THE GRACIE ALLEN MURDER CASE (1939)

In the town of Riverford, the Vogue Perfume company is holding its annual employee picnic. Bill and Ann win the three-legged race and just as Bill is about to propose to Ann, Fred pops in to spoil the moment. The upset Bill walks away and stews by himself, but when the boss's niece Gracie shows up, Bill shares a fancy picnic lunch with her, complete with tablecloth and candles, to make Ann jealous. Gracie is a bit of a scatterbrain, but she's attractive and lively, and Bill takes her out that night to the Diamond Slipper Cafe  Meanwhile, gangster Benny the Buzzard has broken out of prison and comes to the club to see its owner, Dan Mirche, who framed Benny for his crimes in order to avoid prison. That night, Benny is found dead in Mirche's office, and when Gracie sees Bill's cigarette case near the body, she implicates him as the killer and he is taken into custody. Detective Philo Vance is soon on the case, but after Dixie, the club singer, is found dead from poisoned flowers that were sent by Vance, he may be a suspect too. Despite her good intentions, Gracie makes a comic mess of everything around her, but Vance manages, despite her "help," to clear his name (and Bill's) and solve the case.

This is an odd duck of a movie. Gracie Allen, wife and comedy partner of George Burns, took her madcap goofball act solo here with mixed results. Gracie is introduced at the picnic as Gracie Allen, but she's not playing herself exactly, that is, a comic star of radio and movies, just the boss's niece. She's constantly misunderstanding people and wrecking havoc with the English language. With Burns as her straight man, she can be quite funny. Alone, she is still funny but is a bit too much to take, especially as she's in practically every scene of the movie—though this is ostensibly an entry in the Philo Vance movie series, Vance (Warren William) doesn't show up until a half hour in, and he is largely relegated to a supporting role. I enjoyed Gracie constantly calling Philo "Fido" and her messing up the lyrics to a cute song, "Snug as a Bug in a Rug." When a woman complains that her pansies are drooping, Gracie replies, "You ought to wear suspenders." The last scene of the movie is a delightful surreal moment in which she tries to shake hands with two men at once. But really, after the 20 minute mark, I was getting a bit weary of her shtick, especially because no one around her reacts to her shenanigans as well as her husband did. Both William and Kent Taylor (Bill) have to resort to versions of just rolling their eyes in irritation, which itself gets irritating. Speaking of Kent Taylor, as I look over my past reviews of his movies, I generally find him to be OK, a decent B-lead or A-supporting player. Here, he makes a good impression in the first half hour or so, looking handsome and acting like his character might have some complexity—it's not altogether clear that he's supposed to be a nice guy. But he largely disappears from view for the rest of the movie. William also suffers a bit from being sidelined so often. Jerome Cowan is fine as Michie, and other familiar faces include Donald MacBride, H.B. Warner, Richard Denning, Willie Fung, and William Demarest. Cute as a novelty but maybe not recommended for people looking for a traditional Philo Vance mystery. Pictured are Allen and Taylor; the bottom picture is a publicity shot. [Blu-ray]

THE YOUNG SWINGERS (1963)

The Vanguard is a small jazz club run as a co-op by a group of young musicians who sing and play in a combo there. Businesswoman Jo Helton visits the place with her lackey of a lawyer (Justin Smith). She wants to buy the place to tear it down and replace it with an office building, but Rod Lauren, a singer, emcee, and co-owner (pictured at left), won't sell, saying the place is just starting to turn a profit. Smith tells Helton that the kids have a lease, and as she leaves on a business trip, she tells him to use strong arm tactics, like finding safety violations, to get the building for herself. Her niece (Molly Bee), who has just turned 21, goes to the club one night with her obnoxious boyfriend who gets in a fistfight with Rod and leaves, letting Molly and Rod do a little bonding, especially when the electricity is turned off and Rod discovers that Molly can sing—we find out later that her mother was a USO singer who was killed in a plane crash. Knowing that Smith is trying to close the club, Molly takes a job there. When Helton returns and hears her sing, she is brought to tears by how much Molly sounds like her mother, and she starts to soften her stance about the lease. But then a faulty wiring problem, which the safety inspector had pointed out, causes a fire which destroys the club. Will Rod and the gang be ruined? Will Molly and her aunt manage to reforge their relationship?

I have a mild thing for Rod Lauren. He's not a great actor (though he can sing and even had a top 40 hit in 1960) but he has a mildly smoldering and sullen look that he puts to good use in the handful of B-movies he made, most notably the cheapie cult classic THE CRAWLING HAND. Here, his sullenness reads as broody determination which works for the movie. Its title is a bit misleading as there is not any real swinging done by anyone. The music, however, is OK. Though the combo is lightly jazzy, the rest of the numbers are either pop or folk. The front of the club has a sign announcing a Hootenanny night, but aside from two bland folky songs performed by the Sherwood Singers we see no hootenannying going on. Rod and Molly Bee (who was a country singer) each get a song, as does R&B singer Gene McDaniels who plays one of the club owners. Jo Helton gives an odd performance as the mean aunt. It's interesting that, as other viewers have pointed out, her role as a tough businessperson villain is usually played by an older man. Helton was only 30 here, though she does look a little older. But her facial expression for most of the movie is a glare of smirky irritation and it does get tiring. Even as she starts to melt a bit near the end, she still mostly smirks. I didn’t like her at first, but eventually I started to make a game out of being able to catch her without that smirk. I don't think I ever did. This short B-film has an airless TV episode feel to it, even in the jazz club. An actor named Larrs Jackson plays another owner who sings a comic novelty song which includes an impression of Walter Brennan; the actor is billed as Jack Larson, but he is not the better known Jack Larson who played Jimmy Olsen in the Superman TV series. Should you watch this? Well, it's short and predictable so as B-movie comfort fodder, maybe. Otherwise, only for fellow fans of Rod Lauren. [YouTube]

MYSTERY BROADCAST (1943)

Jan Cornell has a weekly radio show called The Crime Was Never Solved in which she dramatizes, well, unsolved crimes. The voice and sound effects cast includes her friend and roommate Smitty, and the show's sponsor is Stanley Cigarettes, in the person of A.J. Stanley and his wife Eve. Her show competes with a crime show hosted by Michael Jerome, and his show is gaining on hers in the ratings so Jan announces that her next show will be about the unsolved murder of actress Lenore Fenwick and that she will solve the case. Fenwick was found dead in a cabin on the grounds of the Crying Pines Lodge with the pages of her unfinished memoir next to her. Her producer is not happy with this development but A.J. encourages her in order to show up Michael, though Stanley's wife is not so happy. Neither is cast member Mida Kent who gives a lame excuse for not being present for the next show. Mida calls Jan later that night and asks to meet with her, but she is murdered before she can talk. Newspaper columnist Bill Burton brings Michael into the group and soon he is helping Jan investigate, and of course striking small romantic sparks with her. It turns out that Mida was present at Crying Pines the night of Lenore's death night, as was secretary Irene Hill who has gone missing. When Jan and Smitty go to the cabin to record the sound of the "crying pines," they are threatened by a mystery woman who is herself shot and killed. That woman was Eve Stanley, who was originally Irene Hill. Stanley claims to have known nothing about his wife's past, but more digging by Jan and Smitty and Michael bring stolen money and a blackmail attempt to light and Jan is able to solve the case just moments before the climax of her radio show, which she is then able to retitle The Crime That WAS Solved.

This is a fairly fun hour-long B-mystery from Republic which remains light on its feet, in both tone and pacing. Ruth Terry (Jan) is only OK in the main role, outshone by Mary Treen as Smitty; nowadays, Smitty would be the lesbian best friend but here she's just an unsophisticated working girl. Frank Albertson (Michael) is good but unfairly top-billed; he and Terry do work up some chemistry, but to the movie's credit, she remains the primary sleuth while he mostly waits in the background for the right moment for a kiss (which, in the last scene, is comically timed at a full minute by the radio show staff). Nils Asther has a small role as (what else?) an exotic gigolo type and Wynne Gibson is fine as Eve Stanley. Francis Pierlot plays the eccentric Mr. Crunch, supervisor of a newspaper morgue (yes, a misunderstanding of that word pops up for comedy). Charles Hayes and Kirk Alyn show up in bit parts as handsome policemen whom Smitty flirts with. Addison Richards does what he can with the ill-defined role of Bill Burton. The nighttime scene at Crying Pines is nicely atmospheric, and the whole thing goes down pleasantly. Pictured are Albertson and Terry. [Streaming]

THE INVISIBLE DR MABUSE (1962)

The Metropol Theater, which seems to specialize in Grand Guignol operettas, is presenting a show called "The Dancer, the Executioner and the Clown" which climaxes each night as the dancer is executed by guillotine. After her head drops in a basket, the curtains close and the dancer, Liane, comes out to take a bow. Watching her every night from a box is an invisible admirer; all we see is a pair of binoculars hanging in the air, pointed at the stage. One night, FBI agent Nick Prado, who is scoping out the theater as a possible hotbed of bad guys involved with the super-secret Enterprise X, sees the binoculars and chases after the invisible figure. Prado winds up backstage where he is trapped by some set flats, sent down a trap door, and tortured by what appear to be stagehands, led by a clown. They accidentally kill Prado, much to the anger of their leader who is only seen in shadow. Nick's body is packed into a theatrical trunk and sent to the docks to be shipped out, but the dock workers are on strike, so dogs sniff out the corpse and his death makes the headlines, which irritates the Shadowy Guy even more. Fellow FBI agent Joe Como comes to Berlin to investigate. Enterprise X is the work of a Dr. Erasmus; it can make people invisible, and in fact, the invisible fan of Liane's is Erasmus as his face is horribly deformed from a car accident, not Shadow Guy, But Shadow Guy wants to get his hands on the invisibility device to create an invisible army which he will use to commit a major crime on December 8th. Como and Inspector Brahm think it sounds like a plot by the evil and insane Dr. Mabuse, but isn't he dead? At the end of the previous Mabuse movie, Mabuse appears to die in a fire, but his body was not found, which left the possibility of a sequel open. This is that sequel which brings back Lex Barker as American FBI agent Joe Como and Wolfgang Priess as Mabuse. Otherwise, however, this works as a standalone pulp fiction story of a mysterious crime lord who orders his henchmen around in a plot for eventual world domination. Someone tries to kill Como (doesn't work) and Liane (also doesn't work), and the invisible army does indeed come into being, but in the end, Mabuse is stymied in a spectacularly fiery climax (Priess only appears as Mabuse in the final scene) and carted off to an asylum as hopelessly insane, leaving the door open for yet another Mabuse tale. Barker is OK, as is Karin Dor as Liane. I missed Gert Frobe as the inspector, but otherwise this is a well paced and well shot action thriller, even if the Mabuse connection has weakened a bit by now. Pictured are Dor and Barker. [Blu-ray]

THE FURY OF ACHILLES (1962)

The Greeks are in the tenth year of their siege of Troy, the city behind impenetrable walls. With the army stalled out, the Greek leaders (Agamemnon, Ulysses, Achilles and his close friend Patroclus) take to plundering cities along the coast, and in Lyrnessus, in addition to food and supplies, they take women, among them Criseide, a maiden at a temple to Apollo, for Agamemnon, and Briseis for Achilles. The women seem at various times to be irritated or pleased with their men, though Briseis tries to stab Achillies in the back, not realizing that he is invulnerable, and her knife strikes sparks but does not penetrate his skin—the story of him having one vulnerability (famously, his heel) crops up on occasion but never really comes into play here. An oracle has let it be known that Achilles will die at Troy but not before he kills the Trojan warrior Hector, and Briseis eventually warms to him. The father of Criseide calls on Apollo for help and Apollo sends a huge storm and several days of an unknown pestilence to the Greeks. Criseide is returned but Agamemnon takes Briseis from Achilles, which causes the petulant Achilles to refuse to fight. When Hector's men attack, Patroclus dresses up in Achilles' battle garb; Hector kills him but Achilles gets his revenge, and the movie ends with Achilles still alive and handing over Hector's dead body to his father King Priam. This film, inspired by the Iliad, is basically a high-class peplum rather than a full-fledged epic. It seems to have had a decent budget for a peplum and it's almost two hours (which is definitely too long) but it's serious in its retelling of Achilles' story. There are robes and swords and sandals, and the women are done up in way too much 60s style hair and makeup, especially Cristina Gioni as Patroclus' woman. Gordon Mitchell (Achilles) certainly has the physique for a fighter (he is shirtless at times to show this off), though his face is hard and unattractive and his acting is just adequate. Jacques Bergerac, a handsome French actor better known for romantic parts (pictured at right), is better as Hector. For the record, Mario Petri is Agamemnon and Ennio Girolami is Patroclus. There are several big battle scenes but some of the swordplay is on the weak side, with swords just glancing off the bodies of soldiers as they fall to the ground, though the Achilles/Hector battle at the end is well done. Unlike some other Trojan War films, this one does feature supernatural actions of the gods, even if we only see gods onscreen very briefly. Generally, it's impressive without being exciting or engrossing. [YouTube]

GHOST OF THE CHINA SEA (1958)

Luzon, 1941. The people of the Philippines are "pretending to be at peace" even as the Japanese are carrying out a drawn out invasion. Justine Woolf runs a plantation that she is unwilling to leave despite supply disruptions, distant bombing rumbles, and warnings from both Rev. Edwards and her hired hand, the cynical Martin French. But eventually, Japanese planes strafe her fields, killing many workers and causing the rest to leave, with only Edwards, French and her part Japanese bookkeeper Hito remaining. They escape into the jungle and, though briefly captured, are freed by American sailor Larry Peters, whom French assumes is a deserter. Nevertheless, they follow Peters to a seized but damaged Filipino boat Peters calls the U.S.S. Frankenstein. They set sail looking for an island refuge, along the way picking up fuel and guns and a handful of freedom fighters. French is a fairly obnoxious bully who always thinks everyone else is in the wrong, but through Justine, we come to see him as a damaged and conflicted soul and he slowly comes to trust others. The main conflict in the group, between Edwards and French, concerns the act of killing—Edwards preaches against it but French sees it as a necessity. After a number of small skirmishes, our survivors end up a sure target for a Japanese ship, and they'll need a miracle (or the American Navy) to get out alive.

Though I’d never seen this movie, it felt very familiar to me, and I realized later that it's a lot like BATTLE AT BLOODY BEACH, an Audie Murphy war adventure made a couple of years later. One subgenre of war movies, cheaper to make than large-scale battleground movies, involves a small group of people, sometimes soldiers, sometimes civilians (and sometimes a mix of both), making their way past enemy soldiers to arrive at safety. These two movies are good examples, both made with B-movie budgets several years after the war, and both fostering a bit more in the way of character development than is possible in the films with a wider scope. This movie is nothing special but still worth watching. Location shooting in Hawaii is helpful, though honestly some of it still looks like studio work. The acting is average. David Brian, a familiar character actor who specialized in westerns and melodramas, gives a one-note performance in what is, to be fair, a one-note role as French. Lynette Bernay (Justine) and Noman Wright (Rev. Edwards) are bland in their stereotypical parts. Jonathan Haze (Peters) is a notch better, giving his sailor character some personality. Poor Wright is given to dimestore philosophizing. At one point, he talks about needing "corners and shadows in which to think" and later describes their plight as that of being "phantoms on a spectral ship, tracking the moon through the river of time, [becoming] a ghost of the China Sea." The movie could have used either more or less of that kind of semi-poetic atmosphere. Pictured above are Brian and Bernay with an unidentified actor to their left. [YouTube]

QUEEN KELLY (1929)

In Kronberg, the capital of a middle European kingdom, Regina V, known as the Mad Queen, nurses a "morbid jealous passion" for Prince Wolfram, known among the women of the land as Wild Wolfie. We first see him arriving at the castle at dawn, drunk and stumbling and accompanied by a pack of whores. Regina, who has had her morning bath with glasses of champagne served by her courtiers, holding her white cat against her naked breast, is furious and orders Wolfram to drill his squadron in the hot sun all day. During the march, he crosses paths with a group of orphan convent girls. One of them, Patricia Kelly, is coyly flirtatious and as she curtsies, her panties accidently drop to her feet. Wolfram laughs; she crumples them up and tosses them at his face. He smells them approvingly and tosses them back, clearly attracted to her. At the convent, the Mother Superior tells her to pray for "deliverance from worldly thoughts," but she prays to meet up with Wild Wolfie again. Meanwhile, the Queen decides to tame Wolfram once and for all, and orders their marriage to occur the next day. At midnight, Wolfram and a buddy sneak into the convent, set a small fire for distraction, and carry Patricia away to the castle where she and Wolfram share a rich dinner (she has champagne for the first time and says it’s "like drinking fireworks") and some heavy duty petting in his bed until Regina storms in with a whip, applying it first to Wolfram and then chasing Patricia around the palace. She escapes and, mortified, jumps into a river, hoping to die. She is rescued, taken back to the convent, and sent away to Dar es Salaam in East Africa to attend to her dying aunt. Patricia discovers that her aunt is the boss of a bunch of ladies "of the horizontal profession," in other words, she's the madam of a notorious brothel. Over the aunt's deathbed, as last rites are being performed, Patricia undergoes a bizarre marriage ceremony to Jan, the old, crippled, and ugly assistant to the aunt, during which she imagines Wolfram's figure instead of Jan's. In a rushed and incomplete conclusion, Pat becomes the madam (Queen Kelly of the title), Jan is killed in a barroom fight, and Wolfram eventually comes riding to her rescue to have her become his queen in Kronberg.

This silent film was the last film directed by Erich von Stroheim and it was never properly finished. The star, Gloria Swanson, was also the producer, and when she began to dislike the direction the film was taking, she and her money man, Joseph P. Kennedy, stopped production after a couple of months. A few years later, Swanson had a different ending shot, in which Pat’s leap into the river leads to her death, with final shots of a chastened and mourning Wolfram. This version was shown in Europe but was not popular, partly perhaps because of the talkie revolution. The 100 minute print now in circulation retains the original ending but because production was abruptly ended, it’s a bit raggedy and explanatory stills and titles have been inserted by Dennis Doros based on von Strohem's published screenplay. But the unfinished state of the film gives it a unique dreamlike quality and it's well worth seeing for silent film fans.

In addition to the choppy narrative, there are other problems. Kelly is a schoolgirl, perhaps eighteen years old at the most; Swanson was thirty and could perhaps pass for mid-twenties, but it's impossible to accept her as a teenager. Otherwise, she's fine here, giving a performance that blurs the character's motivations; sometimes she seems sweet and innocent, sometimes sensual and knowing. In the somewhat truncated brothel scenes, which are almost breathtakingly unsavory, she comes off as truly horrified at her surroundings and her prospects—it helps that Tully Marshall is grotesquely convincing as Jan. Walter Byron (pictured with Swanson at left) is exactly right as Wolfram: handsome, sexy, energetic, yet just weak enough that he can't bring himself to rebel against Regina for Kelly's sake. He never quite made it in sound films, though he kept acting, often in uncredited roles, until the early 1940s, and I liked him quite a bit here. Seena Owen, who retired from films in the early sound years, is good as Regina, though she's mostly called on to strike poses and glower. The sets are lovely and the cinematography is often luminous. The footage that Gloria Swanson, as Norma Desmond, is watching at her home in Sunset Boulevard is a prayer scene from Queen Kelly. Though this wild movie has been tamed by its unfinished status, it is still a memorable viewing experience. On YouTube, the 100-minute version is the restored print, though the cut version Swanson prepared is also available; look for the hour-long version. [YouTube]

CHARLIE CHAN ON BROADWAY (1937)

On an ocean liner heading from Germany to New York City, Billie Bronson is barricaded in her bathroom by the thuggish Mitchell while he ransacks her room, looking for something he doesn’t find. As it happens, next door to her is detective Charlie Chan and his son Lee, returning from their adventure at the Berlin Olympics. They come to her rescue and later she sneaks a wrapped package into Chan’s room and it leaves the ship in his luggage. We learn that Billie’s package contains a diary that could blow the lid off of some criminal enterprises. While Charlie is the guest of honor at a police dinner, Lee catches Billie in their hotel room, looking for the package. She claims she had the wrong room by mistake, but the suspicious Lee follows her to the Hottentot Club where a number of people are interested in the diary: reporter Speed Patten who has offered to pay for her story, freelance photographer Joan Wendall, club owner Johnny, his mistress Marie, and mobster Buzz Moran who warns Billie to get out of town. Billie winds up shot dead in Johnny’s office and Lee is held by the cops until Pop frees him. Back in Chan’s hotel room, the package is gone and Mitchell (from the ocean liner) is found dead with a crumpled diary page in his hand. Chan works with Inspector Nelson and eventually gathers the suspects in a room to solve the case.

This is a fairly typical entry in the Chan series with Warner Oland and Keye Luke as father and son. There are rumors that Oland may have suffered a nervous breakdown around the time of filming, and indeed he only did one more Chan film, but he and Luke are fine here. There are several suspects, a couple of red herring clues, and a killer whose identity is a surprise. There is an interesting gimmick: the Hottentot Club hosts a Candid Camera night where patrons can bring their cameras and take candid shots of everyone in the place. This was apparently a real trend at the time, and a photograph taken at the club provides an important clue. As usual, Lee is a bit bumbling but at one point he does save Charlie from getting shot. A solid supporting cast includes Harold Huber as the inspector, Leon Ames as Buzz, Donald Woods as Speed, J. Edward Bromberg as Speed's editor, Douglas Fowley as Johnny, Louise Henry as Billie, and Marc Lawrence as Mitchell. My only real complaint about the movie is that despite the title and the use of "Give My Regards to Broadway" in the beginning, the film has no Broadway feel; with its bland, cheap sets it might as well be set in Cleveland or Kansas City. Pictured are Louise Henry and Donald Woods. [DVD]

L'AVVENTURA (1960)

Friends Anna and Claudia are about to embark on a yacht trip off the Sicilian coast with Sandro, Anna's boyfriend who has just returned from a long business trip, and two other couples. When Anna and Claudia stop by Sandro's place to pick him up, Anna and Sandro, who both seem a bit disgruntled with their relationship, engage in somewhat desultory sex, leaving Claudia pacing in the street outside. On the yacht, relations among all the couples seem a bit unsettled, with the single Claudia observing the tensions around her. At one point, Anna jumps impulsively into the water and claims to see a shark, but this seems to be just an attention-getting move. The yacht stops at a small rocky island where the passengers get out to explore, but when they regroup, Anna is missing. They search for a time, and eventually they call in police from a nearby town, and when nothing comes of the search, Sandro and Claudia, the two closest to Anna, decide to search towns on the mainland where she has supposedly been sighted while the other friends continue on their trip. In one town, they observe a would-be celebrity named Gloria Perkins trying to attract press attention, surrounded by men and proclaiming that she is a writer who feels "in touch with" Tolstoy and Shakespeare. A pharmacist who claims that Anna was in his store sends Claudia and Sandro to the town of Noto, filled with stark blocky architecture and mostly empty of people, except when Sandro leaves Claudia alone in the streets for a moment when dozens of men congregate menacingly around her. Soon Claudia and Sandro begin an affair, and the search for Anna fades into the background. The two catch up with some of the other passengers who are holding a huge party at a fancy hotel. While Claudia decides to skip most of the festivities, Sandro attends and winds up at dawn groping Gloria Perkins on a couch in the lobby. Claudia finds them, Sandro is appropriately chastened, and he ends up in tears on a bench on the hotel roof as Claudia tentatively consoles him.

This film from Michelangelo Antonioni jump-started the European art film craze of the 1960s, along with Godard's BREATHLESS and Resnais's HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR. It's often referred to as a movie in which nothing happens, though as one can tell from the summary above, things do happen, but they largely seem to be incidental things, apparently unrelated to what we assume will be the plot's engine, the search for the missing Anna. This became the first in a series of three Antonioni movies unofficially referred as an alienation trilogy, as the theme of all the films relates to the alienation we feel from our fellow humans and from our surroundings—though frankly, most of Antonioni’s films after the trilogy mine the same material. The first time I watched the movie, many years ago, it felt long and slow and, indeed, like nothing much was happening (with the narrative or the characters) because I kept waiting for the mystery of the missing Anna to be solved. This time, after knowing the outcome and having seen the other trilogy films (LA NOTTE and L’ECLISSE), I paid more attention to the visuals and the acting. Physical space, landscapes and architecture are important here, often symbolic of emotions and mental states. The scenes in Noto are the most impressive, highlighting buildings which were designed during the fascist reign of Mussolini, as opposed to the older, more classic designs we see elsewhere. The director has said that the movie is a critique of modern morality, or lack of it, though ironically the film was attacked on grounds of being immoral (adultery galore). There is no explicit sex here, though a long outdoor scene of Sandro and Claudia kissing passionately is quite sexy, and climaxed by a shot of a train barreling along beside the couple, which I took to be a satirical comment on the traditional "train through a tunnel" sex imagery. 

The two central actors couldn't be better. Monica Vitti (Claudia) is stunning looking and sensual, and her face conveys subtle shifts in her emotional states, coldly observant in the beginning, confused by her feelings for Sandro later, and finally in the end ambiguous in her moral outlook. At times, the mature looking Gabriele Ferzetti (Sandro) seems like a father figure to both Anna and Claudia, though Ferzetti was only six years older than Vitti, but he is convincingly attractive and seems a solid, settled presence to the younger women. Lea Massari (Anna) is only in the first half-hour but she haunts the rest of the film, until you realize that she no longer does. Critics often say that the dialogue here is unimportant, which isn't really true—it's more that the visuals (both backgrounds and actors' faces) carry as much of the narrative as the dialogue. But there are indeed not many memorable lines. I only noted one line in my notes: "Islands, I don't get them," says one of the passengers on the yacht. While I appreciated this movie much more the second time through, it still felt a bit long with individual scenes which could stand some trimming. But in many ways, this is a feast for the eyes and the mind, and even people who don't take to art films might get something out of this, even if it's just to say that they watched a movie where nothing happens. The title is Italian for "adventure" but is also a slang term for a fling. [DVD]

THE MAD DOCTOR (1940)

In a nicely atmospheric rainy night scene set in the small town of Midbury, a medical doctor (Ralph Morgan) is called out of his bed to attend to the wife of psychiatrist Basil Rathbone. She is sick with pneumonia but she's dead by the time the doctor arrives. Morgan finds the death suspicious but mostly because he finds Rathbone's demeanor to be cold and secretive. We discover what Morgan doesn't know, that Rathbone has a habit of marrying rich women, and he and his assistant (Martin Kosleck) kill them for their money. Though it's never made explicit, Rathbone and Kosleck are certainly lovers; Kosleck is coded as gay through his hobby of flower arranging and by lying languidly around the house in a robe, and the two constantly exchange intense glances (as pictured at left). They move to Manhattan where Rathbone soon has a lucrative practice and is called on to treat Ellen Drew, the depressed sister-in-law of a newspaper publisher. Drew's boyfriend, reporter John Howard, isn't happy with this arrangement, calling Rathbone a "half-baked soul meddler" due to his use of hypnosis, and he plans to write an expose of such doctors for his paper. But Drew's mental state soon improves, and she starts to fall for Rathbone even as Howard heads to Midbury where Morgan has done some digging into Rathbone's past and uncovered his history with wives. Can Howard piece together a compelling case against Rathbone before Drew becomes his next victim?

Despite the maddeningly generic and random title, this is not a horror film but a fairly nifty psychological thriller. The strongest elements here are the performances of three of the actors. The always reliable Rathbone is very good portraying a man who, if he's not actually mad, is clever and has a sinister obsession—though we're led to believe that, at least for a time, he might actually feel enough for Drew so that he won't try to kill her. Kosleck, as his companion, is perverse and slimy and great fun to watch. Morgan, often a rather heavy-handed player, is just right as the suspicious doctor. Ellen Drew is fine as the damsel in distress, but John Howard isn't particularly good as the boyfriend, let down in part by a script which keeps him offscreen for a fair chunk of the last half. He also comes off as a bit cold and passionless. I enjoyed the mostly comic supporting performances of Vera Vague (real name, Barbara Jo Allen) and Hugh O'Donnell as Drew's parents. Somewhat improbably, the murder of a night watchman at a cemetery becomes fodder for big headlines just because it's a big plot point. There's a well shot subway murder near the end. It’s a decent looking B-movie in terms of sets and atmosphere. Definitely recommended. [Blu-ray]