants to stampede, and foils Schroeder's plans. Before long, another visitor to the jungle makes trouble. Sikes is looking for revenge against Tarzan for getting his brother jailed for seven years. His associate, Lapin, is looking for the treasures of the lost city of Zaibo. Tarzan confronts them and does battle with a big thug who looks like a Turkish wrestler. Sikes tells Tarzan he's going to hunt him down to either kill him or tame him, giving him a two hour head start. Tarzan says, "He who hunts in jungle is in turn hunted," and that's exactly what happens—instead of running off, Tarzan takes to the treetops and follows Sikes. They all wind up in the ruins of Zaibo where Tarzan, as promised, enforces justice.

The history of this Tarzan oddity is a bit messy. Three pilot episodes of a Tarzan TV show starring Gordon Scott were shot in 1958 (Scott, pictured, was playing Tarzan in the movies at the time) but no network was interested, so a short feature film was put together from the pilot footage and released overseas in 1960, and eventually aired on American television in 1966. That's why this film feels a bit disjointed; the first section (roughly 20 minutes) is the Schroeder story, a traditional white trapper tale, and the last section (50 minutes) follows Sikes and Lapin in a "Most Dangerous Game" story crossed with a Lost City narrative. Jane plays little part in the proceedings, and Boy (after complaining about having to read Treasure Island) vanishes at the half-hour mark. Though obviously done on a cheaper budget than the theatrical films, this is watchable, largely due to Gordon Scott. As an actor, he's not as interesting as Lex Barker (pre-Scott) or Jock Mahoney (post-Scott) but he has an impressive physique and is pretty good at vine swinging, though I suspect that some of that is done by a stunt double. Eve Brent (Jane) and Ricky Sorenson (Boy) are bland, as are the bad guys, though Sol Gorss, as Sikes, works up some decent villainy. There appears to be freshly shot African footage that is worked in well with the studio scenes. There is an odd shot of an animal (maybe a mongoose) killing a snake included for no apparent reason. IMDb calls this a 1960 TV movie, but they're wrong—it wasn't shown on TV until six years later. Some reviewers claim that Sikes is getting revenge for Schroeder, but they have different last names, and Sikes says that his brother has spent 7 years in jail, so it can't be the same person. [DVD]