THE UNGUARDED HOUR (1936)

A twisty little crime/courtroom thriller. Franchot Tone is an ambitious prosecuting attorney who is trying a murder case, based on circumstantial evidence, against a mild-mannered man (Dudley Digges) accused of throwing his wife off a cliff. Tone's wife, Loretta Young, could testify to Digges' innocence; she was present at the scene but won't come forward because she was there to pay off a blackmailer (Henry Daniell) who has incriminating letters from Tone to another woman (Aileen Pringle). Soon, Pringle is found murdered and circumstantial evidence points to Tone. I don't want to give away the tricky ending, but I will say that Tone isn't quite up to the task of presenting subtle shifts of character to keep us off-balance. Because of his rather weak performance, the solution is a little more obvious than it should have been. Roland Young is good as a friend of the family; there's a nice scene toward the end in which Young and Lewis Stone sort through the evidence against Tone. Worth seeing. [TCM]

ESCAPE IN THE DESERT (1945)

A needless B-movie remake, in the Warners tradition, of THE PETRIFIED FOREST, with Nazis replacing gangsters. The rather wooden Philip Dorn stands in for the passive Leslie Howard, as a Dutch pilot and artist who winds up in the middle of the desert at a roadside diner where Jean Sullivan and her father (Samuel S. Hinds) mistake him for a Nazi spy. Helmut Dantine is the real spy who holds folks hostage; Kurt Kreuger is a cute Nazi who wears a football jersey; Alan Hale and Irene Manning show up briefly. Not a terribly effective movie, although the action toward the end may be enough to satisfy B-movie fans. Sullivan was a starlet who made three movies in the 40's before vanishing until popping back up on a soap opera ("Somerset") in the 70's. [TCM]