DOCTOR X (1932)

I saw a black and white print of this on Chiller Theater way back in the 70's, I think, but the print I watched yesterday was in color. It looked a little faded, which is to be expected since it was shot in two-strip Technicolor in the early days of color technology; I guess the fact that it's still available in color at all is a good thing. Reds and greens predominate and add to the fairly creepy feel of the film. The Full Moon Killer has foiled the police several times, and cocky reporter Lee Tracy is determined to track him down. Evidence points to a doctor (because the killer uses a particular kind of scalpel) and possibly a cannibal (teeth marks on the victims). Suspicion surrounds Dr. Xavier's Medical Academy; no, its not a haven for mutant teenagers, just eccentric research scientists. A number of doctors who have interests in either cannibalism or the effects of the moon are under suspicion, even one (Preston Foster) who it seems could certainly not be the killer because he only has one arm and the killer strangles his victims with both arms. Xavier himself (Lionel Atwill) has a touch of the eccentric in him and is also considered a suspect, but he agrees to run some experiments designed to smoke out the real killer. Fay Wray, as Atwill's daughter, gets involved with the experiments and with reporter Tracy. Much of the film is nicely atmospheric, though there are plot lulls, and Tracy, who is mostly around for mild comic relief, grows irritating quickly--I was hoping he'd be the next victim. The opening scene is set partly in a brothel run by Mae Busch, a startling pre-Code moment. The unmasking climax is well handled. If you can tolerate Tracy, the movie is worth watching.

HORROR EXPRESS (1972)

I finally saw this film whose reputation has grown over the years. Unfortunately, the DVD was not letterboxed or restored; in fact, it looked like a dub from a TV print. Still, it was an interesting hybrid of a movie, like a cross between THE THING and NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, with a religious element that is not fully explored. Christopher Lee is Professor Saxton, an archeologist who is carting the fossils of a supposed "missing link" creature along with him on the Trans-Siberian Express. Peter Cushing is a curious doctor who butts into Lee's business and inadvertantly has a hand in allowing the fossil (which has returned to life) to escape and wreck havoc on the train. There are some interesting characters introduced, including Telly Savalas as a brutal Cossack who boards the train along the way to wreck some havoc of his own, and a sexy & mysterious woman whose sole purpose seems to be sexy & mysterious. There is also a Rasputin-ish mad monk (Angel del Pozo) who seems to shift his alliances from God to Satan, but does he? The plotting here is handled rather ineptly so I honestly don't know whether the monk is supposed to be bad or not. But these characters aren't developed very well because mostly they're around to serve as creature bait.

The missing link winds up being an extraterrestrial life force that can hop from body to body when its host dies (as in John Carpenter's version of THE THING). In a particularly outrageous plot development, Lee and Cushing discover that images of what the creature saw in prehistoric days are available for viewing through the blood of its eyes (!!). It moves the plot along nicely, but it's hard to get past the silliness of the gimmick. The abovementioned religious element involves the idea that the creature really is Satanic; even though that would not seem to be true, there is no explanation for a scene early on when the monk tries to draw a protecting cross on the fossil box, but the cross image fails to materialize. There are some effective shocks along the way, but the climax is truly worth sticking around for--it turns out that the creature can bring the dead (or at least the dead that it has killed) back to life, and in a truly creepy scene, dozens of dead bodies rise up and head for the train car where the last survivors are trapped. This movie has everything but the kitchen sink, and that's why it's fun to watch.

HORRORS OF THE BLACK MUSEUM (1959)

With this movie, it seems like American International was trying to beat Hammer at their own game by producing a distinctly British horror film with a William Castle twist. It is in fact a notch above several Hammer (and AIP) productions of the time, but the parts are greater than the whole. Michael Gough (Alfred in the recent Batman movies) plays a crime reporter who is following the exploits of a killer who specializes in particularly bizarre methods of murder, including, in the classic opening scene, a pair of binoculars with needles that shoot through the victim's eyes to her brain. It's clear from early on that Gough himself is the killer, assisted by a young male assistant (Graham Curnow) who helps him with the upkeep of his "Black Museum," a place for the display of horrific murder and torture weapons. Gough uses a serum and hypnosis to turn Curnow into a Jekyll/Hyde monster who kills at Gough's bidding. The young man's face also becomes puffy and scarred, though it's never explained why. Other shock killings include electrocution, a guillotining in a bed, and a person dumped in a vat of acid, reduced quickly to just a skeleton. Shirley Ann Field, who played the unnerved actress in PEEPING TOM, is Curnow's girlfriend. The Castle touch is in the prologue, with a man supposedly trying to hypnotize the audience--it's sort of cheap fun, but has virtually nothing to do with the narrative. Overall, above average October fare.

BRIDES OF DRACULA (1960)

This is probably the best Hammer movie ever; though HORROR OF DRACULA comes close, this one has more interesting characters, better acting, and a colorful and stylish look. A voiceover at the beginning tells us that Dracula is dead (making mincemeat of the title), but vampires are still afoot in Transylvania. In a set-up a bit like that of Katharine Hepburn & Elizabeth Taylor's in SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER, the Baroness Meinster (Martita Hunt) trolls the village at night looking for lovely young women to take back to the castle to satisfy the lust of her vampire son, David Peel. The "seduction" scene that plays out between Hunt and a young French schoolteacher passing through the village (Yvonne Monlaur) is well-staged; though we don't know the specifics yet, it's clear from the looks and actions of the villagers that they fear for the safety of Monlaur. However, this naive woman winds up being Hunt's downfall. The mother tells her that Peel is insane and must be kept locked up, but Monlaur meets him, finds him charming, and unlocks him (a poorly motivated scene--why on earth would she unshackle him after a minute and a half of trivial conversation?). Now the vampire is free to start collecting "brides" from the nearby girls' school.

Peter Cushing plays Van Helsing, as he did in HORROR OF DRACULA, and he's good, but taking the acting honors here are Hunt as the mother and Freda Jackson as Peel's caretaker, not a vampire herself, but a zealous assistant. The creepiest scene in the movie doesn't involve Peel, but Jackson, stretched out on the fresh grave of one of the women Peel has killed, talking through the dirt to coax the newly-created vampire to arise. Some critics have panned Peel's performance, saying he was just a too-pretty face, but I think he's fine, although the women do upstage him. The real problem with Peel (and with most of the vampires) is the artificiality of the fangs they wear. They look like wax fangs bought in a drug store at Halloween. But that's really all that's wrong here. The colors, lots of rich reds and blues and purples, are striking, and the sumptious sets are the best Hammer sets ever. Mona Washbourne, who played the beloved nanny in BRIDESHEAD REVISITED, has a small role as the mistress of the girls' school. Highly recommended for midnight viewing.

CHAMBER OF HORRORS (1940) aka THE DOOR WITH SEVEN LOCKS

Edgar Wallace was a British author of crime and thriller novels; he had over 150 works published and many of them have been made into movies, mostly in England or Germany and mostly B-thrillers (IMDb shows 170 films based on his works, including KING KONG, the screenplay for which he co-wrote just before his death). This modest thriller is really more an "old dark house" police mystery rather than a horror movie, but its atmosphere is spookier and more effective than many a "legitimate" horror movie. As he's dying, Lord Selford explains his plans to be buried with the family jewels in the family crypt, in a tomb with seven locks, apparently to ensure that the treasure gets passed down properly when his son marries. After this creepy little deathbed scene, complete with a threat of afterlife revenge reminiscent of the opening of THE GHOUL, the action jumps ahead several years when Lilli Palmer gets involved with the Selford family and assorted hangers-on. She is given one of the seven keys by an old man in a nursing home who is killed before he can explain what's going on. Palmer and her friend (Gina Molo, here mostly for comic relief) get the police in on the situation. Leslie Banks, known mostly for his creepy turn as Count Zaroff in THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME, is almost as creepy here as Dr. Manetta, who is clearly the mastermind behind whatever larceny is being planned. The plotlines are not always clearly delineated, but it's easy enough to keep track of the basics: damsels and cops in distress, strange servents and henchmen not to be trusted, keys to be carefully looked after. And, to help keep things light, a romance between Palmer and a Scotland Yard inspector (Romilly Lunge).

The "old dark house" elements included a cobwebbed crypt, a mysteriously missing heir who just as mysteriously turns back up, an occasional dead body, and the chamber of the title, a place where Banks has collected a variety of historical torture instruments; once you see the iron maiden demonstrated, you just know it will play a key role in the climax. There are some Hitchcockian touches, especially early on when an attempt is made to make Palmer think she's imagined the existence of the dead man in the nursing home. Banks has a pet monkey to whom he speaks Spanish and who inadvertantly helps some of the good guys out of a jam in the crypt. Cathleen Nesbitt (AN AFFAIR TO REMEMBER, SEPARATE TABLES) has a small role as one of the sinister skulkers. I hadn't heard much about this film before I saw it, but I enjoyed it a great deal.

SON OF FRANKENSTEIN (1939) & GHOST OF FRANKENSTEIN (1942)

The first two Frankenstein movies, both stylishly directed by James Whale, are much-praised and have probably been written about more than any other classic horror films (except maybe KING KONG). I watched the third and fourth in the series yesterday, for the first time since I was a teenager in the 70's when they showed up regularly on "Chiller Theater." Though SON has the bigger budget and a better critical reputation, I found GHOST to be more exciting and more fun.

SON definitely looks better than any of the other Frankenstein movies, with its vast expressionistic sets and creepy jagged shadows. Basil Rathbone plays Wolf, the, duh, son of Frankenstein who, after the death of his father (it's not clear how much time has passed since BRIDE), comes to town to clear up his father's estate. The townspeople, never having quite gotten over his father's terrifying antics with artifical life, are not happy to see the son, even though he claims to have no interest in his father's ideas. Eventually, however, he meets up with broken-necked Igor (Bela Lugosi), discovers the creature (Boris Karloff) still exists, and gets sucked into tampering in God's domain. Rathbone is a bit hammy; the best performance is by Lionel Atwill as the inspector with the wooden arm--the monster tore off his real one years ago. But above and beyond the performances, I had two problems with the movie: 1) It's hard to take much of it seriously after Mel Brooks' YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN, which actually draws more inspiration from SON than from the original. In the opening scene on the train, I kept expecting Rathbone to look out the window and ask, "Pardon me, boy, is this the Transylvania station?" 2) The movie, at around 100 minutes, is too long and lacks momentum. It's not like it's hard for anyone who's seen any other monster movie to figure out exactly every twist the plot takes. Rathbone is the only person with any energy here. His son (Donnie Dunagan) is whiny and irriatating, and his wife (Josephine Hutchinson) is a zero. Lugosi gives a good performance, but he can't compensate for the long, dull patches. However, the sets are always interesting. Lugosi's plot to use the monster to kill off the men who hanged him may have inspired the writers of the Dr. Phibes movies.

GHOST is short and, while still awfully predictable and not nearly as impressive visually as SON, moves along at a good clip and is finished in a little over an hour. The plot seems to pick up right after SON; even though Rathbone has left and the monster is supposedly dead for sure, the villagers still feel under a curse (almost literally, as even the barren fields are blamed on the Frankensteins). The townspeople destroy the castle, but Igor escapes with the creature, alive but weak. Conveniently, there's another brother, Ludwig (Cedric Hardwicke), a "doctor of the mind," as we're told two or three times, living in another city. Igor's plan is to get Ludwig to nurse the monster (Lon Chaney Jr.) back to health. Hardwicke gets the Frankenstein bug in his system and decides to transplant a "healthy" brain into the monster's skull, but his treacherous assistant (Lionel Atwill, playing a different character than in SON) helps Igor to subvert the plan. Evelyn Ankers is Hardwicke's daughter and she's good in her limited role; Ralph Bellamy, as her boyfriend, has even less to do and barely registers at all. Chaney isn't bad as the monster; he's not as expressive as Karloff, but at least he looks the part. Ultimately, I would judge GHOST to be the better movie simply because it's easier to sit through. The title, BTW, is justified by a scene in which Hardwicke's father (played by Hardwicke) "haunts" him, causing him to tackle his father's project.

THE BAT WHISPERS (1930)

Very early talkie in the "old dark house" genre. It's based on a famous play and novel, "The Bat" by Mary Roberts Rinehart, and its stage origins show for most of the running time, but in the opening (and in a few key sequences later) the camera is let loose to do some wild things. There is some nice subjective camera work with long swoops over miniature sets, especially in a shot over a long row of trees outside of a secluded mansion. As far as the plot, a bank robbery occurs and a number of folks think that the loot might be hidden in a large old house that has been rented for the season by Cornelia, perhaps the first in a long line of Hollywood "feisty old ladies" (played by Grayce Hampton). The bulk of the movie takes place in the house with Hampton, her niece (Una Merkel, good as always), an easily spooked maid, and assorted visitors. The plot doesn't stand up to much analysis. Merkel's boyfriend (William Bakewell) is a suspect and sneaks his way into the household by posing as a gardener, but nothing much comes of that plotline. The very Prussian Gustav von Seyffertitz plays a potential villain, and Chester Morris (looking very different then he does in his later movies) plays a detective who is hiding some secrets of his own. The first few scenes, with the Bat stealing jewels from a locked safe in a high-rise apartment, and the setting-up of the old house mystery, are promising. But as the characters start piling up, the possible motivations of the suspects become vague, and I eventually lost interest in figuring out who was who. Interesting at times, but not terribly compelling, and Morris, considering his top billing, doesn't really wind up with much to do. A later version, THE BAT, from 1959, with Vincent Price and Agnes Moorehead, isn't much better. Even the combination of those two scenery-chewers doesn't generate much excitement. [A later review of this film and the 1959 remake is here.]

Two INNER SANCTUM Movies: CALLING DR. DEATH & STRANGE CONFESSION

In the mid-40's, Universal took the name of a popular radio show, INNER SANCTUM, and used it as a series title for a handful of B films in the horror-suspense line, each about an hour long, and seemingly made on Poverty Row budgets. Seen now, they seem like episodes from a long-forgotten Twilight Zone spin-off, but instead of Rod Serling as host, these have Lon Chaney Jr. as the star. Most of them, despite the way that Universal has marketed the video tapes, are not horror, but moody psychological mysteries. Nevertheless, if you don't have high expectations, they are acceptable time-passers, especially around Halloween.

In CALLING DR. DEATH (1943), the first in the series, Chaney is a doctor who winds up the chief suspect when his wife is murdered. He knew that she was cheating on him and he cannot account for his whereabouts the night of the murder. Hounded by cop J. Carroll Naish, he tries, with the aid of his faithful nurse, to find the killer and winds up breaking the case using hypnotism. Though it's not especially well written, the hypnosis gimmick gives the movie a creepy scene or two. It's a nice twist for Chaney to play a good guy. STRANGE CONFESSION (1945), though a little too heavily plotted for its own good, is even more like a Rod Serling tale. Chaney is a chemist who discovers what might be a cure for influenza. Before he gets a chance to thoroughly test it, his boss (Naish) sends him out of the country and greedily puts the over-the-counter medicine on the market, with predictably disastrous results. Chaney's own son gets sick, is given the medicine and dies, and Chaney returns to get revenge. The opening takes place at Christmas, with the rest of the story told in flashback. Lloyd Bridges and Milburn Stone, long before their TV fame, have small parts. The story and climax are both meatier than in DR. DEATH, but I kept thinking someone besides Chaney would have given the slow-moving films a little more life.

THE WOLF MAN (1941)

Usually, I avoid writing about the better-known classic movies here on my blog, but for my October horror movie project, I'll break that rule and go back and re-watch a few famous films. The Universal horror films of the 30's and 40's were among the very first movies I remember seeing on TV and they have remained favorites of mine. Of all the Universal greats, my favorite is DRACULA, but I think THE WOLF MAN had the most potential. Unfortunately, it doesn't come as close as it should to being a really good movie, for two reasons: a sloppy screenplay and the sad miscasting of the lead part. Lon Chaney Jr. is Larry Talbot, the son of the British Sir John Talbot (Claude Rains). Larry returns to his stately home after many years in the States (which apparently explains Chaney's total lack of any accent but does not explain the total dunderheadness of his line readings), following the tragic death of his brother. There has been tension between the son and father for some time, but it's quickly glossed over, the first problem with the screenplay. While attending a gypsy fair with a young lady he oafishly flirted with earlier in the day (Evelyn Ankers), he is attacked and bitten by a wolf, which turns out be a werewolf (the gypsy fortune teller Bela Lugosi, wasted in a very short scene). The curse of the werewolf is passed along to Chaney, who begins leaving his house at night, in two-legged wolf form, to attack wandering innocents in the dark.

I suspect this was intended to be close to an A-project, what with the strong supporting cast of Rains, Ralph Bellamy, and Patric Knowles, and much of the movie does look good, in that studio-bound way that the Universal films (and later the Hammer films) had about them. But Chaney is inept throughout. To be fair, some of the problem has to do with his looks; it's just laughable to think that he and Rains could be related--Patric Knowles would have been more believable. And he does garner some sympathy because he comes off as basically a nice guy stuck in a tragic situation not of his own making. He also snarls OK in his wolf make-up. But every line he delivers sounds wooden and awkward, and I don't for a minute believe that Ankers would be charmed by him. He first discovers her when he's looking through her window with his father's telescope, and I thought the theme of watching or spying might continue through the movie, but the screenplay drops or ignores any plot point that threatens to become interesting (like the father-son relationship, like why Lugosi changes into a four-legged wolf but Chaney does not, like why Maria Ouspenskaya [Lugosi's mother] seems to have the power to stop Chaney's transformation). I guess I'm being awfully hard on the movie. After all, it is fun to watch, it's atmospheric, and the little rhyme about how even a man who is pure of heart can become a wolf sounds so authentic, it's hard to believe that it was original to this movie. But with a stronger story and a better actor in the lead role, it could have been so much better.

THE WOMAN WHO CAME BACK (1945)

A forgotten B-horror film (from Republic) that has inexplicably turned up on DVD when so many greats are still missing from that format. Fairly good acting and a solid idea for a plot help make up for a low budget and bland directing style. Set in the Salem-ish town of Eben Rock, the story begins with Nancy Kelly returning to her hometown after years away (and after leaving her fiancee, John Loder, at the altar). She is the descendant of a witch-hunting judge who sent several accused witches to their fiery deaths. On a bus headed for town, an old lady meets up with Kelly and claims to be a reincarnation of a witch named Jezebel that her ancestor killed exactly 300 years ago. The bus runs off the road and Kelly is the only survivor (shades of CARNIVAL OF SOULS). Eventually, Kelly settles in town and rekindles her relationship with Loder (which Loder's sister, Ruth Ford, is not happy about), but soon Kelly gets the idea that Jezebel's spirit has inhabited her body, and the townspeople start freaking out.

Good ideas for scenes are undercut by too-harsh lighting and some of the worst day-for-night shooting I've ever seen--even nighttime interior scenes are too bright. The most successful scene is of Kelly, alone in her house at night during a storm, reading a book on superstitions which, when she puts it down, seems to leap of its own accord into the fireplace. A scene in a (very spare) church where the townspeople almost turn on Kelly until the preacher stops them, is also nicely done. There winds up being a rational explantation for most of the weird occurances, but a few things (like flowers dying at Kelly's touch) are left dangling. Elspeth Dudgeon, who, in drag, played the dying patriarch in THE OLD DARK HOUSE, has a small but creepy role as the witch on the bus.

THE MASK OF FU MANCHU (1932)

Yes, I suppose this is a rather reprehensible film with its racist and colonial streaks running a mile wide throughout. But one can do a little deconstructive work on it to turn it into an almost guilt-free guilty pleasure. Ostensibly, the good guys are the bland Nayland Smith (Lewis Stone) and Prof. Van Berg (Jean Hersholt) who have unearthed the mask and sword of Genghis Kahn in the Gobi Desert. They defy a curse to bring the relics to the British Museum, but the wicked and powerful warlord Fu Manchu (Boris Karloff) has nefarious plans. He kidnaps one of the good guys, tortures him to death, and gets the rest of the good guys to play right into his hands. Fu's daughter, played by Myrna Loy (at the peak of her sexy and exotic otherness before she was softened to play safe and domestic Nora Charles in the Thin Man movies), lusts sadistically after the hunky white guy (Charles Starrett); my very favorite scene is where he is stripped to the waist and whipped (with Loy drooling over him nearby), then strapped down to a table wearing a diaperish loincloth and given a serum to render him Fu's slave. There are other torture scenes that apparently inspired some scenes in GUNGA DIN, STAR WARS, and the Indiana Jones movies. Ultimately, I found myself rooting for Loy and Karloff, especially against the shrill bitchery of the blond "damsel in distress" (Karen Morely). The atmosphere of the scenes in Fu's lair is sometimes quite creepy, and this would not be out of place as Halloween night viewing, but overall, this is a horror movie best appreciated as camp.

SECRETS OF THE FRENCH POLICE (1932)

With that title, this movie doesn't sound like it has much potential for Halloween-month viewing, but in the last ten minutes, some very effective scary-movie elements come into play. It's hard to believe that this fast-paced, hour-long thriller was produced by David O. Selznick, known later more for much bigger films like GONE WITH THE WIND and REBECCA. It starts off like a fairly average cop story (albeit with French cops) and turns into a nifty little mystery with a horror movie atmosphere. Frank Morgan is an inspector involved in three cases that wind up connected: tracking down a cop killer, looking for a missing flower girl (Gwili Andre), and keeping an eye on a shady character (Gregory Ratoff) who claims to have the missing Russian princess Anastasia in his custody. It turns out Ratoff has kidnapped the flower girl and hypnotized her into thinking she really is Anastasia to pull a scam on Russian royalty. A gentleman thief (John Warburton) who is sweet on the girl helps break the case.

The first half is a little slow getting going; several characters and plot points are brought up and then are dropped completely or become irrelevant (including the effective opening scene at the secret funeral of the dead policeman). Ratoff (Max the producer in ALL ABOUT EVE) is a fairly good villain, sounding a lot like Bela Lugosi. Morgan underacts for a change, except in a comic relief scene where he pretends to be drunk. Horror and action serial elements include a startling car accident, a big old house with secret passages, women who are killed and turned into statues (allowing a rare explicit bare breast shot), and a climax in a "mad doctor"-type lab. An actor named Arnold Korff, playing a Russian duke who comes to examine Ratoff's supposed Anastasia, resembles the older John Gielgud. Andre herself, who didn't wind up having much of a career, looks a lot like Myrna Loy once she's done up like a Russian princess. Some of the scenes in Ratoff's house were shot on sets from THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME. Considering I had never heard of this movie, it was surprisingly brisk and fun (and even scary) and should hold up well to second and third viewings.

NIGHT OF THE DEMON (1957)

It's October, the time of year when a young man's (or even a middle-aged man's) fancy turns toward ghosts and ghouls and things that go bump in the night. Every October, I re-read my favorite stories by H. P. Lovecraft and Ray Bradbury, so I thought this year, I would try to review some lesser-known classic horror movies (and maybe re-visit a few old favorites) and devote most of my October blog entries to them.

First up is this British classic, directed by Jacques Tourneur, director of several of Val Lewton's low-key horror classics of the 40's. The film may be best known in this day and age as the inspiration for some key lines in ROCKY HORROR'S opening number: "Dana Andrews said prunes/ Gave him the runes/ And passing them used lots of skill." Andrews is an American psychologist who comes to England to participate in a conference at which his colleague (Maurice Denham) plans to debunk a witchcraft cult led by the charismatic Julian Karswell (Niall MacGinnis). However, just before Andrews' arrival, Denham is found dead, electrocuted and mangled, apparently dispatched by a demon conjured up by MacGinnis. Andrews and Denham's niece (Peggy Cummins) continue with Denham's work, and MacGinnis threatens Andrews with the same fate. The abovementioned song lyric was inspired by the method of conjuring: MacGinnis plants a piece of parchment inscribed with mysterious runic symbols on his intended victim, sets a time for the death, and waits for the demon to do its thing. Andrews moves from total rationalism and skepticism to eventually being convinced that there is indeed something to MacGinnis's witchcraft as he tries to break the curse of the runes.

Perhaps because of Tourneur's use of subtle suggestion over explicit horror in movies like CAT PEOPLE, there has always been controversy over the appearance of the demon here. We see the demon, once at the beginning and again at the climax (an exciting one aboard a train racing through the night), and some fans are sure that Tourneur never really intended us to see the demon at all, that he wanted to keep it just a suggestion. But I think we are meant to believe in MacGinnis's powers; a scene where MacGinnis conjures up a fierce windstorm out of a clear blue sky can't really be explained away without resorting to belief in his witchcraft. My only problem with the demon is that the close-ups are disappointing, just like King Kong's close-ups. When the demon is materializing far off in the sky, the effect is actually quite creepy and effective, perhaps the best Satanic special effect in movies (except for THE EXORCIST). Andrews gives his usual clunky performance, and Cummins is bland, but MacGinnis gives full life to his character, seemingly based at least a little on real-life witch Aleister Crowley. He's not some indestructible comic book villain, but fully human, even a tad likeable at times, although he also seems to be something of a mama's boy. The lovely black and white photography is quite striking, and sometimes reminded me of some of the effective widescreen compositions in the original THE HAUNTING. This is the uncut British version which runs about 12 minutes longer than the American one (CURSE OF THE DEMON), but either version is actually worth seeing. This would make a good Halloween week pick!

HELL'S HOUSE (1932)

This early Poverty Row talkie would probably not even exist today if it weren't for Bette Davis's appearance in a supporting part. Pat O'Brien is a bootlegger who hires an orphan (Junior Durkin), newly arrived in the big city, to keep an eye on his office while he's out. On his very first day, Durkin is busted in a raid and O'Brien chooses not to help him. The rest of the movie is a fairly hundrum reform school expose--technically, I guess it's a reform school, but all they do is stack bricks and eat and sleep, so it's more like a juvenile prison. Actually, things don't seem all that bad there, but an asthmatic buddy of Durkin's (Frank Coghlan Jr.) dies in solitary, and that triggers the finale, where O'Brien has a change of heart and gets a newspaper reporter to help expose conditions at the school. The actors are OK, but the primitive filming style and the low budget hurt the film. The one effective scene takes place when O'Brien, as he drives away from his office after setting Durkin up in charge, watches in his rear view mirror as the cops raid his place. Clearly he feels bad about it, but he also doesn't have the guts to turn around and help the poor kid. Bette Davis, who appears in the beginning and end, is quite energetic and definitely stands out, even though she has llittle to work with. Even diehard Davis fans don't have to worry about missing this one.

THEY WON'T BELIEVE ME (1947)

A solid noirish melodrama; it might have come off a little better with a stronger leading actor, but it's certainly worth seeing. The film begins with Robert Young on trial for murder; the rest of the story is his flashback testimony of how he wound up in this jam. Stuck in an unhappy marriage with a rich woman (Rita Johnson), Young engages in a flirtation with Jane Greer that's about to get pretty serious until the wife butts in and buys him a partnership in a brokerage firm. He breaks things off with Greer and moves out to the West Coast, and eventually starts another fling, this time with sexy golddigger Susan Hayward. The wife again takes action, buys him *out* of his job and isolates the two of them in a mountain home where he's kept on a tight leash. Soon, he gets up the gumption to run off with Hayward, but in that film noir way, fate intervenes with ironic and deadly twists and turns until Young winds up acccused of murder, which he didn't commit, even though he does bear some "cosmic" moral responsibility for the situation; he did have murder in his heart, he lied, he betrayed his wife, and maybe worst of all in the film noir universe, was too weak to take control of his own life. The way that Greer comes back into the movie is perhaps its most interesting twist, except for its nicely ironic ending.

Though the setting is mostly out in nature rather than on dark, rainy streets, it still has a strong noir feeling in the same way that OUT OF THE PAST, also set out in nature (and also with Jane Greer) did. The plot and the characterization of the leading male brought to mind DOUBLE INDEMNITY. Both Young and Fred MacMurray play rather weak men dealing with conflicting impulses of good and evil, and both went on to greater stardom playing passive father figures on 50's & 60's TV. Young leaves a little bit to be desired in the lead role, but the rest of the acting is good. I don't always like Susan Hayward, but she's very good here. I hadn't heard much about this movie, but I recommend catching it if it crops up on TCM again.

THE HITCH-HIKER (1953)

This lean little noir thriller has a strong critical reputaton, but the years have not been kind to it. It's only 70 minutes, but it still felt a bit long--it would have worked better as an hour-long TV episode (which means roughly 45 minutes of plot, with credits and ads added). Edmond O'Brien and Frank Lovejoy are on a road trip when they pick up hitchhiker William Talman, who it turns out is a psychopathic murderer who has been hitching rides and killing drivers for days. Except for a little exposition at the beginning (with the first murder taking place during the credits), the whole movie is mostly the three of them in the car and, after it breaks down, in the desert, as Talman tries to reach a Mexican coast town to escape by ferry boat. The tension is broken towards the end with a few cutaway scenes of the police as they begin to zero in on the group, but these are kept to a minumum. Talman is very good, edgy and creepy, with a paralyzed eye that stays open even when he's asleep (I wonder if Talman actually had that injury? IMDb doesn't say). O'Brien's never been a favorite of mine, but he's very good here, as is Lovejoy. The trusting and caring relationship between the two is developed nicely and is part of what saves them. I couldn't help but wonder why the two didn't just try to attack him, since he flat out tells them that, eventually, he's going to kill them, so they would seem to have little to lose. Nice photography and some nice directorial touches here and there. Worth seeing, but not as thrilling as it probably once seemed.

THE OUTCASTS OF POKER FLAT (1937)

Though not as good as THREE GODFATHERS or OX-BOW INCIDENT, this is a decent entry in the "bleak western" genre. Preston Foster is a gambler who owns a saloon which doubles as a gambling house (and a brothel, I assume). Despite the success of his business ventures, he is generally considered a bad influence in town. He reluctantly adopts a little orphan girl (who grows up to be Virginia Weidler) and, when a schoolmarm (Jean Muir) arrives to bring education to the rough frontier town, he turns the girl over to her, assuming Muir will be a better caretaker--and Muir gets some help from Van Heflin, as a young preacher who arrives with her to build a church. In the course of the story, Foster is revealed to be a softie and a good guy at heart. The rather rambling plot suddenly takes a weird turn in the last 10 minutes when Foster and some of his cronies are tossed out of town, and Muir, in love with Foster, follows. They wind up stranded in a cabin in a snowstorm with no food and no way to keep warm. Heroism and death follow. Like THREE GODFATHERS, the bleak ending leaves us with a somewhat muddled message. Most of the acting is good (Foster, Weidler, Heflin, and Margaret Irving as the good-hearted "madam" who basically lives with Foster and helps raise Weidler), but Jean Muir as the schoolmarm is wooden and irritating. I found it hard to believe that she'd fall for Foster, and especially that he'd fall for her. Overall, pretty good for a short B-western.

POSSESSED (1947)

This movie, which many think has Joan Crawford's best performance ever, is an interesting mix of noir atmosphere and old-fashioned "women's" melodrama, with a little Hollywood psychoanalysis thrown into the mix. I'm sure there's a good book out there somewhere about how and why Hollywood embraced themes of psychological distress and mental illness in the 40's. This, THE SNAKE PIT, and THE LOST WEEKEND all share certain elements, including visual style and an ambiguous attitude toward the power of medicine to explain and cure mental illness. Crawford is a nurse to the ill (physically and mentally, I assume) wife of Raymond Massey, a character whom we never actually see. Crawford's also carrying on an affair with engineer Van Heflin, who winds up working for Massey. Heflin wants to break things off with Crawford; to him, they're just having a casual fling, but he thinks she's become clingy with her talk of marriage and his rejection begins to unbalance Crawford. When Massey's wife kills herself, Massey asks Crawford to marry him, even though he knows she doesn't love him. He agrees to essentially a sexless union and they marry, though Crawford keeps one eye on Heflin. Massey's daughter, Geraldine Brooks, is slow to trust Crawford, but soon comes around. Unfortunately, she also begins dating Heflin, whose motives for the relationship may not be entirely pure (Daddy's rich). This sets the stage for Crawford's eventual full-blown fall into psychosis.

Crawford carefully walks an acting tightrope here; her character is high-strung from the start and goes certifiably mad by the end, but Crawford never goes over-the-top, tempting as that must have been, especially since she spent much of the 50's doing exactly that in her films. I'm not a big Heflin fan but he is fine here, doing a good job of keeping his character's motivations tantalizingly ambigious. In fact, none of the main characters are exactly "black or white" in terms of their actions or judgments. The relationship of Crawford and Brooks was reminiscent to me of the relationships of both Stanwyck and MacMurray to the daughter in DOUBLE INDEMNITY. The noir lighting and expressionist-style look really add to the film's atmosphere, especially in its opening and closing sequences (like INDEMNITY, it's told in a long flashback). Though this isn't quite as good as INDEMNITY or as compelling as THE SNAKE PIT, it is still very much worth seeing, and it contains maybe Crawford's last great role (?).

Two Comic Trifles with Nat Pendleton

Pendleton was a wrestler who sustained a decent career in the movies as a comic sidekick. I just happened to watch these two fiilms right in a row recently; other than having Pendleton and being comedies, they have little else in common.

BABY FACE HARRINGTON (1935)--This was probably one of supporting actor Charles Butterworth's few leading roles, albeit in a fairly short, second-feature movie. It's essentially the story of one eventful day in the life of a mild-mannered husband (married to Una Merkel): first, he gets fired when he asks for a raise; then, he loses the money he withdrew from the bank to pay off his mortgage, and he wrongly accuses a relative (Donald Meek) of stealing it. Thrown in jail overnight for stealing money from Meek, he gets involved in a breakout masterminded by a real thief, Nat Pendleton. Of course, you see it coming a mile away that he'll wind up a hero. I liked Butterworth in a Roland Young-type part in FORSAKING ALL OTHERS, but he doesn't quite have what it takes to do a strong comic lead. But there is a wonderfully dry and somewhat dark bit near the end where he decides to kill himself by hanging, and winds up in a long, humorous conversation with Pendleton over kinds of knots. Merkel, of course, is good as usual.

IT'S A WONDERFUL WORLD (1939)--I saw this way back in the late 80's, before TCM, when TNT was showing old movies,with ads. I didn't like it then, but I decided, what with Jimmy Stewart and Claudette Colbert and TCM's adless presentation, to give it another chance. No dice. It's a screwball mystery--Stewart is a man who's on his way to jail as an accessory in a murder case; he escapes in order to try and catch the real killer and save not just himself but his boss, who is about to be executed. Colbert is a whacky poet he meets along the way--he carjacks her, then can't get rid of her as she vows to help him. I like Colbert here, but Stewart is not up to his usual high standard. The supporting cast is solid, including Pendleton, Guy Kibbee, and Cecil Cunningham, but I couldn't recommend this except to diehard fans of screwball.

CAIRO (1942)

I am most assuredly not a fan of Jeanette MacDonald, so I don't know why I watched CAIRO in the first place. She has a couple of moments here, but like Ruby Keeler in COLLEEN (which I reviewed a few days ago), she is mostly a big energy drain at the center of the movie. Overall, it's a rather cute spy movie spoof, with Robert Young as an American reporter who gets in over his head with a spy ring in Cairo. He thinks MacDonald is a German spy, and gets suckered in by the real spies (including Reginald Owen and Mona Barrie, an actress I'd never heard of, who is pretty good here). There is a very funny bit where Barrie complains about the constant use of secret passages ("Why can't we use doors like normal people?"). There are sneaky references to WIZARD OF OZ and THE PHILADELPHIA STORY, and a very fun reference to MacDonald's role in the movie SAN FRANCISCO: Young says to her, "Have you ever been in San Francisco," and she replies, "Once, with Gable and Tracy, and the joint fell apart." Ethel Waters gets to sing but otherwise is underused, as is Dooley Wilson, who gets about three minutes of screen time as Waters' love interest. Despite MacDonald, it is a fun movie, although it drags a bit in the middle.

DESK SET (1957)

I'm pleased to report that I finally found a pairing of Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy that I like. I pretty much hate WOMAN OF THE YEAR, don't much care for ADAM'S RIB or GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER, and feel neutral about KEEPER OF THE FLAME. But I saw DESK SET the other night on AMC and enjoyed it (except for the terrible pan & scan print).

Tracy is an efficieny expert brought in to do some work in the reference library of a TV network. The reference librarians assume that whatever he's doing, it's a threat to their jobs; it turns out he's paving the way for a huge room-sized computer to be brought into the department and the women fear it's intended to replace them. Hepburn is the head librarian and she and the other librarians (including Joan Blondell) have a nice casual chemistry. Hepburn has been dating network exec Gig Young for years but the relationship's not going anywhere and she and Tracy begin to hit it off. They have a number of cute scenes together, including a causal lunch on a rooftop and a drunken Christmas party. Tracy does a good job at playing a 50's version of a computer geek, a little oblivious to what's going on around him. Neva Patterson is good as the "techie" who is brought in to run the computer; her demeanor reminded me of Bebe Neuwirth as Lilith in FRASIER. Given that it was made in 1957, I was surprised at the casual assumption that Hepburn & Young's relationship was an intimate one, despite they're not being married. The "surprise" ending involving the computer was nice. I think Tracy and Hepburn were perhaps just a bit too old for their parts, but this was still pretty much a delight all the way around.

Two Early 30's MGM Movies (how's that for an interesting theme?)

TUGBOAT ANNIE (1933)--Marie Dressler in the part she's probably most remembered for (aside perhaps from her relatively small part in DINNER AT EIGHT). She and Wallace Beery have good chemistry as an earthy, long-married couple who run a tugboat. Beery's an irresponsible drunk but he remains mostly likeable; Dressler is the backbone of both the family and the movie. Robert Young is their son who makes good and then essentially cuts all ties to his family on account of Beery's drinking. If this movie were remade today, they would be the very model of a dysfunctional, codependent family. Of course, Beery gets the chance to make good in a melodramatic finale involving bad weather. I usually go into Beery movies not wanting to like him, but he usually wins me over (except perhaps in GRAND HOTEL). Frankie Darro, one of my favorite kid actors, plays the Robert Young character as a child. Overall, a bit sappy and predictable, but an interesting cultural artifact--it was apparently an incredibly popular movie in its day.

THIS MODERN AGE (1931)--Interesting mostly as a somewhat bizarre pre-Code relic. At heart, it's a bland melodrama whose main point of interest is Crawford's shiny blonde hair. She plays a young woman who finds her long-lost mother (Pauline Frederick) in Paris and tries to catch up on lost time with her. The mother is being kept by a married man, but she hides this from Crawford, who herself is beginning to fall in with a fast crowd, led by a young, rich drunkard played by Monroe Owsley (who looks a little like a cross between Pee-Wee Herman and Ayre Gross). Thanks to the boy's drinking, they get in a car crash (oddly played for laughs) and Neil Hamilton saves them. Crawford falls for Hamilton, and vice versa, until he finds out the truth about Crawford's mother. Predictable plot twists ensue on the way to a forced happy ending. No need to worry about catching this one unless you're a Crawford fanatic.

COLLEEN (1936)

The Warner Brothers musical was definitely on its way down with this one, a rather drab affair all around. The trappings are OK, but the Busby Berkeley touch is missed and the multi-undertalented Ruby Keeler provides a vacuum at the center of the movie. There is a rather convoluted plot reminiscent of the Gold Diggers movies, except it doesn't revolve around the staging of a Broadway show. Keeler is a bookkeeper for a dress design company. She falls for Dick Powell, a businessman who is ordered by his rich but very eccentric boss (and uncle) Hugh Herbert to shut the company down. Jack Oakie (also undertalented and occasionally irritating, but serviceable here) is Keeler's con-man boyfriend, who gets sweet on golddigging Joan Blondell, who is plucked out of a chocolate factory by Herbert, who wants her to be his mistress, against the wishes of his wife, Louise Fazenda. Got it? There are rather bland songs scattered throughout, and a couple of creative dance numbers, including the finale "You Gotta Know How to Dance." Blondell and Fazenda give the movie its only real zip. If you like Herbert's befuddled and giggly schtick, you'll love him here--he does a lot of it. Marie Wilson has a small part and Ward Bond has an even smaller part as a cop. The most interesting thing about the movie is that during the credits, the actors introduce their characters through song.

THAT'S RIGHT, YOU'RE WRONG (1939)

This is a cute little comedy (not quite a musical, although there are several songs performed) with 30's bandleader Kay Kyser and his Kollege of Musical Knowledge band. I'd seen one previous Kyser movie, YOU'LL FIND OUT, which as I recall was about spies and seances, but that was quite a while ago. This one, from 1939, was his first movie, and it has a premise full of self-referential fun: a studio head hears Kyser's popular radio show and has the idea to bring Kyser and his band to Hollywood to appear in a movie. When he sees Kyser's plain appearance, he realizes that he's not cut out to be a romantic leading man, as the role calls for, and he tries to get Kyser to bow out. However, Kyser catches on and instead plays along until he gets the producer to agree to buy him out of his contract.

The first half is quite funny and moves along at a good speed. As the plot thickens in the middle, it bogs down a bit, but there are pleasures to be had all along the way. May Robson is delightful as Kyser's earthy grandmother; Edward Everett Horton is one of the screenwriters; Adolphe Menjou is a studio boss; Lucille Ball is an ambitious starlet. The funniest scene involves a screen test with Kyser, playing a gondolier, romancing Ball. He has ridiculous makeup, including huge hoop earrings, a loose toupee that flaps around, and a patently fake mustache that winds up on Ball's face during a kiss. The plot actually ends at around the 80 minute mark and the last ten minutes is a recreation of a real Kyser radio show. His famous sideman, Ish Kabibble, is deadpan fun. The musical highlight is a weird number where they all dress up like animals and sing a song about a fox and a dog, and there's even an early OZ reference courtesy a singing scarecrow!

THE SWIMMER (1968)

According to the calendar, fall should soon be upon us, but with our Internet "Weather Bug" telling me that it's 97 degrees out right now, summer seems to be in no hurry to leave. So watching this film, set on a hot summer afternoon in a wealthy Connecticut suburb, seemed in order. I'd seen this movie in bits and pieces over the years but never all of it until now. I was quite impressed and am still thinking it through. Burt Lancaster is a suburban advertising man, with wife and kids, who frivolously decides to swim home one summer afternoon through the pools of his neighbors. (Where he's been that morning and why he's wearing only swimming trunks in the first place is never brought up.) In doing so, he meets up with people he hasn't socialized with in a while and has to face up to unpleasant elements of his past (an abandoned mistress) and present (an unsavory crush on college girl who used to babysit for his kids). For a while, I thought this wasn't working; the narrative thread is rather weak, and many of the characters, especially Lancaster, talk at times in overblown dialogue that doesn't always quite come off. But eventually it begins to gel: it's really more a personal allegory than a totally realistic narrative. It turns out that Lancaster has a secret, from us if not from his neighbors, and the revelation at the end, though not totally out of the blue, is stunningly presented. Too much of the dialogue was obviously post-dubbed which gives the whole thing a weird distancing effect, like a dubbed foreign movie. But even when things got slow, Burt Lancaster in the prime of his life, in tight swim trunks, was enough eye candy to get me to stick with it. The cast is mostly unknowns and TV actors, with a brief but showy part by Janice Rule, apparently filmed several months after principal photography was completed. The production history of the movie was a rocky one, but unlike many troubled films, the off-screen problems don't affect the movie. Highly recommended if you have a high tolerance for allegory.

SPOILER PARAGRAPH!!!:
In the end, we discover that Lancaster has apparently lost his cushy job and house, and possibly his wife and kids as well. The neighbors he meets as he swims through the pools all seem to be aware that something bad happened to him in the past, and they're surprised to see him, but none act like there's anything wrong with his references to his house and his family, and the specifics of his loss or trauma are never made clear. All we know is that when he finally comes to his pool, the house is locked up and the grounds look like they haven't been cared for in quite a while. Stickler for narrative that I am, I am left wondering: Where was he just before the beginning of the movie? Did he lose his house and none of the neighbors knew? Or do they know and are humoring him? Why is he in swimming trunks? Or, does none of it work on a literal level? Has he lost both his lifestyle *and* his mind? Was he in an institution? Was this all in his imagination? Is the whole thing a "rich white guy male menopause" episode? In some ways, all that stuff doesn't matter; the effect of the ending is strong and leaves an impact no matter how you choose to interpret the film.

FOUR JILLS IN A JEEP (1944)

This is a wartime variety-show musical loosely based on the real-life USO experiences of the main actresses: Kay Francis, Carole Landis, Martha Raye, and a dancer named Mitzi Mayfair who I had never heard of before I saw this film. The four, who all play themselves, go from doing a USO radio show in the States to traveling to England to play for the soldiers, then volunteering to head out to North Africa in the middle of some real action (where it threatens to become a bland variation on CRY HAVOC). I understand that the plot is basically an excuse for the musical numbers, but the numbers are nothing to write home about, except for Martha Raye singing a swing novelty called "Mr. Paganini" (a song I know from Ella Fitzgerald, my favorite singer of all time).

Kay Francis comes off the best, even though, as she admits, she doesn't sing, dance, or recite, but she is the backbone of the group, organizing events and keeping up morale. The bland Dick Haymes plays a soldier who falls for Mayfair. The infinitely irritating Phil Silvers is an infinitely irritating soldier who is assigned to accompany the girls. Some celebs who appear as themselves include Carmen Miranda, Alice Faye (who does a nice rendition of "You'll Never Know"), and George Jessel. The North Africa section, with the Jills playing nurse under fire, rings totally false, but dramatically is the most satisfying part of the movie. I must admit I could barely stay awake through this one, and if it weren't for Kay Francis, I probably wouldn't have bothered finishing it.

BROTHER ORCHID (1940)

When this was shown recently on TCM, Robert Osborne described it as a gangster spoof, which is, I think, misusing the word "spoof." It is, however, very light in tone, with some funny moments. Edward G. Robinson plays a gangster who thinks things are getting too hot so he decides to retire and live the classy life (a plot thread straight out of an earlier Robinson movie, THE LITTLE GIANT). He leaves his mob in the hands of Humphrey Bogart--Robinson should have learned, after KID GALAHAD and THE AMAZING DR. CLITTERHOUSE, not to trust Bogart!). Things don't work out, so Robinson comes back to the old business, only to be double-crossed by Bogie and the mob (except for faithful sidekick Allen Jenkins). On the run from assassins, Robinson winds up wounded on the grounds of a monastery. The brothers give him medical treatment and he decides to lay low and stay with the flower-growing monks for a while (hence the title of the movie), but eventually he gets dragged back into his old life, at least for one more shot at revenge against Bogie.

Robinson is good, especially in the earlier scenes; his final transformation to gentle monk could be handled better. Donald Crisp and Cecil Kellaway are fine as monks; Allen Jenkins is also good, but rather inexplicably vanishes from the movie about halfway through. The surprise for me was Ann Sothern, who steals most of her scenes as Robinson's long-time gal who keeps hoping against hope that he'll marry her (rather like Adelaide in GUYS AND DOLLS). The last few minutes are wrapped up a little too quickly, but otherwise, quite worth watching.

THE CROSS OF LORRAINE (1943)

In WWII, during the occupation of France, a group of French soldiers are talked into surrendering to the Germans with the promise of being sent home, but are tricked and sent to a concentration camp. The movie follows their attempts to stay sane and healthy, and to escape to join the Resistance. Gene Kelly is the cockiest one of the bunch who is eventually beaten down through torture. Jean-Pierre Aumont becomes the de facto leader of the men, remaining level-headed but optimistic, and eventually leading an escape. Cedric Hardwicke, Hume Cronyn and Wallace Ford are other prisoners. Peter Lorre is appropriately slimy as a Nazi bureaucrat. The post-escape section of the movie, in which some of the men manage to hide out in a small village and lead the entire village populace in an uprising, feels a little too Hollywood, but it certainly helps the film's propaganda quotient; the main point of the story seems to be to show American audiences that not all the French gave up or became collaborators--the title cross is a symbol of the Free French. For a 40's movie, there is a rather startling scene of violence where a Nazi gets a knife in the neck. Aumont's genuine French accent thows things off for a while, since none of the other actors is even really trying to sound French; until you get used to it, it feels like Aumont is the only French soldier among an international group. Overall, it isn't very realistic, but it is occasionally exciting and manages to rouse the right inspirational feelings.

SMARTY (1934)

This is an infuriating little comedy, an early screwball, with a lead female character who manages to be more irritating than the Hepburn character in BRINGING UP BABY--and for me to say that, you know she had to be a truly unlikable bitch. Despite my intense dislike of the character, Joan Blondell, who plays her in one of her few leads, is very good, a little different in tone than I've ever seen her. She's not quite tough, but she's not a whimpering wallflower. She's not dumb, but she's not all that smart, either (I have no idea where the title comes from; the British title, HIT ME AGAIN, makes much more sense). I laughed out loud several times, even while I was grinding my teeth at both the Blondell character and the way she was treated. Plotwise, Blondell has a fight with her husband (Warren William, also cast a smidge against type, where he seems NOT to be a ruthless and callous bastard businessman) and he slaps her in the face at a dinner party. She doesn't actually seem to be all that hurt, physically or emotionally, but she nevertheless decides to get a divorce, egged on by lawyer friend Edward Everett Horton, who is himself in love with Blondell. After the divorce, Horton marries Blondell and is eventually driven to slap her as well, which sends her back to William, who not only slaps her again, but also rips her dress off before carting her to the bedroom for what looks to be consensual sex.

The message, honest to God, is that some women just need to be slapped around every so often, and when they (and their husbands) realize that, happiness will reign supreme. Yes, the Blondell character was incredibly obnoxious, always choosing to do the stupidest, most irritating thing in any given situation, but how even mild physical abuse is the answer to that is beyond me. What these men see in her (aside from her physical charms, which are nicely displayed) is also beyond me. I thought William and Horton should both have dumped Blondell and gone off together at the end. The acting all around is quite good. Claire Dodd and Frank McHugh provide nice comic relief (relief, that is, from the "comic" arguing and violence that occurs among the three leads). I've rarely enjoyed a movie and been so exasperated by it at the same time. The fact that it's only an hour long helps; if it were made a few years later, it would have been stretched out to at least 90 minutes and probably would have been unbearable. Even though this would seem to be an early example of screwball comedy (it came out the same year as IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT, which many claim to be the first screwball), I have yet to find a reference to this film in any critical histories or even in the standard reference books, like Halliwell or Maltin. Perhaps it deserves to be mostly lost.

THIS WAS PARIS (1942)

This is a little-known wartime propaganda movie, made in England and released by Warner Bros. It plays out a bit like a B-movie variation on CASABLANCA. Griffith Jones, a very handsome British leading man of his day, plays an Intelligence agent who, in the days just before Germany invades France, is assigned to find out if Amercian dress designer Ann Dvorak is a spy. Of course, they fall in love. Ben Lyon (of HELL'S ANGELS), despite getting top billing, has a fairly unimportant supporting role as a drunken journalist. A young but still hefty Robert Morley plays a Nazi. Like THE CROSS OF LORRAINE, which I also saw recently and will review soon, I assume this was intended to be unsubtle homefront propaganda to assure Americans that France hadn't totally given up against the Nazis. When one character yells out, "Achtung!" the reply from a sympathetic character is, "Why, you're not French, you're a hun in stolen clothes!" Politically, the ending is downbeat, but the young lovers have a happy resolution. Dvorak looks a lot like Rosalind Russell in several scenes, but her acting is only so-so. Overall, slow moving, with a B-movie feeling, a couple of overly melodramatic revelations, and a bizarre fisticuffs scene that seems to have come right out of a Saturday afternoon serial. It does build to a fairly satisfying last 15 minutes, but it's not necessarily one to search out, unless you're a Griffith Jones fan--I haven't seen him in much, but I've liked what I have seen of him. He's also the father of Gemma Jones, who played the mother in both BRIDGET JONES' DIARY and THE WINSLOW BOY.

PACIFIC LINER (1938)

I'm a fan of Chester Morris--he wasn't really a first-rank actor, but he had a look and energy that often made him exciting to watch. This, however, was pretty much a total disappointment, although the plotline had a lot of potential. Morris plays a doctor on a cruise ship headed from Singapore to the US; when cholera breaks out below decks among the boiler room men, he has his hands full trying to care for the men, contain the illness, and deal with the ornery foreman, Victor McLaglen. There's also the pretty and demure nurse (Wendy Barrie) who only has eyes for Morris though McLaglen keeps trying, in his boorish but ultimately harmless way, to woo her. The cholera plot keeps threatening to become interesting, but perhaps because of the low budget, we're mostly confined to just a couple of cabins and the boiler room. The boiler room set is nicely done, but the passengers on the ship are only seen in passing and the whole thing winds up feeling a bit claustrophobic, and not in a way that adds needed tension.

McLaglen outdoes Morris for energy; Morris seems uncomfortable up against the blustry older actor. Alan Hale and Barry Fitzgerald are in the supporting cast. Barrie, who played a wife opposite Charles Laughton in THE PRIVATE LIFE OF HENRY VIII, wound up working mostly in B-pictures; I remember her from a couple of Falcon movies. Everett Brown, Big Sam from GONE WITH THE WIND, has an interesting, non-stereotyped bit as the lone black man on the ship. This mostly forgotten low-budget film actually got an Oscar nomination for best musical score, but I can't say the music was especially memorable.

BLUES IN THE NIGHT (1941)

The atmosphere and acting in this tight little Warner Brothers drama help it transcend its B-movie feeling--nothing against Priscilla Lane, but when she and a guy named Richard Whorf are the top billed stars, I'm assuming the studio didn't consider this prestige material (Whorf went on to a bigger career as a director, most notably with CHAMPAGNE FOR CAESAR). It's got elements of a musical, a comedy, a melodrama, and a romance, all with a heaping helping of noir atmosphere.

It's basically the story of the trials and tribulations of a scruffy jazz band, composed of Whorf (an intense pianist), Lane (the singer), Jack Carson (trumpet player and Lane's husband), Elia Kazan (yes, the director, as an intellectual clarinet player), and Billy Halop (probably the best-looking Dead End Kid, on drums). They piece together a meager living and wind up the house band at a roadhouse called the Jungle in New Jersey, within view of the lights of Manhattan (sounds a little Springsteenish...). There are romantic problems triggered by Betty Field as a gangster's moll who also fancies herself a singer. Lloyd Nolan is the gangster who helps the band but mistreats practically everyone else around him, including bartender Howard Da Silva and crippled hanger-on Wallace Ford.

Aside from Whorf, who just doesn't quite fit the part, the acting is fine, espeically Nolan and Ford. Kazan and Halop are good as the naive youths, and Carson fits in as the weary but never-say-die voice of experience. There are some surreal montages, used in dream sequences or as transitional passages, directed by Don Siegel, that really add to the noir feel, as do the nighttime sets. The Jungle itself almost becomes a character, like Rick's in CASABLANCA or the hotel in HOLIDAY INN. The first half, as the characters and situations are set up, is the best, but things never really lag all that much. The band's music is a little too glossy sounding considering their stated desire to play down & dirty blues ("the music of the people," says Whorf), but the title song, which is played several times in several different ways, is just perfect. Highly recommended!!

NO MORE LADIES (1935)

This mostly forgotten comedy, shown during TCM's Joan Crawford tribute, is a mixed blessing. The unoriginal adultery plot (which calls to mind the later and funnier THE AWFUL TRUTH) is secondary here to the clever dialogue (by Donald Ogden Stewart, who wrote the screenplay to THE PHILADELPHIA STORY) and to a strong supporing cast. Crawford plays another rich young woman of the 30's whose only troubles seem to be romantic ones. After years of indecision, she and fellow rich guy Robert Montgomery decide to tie the knot, but he can't quite settle down and he has what we assume to be a one-night stand with Gail Patrick. Then he lies to Crawford about it. She finds out and tries to retaliate by flirting with pal Franchot Tone at an impromptu house party.

Crawford is fine, but Montgomery and Tone, fighting for Crawford's hand, wind up being nearly indistinguishable from each other, both in looks and in character. There is some very funny dialogue along the way, but it was the supporting cast that rescued the movie for me: Charles Ruggles is fun as a slurring drunk and Arthur Treacher comes in at the end as a stuffy Brit who mumbles loudly and is tricked into misusing American slang--to thank a young woman for a dance, he gleefully shouts, "Nuts to you!" Vivienne Osborne, whose work I'm not familiar with, is good as Treacher's ditzy wife who gives everyone irritating pet names. Even Gail Patrick, who isn't normally given much to do in her man-stealing parts, is fine here. But the best is Edna May Oliver, playing the wise and witty matriarchal figure--she steals every scene she's in and was the main reason I finished watching the movie. She gets to play a little different part than usual, but still manages to let loose with a braying cackle or two, at just the right time.

More End-of-Summer Catching Up

MR. MOTO'S LAST WARNING (1939)--It's difficult not to compare Moto to Charlie Chan (in fact, there's a cute little self-referential joke when we see a partially-obscured poster for a Chan movie). I can't speak with authority about the whole series since I've only seen this one Moto movie, but this was certainly more exciting than your typical Chan flick, less a mystery than a spy thriller; it was quite atmospheric and Lorre made a fine Moto (unlike Oland & Toler, he seemed a little less locked into a cultural stereotype). George Sanders was quite good (and very young looking) as one of the bad guys, and John Carradine, looking exactly like John Carradine, has a part as a relatively disposable good guy. Not great, but good.

PANAMA HATTIE (1942) was ridiculous and very hard to get through. I don't like Red Skelton, but he wasn't even the worst thing about this movie. Skelton, Ben Blue, and Rags Ragland are sailors who frequent a club in Panama where Ann Sothern sings and dances. Eventually, they all get mixed up with spies, and there's a subplot involving Dan Dailey, as Sothern's fiance, and his young daughter, who doesn't get along with Sothern. The spy plot has so many loopholes, even the director seems to know it, and it all just falls apart about 10 minutes before the end. But the musical numbers kept my interest: Lena Horne does "Just One of Those Things" and Ann Sothern does "I've Still Got My Health." Best of all is one of my favorite novelty singers, Virginia O'Brien, who specialized in stand-still, deadpan singing; she's very funny. She didn't do a lot of movies, but she's always worth watching.

MILLION DOLLAR LEGS (1932)--One of the most tedious comedies I've ever subjected myself to, worth it only for some prime bits by W. C. Fields. Apparently, Fields hadn't yet worked out his familiar screen persona yet--this was the first of his Paramount movies, before he was given free rein--but he still steals every scene he's in. Playing the president of Klopstockia, he reminded me of a cross between Groucho Marx in DUCK SOUP and Mel Brooks in BLAZING SADDLES. The plot is ridiculous; the Marxes could get away with this kind of stuff because they were geniuses, but with a lumbering cast led by the very unfunny Jack Oakie, the whole thing falls flat. Aside from Fields, the only other notable appearance is by Hugh Herbert, before he made that strange, wheezing, "woo-woo" laugh his trademark.

Some End-of-Summer Catching Up

Over the next couple of days, I hope to post some short reviews of films I saw over the past three months that I was not so impressed with, or that got lost in the shuffle.

THE HEAVENLY BODY (1943)—After suffering through this, I now know that William Powell is fallible. At one time, I would have said that any movie he's in is worth watching. This one, sad to say, is not. Powell plays an astronomer who, caught up in the excitement of his discovery of a comet, neglects his wife (Hedy Lamarr), who consults an astrologer (Fay Bainter), who tells her that, within a few days, she will meet and fall in love with a well-traveled stranger. Sure enough, she meets up with a handsome and well-traveled air raid warden (James Craig). Powell is then forced to fight to get his wife back. Powell is OK, but Lamarr is terrible; with her dull-eyed look and her wooden acting, I wanted Powell to dump her from the get-go. Lamarr and the equally awkward Craig deserve each other. I think the writers thought they had a screwball comedy on their hands, but it has practically no snap and verve, and no chemistry between the actors. Bainter is good, as is Spring Byington in a small part as the nosy neighbor who gets Lamarr interested in astrology in the first place.

THE EX-MRS. BRADFORD (1936), another Powell film, is a so-so Thin Man knockoff. Powell is a doctor, divorced from Jean Arthur, a writer of mysteries. She wants to give the marriage another chance and she spends much of her time being obvious and obnoxious about reuniting. I had a bit of the same problem here as I've had with similar screwball comedy characters, like Hepburn in BRINGING UP BABY and Fairbanks in JOY OF LIVING, but ridiculous single-minded characters like that are just part of the genre, I guess. At any rate, the two get drawn into solving the murder of a jockey during a big-money race. The mystery itself is sloppily plotted and the suspects are never very clearly differentiated from each other, so I didn't really care who did it. Robert Armstrong, Eric Blore, Ralph Morgan, and James Gleason are fine, however, and one of my favorite teenage actors, Frankie Darro, has a small but important part as a jockey who might be the next target for murder.

PLYMOUTH ADVENTURE (1952) is a stodgy retelling of the voyage of the Mayflower. Spencer Tracy is the captain; he's been hired to take the Pilgrims to the New World, but he has no convictions about their adventure, he's in it just for the money. Predictably, his gruff and cynical attitude undergoes a change by the end. Gene Tierney is good as the wife of John Alden, who has an affair (I think—it's never clear how far things go) with Tracy. Aside from that rather uneventful triangle, there's not much plot and things bog down often, aside from one nice sequence of a raging storm in the middle of the ocean. Leo Genn and Van Johnson are good, and Kathleen Lockhart, the real-life wife of Gene and mother of June, has a small role as the wife of a pilgrim who is wanted by the British authorities. Tracy's heart isn't in this and his character is too one-dimensional. I'm a little surprised that no one has tried to do another Mayflower movie in a mega-budget-action mode recently.

THE HARD WAY (1942)

This is an interesting variation on the backstage musical, kind of a noirish melodrama with some vaudeville routines and songs thrown in. Ida Lupino is a working-class wife with an unambitious and potentially abusive husband. She is guardian of her kid sister (Joan Leslie) and wants her to be able to escape the life Lupino feels trapped in. A second-rate vaudeville team, Dennis Morgan and Jack Carson, comes through town one night and Leslie decides to run off with Carson, who is not only charmed by her but also thinks she has talent. Lupino is not happy at first, but then realizes she can use the situation to help not only Leslie but herself, and she accompanies her sister and the team on the road. Eventually, she turns Morgan and Carson against each other as Leslie begins to achieve some level of stardom on her own.

This was Morgan & Carson's first movie together and they're pretty good, given that it's much heavier drama than they would eventually be known for. They have a good rapport already and Morgan is especially charming. Carson does a nice job with his dark descent, ending, rather shockingly, in suicide (one of two suicides in the movie). Lupino is also good as her single-minded pursuit of Leslie's success blinds her to anything else. Joan Leslie is the weak link here; she's fine in the earlier scenes, but doesn't quite have what it takes to come off believably as a breakout Broadway star in the movie's one big musical number. The happy ending for Leslie feels contrived and artificial, and it's yet another movie with the moral that women should give up their careers to make their men happy--or if they're really unhappy, they should just die. The atmosphere, especially in the beginning and end, feels noirish, although it otherwise doesn't really fit the genre.

Character actors in B-movie leads: Charles Ruggles & Grant Mitchell

FRIENDS OF MR. SWEENEY (1934)--I tend to forget how much I like Charles Ruggles. Mostly I've seen him in supporting comic roles in films like BRINGING UP BABY, TROUBLE IN PARADISE, and RUGGLES OF RED GAP (where he does NOT play Ruggles!). The time I remember not liking him was in MURDERS IN THE ZOO, where his comic style felt out of place. In this one, he has a rare lead part as a milquetoastish journalist who writes strong, nearly radical columns that his editor always wants toned down. His secretary, Ann Dvorak, likes him and encourages him to stand up for himself. A series of occurances involving dating, dancing and drinking changes his outlook and in the end, he helps to foil the ambitions of a crooked politician. This is short (70 minutes) and the first half is quite fun. The strenuous shenanigans of mistaken identities and gun play get a little tiring in the last half, but the movie doesn't outstay its welcome. Dvorak is rather mild; I think her strong performance in THREE ON A MATCH was a career fluke. Berton Churchill (as the philandering editor) and Eugene Pallatte (as a visiting college buddy of Ruggles's who helps bring out the adventurer in him) are good. Not one to search out, but if you stumble across it, it's worth catching.

FATHER IS A PRINCE (1940)--Barely an hour long, this bland second feature, which today would be a pilot for a sitcom, is about a father (Grant Mitchell) who is too concerned with making money and having his house run like clockwork to truly be a loving dad and husband. Most of the movie is light and humorous in tone, but it takes a melodramatic turn when the mother (Nana Bryant) takes deathly ill (during a loud argument with Mitchell) with some unstated illness that requires a touch-and-go operation--her brush with death makes Mitchell realize that he should change his ways toward his family. Pretty mild stuff that even the supporting cast (Jan Clayton, George Reeves, John Litel) can't bring to life. Mitchell, who is fine in small roles (most notably as the cantankerous father in MAN WHO CAME TO DINNER), can't really handle a leading part. But Lee Patrick (the secretary in MALTESE FALCON) is very good as a rich relative.

THEY DRIVE BY NIGHT (1940)

[Some plot spoilers included below!!]
I had avoided this one, even though it has Humphrey Bogart and Ann Sheridan, because it's about truckers and I tend to put trucker films in with circus films and sports films as movie genres that I avoid. But this was quite good, and has the best George Raft performance I've ever seen. Raft and Bogart are brothers who are "wildcat," or independent, truck drivers, struggling to make a living on their own apart from corporate trucking. They still owe some money on their truck; in the opening, truckstop waitress Ann Sheridan helps them escape the repossession man so they can get one more haul and pay their last installment. Raft and Sheridan fall for each other (Bogart, in one of his last supporting roles before he hit it big with HIGH SIERRA & MALTESE FALCON, is married and faithful). According to this film, the most dangerous part of being a trucker is the possibility of falling asleep at the wheel, and an accident of this kind winds up derailing the careers of both Raft and Bogart, so they end up in the corporate business anyway, thanks to good-natured trucking boss Alan Hale. But his scheming wife, Ida Lupino, gets the hots for Raft and won't stop at murder to try to snag him.

The story is fast-paced and seems fairly believable, as are the characters. Hale gets a rare chance to shine here, as does Roscoe Karns as a trucking buddy. Lupino goes over-the-top as the psychotic wife, but her performance fits. She kills Hale by locking him in the garage, drunk and at the wheel of a running car; her breakdown in a courtroom scene is quite good, with the electric-eye garage doors coming back to haunt her ("The doors made me do it!!") at the climax. I spotted handsome John Ridgely in a small part, along with George Tobias and John Litel. Apart from a sort of phony feeling happy ending, this is definitely one I'd recommend.

THE TENTH VICTIM (1965)

This swingin' 60's satire is more relevant than ever, and not just because Mike Myers was influenced by it when he cobbled together his Austin Powers material. In the future, something called The Big Hunt has been legalized, allowing people to hunt and kill each other. You join the Hunt and are paired up by computer with another person--one is the hunter and one is the victim. The hunter gets all kinds of information about the victim, but the victim only knows that he or she is being hunted. The object is for one to kill the other. This has supposedly channeled mankind's aggressive tendencies and cut way down on crime, war, and birth control. Ursula Andress is about to go after Marcello Mastroianni; if she kills him, it will be her tenth kill and she'll win a million dollars. Of course, things get complicated and they fall in love, sort of.

The part of the satire that bites the most today isn't the conceit of the legalized hunt so much as it is Andress selling her killing to an advertiser; the Ming Tea company will film her killing Mastroianni and endorsing their tea as she fires the lethal shot. Everything is set up in the Roman Coliseum, including dancing teapots and singing children, waiting for her to lure him to his death. In this day and age of Survivor and The Mole and The Bachelor, this set-up suddenly doesn't seem all that far-fetched--as with NETWORK, real life has caught up, rather scarily, with what was once outrageous satire.

The movie has a problem that a lot of current movies have: one too many endings. They cop out a bit in the final scene, although the comment it makes on the desire to marry (or escape marriage) is amusing. In the first scene, Andress kills a man with a shiny silver bikini top that shoots bullets; Myers paid homage to this in AUSTIN POWERS 2, and he also uses the Ming Tea name for the band that records background music for each of the Powers movies. Andress is good, and Mastroianni is very good, looking quite nice as well with bleached hair and black mock-turtlenecks. The look of the movie is generally low-budget, but there are some striking visuals here and there, and lots of fun, almost throwaway references--comic books are called "classics" and are highly collectible items of academic study; a killing takes place in a (rather mild) S&M club where Andress dances teasingly in front of a man, then slaps him silly. Very fun.

THE LAST OF MRS. CHEYNEY (1937)

This Joan Crawford comedy was fun, although not quite as fun as it should have been given its strong cast. It's a remake of a movie made in 1929 with Norma Shearer. Crawford plays a woman who poses as a rich widow in order to gain the confidence of a group of rich folks so she can steal a valuable strand of pearls. Her "servants," including William Powell (apparently her lover), Melville Cooper, and Sara Haden, are actually her partners in crime. Frank Morgan does his usual doddering old fool character, falling for Crawford and doing foolish things while pursuing her. Robert Montgomery is the English Lord who also falls for, and she eventually for him. He catches her in mid-theft and the sparks really start to fly.

From what I recall, this follows the original quite closely. Crawford comes off better than Shearer did (part of the reason is the awkward early talkie acting style of the original). Powell, in what amounts to a supporting role, is just as wonderful as he always is. Nigel Bruce is good, as is Jessie Ralph as the Duchess. In fact, the movie could have used more Ralph, Bruce, and Powell. But Montgomery is the weak link, not nearly as good as Basil Rathbone was in the '29 film. He does a variation on his "irritating cad who is actually a charming fellow," but he comes off far more irritating than charming, and I couldn't buy that Crawford would even think about giving up Powell for him. Still, it was worth watching. The first 20 minutes and the last 20 minutes are the most fun.

THIS LAND IS MINE (1943)

[Warning: some plot point spoilers are included below]

Despite an only so-so critical reputation, I was pleasantly surprised by this movie. I'm always interested in seeing WWII narrative propaganda movies; this one worked quite well as propaganda, as an exciting story, and as an examination of the shades of gray involved beneath labels like good, evil, brave, and cowardly. Only in the last 15 minutes did I feel let down, when the movie stops dead in its tracks for too much speechifying, most of it by Laughton; even he can't quite save the material there. In an unspecified European village in a country that has been overrun by the Nazis, Laughton is a timid schoolteacher who won't stand up to his rowdy students, or for his principles when the Nazis start to censor teaching material. He also has a crush on a lovely neighbor, Maureen O'Hara, but his mother (Una O'Connor), whom Laughton lives with, has put a damper on that. O'Hara's brother, Kent Smith, is secretly a Resistance fighter who assassinates a Nazi officer and winds up in big trouble. George Sanders, as O'Hara's boyfriend, is a local industrialist who advocates collaborating with the enemy and winds up betraying Smith to the Nazis (after O'Connor betrays Smith to Sanders). Eventually, Laughton rises to the occasion and winds up a tragic hero.

I'm a big Laughton fan and, for the most part, he gives his usual excellent performance until the interminable propaganda speeches at the end. Kent Smith is surprisingly good, given his usual propensity for woodeness. O'Connor (who I like despite the over-the-top screeching she is usually called upon to do in her roles) was a little more subtle than usual. Walter Slezak is fine as a "civilized" Nazi who wants as little trouble as possible. But the real surprise for me was George Sanders. The more I see of him, especially in his 40's movies, the more impressed I am. He had the most complex part, a man who "collaborates" with the Nazis and genuinely thinks he's doing so for good philosophical reasons. His internal torture when he realizes the implications of what he has done is expressed very well by Sanders and he turns the character into something very much like a tragic anti-hero. Yes, it's wartime propaganda, but I think it holds up surprisingly well. Directed by Jean Renoir, so the unspecified country is probably France.

THE SECRET AGENT (1936)

This British Hitchcock thriller, based on a couple of stories by Somerset Maugham, is one of John Gielgud's earliest movies, and one of only a handful he did between the early 30's and the mid 50's. He plays the equivalent of a somewhat reluctant James Bond; a novelist who has done espionage work for the British in the past, he is "killed off" by his bosses and given a new name (Ashenden) and a new assignment: go to Switzerland and kill off a German spy, whose identity isn't known yet. With him are Madeleine Carroll, posing as his wife, and Peter Lorre as a rather flamboyantly eccentric fellow agent who goes by three names: "The General" (which he's not), "The Hairless Mexican" (which he's not), and some very long name which he rattles off speedily but that I could never make sense of (which also is probably not his name). The three soon pinpoint the spy, an older British man with a German wife and a dog, but when Gielgud and Lorre get him alone on a mountain top, Gielgud begins to have doubts as to whether or not he's the man. I won't say much more about the plot from that point on except that there are some nice twists and turns before all is resolved.

There are a couple of grand Hitchcock set pieces, including the cornering of the old man on the mountain-top and a creepy scene in a church involving an unseen organist and a bizarrely prolonged chord. There is also an exciting chase through a chocolate factory (I kept wondering if I'd see Lucy and Ethel near the conveyor belt!) and the climax features a speeding train under bombardment from the skies. Robert Young is also present, as a dashing American who spends most of his time flirting with Carroll. Apparently the Maugham stories are autobiographical, based on his experiences while spying for the British, and it's adds a little something to think of Gielgud as playing a version on Maugham, as Herbert Marshall does in THE RAZOR'S EDGE and MOON AND SIXPENCE. Not quite as fun as THE LADY VANISHES (though for my money, better than the 1934 MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH), but its theme of the spy whose heart isn't quite in his work is interesting and a bit ahead of its time.

Two with Edward G. Robinson:

THE AMAZING DR. CLITTERHOUSE (1938)--A very unusual plot and tone make this one worth watching. Edward G. Robinson plays a psychiatrist who makes a hobby of jewel thieving in order to carry out experiments concerning how people react physically and mentally when they engage in criminal activities. He winds up joining a gang (w/ Allen Jenkins, Ward Bond, Maxie Rosenblum, and Humphrey Bogart) and getting friendly with their fence (Claire Trevor). Things are fairly light for the first half, but complications soon pile up. First, Bogart gets defensive about Robinson slowly taking his role as gang leader. Then, when Clitterhouse fears he could be getting addicted to the rush of crime, he tries to get out, with unpleasant results. Even though events lead to a cold-blooded murder and a sensationalistic courtroom trial, the tone remains light, more like a 60's dark comedy than a 30's gangster film. The fairly satisfying ending is one of the oddest of the Code era, showing that punishment in the eye of the beholder. The whole cast is very good.

THE WIDOW FROM CHICAGO (1930) is an early Robinson gangster film without much charm or excitement until the last 10 minutes. Alice White plays the sister of a cop who was murdered by Robinson. She poses as the widow of an out-of-town enforcer who was supposedly killed on the way to do a job for Robinson. Working undercover for the police, she infiltrates the gang successfully until the enforcer (Neil Hamilton, Commissioner Gordon on TV's BATMAN) shows up alive. It is a clever plot, but the actors can't do much with it until the chase finale. Part of the problem is that it's a fairly early sound film and the direction feels slow and awkward. Robinson uses his most stereotyped gangster mannerisms, although to be fair, they may not have been stereotypes at the time. Frank McHugh has a small supporting role.

EVELYN PRENTICE (1934)

William Powell and Myrna Loy in a cross between a Thin Man movie (done as a courtroom drama instead of as a comic detective story) and a serious THE AWFUL TRUTH. I'm going to discuss the plot in some detail, but nothing here will give away the ending. Powell is a successful and busy lawyer (finishing up a headline-grabbing case defending Rosalind Russell) and Loy is his wife, who is feeling like she's taking second place in Powell's life. Powell may or may not have had a brief fling with Russell; this came out the year they began to enforce the Code, so things are left a little murky. They definitely shared a train compartment when they shouldn't have. Loy finds out and retaliates by getting serious with a drunken lout of an admirer (Harvey Stephens), although again, whether or not their relationship becomes physical is left up in the air. This reminded me of THE AWFUL TRUTH, where I think we're supposed to believe that both Cary Grant and Irene Dunne are innocent of any real hanky-panky, but the possibility has to remain in the air for the plot to make sense.

Stephens blackmails Loy with incriminating letters she wrote to him. Loy threatens him with a gun. We know that the gun goes off and that Stephens winds up dead, but we don't see the actual incident. A sleazy girlfriend of Stephens', Isabel Jewell, is arrested for the murder, and Powell, who knows nothing about all of this, takes her case, at the instigation of Loy—she thinks he's such a good lawyer, he'll be able to get Jewell off and ease her conscience. However, once we get in the courtroom, there are surprises for everyone. Despite a couple of cheating moments (we see Loy confront Stephens but are denied seeing the climax of the scene just so that vital information is withheld from us until the end), this is well plotted and well acted. Russell pretty much vanishes at the halfway point, but the rest of the supporting cast is very good, especially Una Merkel, as a friend of Loy's, and Jessie Ralph, as an old woman who could possibly identify Loy as being present the night of the murder. Isabel Jewell is also good; I'm not sure why she didn't have a stronger career. Definitely recommended.

HOLLYWOOD CAVALCADE (1939)

With a title like this, I assumed the movie would be a frothy musical comedy, but instead it's a fairly serious fictional bio-pic with very little music. Don Ameche is a Mack Sennett-like figure who pioneers slapstick comedy and bathing-beauty movies, then gets too big for his britches and falls into a career tailspin while the actress he discovered (Alice Faye, supposedly loosely based on Mabel Normand) soars to the top. Critics such as Leonard Maltin like the early parts which recreate Keystone Cop films, using actual silent celebs like Buster Keaton and Ben Turpin (and Mack Sennett appears briefly as himself), but then they claim the movie goes wrong when it gets melodramatic in the last half.

However, I liked the last half better--Ameche and Faye mostly rise to the occasion (although the situations get awfully trite). It becomes a serious SINGIN' IN THE RAIN, dealing with the transition from silent to talking pictures, though not in as much depth as RAIN. With the title, I expected lots of song and dance, but there is virtually none. Still, it was a pleasant surprise. A handsome young actor named Alan Curtis plays Faye's love interest and he doesn't have much to do except look handsome. He looked familiar; according to IMDb, he had a fairly strong career in secondary parts, although he died in his 40's after kidney surgery. He's in BUCK PRIVATES, PHANTOM LADY, SHOPWORN ANGEL, HIGH SIERRA, and HITLER'S MADMAN, all of which I've seen but in none of which can I place him. Ameche is good, but Faye is lukewarm as always; I can never quite figure out how she got the career she had.

BROTHER RAT (1938)

I've seen bits and pieces of this over the years, but now that I've seen the whole thing in one sitting, I think it's best experienced in short bursts. Based on a hit play, it's the adventures of a group of guys sharing a dorm room at the Virginia Military Institute, a real place that I can only assume is heavily fictionalized here. Wayne Morris (handsome and sturdy) is the cocky and daring one, Ronald Reagan is the one who wants to be the voice of reason, and Eddie Albert is relatively shy and quiet, partly because he has a secret bride who is pregnant--school rules don't allow marriages for cadets. Scenes of the three guys interacting in their room are pretty good, as Morris & Reagan & Albert do work up some fun chemistry, but when the movie opens up the play beyond that, the going gets a little tedious. Priscilla Lane and Jane Wyman are OK, but aren't given much to do aside from a flat slapsticky bit where they're caught with the boys at their house after hours. William Tracy (the annoying messenger boy in SHOP AROUND THE CORNER) has a small part, as does Johnnie Davis, who stands out to me as the androgynous fellow who sings "Hooray for Hollywood" at the beginning of HOLLYWOOD HOTEL. Overall, it passed the time well enough, but much of it was surprisingly slow-moving and the characters were not as charming as they should have been. It didn't inspire any great desire in me to see the sequel.

Rathbone and Cushing as Sherlock Holmes

When I was growing up, I saw most of the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes movies on TV on the late afternoon show. The first two, HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES and ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES, are generally considered the best, if only because they cost the most and had the most care taken in their making. These two, set in Conan Doyle's time, stand out to me, but the rest, set in the present and mostly made on B-movie budgets, have tended to blur together in my memory, so I'm trying to re-watch the other Rathbone films as I run across them. THE HOUSE OF FEAR (1945) has a good critical reputation, though there are plot loopholes galore. A "Ten Little Indians" atmosphere is created in a house where a group of seven men are being killed off, one by one, often mutilated beyond recognition, in what appears to be an attempt to get insurance money. Holmes and Watson (and later, Lestrade) arrive on the scene to figure out what's what. I admit it had me puzzled, although my partner Don figured out the solution in the first 20 minutes, and it's a nifty one. THE SCARLET CLAW (1944) has a Hound of the Baskervilles-type setting, a small village where animals, and eventually people, are being found dead. Holmes and Watson learn about the situation after a retired actress is killed, then they receive a letter from the dead woman asking for help. She's beyond help, but they decide to investigate anyway. This isn't quite as good as FEAR, but it has its moments and the foggy village atmosphere adds to the movie's appeal.

I think Rathbone is the best Holmes (and, of course, Nigel Bruce is the best Watson), but I watched the 1959 Peter Cushing version of HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES anyway and was quite disappointed. It's a Hammer production and looks and feels like one, with its bright colors and elaborate but artificial sets; the problem is that it keeps threatening to become a full-fledged Hammer horror movie, but it never does. Some more bosoms and blood could only have helped. I won't rehash the plot, about a supposed ghost hound from Hell that is threatening Lord Baskerville and assorted other villagers. Christopher Lee is wasted as Baskerville--he does his best to bring some oomph to his role, but is defeated by mediocre direction. Cushing is serviceable as Holmes, and Andre Morrell practically vanishes as Watson. On top of which, at almost 90 minutes, it's just too long to sustain interest, especially since it does follow the original story fairly well, so if you know it, you know exactly where it's going. Watching this just made me want to watch the Rathbone version again.