CRIMINAL INVESTIGATOR (1942)

Bob Martin gets a job as a cub reporter—his main credential is that he's the police commissioner's son, though when he tells his boss that he flunked journalism school, the editor says, "That’s one thing in your favor." Martin is assigned the task of getting an interview out of Black, a guy accused of a politically-motivated shooting who hasn't talked to anyone. It turns out that Black is a deaf-mute, but luckily Martin knows sign language so he gets his scoop. He also gets a coded message to deliver to Judson, Black's slimy lawyer. Next, Martin goes to interview Joyce Greeley, who is being released from prison, but Joyce is really Joan, whose kid sister Ellen, not realizing Joan's been in jail for two years, was going to pick her up the bus station. Joyce/Joan is killed by two of Judson's thugs who are after a set of keys to a safe deposit box. Ellen just happens to have the keys, which her sister had given her before she was sent to jail. We get some backstory about Joyce's past (a burlesque dancer who fell in with a bad crowd when her sugar daddy died) and the rest plays out unexcitingly—Martin helps Ellen evade the bad guys—until the climax, a chase set in a theater. If you like Monogram poverty row thrillers, this one isn't bad. The lead, Robert Lowery (pictured; best known as the original Batman in the 1949 serial) is a bland but pleasant enough hero; the only other actor of note present is John Miljan (as Judson) who had a busy career—almost 200 movie credits—as a B-movie villain throughout the 30s and 40s. There's even a completely extraneous song performed in the theater scene. [Netflix streaming]

WOMAN OBSESSED (1959)

This rather mild romantic drama tries to trade on the aura of Douglas Sirk's glossy melodramas of the 50's such as MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION and ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS (which, with its plotline about class conflict, this does resemble a bit). Susan Hayward lives on a farm in the woods in Saskatchewan with her husband and young son. When her husband dies in a forest fire, she struggles to keep the farm going. A young and hunky guy (Stephen Boyd) who knew her husband ambles on by, offers to help, and winds up staying as a handyman.  He's rather moody and temperamental; it turns out his wife died in a fire as well. During a snowstorm, Hayward's horse bolts while she and her son are returning home and the two of them collapse in the snow. Boyd heroically heads out in the storm to save them and soon he and Hayward fall in love. They marry and, though the boy (Dennis Holmes) is jealous of Boyd at first, they seem to be bonding until they run across a deer that had been mauled by a mountain lion. Boyd shoots it to put it out of its pain and tries to make the boy help him skin it, but Holmes becomes so upset, he faints. Boyd is determined to make a man out of him, and of course his efforts just alienate Holmes, and soon Hayward as well. Things deteriorate; Boyd slaps her and rapes her, tries to apologize the next day, and gets into a brawl in town. Hayward winds up pregnant and, during the event-filled climax, has a miscarriage during a torrential rainstorm, and winds up in the hospital while her son goes missing and Boyd tries to find him. Believe it or not, everything works out in the end. It feels like everybody, from the scriptwriter to the stars, was working on half-energy here. It’s a watchable movie but it's very predictable and never compelling.  Boyd and Hayward are fine, though Boyd's character becomes a real pain in the ass by the end, even though we know eventually he'll redeem himself (as will the boy). Also with Barbara Nichols as a hot blond who has an eye for Boyd, and Theodore Bikel as the town doc. Early on, there's a shot of a quicksand bog, so we know that will be important in the third act somehow. [FMC]

TARZAN AND THE JUNGLE BOY (1968)

A geologist and his young son are on a river in Africa when their canoe is overturned in some rapids. The father drowns and the son, Erik, is presumed dead, but a few years later, a blurry photograph is taken of a lad in a loincloth, alone in the middle of Tzekunda country, and Myrna and Ken, two National Geographic journalists, come to Tarzan hoping he'll help them find the boy. Tarzan is reluctant because it is forbidden for outsiders to trespass on Tzekunda land, but when the tribe holds a contest of skills to choose a new leader, Tarzan approaches them. Two brothers, Buhara (the good guy) and Nagambi (the bad guy), compete for the title; Buhara wins and promises to look for the boy, but soon the sore loser Nagambi attacks his brother and leaves him bound and bleeding, to be eaten by lions. Erik, the jungle boy, finds Buhara and tries to nurse him back to health. Tarzan goes ahead into Tzekunda land to find the boy, and Myrna and Ken eventually follow, leading to fisticuffs, animal attacks, and spear and gun fights before Erik is talked into heading back to civilization. 

This film, late in the officially sanctioned series, has the plus of location shooting (in Brazil) but the minuses of a draggy story, lackluster acting, and a TV-movie look. Mike Henry, a pro football player turned actor, certainly looks the part; physique-wise, he's by far the best movie Tarzan ever. But his lackadaisical delivery of dialogue and flat American accent take away any pomp or mystery from the character, leaving him just another comic book superhero in a loincloth. Aliza Gur, a minor Bond girl in From Russia With Love, is remarkably irritating as Myrna, and when the spears started flying, I kept hoping one would find its way straight through her (Spoiler: no such luck). Rafer Johnson (an Olympic decathalon champ) and Edward Johnson provide some sparks as the brothers. Despite the location filming, most of the animal shots (elephants, giraffes, etc.) are clearly from stock footage. Only watch this if you want to admire Mike Henry's body—and I've sat through worse movies for less. [DVD]

LÉON MORIN, PRIEST (1961)

Barny (Emannuelle Riva) is a young widow with a half-Jewish daughter, living in a French town occupied first by the Italians, then by the Nazis. She and her friends, mostly Communists, atheists or Jews, live in fear of their oppressors and some send their children off to be baptized as a safety measure. Adding to Barny's unsettled life, she finds herself entertaining sexual thoughts about Sabine, a female co-worker. In frustration, she goes into a church, intending to basically prank a priest (Jean-Paul Belmondo) in the confessional, but the two wind up in serious conversation. He gives her books to read and soon she is going to his rooms for extended philosophical discussions. She transfers her lustful feelings from her co-worker to the priest—joining several other women who think he's hot (and he is, because he's Jean-Paul Belmondo). Most of the rest of the film, which ends with the eventual liberation of the town, is carried by the ambiguous tension between the two. Is she after salvation (at one point, she converts to Catholicism) or sex? And what does he get out of the relationship? This leisurely but never boring film from director Jean-Pierre Melville does a nice job of setting up the atmosphere of the town and the circumstances of Barny's life before it plunges her into the emotional chaos of forbidden passion (of more than one kind). Riva is fine but Belmondo is even better—the priest clearly knows he's physically attractive to the women of the village but he never seems to trade on it, or even become tempted to respond, though we never really get to know him well. Despite the title, the movie is really about Barny, not him. [DVD]

ATLANTIC (1929)

This is the first talkie made about the Titanic disaster, but because of legal threats from the White Star Line, the filmmakers used the name Atlantic instead of Titanic, and used fictitious characters instead of real people. The movie begins at 11 p.m. on Sunday night with a vaguely ominous scene in which the ship's captain tells his crew not to say anything that might unduly alarm the passengers. There's a rumor that the ship is entering an area of water filled with ice bergs and floes and such—one of the officers, Lanchester (John Longden), says, "I wonder who sets these rumors afloat," one of the few bits of humor, intentional or otherwise, in the film. We spend most of the movie in the company of a handful of upper-class passengers who are drinking and playing poker (we see no one from steerage and only a few crew members). Chief among them are the elderly Mr. Rool (Franklin Dyall) who is confined to a wheelchair, and his wife, son, and pregnant daughter-in law; a minister whom everyone calls Padre; the tipsy, carefree Dandy (Monty Banks); and a bounder named Tate-Hughes who is cheating on his wife with a saucy young lady. About 20 minutes into the film, the ship hits an iceberg though no one takes the bump seriously until alarm bells start going off. Lanchester tells Rool, in his most melodramatic delivery, "The ship has three hours to live!" As women and children are called first, most of the pathos of the next hour involves decisions about whether or not to go (Mrs. Rool refuses to leave without her husband). The ship's band continues playing upbeat tunes trying to keep everyone calm, but the loading of the lifeboats becomes a helter-skelter affair; in one brief scene, two men get into a fistfight trying to get in a lifeboat until a crew member shoots them both. Dandy has a moment of hysteria, then calms down and joins the other men in the lounge to keep up their civilized drinking until the end. After the barful of men sing a drinking song ("Drunk last night, drunk the night before, gonna get drunk tonight like I've never been drunk before"), they hear the band launch into "Nearer, My God, to Thee," and we know the end is near.  

This British-made film has the usual weaknesses of an early talkie: overdone acting, awkwardly delivered dialogue, and no background score, but the scenes of panic at the lifeboats are well done—just don't expect anything like what James Cameron gave us in the 1997 TITANIC, or even what 20th Century Fox did in the 1953 TITANIC. A handful of the actors might be recognized: Madeline Carroll, as the pregnant wife, was the heroine of Hitchcock's THE 39 STEPS; John Stuart, as Rool's son, had a long career with supporting roles in over 100 movies; Longden, the officer (pictured at left in uniform), was a detective in Hitchcock's early thriller BLACKMAIL; Banks was married to comic actress Gracie Fields. Rather than attempt a spectacular special effect as the ship finally sinks, the screen instead goes to black and we hear the awful roar of hundreds of people facing their doom—it's quite effective. It's a bit strange to realize that this was made less than 20 years after the real disaster, so most of the survivors would still have been alive. [YouTube]

ANOTHER MAN’S POISON (1951)

Mystery writer Bette Davis lives in a large house on the outskirts of an English village. Her husband has lived apart from her for some time, though he's returned recently and stranger Gary Merrill has come looking for him. Surprise #1: hubby and Merrill were partners in crime, and Merrill has come looking to get his half of the stash from a recent bank robbery. Surprise #2: Davis has just killed hubby because he was an abusive blackmailer. When the nosy village animal doctor (Emlyn Williams) drops in, Merrill poses as the husband, since few of the locals had actually met him. Meanwhile, Davis is carrying on an affair with the handsome and considerably younger Anthony Steel (pictured), the boyfriend of her secretary. Oh, and Davis has a horse named Fury. All these plot strands eventually collide, leading to full-blooded melodramatics, a couple of outlandish plot contrivances, and a poisoning (hence the title). This isn't a great movie, but it's fun, mostly due to Davis' over-the-top performance, puffing on cigarettes, tossing her hair around, and braying at anyone in earshot. She gets to toss off a few fun lines now and then. When Steel and Murray arrive not long after Merrill, she announces, sounding like Margo Channing, "The night air teems with unexpected guests." Later she says to Steel, "For a man, you have disgracefully long eyelashes." No one else can keep up with her, though Merrill, her real-life husband at the time, is fine, and the sly Williams almost steals a couple of scenes. It's based on a play and, despite a few scenes shot in the great outdoors, is stagy throughout, though with the house being so dark and gloomy, it feels like a film noir that might turn into a horror movie at any moment. [TCM]

THE GIRL NEXT DOOR (1953)

After a star-making whirlwind tour, singer and dancer June Haver decides to settle down for a while and buys a home in Scarsdale. She thinks she's moving to a rustic place "out in the country," but she's actually got a huge, ultra-modern suburban house, complete with charming next-door neighbors, widowed comic-strip artist Dan Dailey and his young son, Billy Gray. They meet cute during her huge house-warming bash when a flock of pigeons and some barbecue smoke from his yard almost squelch the fun in her yard, but soon they’re quite the cuddly item—until Gray, feeling the father-son bond threatened, expresses his disapproval of his dad’s new beau. This leads to the usual hurt feelings and misunderstandings that crop up in Hollywood domestic comedies until the preordained happy ending in which the three of them work it all out. For a time, this is a breezy, colorful, well-paced musical comedy. Haver and Dailey have good chemistry and create characters that keep threatening to be interesting, and they get good support from Dennis Day, as her agent (pictured between Haver and Dailey), and Cara Williams as her close friend. Their characters are flat but their mismatched romance provides some humor. Billy Gray, best known as Bud on Father Knows Best, is fine, and Natalie Schafer (Mrs. Howell on Gilligan's Island) appears briefly as a buzz-kill babysitter. There are quite a few songs, most memorably the opener "We Girls of the Chorus" which plays out under the credits, and Dailey and Haver get some good dances. There are also a couple of cute animated sequences in which the human characters are presented in the form of Dailey's comic strip characters. But when the relationship story between Haver and Dailey gets derailed by Gray's jealousy, it all slows down and becomes too predictable. Still, it's an enjoyable enough small-scale 50's musical. [FMC]

MORE (1969)

Handsome Stefan, a recent college graduate from Germany, decides to take some time to travel through Europe to find himself (it was the 60s, after all) before settling down. In Paris, he loses all his money gambling, but he makes friends with the scruffy Charlie who helps him out. Soon he meets up with American girl Estelle. Charlie warns him about her but he falls for her anyway; they get high, have sex, and make plans to meet in Ibezia where she lives at a hotel run by the somewhat mysterious Dr. Wolf who is rumored to be an ex-Nazi. When Stefan gets there, she proves hard to find, and when he does find her, she's a little weird and distant, and shacking up with a woman named Cathy with whom she is obviously on intimate terms. It's also possible that she's boffing Dr. Wolf. Eventually, Stefan gets Estelle to go away with him to a deserted part of the island and they romp about uninhibitedly, sunbathing in the nude, getting high and having more sex (it was the 60s, after all). Paradise is lost, however, when Cathy stops by, looking for some heroin—apparently Dr. Wolf supplies it to some of the locals. Soon Stefan finds Estelle passed out on the rocks and decides he wants to try some of this stuff. Things go downhill from here as the two go through cycles of addiction which they try to break by taking acid. Ultimately, Estelle is left to an unknown fate and Stefan, hunting for her, shoots up in an alleyway and dies with a mangy dog sniffing around his body and only Charlie there to mourn him.

Like THE VALLEY, which was made three years later, this is an early Barbet Schroeder film with a Pink Floyd soundtrack and a druggy 60s vibe. However, despite the era and the trappings, this is neither a psychedelic trip movie nor a "just say no" message film. The various instances of folks getting high are shot objectively with no colors or effects or frills. There is much more Pink Floyd music here than in THE VALLEY, but there is less plot and, if possible, less characterization. It's difficult to sympathize with either lead character because they are both zeros, in personality and in backstory. The actors, Klaus Grunberg and Mimsy Farmer, are pretty and their acting is adequate, but Schroeder hasn't given them much to work with. Michael Chanderli as Charlie actually has more personality than either lead. At one point, Grunberg relates a story about a cult of sun-worshipers in India who sit in the sun hoping for sensation or enlightenment until they shrivel up and die, and I think that's supposed to illuminate the narrative (there is a lot of sun and searching for sensation), but really, I think everything this movie has to offer is on its surface. I liked one of Grunberg's pronouncements about his Germanic personality: "Where's pleasure without tragedy?" That could also illuminate things, but the pleasure presented here is pretty sparse. [DVD]

TWIN HUSBANDS (1933)

A man (John Miljan) wakes up in a mansion, confused, unsure of his whereabouts, apparently a victim of amnesia. He questions his butler who tells him he is the wealthy Jerry Werrenden. But Miljan isn't quite as confused as he seems; he punches the butler in the face, knocking him out, then interrogates him again, getting him to admit he's an actor hired to play a butler. Miljan is actually a gentleman thief known as the Sparrow.  Soon he finds out what's going on. Werrenden's wife Chloe (Shirley Grey) has conspired with Colton (Monroe Owsley), her husband's business partner, to swindle hubby out of $200,000 of bonds, supposedly the last of the estate that Werrenden has frittered away. Miljan is a dead ringer for the husband, so the two drugged him (in circumstances not made clear) and kidnapped him in hopes that he would help them out. He agrees to pose as Warrenden, meet the family banker, known as the Colonel (Hale Hamilton), and accept the bonds. That meeting seems to go well, but on the receipt for the bonds, the Colonel has penned in $300,000 instead of $200,000. Who's conning who? And where's the husband during these shenanigans?

The plot twists and turns continue, but it wouldn't be fair to spoil the rest of the surprises in this interesting pre-Code film. The story is quite clever, but because it's from a Poverty Row studio (Invincible Pictures), the production isn't quite up to par, so much of the plot is unveiled through dialogue and exposition rather than action. Suffice to say that by the end of the movie, practically every character has been shown to be guilty of something either illegal or immoral and yet only one gets punished in any sense of the word, and even that one manages to elude the law. All the actors are fine; Miljan is a bit bland in a role that William Powell could have done better in his sleep, but he's alright. Grey, who never broke out of B films, has a bit of a Myrna Loy thing going on, and Owsley (in my eyes a dead ringer for Paul Reubens, and pictured at right with Grey) makes a nicely slimy character.  Available on DVD from Alpha, and though it's a dicey print, it's definitely worth watching.  [DVD]

THE BLACK TORMENT (1964)

This little-known movie was marketed as a horror film along the lines of the period shockers which came out from Hammer and American International in the 60's, and the recent DVD is similarly pitched, but I suspect horror fans would be disappointed. The deceptive ads are a shame because this is a well-made Gothic melodrama, rather like a PBS adaptation of a Bronte novel. John Turner is an English lord who returns to his estate with a new wife (Heather Sears). His homecoming is not happy: first, villagers think that Turner is responsible for the brutal murder of a young woman in the woods a few days earlier, though he insists he was far away with Sears. Second, the ghost of his first wife, who killed herself a few years earlier, has been seen around the house. Turner's father (Raymond Huntley) is mute and wheelchair-bound due to a stroke, and relies on Ann Lynn, the sister of Turner's first wife, as his caretaker--she's the only one who can interpret his sign language. Other characters include an accountant (Peter Arne) who seems suspicious from the word go, a butler, a burly blacksmith, and a local slattern who you know will wind up dead. The solution is not supernatural at all, and is in fact easy to figure out, especially if you are at all familiar with Gothic novel conventions, but the movie is still quite watchable. It actually seems better made and acted than the average Hammer/AIP shocker of the era (and it looks OK, although the widescreen movie should have been letterboxed by Image for their DVD). Turner makes a good hero (or is he a villain?) and Arne is fine as well. Worth catching as long as you're not expecting blood and monsters.  [DVD]

FLAME OF STAMBOUL (1951)

On a cruise ship docked in Istanbul, American Richard Denning is given the brush-off by the French Lisa Ferraday, who leaves the cruise and is given a job by the shady Donald Randolph: impersonate an exotic dancer named Marie, the Flame of Stamboul, go to Cairo, seduce a rich Egyptian, and steal some jewels from his collection. In Cairo, a very drunk Denning gets off the cruise ship and goes to the club where Ferraday is performing, making a scene and getting slipped a mickey by the bartender (Nestor Paiva). The next morning, we discover that Denning is a spy and Paiva is his local contact. Their assignment, which in good Mission: Impossible style will be disavowed by the U.S. consulate if they are caught, is to find out the identity of a powerful spy known only as the Voice. It turns out that: 1) Randolph is working for the Voice; 2) Ferraday doesn't realize that she will be, too, when the assignment changes from stealing jewels to stealing top secret defense documents; 3) Denning figures out that Ferraday is the Flame but doesn't know how much she knows about her criminal friends. Norman Lloyd appears as an American crook who has a past with Denning; he works for the Voice, but is willing to switch his allegiance to Denning for enough money. George Zucco, who mostly only appears in deep shadow, is the mastermind Voice, and after some fisticuffs, torture, murder, and some apparent double-crossing, the climax occurs at his dark den.  

What this 50's Columbia B-spy thriller has going for it: an atmosphere like that of a 40's Warners B-spy thriller, a solid 20 minutes or so in the beginning, and good supporting performances: from Lloyd (who in his relatively small role, steals every scene he's in), from the handsome Randolph (who comes off as more exotic than the leading lady) and Zucco (pictured above, to the left of Lloyd), in one of his last roles before he had to retire due to ill health--which may explain his lack of physical activity in this movie; he is mostly seen sitting down. Denning is a B-movie hunk (meaning in good shape with a comic-book hero jawline, but generally colorless) who strikes no sparks with the bland Ferraday, who doesn't even dance very well. Still, the plot had just enough twists and turns to keep me interested.  [TCM]

FAHRENHEIT 451 (1966)

In the future, possession of books is forbidden—imagination leads to unrest with reality and feelings of inequality—and since all buildings have been fireproofed, firemen are now enforcers, setting fires, burning caches of books that some poor souls have kept, and sometimes burning the houses in which they are found. Montag is a fireman who is unhappy with his family life; his wife Linda, like most people in this society, are perfectly happy not to read, and just to watch TV shows which present constant soap opera narratives in which the viewers themselves can sometimes play a part. This has also led to him becoming curious about the content of these books (everything from Lolita to Dickens to Mein Kampf), and he has begun sneaking home a book or two from each fire he helps set. Just as he's about to get a promotion at work, he becomes involved with Clarisse, a young neighbor girl who, he soon discovers, belongs to a secret society of book-readers. After his wife overdoses on sleeping pills—a common event in this society which is treated as a minor medical call by two technicians who pump her stomach and replace her blood—Montag participates in a book burning at which the woman caught with the books kills herself by dropping a match on the kerosene-soaked volumes. This shakes him to his core and when Clarisse's house is raided and she vanishes, he becomes a rogue fireman, on the run to find Clarisse and the book people.

When Ray Bradbury died last week, I was truly sad. The first "adult" books I read were Bradbury short story collections, and his atmospheric fantasy novel Something Wicked This Way Comes remains one of my most-loved books. Oddly, I had never read Fahrenheit 451, maybe because I saw the movie when it came out—I would have been 10 or 11—so I re-watched this film, directed by Francois Truffaut, in anticipation of finally reading the book. Even when I was young, this struck me as an odd movie. For starters, it's set in England, not in Bradbury's beloved Midwest. It was Truffaut's first English-language film and has a very European feel that makes it feel even more distant from Bradbury. The futuristic visual elements are sparse—widescreen TVs, furniture—though the book burnings are shot nicely, and the powerful scene of the Book Lady starting her own fire (pictured above) is in many ways the climax of the movie, even though it comes about 30 minutes before the end. Oskar Werner (below) is fine as the closed-up, confused Montag, and Cyril Cusack is equally good as his boss, who always refers to Montag in the third person. Both Linda and Clarisse are played by Julie Christie, to neither the betterment nor detriment of the film, though Christie herself is fine in both parts.

The film (and the book, which I've just finished) remains relevant today for several reasons, one of which is the way in which Bradbury foretold the coming of reality TV. The book is even more specific about the lack of imagination which has led to people wanting to be entertained in short bursts and only by "real-life" stories. It's not hard to imagine that today's viewers of Jersey Shore, Real Housewives, and Ice Road Truckers have no interest at all in reading at length about things and people and philosophies that are outside their own immediate sphere of interest. In later years, Bradbury was quoted as saying that Fahrenheit 451 was not about censorship as much as lack of imagination, and indeed, both movie and book are vague about the politics and history of the loss of books; in the novel, he says that official censorship wasn’t necessary—the people banned books themselves. Still, images of burning books will always conjure up battles of censorship, from Nazi Germany to Harry Potter, so I think on this one, Bradbury got it wrong: whatever he intended, it is about loss of imagination and censorship. A movie worth seeing, but don't be like me and wait 40 more years to read the book, which, of course, is better. [DVD]

MYSTERIOUS INTRUDER (1946)

The fifth movie in the Whistler series, a string of B-thrillers related only by a narrating character known as the Whistler whom we only see in shadow.  In this one, Richard Dix is an aging and somewhat shady private eye who agrees to help an old man who runs a phonograph store who is desperate to find a young girl from his past named Elora Lund.  A couple days later, someone claiming to be Lund shows up and the old man tells her he has some valuable property that once belonged to her mother, but before he can get it, a thug named Pontos breaks in, kills the old man, and kidnaps the girl.  It turns out the girl was just an accomplice of Dix's named Freda so she's freed, but soon the real Lund shows up, having read a newspaper story about the incident.  The treasure is a small stash of rare wax cylinder recordings made by famous Swedish singer Jenny Lind.  Pontos winds up killed by the cops, and Freda, who's not been on the up-and-up about her role in all this, isn't long for the world, either.  Who is Dix going to work for, himself or Lund?  And who is the mysterious person willing to kill to get the recordings?  The mystery story is fairly well worked-out, and there's a good supporting cast here, including Mike Mazurki as Pontos, Regis Toomey as Freda's landlord, and Barton MacLane and Charles Lane as the cops.  Dix is the weak link; playing a second-rate Sam Spade (of more ambiguous morality than Bogart's detective), he's drab and sluggish, and MacLane and Lane outshine him, though a cardinal rule of this kind of movie is that the detective, whether he's good or bad or conflicted, should always be more interesting than the cops.  This is not a total failure, but despite its short running time (60 minutes), it drags more often than it should.  [TCM]

A SCANDAL IN PARIS (1946)

This historical melodramatic comedy of manners (based on the life of a real person, or at least the book he wrote about himself) should have been more fun than it is; everyone seems to be working at half-energy. George Sanders is Eugene Francois Vidocq, born in a prison in 1775 and raised in the gutter,. When we pick up his story—told by himself in flashback—he has just escaped prison with his pal Emil (Akim Tamiroff). On the way to Paris, the shabby twosome stop in a village where they are recruited by an artist to pose for a painting of St. George (the presentable looking Vidocq, pictured) on a horse fighting the Dragon (the scruffy Emil). When the painting is finished, they steal the horse and more disreputable adventures begin. Vidocq takes his name from a gravestone while he's being charming to a rich lady (Alma Kruger) so he can get his hands on her jewels, though he's also being charming to Kruger’s sweet, wholesome daughter and to a cabaret singer (who happens to be "dating" the chief of police ). He steals the jewels while the police chief (Gene Lockhart) is an overnight guest at the house, then to show him up, pretends to do some sleuthing to find the jewels before the police can. Lockhart is demoted and Sanders winds up being given the position of Chief. He installs Emil and a bunch of cronies as employees in the Bank of Paris, intending to pull off a huge robbery, but soon love (not to mention his earlier stint at St. George which comes back to haunt him) has him contemplating turning over a new leaf.

This being made under the Production Code, Sanders can have lots on larceny in his heart, but can't get away with too much of it if he's to wind up the hero. Most of the film has a light satirical tone, though the plot takes some dark turns near the end with the murder and suicide of two major characters. Sanders is fine in the last half, but I think the part could have been carried off better by someone with more verve, an Errol Flynn type, perhaps. Carole Landis is the singer and Alan Napier is Kruger's husband. This was directed by Douglas Sirk, before his turn toward glossy Technicolor melodrama in the 50's (MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION, WRITTEN ON THE WIND). The whole thing seems a little too calculated and distant to be fun. I did enjoy Sanders' droll observation about adultery: "Sometimes the chains of matrimony are so heavy, they must be carried by three." [DVD]

THE HOODLUM PRIEST (1961)

Young punk Keir Dullea gets out of prison and his buddy (Don Joslyn) takes him to see a guy (Don Murray); it seems like they're planning a heist, but Murray is actually a Catholic priest and teacher who feels his mission is to tend to street people and the down-and-out who already have two strikes against them.  Instead of going to a parent/teacher conference meeting, Murray spends the night at a seedy jazz club tending to members of his flock, which gets him in trouble with his superiors. After Dullea gets involved in a fistfight, Murray finds a high-powered lawyer (Larry Gates) to represent the boy; he also gets Dullea a job at a food-packing plant, though the boss' brother resents Dullea's presence. Dullea strikes up a relationship with a rich girl, but things go south quickly when he is accused (wrongfully) of stealing from his place of work and is fired; Dullea and Joslyn pull a robbery at the plant and accidentally kill the brother. Murray and Gates, who are trying to build a halfway house for young wayward men, keep fighting for Dullea, but ultimately they cannot stop the state from executing him. In the last scene, just before the halfway house is set to open, Joslyn, in a fit of rage over Dullea's death, breaks in, trashes a room, and passes out before Murray gently puts him to bed.

Based on the true story of Father Charles Dismas Clark who actually did start such a halfway house in St. Louis called Dismas House (named after one of the thieves who was promised heaven when he was crucified with Christ) which is still in operation. Though the film is meant to be inspirational, it doesn't avoid the grimness of its subject, nor does it make Clark into a saint; as is pointed out by other characters, not all of his moves, well intentioned as he is, are kosher (so to speak). The handsome and stalwart Murray (pictured to the left of Dullea) is good, especially in a climactic scene where he tries to talk Dullea into giving himself up while the police are trying to smoke him out of an abandoned slum building. I especially liked Larry Gates, best known for a long-running role on The Guiding Light, who made his character's concern with and for the priest seem real. The opening sequence, before we know what's going on, feels like the tense prelude to a gay 3-way. The look of the film alternates between artsiness and cinema vérité and generally works nicely to accentuate the mood.   [TCM]

BITTER SWEET (1940)

This is a Jeanette MacDonald/Nelson Eddy operetta.  You may not need to read any further as you probably know right now if you'll love it or hate it. I'll admit going in that I am not an operetta fan, nor am I a fan of Eddy, who always seemed way too stiff and uncomfortable on screen to have been a big star. I have a bit more tolerance for MacDonald depending on the role. This film, based on an early musical by Noel Coward, begins in 1891 London as MacDonald, about to be married off to a stuffy diplomat—he thinks her singing is too boisterous—runs off with her piano teacher (Eddy). They head off to Vienna where they get married, hang out with Eddy's slightly disreputable but likable friends (Felix Bressart and Curt Bois), and meet up with an military man (George Sanders) and his British buddy (Ian Hunter). Sanders gets her a job at a nightclub, but there's a catch: being the star of the show also means becoming Sanders' mistress. Once she figures out the score, she decides to quit, but when she learns that a famous impresario will be in the audience that night, she returns to sing some songs from an operetta that Eddy has written but is having a hard time getting produced. Sadly, the evening ends badly:  Sanders acts like an ass to MacDonald, Eddy acts like an ass to Sanders, a duel ensues, and Eddy is killed. MacDonald rises to the occasion, gets the operetta produced, and has her moment of triumph singing its lead role. 

Somehow I can't imagine that Coward's original was quite so serious; there is some fun to be had here and there, mostly thanks to Bressart and Bois, and to Diana Lewis who plays a young lady with a speech impediment who marries MacDonald's ex-fiancé, but the run-of-the-mill soap opera plot is predictable and plodding. Eddy tries but doesn’t really seem much more exciting than the stuffy diplomat. Sanders, in a Prussian crew cut, is good as the villain, and the always welcome Sig Ruman adds some needed levity. The film bursts at the seams with bright colors and fun costumes, and since someone is always asking MacDonald and Eddy to sing, there is constant music (and usually dancing as well). MacDonald makes this worth seeing if you're already a fan or are on the fence about operettas, but otherwise it's probably not your cup of tea. [TCM]

MERRILL'S MARAUDERS (1962)

I know the writer and director Samuel Fuller mostly through his scruffy B-movies (THE CRIMSON KIMONO, THE NAKED KISS) but this film shows what he could do with a bigger budget and full studio backing--although, unsurprisingly given Fuller's reputation, he fought with Warner Bros. over this film before it was released and that was pretty much the end of his A-movie days. Shown on TCM's Memorial Day weekend lineup, this WWII film is based on the true story of a volunteer special forces unit in Burma under the command of General Frank Merrill. According to this film, the specific mission of the 3,000 men was to sneak through jungle and mountains to attack an important Japanese supply base in Walawbum. After that success, however, General Stilwell, worried about the possibility that Japan will invade India and meet up with German forces, asks Merrill to take his men further. Each time the men, depleted not just by casualties but also by sickness, hunger and mental strain, believe they'll be on their way home, Merrill keeps pushing them on to one more objective.  The film consists of battle scenes (guns and hand-to-hand) interspersed with bits of the stories of the men as they trudge on.  

Fuller, who fought in WWII, made movies that both glorified the American soldier and showed clearly the insanity of war. This film's weight is on the glory side, though there are a couple of effective downbeat scenes, one of scattered bodies of the dead, another of dozens of wounded and exhausted men hoping desperately for relief but instead being rallied to go on, for balance. Jeff Chandler plays Merrill in his usual somewhat wooden fashion, but the movie really belongs to Ty Hardin (of the hit TV western Bronco) as Stockton, Merrill's second-in-command. Hardin (pictured at left, to the right of Chandler) does a fine job going from fully engaged assistant and "cheerleader" for the men to something of a dispirited nemesis to Merrill. Still, in the clutch near the end of the movie, when Merrill has a non-fatal heart attack while trying to muster the men to move on, Stockton knows what his duty is and performs it. A handful of other characters come alive: Peter Brown (above right with Hardin) as the feisty Bullseye, Will Hutchins (another TV cowboy) as the young Chowhound, and Charles Briggs as Muley, the keeper of Eleanor, a pack mule. Briggs provides both comic relief and tears. Perhaps the most powerful moment in a movie full of explosions on battlegrounds is when rough, tough Claude Akins begins crying uncontrollably when a native woman offers him her rice. The action is not nearly as graphic as the war films of today, but this is still very much worth seeing.  Years later, Fuller got to make the war movie he really wanted to make, THE BIG RED ONE. [TCM]

JOURNEY'S END (1930)

Based on a popular play of the time (which was successfully revived on Broadway a couple of years ago), this is a character study of a group of men in the trenches in WWI. The respected commander Stanhope (Colin Clive) has been on the lines for three years; his nerves have reached the breaking point but he remains stoic on the outside, largely because he's become an alcoholic. His second-in-command, an older man known as "Uncle" (Ian MacLaren), is quiet and likable, and helps Stanhope keep an even keel. There's an easy-going lieutenant (Billy Bevan) who's always ready with a laugh, and a cook who complains about his constraints—his tea tastes like onions and he grouses like hell when he gets canned apricots instead of pineapple. The men go about their days and nights at the front, only a hundred yards away from the Germans, with a grudging sense of fatalism, the only exception being Hibbert (Anthony Bushell), a nervous youth who wants to get medical leave because of his headaches. Stanhope tries to talk him out of it, then shame him out of it, and eventually has to use the threat of shooting him as a deserter. But Stanhope is thrown for a loop when Raleigh (David Manners), a younger school friend of his, arrives for his first stint in the trenches. Stanhope is in love with Raleigh's sister and he's afraid that Raleigh will catch on to Stanhope's deteriorating mental state and write back home about it.

There’s not a strong narrative here—mostly we watch the soldiers talk and laugh and bicker, and get through the endless hours of boredom with the distant sound of guns and bombs in the background until something happens, and nothing much happens until the end; the men carry out a quick sabotage mission, cutting through wire in the German lines so they can carry out a information-gathering raid the next day, and of course not everyone survives. Though stagy, with most of the action occurring on a single set, and a bit too long, this is still a fairly compelling drama thanks to good dialogue and strong performances from all, especially Clive who manages to seem neurotic and stable at the same time. It's a pre-Code movie, but I was still surprised to hear so many "damns" and "hells," given the huge controversy over one little "damn" nine years later in GONE WITH THE WIND. James Whale, who directed this on stage in England, came to America to make the movie and apparently never looked back. Clive (pictured above tending to a wounded man) worked with Whale again, most notably as the meddling scientist in FRANKENSTEIN and BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN. [YouTube]

SWEET AND LOW-DOWN (1944)

If you've seen one classic-era film about jazz bands, or indeed about any kind of musicians, then nothing about this movie will surprise you in the least. A young man with talent is discovered in unlikely circumstances, gets his big break, falls in love, gets cocky and falls in with the wrong element, loses his choice job and his girl only to regain his humility and be redeemed at the end when he gets his job and girl back. Here, James Cardwell is the young man, a working-class Chicago guy who supports his widowed mom and family, and plays killer trombone in his spare time. His younger brother tricks Benny Goodman (playing himself) into listening to Cardwell play, and he is immediately offered a job with the band. Lynn Bari is the girl singer who has apparently gone through most of the men in the band, but she's still a good sort, though her manager (Allen Joslyn) eggs her on to want more money and better billing. Cardwell plays well, and at his first gig, falls for the young Linda Darnell, who becomes something of a groupie, but Cardwell quickly gets too big for his britches and, pushed by Joslyn, leaves Goodman, taking Bari and the musicians with him to start his own band. When that enterprise fails, everyone goes back to Goodman except Cardwell, who has too much pride. Months later, when Goodman comes through Chicago again, will Cardwell be humble enough to take his old job back? 

This a typical big studio B-film with the unusual selling point of Goodman and his band, who perform several numbers which are the highlights of the movie. No big hits are played, though the vocal novelty "Hey Bub, Let’s Have a Ball" is fun. Goodman isn’t much of an actor, and neither is Cardwell.  Both female leads are fine (though they look an awful lot alike), as is Jack Oakie as the band manager, who has a dream of someday playing trombone in the band; a running gag involves Oakie putting bespectacled first trombonist John Campbell on a carrot diet so his eyesight will improve and he’ll be drafted, giving Oakie a chance in the band. Child star Dickie Moore, who was almost 20 by now, has a small role as a military cadet. Every cliché in the book is present here, but it's all handled fairly well.  [TCM]

THE STUDIO MURDER MYSTERY (1929)

Richard (Fredric March) won a talent contest and his prize is a starring role in a new movie directed by Rupert Borka (Warner Oland). Borka, however, thinks Richard is a terrible actor (and is bothered because he suspects Richard is sleeping with his wife) and is ready to take the role away from him. Richard's not a popular guy: his mistress Helen is waiting for him to get a divorce from his wife Blanche (Florence Eldridge), but Blanche confronts Helen and tells her that Richard is a scoundrel who will never marry her; Helen's brother Ted harbors a hatred of Richard for leading his sister on; Helen's father, a night watchman at the studio, has been unaware of the dalliance until now. One night, Richard is seen leaving the studio with Borka, but the next day, Richard's dead body is found on one of the sets at the studio, and all of the above folks seem to have motives. As the cops investigate, so does screenwriter Tony (Neil Hamilton), who, having a bit of a crush on Helen himself, is invested in clearing her name.

This film has many of the weaknesses of the early talkies, such as limited camera movements and scene set-ups, and the mystery itself barely qualifies as a mystery, as it's quite clear, even before the dead body is found, who did it. But the film is fun for its behind-the-scenes glimpses of the Paramount studio. Fans of Fredric March, a rising star at the time, will enjoy this because he acts with his real-life wife Florence Eldridge. There is an amusing chase scene on a staircase set at the studio, and a nice sped-up fisticuffs scene near the end. Doris Hill, as Helen, is deadly dull, but the rest of actors are fine, including Eugene Pallette as a cop (who has a running-gag feud going on with Hamilton, both pictured above), Chester Conklin as another watchman, and Lane Chandler as a writer working on Borka's movie. Beware: this is not on DVD, and the print I saw on YouTube has a seriously flawed soundtrack—it's listenable but barely.  Worth it only for fans of early Hollywood. [YouTube]