HARBOR OF MISSING MEN (1950)

Jim 'Brooklyn' Gannon runs a charter boat business from Key West and he also currently has a side gig helping a guy named Hugo smuggle stolen jewels into the States from Havana. While Brooklyn's clients are catching a big fish, Brooklyn snatches a hot water bottle out of the water thrown there from a nearby boat. Inside it are jewels which Brooklyn will be paid $500 dollars to deliver, but he is snatched off his dock by thugs and taken to a rival smuggler named Danziger who offers him $2,000 to deliver the jewels (along with some crates of illegal arms) to Capt. Koretsky on his boat the S.S. Dardanelles, and Koretsky will give him an envelope with $30,000 to be taken to Danziger. He agrees, and that night when he boards Koretsky's ship, he is surprised to find Danziger's secretary Mae and her 'brother' Frank (probably actually her lover) on the ship. They say they were sent by Danziger to go back to Key West with him to ensure the money is delivered. But actually, the two hijack Brooklyn's boat and steal the $30,000 for themselves. Brooklyn leaps off the boat and Mae assumes he'll drown before he can get to shore, but he's picked up by a small boat called the St. Nicholas belonging to Greek sponge fisherman Corcoris and his son Philip. They take him with them to Tarpon Springs and he meets the rest of the family: Mama, son Christopher and sister Angelike (a Greek version of Angelique). Danziger is told by Mae that Brooklyn stole the money, so he has thugs out looking for Brooklyn so he stays with the family and helps them celebrate the Greek Orthodox feast of Epiphany. In a time-honored ritual, the bishop throws a large gold crucifix into the water and the young men of the parish jump in to retrieve it. Philip gets it but when another guy grabs it from him, Brooklyn jumps in and takes it back, earning the respect of the Corcoris family. In short order, Brooklyn is wounded by Danziger's thugs and opts to join Corcoris for a two month sponge fishing expedition during which, once again, Brooklyn steps in to give much needed help on a dive almost gone wrong. Eventually back in Key West, Brooklyn tries to let Danziger know what really happened, though Mae and Frank try to stop him.

In terms of production and acting, this is an hour-long run-of-the-mill second feature B-movie. Sets are adequate, acting is fair, and visuals are uninspired. But the narrative is a notch above average. The whole Corcoris family plotline is a bit unusual with its emphasis on their religious background. When Brooklyn gets the gold crucifix for the family, Mama gives him a crucifix necklace which ends up saving his life when a bullet fired at him is deflected by it. (BTW, the Tarpon Springs Epiphany ritual is real, and the scene in the movie looks at least partly taken from actual ritual footage.) The religion message is not oversold—Brooklyn says he is not religious and the family never actively proselytizes—but it's an interesting aspect of the plot. Richard Denning (pictured) is his usual mildly wooden self but that works with the underdeveloped persona of his character. Aline Towne is attractive but a bit flat as Angelike, and Barbara Fuller isn't given much to do as Mae. The best performances are from Steven Geray as Papa Corcoris, Paul Marion as Philip, and Percy Helton as Rummy, Brooklyn's older sidekick. George Zucco, one of my favorite character actors, is Danziger (he looks a bit like Abe Vigoda) but is, like Barbara Fuller, underused. Christopher, one of the Corcoris sons, is crippled due to a shark attack, but this is never explored—he mostly just sits in a wheelchair and listens to the conversations. The YouTube prints are murky, and an early scene on the boat is almost completely obscured by darkness. [YouTube]

SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER (1959)

In 1937 New Orleans, Dr. John Cukrowicz works at a state asylum where he is honing his skills in neurosurgery (called "psychosurgery" by his boss, Dr. Hockstader). He gives a demonstration for a small audience of students, performing a lobotomy, and is noticeably frustrated by what he calls the "primitive surgical conditions" under which he has to work. When the wealthy Violet Venable reads an article in the paper about his work, she contacts Hockstader, offering to fund a new wing of the building if John will consider performing a lobotomy on her niece Catherine. The backstory: Violet's son Sebastian, a sensitive boy who considered himself a poet and artist, took long summer vacations with his mother. But last summer, with the aging Violet not up to a trip, Sebastian went traveling with his lovely cousin Catherine. He died under mysterious circumstances on a Mediterranean island; the coroner's report says he had a heart attack while walking on the street, but Catherine witnessed something different which has driven her into a mental institution. John visits Catherine and finds her sane enough in conversation until she is pushed to recall Sebastian's death; she says it happened at the hands of a mob of homeless boys, then becomes hysterical. John agrees to treat her but not necessarily with surgery. Catherine, in the presence of John and Violet, is eventually able to relate what happened last summer, and in doing so, moves herself toward health but drives Violet to a breakdown.

[Spoilers are inevitable.] This psychological Gothic drama is based on a one-act play by Tennessee Williams which is fairly open about its themes of incest, homosexuality, sex trafficking, and revenge, all presented in dialogue rather than onstage action. But because the movie was produced under the strictures of the Hollywood Production Code (weakening but still present), most of the above must be interpreted by the audience from between the lines and from incomplete visual imagery. Sebastian was a hedonistic homosexual who used his mother to procure young men and boys for sex overseas. We're told that Sebastian treated these people as though they were "items on a menu." When Mom became older and less useful in procurement (a word used by Catherine), he got his young cousin to accompany him. At the end of that last Mediterranean trip, Catherine said he had tired of the dark-skinned boys surrounding him and, "famished for blonds," wanted to head to the Nordic lands. We're not sure what triggers the climax, but as Sebastian tries to get away from the boys on the beach and the streets, they chase him to a ruined temple where he is surrounded, mutilated, and partially eaten by the poor street youths. We assume that he paid the boys for sex and that his leaving the island would have cut off a supply of cash. The story, as told by Catherine near the end of the film, is visualized though not explicitly—the boys encircle him and he is dragged down to the ground, his grasping arm rising briefly above the churning mass. Though the language of sexual behavior is not used, an audience member today would have to be willfully ignorant not to pick up what has happened. As far as I'm concerned, the phrases "items on a menu" and "famished for blonds" are more evocative than using words like "gay" or "promiscuous" would have been. 

The first time I saw this, sometime in the 1980s, I was disappointed as I was watching it for titillation and scandal, and by that era, it just didn't cut it. But this time around, I was much more impressed. Gore Vidal's screenplay (with Williams co-credited) is talky but fascinating. Things feel padded out in the middle, but the first half hour, which mostly consists of a long scene of dialogue between Katherine Hepburn (Violet) and Montgomery Clift (John), both pictured at top right, is thrillingly acted by Hepburn, who brings to mind the heiresses of The Philadelphia Story and Bringing Up Baby mixed with the drug addled Mary Tyrone of Long Day's Journey Into Night (which Hepburn would film a couple of years later). Elizabeth Taylor (Catherine), pictured at left, chews the scenery, especially in the last 15 minutes which is largely a monologue from her about what she witnessed, but it's called for. She and Hepburn are forces of nature and we'd be disappointed if Taylor held back. Clift is less impressive as he spends most of the movie reacting to others, but he's fine. Gary Raymond, whom I mostly know from TV as the British sergeant in the 60s war drama The Rat Patrol, is effective in a small role as Sebastian's weasley brother George, though Mercedes McCambridge is mostly wasted as Sebastian's weak mother. I liked seeing character actor Albert Dekker, the bespectacled mad scientist in Dr. Cyclops, as John's boss. Hepburn gets a startling moment when she describes watching, with Sebastian, an incident on the Galapagos Islands in which flesh eating birds blacken the sky as they eat newly hatched baby turtles off the beach. She says Sebastian saw the "face of God" then, which nicely sets up Sebastian's own fate. Catherine, the truth teller, leaves us with two memorable tidbits: that perhaps "love is using people" and that we are like "children in a vast kindergarten trying to spell God's name with the wrong alphabet blocks." I admit I chuckled a bit at that, but it stuck with me. Highly recommended as long as you're up for two hours of talk and great acting. [TCM]

SIEGE OF SYRACUSE (1960)

Between Carthage in North Africa and Rome in Italy is Sicily, in the Mediterranean Sea, and the city of Syracuse. Under King Hieron, Syracuse had remained neutral while Rome and Carthage fought during the Punic Wars. But now, in 213 B.C.E., with the Carthaginian fleet in tatters, Hieron worries that Rome may try to invade Syracuse. Clio, the king's daughter, is engaged to Archimedes, respected mathematician and inventor. While experimenting with a large device of lenses and mirrors that can focus the sun's rays into a light ray that sets fires when aimed properly, Archimedes accidentally burns up the clothes of Diana, member of a traveling dance troupe, who has been skinny dipping in a nearby stream. Mistreated by Gorgia, her incest-minded stepbrother and leader of the troupe, Diana falls for the kindly Archimedes and eventually, he falls for her, and when she becomes pregnant, he decides to call things off with Clio. But when Diana, forced on a crowded galley by Gorgia, gets kicked by an overzealous guard, she's knocked out and when she wakes up, she has amnesia, remembering nothing about her past. In Rome, she becomes the wife of nobleman Marcellus; Archimedes, having no idea what's happened to her, goes ahead and marries Clio. Twenty years later, as Rome makes plans to attack Carthage from Syracuse, Hieron has died and the pretender to the throne, none other than the sinister Gorgia, sends Archimedes to Rome to forge new alliances. He recognizes Diana and meets his grown son Marcus, now a centurion helping to lead the coming siege of Syracuse. Eventually Archimedes uses a bigger version of his light ray weapon to set fire to Roman ships. After a brief siege, Marcellus is killed and Diana is left with Archimedes to contemplate the future.

Often included on lists of peplum movies, this is really a would-be historical epic produced with a peplum budget and a peplum mindset on the part of the filmmakers. The sets and costumes are generally quite impressive, and the acting isn’t bad. Rossano Brazzi is commanding as Archimedes (presented here as having political power in Syracuse though he apparently did not) and Sylva Koscina is fine as Clio. The surprise for me was Tina Louise (Ginger on Gilligan's Island) as Diana, pictured above. Of course, she has the looks to pull off the part, but also, after a shaky few minutes in the beginning, she pulls off the acting well. She's also the only character to age well over the twenty year story span; the others don't age at all, especially noticeable with Archimedes. At two hours, this has some very talky rough spots and very little action until the end. Archimedes' heat ray is mentioned in some historical texts and legend has it that it was used in battle at Syracuse. If this was 90 minutes instead of 2 hours, I would have enjoyed this more. [YouTube]

THE BLUE LAGOON (1949)

On a ship headed for Australia, a man named Reynolds dies and is buried at sea. His young son Michael is cared for by a sailor named Paddy, to be turned over to the American consulate when they arrive in Auckland. The boy is discovered to have whipping welts on his back and may not be mourning his father very much. He spends a lot of time with the only other child on board, Emmeline, and when the ship catches fire, the two, along with Paddy and Emmeline's caged bird, wind up in a canoe, the only survivors, and eventually wash up on an uncharted island. They find skeletons in a cave, not a good sign for their survival, but the three manage to scrape together some shelter and have plenty of food from fish and vegetation. Paddy, a heavy drinker, is freaked out by a huge skull-shaped rock, falls off a cliff and dies, leaving the two children on their own. Ten years later, the two adolescents have survived admirably, reading some books they had with them, including a manners manual, and collecting "beads" they find in the sea which are actually pearls. Two con men pass by the island in their boat and come to shore, realizing the riches in pearls available. One tries to force Michael to dive for the pearls, while the other sneaks Emmeline off to the boat for a more nefarious purpose. In a nicely done sequence, the two crooks wind up shooting each other dead. Deciding civilization is not for them, the two soon discover love and sex. They hold a wedding ceremony as described in the manners book and soon Emmeline bears a child whom they name Paddy. After surviving threats from an octopus, a snake, and a destructive storm, they decide to take off in a handmade canoe, hoping to be found by a passing ship. They are, but in an ambiguous ending, the baby is still alive though Michael and Emmeline appear to be dead.

Back in the day, I saw the 1980 remake of this, with the sexy leads Brooke Shields and Christopher Atkins (both skimpily clad and occasionally naked). It was a big hit but got little critical respect. I have only hazy memories of it, mostly of enjoying looking at Atkins (who was of legal age at the time, though Shields was only 14, with her nude scenes done by a body double). This version, based on a 1908 novel, has much less focus on sex and more on a kind of society vs. nature situation. Jean Simmons is very good as Emmeline; she was 20 but can pass for younger, and she has star charisma already. Many viewers don't care much for Donald Houston as Michael, calling him wooden, but I think he’s quite natural in the role, enacting his character's idea of what a stalwart grown-up man should be. They're both good looking and play their coming of age in a non-sensational manner; they are viewed by one of the crooks as being "the rude clay of humanity." James Hayter and Cyril Cusack are fine as the crooks. The movie benefits from good cinematography and from being filmed partly on location in Fiji, though there are scenes that look like they were done on the Gilligan's Island set. Hard to find, as Paramount apparently bought the rights when they filmed the remake and have never released it on home video, though the print on YouTube is in good shape. [YouTube]

DARKENED ROOMS (1929)

At a boardwalk carnival, Madame Silvara is a mentalist, fake but convincing, and when a customer wants her to take a "spirit photograph" of his dead girlfriend, she goes down the boardwalk to photographer Emery Jago and gets him to fake a picture. In Emery's shop, Ellen, a young out-of-work chorus girl, has come to have some publicity pictures made but faints from hunger. Emery feeds her and hires her as an assistant; her first job is to pose as the spirit behind Madame Silvara, with her face blurred in a ghostly way. Soon Emery decides that spiritualism might be an easy way to supplement his income so he and Ellen get into the racket with some help from Silvara. She sends them to the upper-class home of Joyce Clayton, who wants to get in touch with her aviator boyfriend who died in a crash. In a darkened room, Emery and Ellen hold a seance and claim to make contact, but Joyce's current boyfriend Billy turns on the lights and claims the whole thing is a fake. However, Joyce is a believer and goes to the boardwalk for another session. Ellen, worrying that Emery's interference will just prolong Joyce's misery and scotch things with Billy, hires Bert, an actor friend, to throw an unexpected kink into the seance, hoping that Emery will give up the act. Though not exactly a comedy, this hour-long melodrama is light in tone which works somewhat against the spiritualism plot but works for character development. Evelyn Brent, a star of silent films, is featured in one of her first talkies as Ellen and is quite good. Neil Hamilton (pictured), also transitioning to sound films, is just as good as Emery. Both are youthful, good looking and appealing, and they have nice chemistry. Though they did appear in films together again, they weren’t ever paired up like they were here, which is a shame. Gale Henry, known as a comic actress in many silent shorts, is fine as Madame Silvara. Sammy Bricker has a fun little comic relief role as a sailor who keeps dragging new girls into Emery's studio to have pictures taken. For the record, Doris Hill is Joyce and David Newell is Billy. Wallace MacDonald is Bert; he played in many silent films, but wound up as a prolific B-film producer in the 40s and 50s, mostly for Columbia. An enjoyable hour. [YouTube]

MURDER OVER NEW YORK (1940)

Charlie Chan, on a plane heading to New York City for a police convention, chats with Scotland Yard inspector Drake who is after a saboteur named Narvo. He has tracked Narvo's wife to New York and is looking for help from her. Also showing up in the Big Apple is Chan's pesky son Jimmy. At a party for Drake given at the apartment of aircraft executive George Kirby, Drake winds up dead, poisoned by a tetrogene gas pellet—surprisingly, it's Jimmy who identifies the newly developed gas—and his briefcase of secret documents goes missing. Following the conventions of the mystery genre, the guests at the party all become suspects. There is Fenton, an old friend of Drake's who treats the murder as a personal inconvenience; Jeffrey, a business associate of Kirby's; Ralph Percy, an airplane designer; actress June Preston; Boggs, the somewhat shady butler; David Elliott, a chemist who was working with tetrogene and may have been the last person to see Drake alive; and, of course, Kirby. Eventually Narvo's wife shows up, using the name Pat Shaw; she has left Narvo (and is now involved with Elliott) but worries that she is being followed by Narvo and his Hindu associate Ramullah. Police inspector Vance has the bright idea of bringing in a dragnet of all Hindu men in the city, leading to a comic scene in which one Hindu man is revealed to be a non-Hindu con man. In the somewhat improbable climax, Chan and Vance gather all the suspects onto a plane on which a capsule of tetrogene has been hidden the night before. Will there be a mass murder over New York?

Some years ago, during my first viewing of the Chan films on the Fox Movie Channel, this was one of my favorites due to the airplane climax. Now, however, that scene isn't quite enough to boost the film much above a B-minus. The plot, as is often the case, gets muddled and there are almost too many characters. But there is an unusually strong supporting cast. A few of my favorite character actors are present: Ricardo Cortez, who played both good guys and villains, is Kirby; the British actor Melville Cooper is appropriately obnoxious as Fenton; the British John Sutton is Jeffrey; busy B-movie lead Kane Richmond is Percy; Robert Lowery, who played Batman in a 1949 serial, is the chemist Elliott. As is sometimes the case in Chan movies, the females (Marjorie Weaver and Joan Valerie) are weaker, partly because their roles seem underwritten. Sidney Toler (Chan) and Victor Sen Yung (Jimmy) are fine, though Jimmy is more irritating here than usual. The likable Frank Coghlan Jr. (Billy Batson in the original Captain Marvel serial) has a small but noticeable role. Shemp Howard of the Three Stooges is the fake Hindu man. Donald MacBride, who played cops in dozens of classic-era films, is Vance. The first fifteen minutes, as the case is being set up, are good, as are the last fifteen; it's in the middle that things bog down a bit. Pictured are Cortez, Richmond and Toler. [DVD]

THE SECRET OF THE LOCH (1934)

In a small Scottish village, Joe, perhaps slightly inebriated, runs into a tavern one misty night claiming to have seen the legendary Loch Ness Monster, a giant sea serpent creature that supposedly lives in the Scottish lake. There has been a rash of sightings lately and people who have gone underwater looking for it have not returned. In London at a conference of morphologists, Professor Heggie claims the beast is real and that it's a relative of a dinosaur. His fellow scientists laugh him off the stage, but Jimmy, a reporter, smells a good story and follows Heggie back to his village. Lots of other reporters have had the same idea, but Jimmy gets a leg up by breaking into Heggie's house and flirting with his granddaughter Angela. He gets on the good side of Angus, Heggie's beefy assistant, by wearing a tartan tie of the MacNockie clan (a tie which he filched from a girl at his newspaper) of which Angus happens to be a member. With nothing concrete to go on, Jimmy gets fired by his boss and told that only an interview with the monster will save him. Heggie hires a diver to look for the serpent one night, but he runs into some trouble and his air hose comes to the surface without him. Heggie is charged with negligence in the diver's death and Jimmy, who now is in love with Angela, decides to take a dive himself and settle the matter. 

The Loch Ness Monster has been a pop culture phenomenon since 1934 when a British newspaper published a photograph of the monster, a blurry shot of what looks like a toy dinosaur coming out of the water. This film, which came out at the end of 1934, appears to be a quickie attempt to exploit that photo's popularity. Though a handful of sightings were reported before the 1930s, it wasn't until the photo and a separate account of a sighting became news, perhaps because of the building of a new road which gave more access to the loch, that Nessie became a legend. This is mostly a comedy, despite the death of the diver, with humor provided by the village locals and the morphologists. In the last few minutes, Jimmy does indeed see the monster (an iguana photographically enlarged and matted into an underwater shot) and later a group of men see it rise up out of the loch, in a shot that looks very much like the newspaper photo. Seymour Hicks, a distinguished stage actor known for playing Scrooge in an early sound version of A Christmas Carol, is Heggie, and he doesn't seem to be too happy in the role. Frederick Peisley, however, throws himself into the comic romantic lead as Jimmy (pictured), and Gibson Gowland (the star of GREED) is fine in the semi-comic role of Angus. Nancy O'Neil has the underwritten part of Angela. In the 70-minute movie, we don't even get near the loch until the 50-minute mark, so don't watch this expecting a serious sci-fi, adventure, or horror film, though the murky atmosphere of most of the scenes is effective—with some of the murkiness due to the age of the unrestored print. As a novelty, and as the first film about the monster, it's kind of fun. As far as other movies on the subject, there haven't been many, with the most well-known one being a Scooby-Doo cartoon movie made for video in 2004. [YouTube]

SCOTLAND YARD HUNTS DR. MABUSE (1963)

aka DR. MABUSE VS. SCOTLAND YARD

The fifth of the Dr. Mabuse German reboots from the 1960s begins with Mabuse dead, as he was at the end of the fourth film, THE TESTAMENT OF DR. MABUSE. The supernatural has usually been an element of the Mabuse films, often obliquely or ambiguously, but here we see the spirit of the crime lord Mabuse possess Prof. Pohland, an asylum director, and direct him to spread “panic and chaos.” After that, however, it’s mostly a straightforward crime melodrama. In fact, given that the plot is based on a story by Edgar Wallace’s son Bryan, it's very close in look and feel to the German krimi movies of the era, as the earlier THOUSAND EYES and RETURN were, with a sci-fi element. It begins in Hamburg. Inspector Vulpius is upset that Mabuse's infamous "testament," the scribbled documents that he wrote in the throes of madness and which contained plans for future criminal plans, has been destroyed. A train derailment frees a prisoner, Cockstone, whom Pohland uses to help refine a new and dastardly invention by Prof. Lawrence: something that looks like a camera but is actually a mind control device. When aimed at someone's head, that person will follow whatever instructions they are given (verbal orders transmitted to the person somehow), though the control fades when the subject sleeps. Cockstone kills Lawrence and Pohland moves his operations to England, where he sends his henchmen out with the devices, triggering a major crime wave of robbery and murder and suicide. Vulpius follows and teams up with Scotland Yard man Bill Tern to stop Pohland's reign of terror. Though this feels very little like a Mabuse movie, it’s fun as a crime movie, well paced and exciting. 

Few cast members from the earlier Mabuse movies are present here. Peter van Eyck is a bit lightweight and even a bit too old for part of Tern, without the energy of Lex Barker, the lead in the last two films. Werner Peters, who played minor roles in previous films, is fine as Vulpius, though I do miss Gert Forbe from the previous movie. One of the oddest characters in a Mabuse movie (or, for that matter, in a krimi) is Tern's elderly mother, played by Agnes Windeck, who gives herself nightmares from reading crime novels but is very helpful to her son with her off-the-wall insights. Even odder is Klaus Kinski, a regular in the Edgar Wallace krimi films, playing Joe, a fellow Scotland Yard detective. His stock-in-trade is playing tense neurotics, and here, though he's a good guy (except briefly when he is put under mind control), he still looks like he might just snap any minute. Walter Rilla reprises his role from TESTAMENT as Pohland, the Mabuse stand-in, and is very good. Sabine Bethmann plays a half-hearted romantic interest for Tern. The best scene is one in which a hangman, about to execute a prisoner, is forced through mind control to hang himself. Even though the reboot movies move further and further from the mood of the Fritz Lang Mabuse movies, they are still worth seeing. I’ve got one more to go. Pictured are van Eyck and Kinski. [Blu-ray]

EVERYBODY'S DOING IT (1938)

Mr. Byers, the head of a big advertising agency, sends Waldo, a young underling, out to find Bruce Keene (Preston Foster), an unreliable ad executive who spends too much time in bars and not enough in his office. When he's found, he gets fired, much to the dismay of his girlfriend Penny (Sally Eilers), who is a secretary at the same agency. That night, Bruce draws a kind of combination caricature/rebus on a wall at a restaurant that impresses the owner, and Penny, and eventually Mr. Byers who rehires Bruce to do a campaign for a new cereal called Tantalizing Tasties. One a week, he'll draw a picture puzzle to be published as a newspaper ad, and contests will be held to solve the puzzle with a big cash prize each week. But to enter, contestants must include a boxtop from the new cereal. When the promotion pays off, the cereal is a hit, but Bruce starts hitting the taverns pretty hard. Penny hires small-time crook Softy Blane to kidnap Bruce and take him to a health farm to dry out, but Devers, Blane's boss, decides that cornering the market on puzzle answers would make for some easy money, so he breaks Bruce out of the farm and kidnaps him for real, keeping him making the puzzles. Eventually Penny figures out, from clues in the pictures, what's happened to Bruce and goes to the police. A fairly slapstick finale of guns and fists leads to Devers' capture, and to Bruce proposing to Penny. This is a mild little romantic comedy with crime overtones that never gets too terribly serious. Apparently, it's built around an actual fad of the time for picture puzzles—you might think that would date the movie badly, but it actually gives it a nice novelty appeal. Foster and Eilers play off each other well, but it's the supporting cast that makes this movie fun: Cecil Kellaway, Guinn Williams, Richard Lane, Arthur Lake and Jack Carson. There’s a song with a cute title: “Put Your Heart in Your Feet and Dance,” and there's a fun line from Williams to a flirting Lorraine Krueger: “You’d love anything that had biceps.” Pictured are Foster and Lane. [TCM]

JUNGLE QUEEN (1945 serial)

In 1939, just before the outbreak of WWII, Germans are worried about access to Europe through Africa and a number of Nazi spies are sent to Tambosa in British Middle Africa. Their mission is to take control of the Tongghili, a group of tribes coexisting under their ruling judge Tonga. When he is killed, the tribal elder Godac, by virtue of his possession of the powerful Sword of Tongu, is set to name a successor. The Nazis get the cooperation of Maati, who will serve as their puppet ruler, but Kyba is also in the running. Lord Bell, head of British espionage and known by most only as Mr. X, has agents in Tambosa trying to figure out who the Nazi leaders are and counteract their efforts among the locals. Unfortunately, a Nazi spy is listening in to all conversations in Mr. X's office and he reports to Dr. Elise Bork, outwardly the respected head of an experimental farm but actually a spymaster, and her associate Lang who maintains direct contact with Maati. Meanwhile, Pam Courtney comes to Tambosa looking for her father, an explorer who has vanished; she has been tasked by Mr. X to get her father to help in their efforts to find the Nazis. Two unofficial American agents, adventurer Bob Elliot and his auto mechanic buddy Chuck Kelly, meet Pam on a plane and the three pool their efforts to find and stop the Nazi spies. A wild card in all this is Lothel, the mystery queen of the jungle, who can walk through fire unharmed (as pictured at left), can appear and disappear at will, is invulnerable to bullets, and tries to influence the Tongghili to choose Kyba as the new leader. When that seems to fail, she works with the Allies to find and defeat the Nazis.

This is a 13-chapter serial and most of the above summary is made clear in the first two chapters, which leaves eleven more chapters to fill. On the plus side, this has the look of a relatively high-budget B-film with good sets and some twisty plot points. For the most part, it doesn't keep repeating story bits like many serials do. On the other hand, the writing is not great. Far too much activity is talked about rather than shown, with people constantly announcing who they are, where they are, what they've just done and what they're planning on doing. Each chapter has a cliffhanger but the next chapter begins with exposition, usually expressed in dialogue, often in England or Berlin, before we see how the cliffhanger works itself out. There are plenty of plot holes. For example, we never understand the importance of the Sword of Tongu aside from its being a symbol of power. I kept wondering why the bad guys didn't just construct a fake one, and in fact, long about chapter 12, someone does. Lothel, the title character, is quite strange. In terms of being a great white protector of the Tongghili, she's sort of a Tarzan figure. She seems to live in the back of a cave chamber which is filled with fire and used as a place of justice—accused criminals are sent to the fire chamber and told that the innocent will survive. No one ever does except Lothel; in every chapter, we see a clip of her, dressed in diaphanous robes, leaping through the fire and emerging in the throne room to make important proclamations. Her origin is never even touched on. There are a number of characters, some (like the sinister bar owner Tambosa Tim) only present for a short time. Some of the Nazi henchmen, such as Drake and Weber, are important briefly before they are sacrificed.

The acting is fairly weak. Our hero, Edward Norris (Bob), is OK in the crunch but not quite as heroic looking or acting as he could be, definitely not up to the standards of Kane Richmond or Buster Crabbe. Eddie Quillan (Chuck) is mostly comic relief with an occasionally heroic scene. Lois Collier (Pam) fades into the background. Ruth Roman (known later for Strangers on a Train and lots of TV including Knots Landing) has a nice otherworldly look and demeanor as Lothel, but when it comes down to it, doesn't have much to do except flit about in her fireproof nightgown. Douglass Dumbrille (Lang), Clarence Muse (Kyba), and Napoleon Simpson (Maati) are fine, and the best performance comes from German actress Tala Birell as Bork. Though she gets stuck in her own repetitive bits, she's convincing as the chief villain who also has to appear pleasant and innocent. It's a rarity to have a female as the main Nazi and she's up to the task. I like the fact that some of the Black characters, mostly Maati and Godac, have actual agency and aren't just mindless followers or henchmen. I liked this a little less than I wanted to, but the Blu-ray print has been nicely restored, even if some of the early chapters are a little faded looking in terms of clarity. As a whole, it's awfully talky though rarely boring, and probably not one for a viewer new to classic era serials. Pictured above right are Norris and Quillan. [Blu-ray]