HIRED WIFE (1941)

Brian Aherne is the head of a small but successful cement company. Rosalind Russell is his "girl Friday," the secretary who keeps things running smoothly; she also has a thing for Aherne though he's clueless. Virginia Bruce is a hot blonde model whom Aherne wants to hire for a new ad campaign. When a consortium tries to take over Aherne's company, his lawyer (Robert Benchley) advises him to get married and put his cash and assets in his wife's name to protect them. He decides to marry Bruce, but Russell makes Bruce think that Aherne is insulting her by trying to buy her, so she says no. Russell says yes, and they get married by a small-town justice of the peace (Chester Clute). She moves in with him, but to ensure there's no hanky-panky, Benchley also moves in and sleeps in Ahern's bedroom, with Russell in a guest room. However, when Aherne finds out what Russell did, he starts openly dating Bruce. Then it turns out that the weddings that Clute has been performing are invalid, so all bets are off as Russell and Bruce fight over Aherne.

This is a mildly paced screwball comedy, the kind that needs a good cast to put it over, and this one does have a pretty fair cast that helps to paper over some of the screenplay problems. Sometimes (AUNTIE MAME, HIS GIRL FRIDAY, THE WOMEN) I love Roz Russell, but more often I don't, so I’m pleased to count this in the plus column. She gives just the right amount of juice to what could have been an unpleasant character (for my money, Katherine Hepburn in BRINGING UP BABY goes way off the rails). Aherne is not my favorite actor, but he's nicely in control here; I generally always like Bruce. As usual, Benchley is very funny and not really given quite enough to do. I haven't even mentioned the plotline involving handsome and elegant John Carroll (pictured with Russell) who does a nice job as a gold-digger who sets his cap for Bruce. There are plotholes galore but the cast and the brisk direction by William S. Seiter make this generally enjoyable. [TCM]

UNHOLY LOVE (1932)

Theoretically, this is a modern retelling of Flaubert's Madame Bovary, set among the upper class in Rye, New York, but aside from the central situation, it bears little resemblance to the novel (as I recall it from my college days). H.B. Warner is a doctor who is called to the bedside of a dying man, the father of Joyce Compton. Warner's son (Lyle Talbot), who had been attending the man, can do no more. Neither, as it turns out, can Warner. But he is surprised to discover that Talbot and Compton have been secretly married—the expectation was that he would marry Lila Lee, a woman closer to his own class. No one expects it to last: Lee says to Warner, "He's brought home another stray kitten," and Warner replies, "Yes, and we're all going to get fleas." Soon, after the couple gets high-hatted at the fancy 400 Club, Compton does get a little itchy, but two tennis-playing playboys offer to scratch that itch. During the summer, Compton buys a cottage so she can shack up with one of the playboys but Warner finds out about it and tries to keep the truth from his son; things generally go south from there until, when the playboy tires of her, she tries to kill herself.

This B-movie exemplifies many of the problems that plagued early talkies: an immobile camera, stilted acting, stagy set-ups, no background score, and weak writing. The one interesting twist is in the casting: the dark, sultry Lila Lee plays the good girl, and the blond, wholesome Joyce Compton plays the bad girl. Lee is fine but her talents feel mostly untapped; despite getting higher billing than Compton, she doesn't have much to do. Compton doesn't seem very naughty—her voice is high and bouncy like that of the fine comic actress Una Merkel—and her character is given almost no background, so unlike with Madame Bovary, we have very little reason to empathize with her, or even to dislike her as a standard homewrecker. I like Talbot (pictured with Compton), but by the halfway point, he's largely written out of the plot. He does get a good line early on: "Don't hate me just because I'm a tongue-tied mug." Jason Robards Sr. is one of the playboys. A ponderous melodrama, only for fans of the cast members. [YouTube]

NOWHERE TO GO (1958)

In an impressive opening sequence with a jazzy score and a film noir feel, con man George Nader escapes from a British prison using explosives smuggled up to him by rope and arrives at a flat which his buddy Bernard Lee has gotten for him while its owner is away. In a flashback, we see how Nader, young and charming, scammed an older woman out of a collection of rare coins, sold them and put the money in a safe deposit box, and allowed himself to be caught, thinking that because he's American and a first-time offender, he'd get a light sentence. Instead he gets ten years, hence the breakout. Nader goes to retrieve the money but is scared away by a policeman. He wants more help from Lee, but Lee wants a bigger cut of the money. Meanwhile, a lovely young woman (Maggie Smith) shows up looking for the owner of the flat. In the way of such ventures, nothing goes right for Nader: there’s a double cross and a death, and then, because of the headlines over the death, the underworld figures that might help Nader give him the cold shoulder. The only person left is Smith who eventually figures out that Nader is in big trouble, but she's fallen for him so she takes him out to the country to stay with her family. Unfortunately, even out there on a farm, Nader winds up with nowhere to go.

Though not a masterpiece, this is a nice example of latter-day film noir. Nader (pictured) is good playing a bad guy who has few redeeming qualities, yet for whom we still have some sympathy. His surface charm feels exactly that—only on the surface—but we still keep holding out hope that he'll get free and straighten up. Maggie Smith, in her first movie and at only 24, looks impossibly young, and plays her character with a nice mix of innocence and guile. Lee, famous as M in the earlier James Bond movies, is fine as the greedy friend. The movie looks great with superbly crisp black & white cinematography; the first half is fairly well paced, but the second half drags, partly because nothing can match the exciting opening scene. Good jazz score by Dizzy Reece. [TCM]

FEAR (1947)

This Poverty Row film noir adaptation of Crime and Punishment has some of the typical hallmarks of a below-B budget movie including cheap-looking sets, an underpopulated look due to a lack of extras, and some screenplay loopholes, but the stylish direction by Alfred Zeisler knocks this one up a notch and makes it worth seeing. Larry (Peter Cookson) is a struggling medical student living in a shabby apartment. He's behind in his rent, and when he gets a letter telling him the college has had to cancel all their scholarships (first screenplay weirdness), he takes his father's engraved watch to Prof. Stanley who acts as an unofficial campus pawnbroker, but Stanley won't give him enough to cover rent. The next evening at a college diner, the guys all badmouth Stanley, saying he's no better than "a leech or a black beetle." Inspired by the chat, Larry returns to Stanley's to kill him and steal money from his locked box. He smashes the professor's head in with a fireplace poker, but before he can get away with the money, visitors at the door scare him away. Suddenly, Larry's luck changes: a journal accepts an article he wrote about "men above the law" and he gets a check for $1000. He also hits it off with Eileen (Anne Gwynne), a young woman he loaned money to earlier who is now working at the diner. But since his watch was found at Stanley's apartment, he also comes to the attention of Inspector Burke (Warren William) who plays cat-and-mouse games with him, first treating him as a sidekick, then trying to get him to admit his guilt. When a housepainter who was in the building at the same time as the murder is arrested, Larry thinks he's all set. But of course, fate has other plans in store.

If you know your Dostoyevsky, you may think you know the resolution, but there's a twist ending that's kind of a cheap trick, though it's also sort of fun. At any rate, it doesn't really spoil the rest of the movie for two reasons: 1) due to weak writing, we don't really care about any of the main characters or their outcomes; 2) the rest of the movie is enjoyable. The acting is slightly better than average for a Monogram cheapie: Cookson holds the screen well—and he's on screen for almost the entire running time—and Gwynne (pictured with Cookson) is fine, though underused. William, only in his early 50s, looks rundown—and indeed he died the next year—but he brings an old pro's touch to the movie. Busy character actor Nestor Pavia slinks in and out as a cop who is constantly following Larry, or at least Larry thinks he is. A very young Darren McGavin, with bleached blond hair, has an amusing bit as a student who tries balancing a beer bottle on his chin. A strong noir atmosphere is present in the murky nighttime look of the film. There are a few very nice directorial touches, including Stanley's murder—we don't see the killing blow, but we do see Stanley fall to the ground and a cup of coffee spills, looking just like blood. A shot of Larry strolling the streets at night and contemplating suicide by stepping in front of a train is also nicely done. [TCM]

QUEEN OF THE AMAZONS (1947)

As you know if you read this blog regularly, I enjoy B-movies of the 30s and 40s. With their cheap sets, unexceptional acting, flimsy scripts, and short running times, they are an acquired taste; today's younger moviegoers, used to more professionalism in any given cable TV program than they'll find in some of these films, probably never watch them. But for me there is something pleasurable about their unpretentious tone, their largely unknown cast members, and sometimes a style so primitive that I think, "Hell, I could have made this in my backyard!" And, of course, there is the pleasure of picking the film apart for its illogic or its plot loopholes or its boring and/or batshit-crazy performances. This movie is really no better or worse than hundreds of other B-movie adventure films, but it deserves to be enshrined in the "so bad it’s almost good" category.

Jean Preston is in India hunting for her fiancé Greg Jones; he was last seen on safari but has vanished.  She and Greg's father learn from two natives named Tondra and Moya that Greg had mysteriously gone off to Africa on a solo safari with Moya as his guide, but before they can tell more, Moya is shot and killed. Leaving the dead body in her hotel room, Jean and Mr. Jones head off to Africa and into the jungle with an entourage including a young—and possibly sinister—admirer named Wayne, a comic-relief cook named Gabby, a handful of natives, and a hunky guide named Gary. We find out, in part through awkward narration from Mr. Jones, that Greg was actually investigating an ivory smuggling gang so they worry that harm has come to him. Actually, he has fallen in love with Zita, the Queen of the title, one of a group of women who survived a shipwreck years ago and have set up their own little village in the wilderness. When our gang gets to Zita's place, they discover that someone with a tie to Zita may be behind the smuggling ring.

The one strong point here is the plot which is as compelling as any average jungle melodrama—imagine Gary as Tarzan and Jean as Jane—but most of it is laid out as exposition. What little action there is comes mostly at the end, in a nicely done battle sequence between the good guys and the bad guys. The rest of the film is made up of bland dialogue scenes interspersed with obvious stock footage of lions and tigers and natives—lots of stock footage. Scenes tend to either end abruptly or take too long to fade away. The acting is mostly dreadful, but of course that's part of the fun. Patricia Morison is a total zero as Jean, as is Keith Richards (not the Rolling Stone) as Wayne. John Miljan is boring as the elder Jones, and Amira Moustafa, in her one starring role, is both exotic and unexciting as Zita. B-movie stalwart Robert Lowery (pictured with Moustafa) is fine as Gary and old pro J. Edward Bromberg does what he can with the underwritten part of Gabby. The best line is Gary's: “Zita, my dear, you're quite a queen.” Certainly not everyone's cup of tea, but my bad movie self was happy. [DVD]

THE SEED OF MAN (1969)

A 50-year truce in a global war has been breached; war has continued and various illnesses are laying waste to the populace. A young couple (Marco Margine and Anne Wiazemsky, pictured) at the airport see TV screens playing footage of the war and head out to the countryside to escape. Along the way, after driving through a particularly long tunnel, they see a schoolbus stopped in the middle of the road with everyone on it dead of the plague. Soon they are stopped by a patrol, checked for signs of plague, and told to leave their car and head off on foot and find a new home. At the seashore, they find a beach house whose owner’s dead body is sprawled out in a chair on the front porch. They set up housekeeping there with Margine turning the house into a museum with, among other things, a typewriter and a huge wheel of cheese on a pedestal. Margine wants a child but Wiazemsky doesn’t want to bring a new life into the world. They encounter a black-shirted paramilitary group on horseback who tell them that procreation is their duty; later, another woman (Annie Giradot) comes by, flirts with Margine and eventually has sex with him, but the jealous Wiazemsky beats her to death, cuts off her leg, and serves it up for dinner that night.

You probably don’t need any more plot summary to decide if this Italian film is your cup of post-apocalyptic tea. The journey-to-the-sea trope reminds me of Cormac McCarthy's recent book The Road (I haven't seen the movie) and the last half of GLEN AND RANDA. Directed by Marco Ferreri and made on the cheap, the film has very few special effects—war footage is obviously black & white newsreel film from WWII—and very little gory make-up (except in two short scenes). There is a gigantic washed-up dead whale (yes, it's a Moby Dick symbol) and a nice moment when the couple see a blimp in the sky and assume it's help on the way but it's actually a Merry Christmas ad for Pepsi. The ending is frustrating on both a narrative and symbolic level. For fans of 60s and/or end-of-the-world films only. [DVD]

GLEN AND RANDA (1971)

We first see Glen and Randa, two young people, frolicking naked near a stream and investigating a rusted car up in a tree—apparently the tree grew through the car. The world into which they were born is post-apocalyptic—apparently due to nuclear war—and the population of America seems to be broken up into small communal camps of people who can barely communicate with each other, let alone set up any kind of government. Glen and Randa have patched together bits of information gleaned from books, comic books, and magazines about the way the country used to be—when they see a horse, they think it’s either a dog or a camel—and Glen wants to find The City, which he thinks is called Metropolis. They meet up with a glad-handing fellow who calls himself the Magician, a self-styled clown/wise man figure who babbles constantly but makes little sense, and with a map he gives them, the two go on the road. They discover Randa is pregnant and eventually reach the West coast, which now is in Idaho, and are befriended by an old man named Sidney Miller living alone on a beach. He lets they stay in a dilapidated trailer (with the skeleton of its previous occupant still stretched out on a couch) and helps them enlarge their vocabulary by writing the names of household objects (like “stoev” and “teve”) on the objects. When Miller tells them that people used to sit and watch TV all night, they plunk themselves down in front of it, staring at the blank screen because they think they should. Glen is certain that if he could just get across the water, he'd find The City, though Sidney tells him that nothing's left past the water.  There’s a birth, a death, a fire, and an Adam & Eve (with a twist) ending.

I don’t review many movies of the 70s because the end of the Production Code and the beginning of the movie rating system really does mark a distinct break between the classic and modern movie eras. But this was one I've wanted to see since I was a teenager. It's a low-budget, scruffy independent film (called "underground" in its day) which was originally released with an X rating because of the male and female full-frontal nudity featured in the opening scene. However, despite one brief sex scene later in the film, this would not raise many eyebrows today—and has indeed been re-rated with an R. It's usually described as science-fiction because of its setting in a future world, but it has very few of the trappings of traditional SF, and is more akin to EASY RIDER in its look and feel. Steve Curry, from the original cast of Hair, does a nice job as the innocent stripling Glen. He's so good, it seems strange that his acting career went nowhere. He has to carry the picture partly because Randa, played by Shelly Plimpton, is barely a character; she has few lines and aside from being pregnant plays no important part in the action. The most shocking scene in the film involves Curry grabbing fish out of a stream and beating them to death on the rocks (not an ASPCA-approved moment). Garry Goodrow is incredibly tedious as the Magician, with most of his monologues seeming improvised. It took fortitude to stick with the movie past his section (roughly the first half-hour), but things did get better. Woodrow Chambliss is effective as the old man, the only character here to have a potentially interesting backstory, and his bonding with Glen and Randa is touching without being overly sentimental. Worth seeing; the satisfying ending makes up a bit for the rough first third. Pictured is Steve Curry. [DVD]

MASK OF THE DRAGON (1951)

Daniel, an American soldier who is heading back home from Korea, agrees to take a valuable jade dragon statuette with him to deliver to a gift shop called the Jade Lotus. He assumes he’s doing a good deed for the Chinese storeowner, but he's unwittingly smuggling uranium into the States. When he arrives in Los Angeles, he is attacked and killed by two thugs but they don't get the dragon; he had mailed it to the wife of his good friend, private eye Phil Ramsey. The rest of the movie is a cat-and-mouse game involving Phil, his wife Ginny, the proprietor of the Jade Lotus, his henchmen, the cops, and a singing TV hostess named Terry. The print of this B-thriller on a Forgotten Noir set from VCI is beautiful; it's a shame that the movie is so bad. Richard Travis, who plays Phil, is a terrible actor, though to be fair, he's no worse than most of the rest of the cast. Sid Melton (familiar to me as Uncle Charley on TVs Make Room for Daddy, far right in the picture at left) is just dreadful as an offensive comic relief thug—a Caucasian making a series of bad jokes about Asian names, as in "Chiang Kai-shek and his cousin Cancelled Check." An actor credited as Mr. Moto (also the jokey name of his character, pictured putting the blindfolded Travis in an armhold) is the serious thug who knows some martial arts moves. The only actors in the movie worth watching are Sheila Ryan as Ginny and Lyle Talbot as a cop. The film, which didn't have much steam to start with, stops dead in its tracks for a country/western number by a TV band. The background score is played primarily on an organ, like in an old soap opera. In the final shot, Travis looks right at the camera and says, "Confucius say, when hero captures crook, time for picture to end." Finally: 1) this is NOT a noir; 2) there is no mask, of a dragon or otherwise. [DVD]

TARZAN’S REVENGE (1938)

Mr. and Mrs. Reed and their daughter Eleanor are on safari in Africa, hoping to take some live animals back to place in zoos, while Eleanor's fiancé Nevin is killing crocodiles on the river. The wealthy Ben Alleu Bey comes on to Eleanor, though she thoroughly rebuffs him. When Eleanor falls and gets stuck in the riverbank mud, Nevin wrings his wussy hands while Tarzan comes swinging in to help her. Safari guide Olaf, a burly guy with a facial twitch, eggs the group on to find the rare white crocodile, leading them toward Bey's palace in the jungle. After some adventures with lions and chimps, Eleanor is snatched by Bey's men, Nevin proves again to be the non-heroic type, and Tarzan again comes to her rescue. This is an unofficial entry in the Tarzan series, made not by MGM but as an indie production by Sol Lesser, so instead of Johnny Weissmuller, Tarzan is played by Glenn Morris (pictured), an Olympic decathlon champ. Morris is a bit goofy looking and a little wooden but serviceable. Olympic swimming champ Eleanor Holm is his leading lady who decides to stay in the jungle with Tarzan at the end. Neither one ever starred in a movie again. There's a good supporting cast including George Barbier as Dad, Hedda Hopper as Mom, C. Henry Gordon as the slimy Bey, George Meeker as the wimpy—and eventually villainous—Nevin, and Joe Sawyer as Olaf. The budget for this was lower than for the MGM films, but the palace sequence is quite impressive, with elaborate sets and a dancing-girls number. This was the last non-franchise Tarzan movie for many years. The film was legal (Edgar Burroughs sold Sol Lesser the rights to one novel) but only MGM and RKO would make Tarzan films until the late 1950s. Quite watchable with adjusted expectations. [TCM]

THE PERILS OF PAULINE (1933 serial)

This is not the legendary silent serial from 1914 which most famously featured its put-upon title heroine tied to railroad tracks; it's not even a remake (even though it has a speeding train behind its title card), it just uses the title of the original attached to a completely different character and plot. Still, this is a top-notch 12-chapter serial. Prof. Hargrave, his daughter Pauline, and his scaredy-cat secretary Dodge are in the Orient searching for the other half of a broken ceramic disc with contains the formula to a poison gas which has been responsible for the destruction of entire ancient civilizations. Hargrave wants to find it, test it to see if it works, and give the formula to the government for safe keeping, but the evil Dr. Bashan and his henchman Fang are hot on his trail, wanting the gas for their own nefarious purposes. Handsome American architect Robert Warde, out of a job because a local civil war, saves Pauline from being kidnapped and ends up tagging along on their quest. After finding the disc half in a Chinese temple, they discover that the disc only has instructions for finding the actual formula on another disc. Hargrave's group, always trailed by Bashan's, goes to Egypt, Singapore, and New York City in search of the disc. Each 20-minute chapter ends with a cliffhanger in which someone, usually Pauline, is in danger from Bashan and his men; the next chapter shows them getting saved, usually by Warde, and moving on to the next temple or jungle or museum where more trouble awaits.

Unlike many of the later serials, this was made by a big studio, Universal, and the first few chapters are much better made than the average B-studio serial. Well-integrated stock footage makes the tumult of the war-torn village effective, and the Tsai Tsin Temple scenes are exciting. From there, things slow down a bit as the formula kicks in: Hargrave's gang finds something; Bashan just misses getting it and plots to steal it from them later. There's a typhoon at sea, a rafting expedition down a jungle river with a dangerous leopard up in the trees, and marauding natives and animals, all run-of-the-mill scenarios for serials. In the last few chapters, a spooky museum and a raging fire in a Manhattan building allow the pace to pick up again, leading to a tidy ending, not just for Hargrave but for Pauline and Warde as well.

At the beginning, Pauline appears to be a girl who can take care of herself, shooting and killing at least one attacker, but eventually she mostly gets in trouble, screams really loud (almost as though she'd heard Pee-Wee Herman’s word of the day), and gets saved by Warde. Evalyn Knapp is adequate but no more as Pauline, though Craig Reynolds (acting under the name Robert Allen, pictured abpve left with Knapp) is fine as Warde. John Davidson, who spent much of the rest of his career as a serial villain, looks evil enough as Bashan (above right), but never gets the chance to bust loose with any over-the-top evil attitude. A British comic actor named Sonny Ray (at left) has the thankless role of Dodge, the cowardly comic relief. He's OK, just used too often—at least once a chapter, he has to shriek or flail or generally mince around with his ass stuck out. His best moment, in Chapter 9, is in the museum where he falls into a plaster trough and comes out looking (and walking) like a mummy. Hargrave (James Durkin) is occasionally referred to as Hargraves and even Hargreaves, sometimes within the same scene. Also with Pat O'Malley as a helpful pilot and Frank Lackteen as the scary-looking Fang. If you've never seen a serial, this might be a good one to start with.  [TCM]

FANTASTIC ARGOMAN (1967)

aka THE INCREDIBLE PARIS INCIDENT   

Here's something different: a movie that combines the superhero and secret agent genres. We first see Argoman, a slightly dumpy masked guy in yellow and black tights, on a mission for the Soviet Union. When he's attacked by two camps of villains, he uses his telepathic powers to get them to kill each other and he escapes, getting a snuff box used by Peter the Great as payment. In his alter-ego as playboy spy Sir Reginald Hoover, he is called upon by Scotland Yard to get back the royal Crown of St. Edward which has been stolen by someone who signs her notes "Jenabell, Queen of the World." It turns out that what she's really after is a gigantic one-of-a kind jewel which has immense powers of its own. What follows is a series of encounters between Argoman and the Queen of the World (and her henchmen). The DVD print is faded and splicy, and the moviemaking itself is lackluster. The problems begin with the tone: lazy camp with no real visual or narrative flair. Roger Browne, as Hoover/Argoman, is boring when out of costume, and a low-rent Adam West-as-Batman when in costume. His character has some promise—he stole the Mona Lisa, he loses his powers for six hours if he has sex—but is neither consistent nor consistently funny. Dominique Boschero is unmemorable as the Queen of the World, though I do like her green glittery outfit with a headdressy helmet. Eduardo Fajardo is OK as Chandra, Hoover's butler/sidekick (pictured with Browne). Whether the problem was a too-low budget or too-paltry imagination, this just doesn't work. Mystery Science Theater 3000 really should have gotten their hands on this one. [DVD]

HARPER (1966)

Detective Lew Harper (Paul Newman) is living in his small office because his wife (Janet Leigh) is divorcing him. He takes on a case for the rich invalid Mrs. Sampson (Lauren Bacall); her husband is missing and, though she doesn't necessarily want him back, she suspects he's shacked up with a woman and wants to who he's with. Either way, the family wants to avoid involving the police, but soon a ransom note arrives. This straightforward detective thriller (not really a film noir despite having a set-up like the film of THE BIG SLEEP—even featuring Bacall, that movie's star) moves through its predictable paces, and what makes it watchable are the interesting characters, mostly red herrings, and actors playing them: Shelley Winters as an alcoholic former movie star who was the latest in a string of Sampson's mistresses; Arthur Hill as the family lawyer and old buddy of Harper's, who may not be completely trustworthy; Pamela Tiffin as Bacall's sexy stepdaughter, Robert Wagner as the family driver and pilot who may be engaged in a dalliance with Tiffin, Julie Harris as a drug-addicted jazz singer and former mistress of Sampson's, and Stother Martin as a new age guru. Newman is fine as the laid-back gumshoe, kind of a very mellow but still manly Sam Spade (and sexy as hell even when he's supposed to be scuzzy and unclean first thing in the morning, as in the above picture), but both Bacall and Leigh are underused. The visual and narrative styles are rather flat, so at two hours, it wears out its welcome, but the last minute—a very 60s touch—is worth sticking around for. Based on a book by crime writer Ross Macdonald—in the book, the character is named Lew Archer. [TCM]

THE DIAMOND WIZARD (1954)

A million dollars is stolen from the U.S. Treasury and a Federal agent on the case in Minneapolis is killed by two British men who are trying to sell synthetic diamonds as real ones. Scotland Yard is worried that a glut of the diamonds, which test as real, could destroy the South African economy. American Dennis O'Keefe, a friend of the dead agent, is called in to work with Scotland Yard on the case. The only clue they have is that one of the killers has eyes of two different colors. By coincidence, O'Keefe meets up with Margaret Sheridan, who is looking for her missing father, a scientist who worked on the H-bomb. It turns out that her dad's latest hobby is working with diamonds. Sure enough, her father is being held captive by crooks who are forcing him to create these new diamonds. The first half of this B-thriller, made in England and directed by leading man O'Keefe, is slow going—too many scenes of people standing around in offices exchanging information. But things pick up nicely in the last 20 minutes after Sheridan is abducted by the bad guys, and during a chase sequence, there's a well-shot scene on an escalator (pictured). A little more of that visual style would have been welcome. O'Keefe is a fine hero; the rest of the cast is rather colorless except for a nice turn by Alan Wheatley as a diamond dealer. If you can get through the slow first half, it's decent viewing. [Netflix streaming]

NIGHT EDITOR (1946)

William Gargan is a world-weary cop with a sweet wife and cute son who is trying break off an affair with spoiled rich sexy blonde Janis Carter, who seems to like things a little rough. One night, while parked near a beach, he tries to tell her goodbye, but she gets into a tussle with him which ends in a torrid kiss. However, at the same time, they see a man beat a woman to death with a tire iron in another parked car. He pulls his gun to shoot at the escaping killer, but Carter warns him about the scandal that would erupt if he got involved. When the police investigate, they find Gargan's tire tracks in the sand. Before they can trace the tracks, the cops arrest a man for the murder. Gargan knows they don't have the right man, so he races against time to find the killer on his own. When it turns out that Carter not only knew the dead woman, but may be engaged in a dalliance with a suspect whose prints were found at the scene, things get even stickier for Gargan.

This unsung little B-film is a very nice example of film noir, complete with a flawed and conflicted hero (more like an anti-hero for most of the film), a sexy femme fatale, and passion and murder in the night. Gargan is fine as the appropriately hangdog lead; in his attempted breakup scene, he actually gets to say lines like, "This is the end of the line," "You’re just no good for me, baby," and "We both add up to zero." Carter (pictured with Gargan), however, burns up the screen, giving one of the best "bad girl" performances in all of noir. She (the character) is smoking hot and knows it, lording her power over poor Gargan for most of the running time. Only at the climax, which involves an icepick in someone's back, does she falter a bit, and I blame that on the writing. Jeff Donnell is colorless as Gargan's wife. The title comes from a radio show from which this was adapted; the main story is framed as a flashback told by the night editor (Charles D. Brown) of the New York Star to his staff, primarily intended as a cautionary tale aimed at a sweaty and despondent young reporter (Coulter Irwin, who definitely has the sweaty part down). A must-see for noir fans, available on the DVD set Bad Girls of Film Noir, Volume 2. [DVD]

WILDCAT BUS (1940)

This had a lot of potential to be interesting to me: a little-known B-movie which has generated very little comment, a lead actor I'd never heard of, and a left-field focus on the illegal "hired car" business. Things do start off well: it opens "cute" with young layabout playboy heir Charles Lang being kicked out of his penthouse apartment because he’s been judged incompetent. His chauffeur and faithful buddy Paul Guilfoyle goes out job-hunting with him. Cute scene #2: looking for a job at Federated Bus Line, Lang gives a boot in the ass to a mechanic working under a car who turns out to be Fay Wray, who is also the boss's daughter. Based on his experience, Guilfoyle gets a job as a bus driver but Lang is turned away. He winds up with a job as a wildcat driver, someone who charges passengers to ride in his car from one city to another, but who isn't officially licensed as a bus or cab driver. We soon discover that his boss, Don Costello, is using underhanded tricks, like tampering with the buses to cause accidents, to drive Federated out of business. It takes a while, but eventually Lang realizes what's going on, and after Guilfoyle is seriously injured in one of the arranged wrecks, Lang teams up with Wray to put the wildcatters out of business.

I wanted to like this, but after a promising 15 minutes, it peters out due to so-so performances and a disjointed narrative, like someone took every other page out of the script to shorten the running time. To its credit, it does move quickly and the last 10 minutes, involving a bit of vigilante justice, play out well. Lang (pictured at right) looks like a 40s Tab Hunter and does an OK job with his comic bits, but is not a heroic type. He has little chemistry with Wray who does the best she can with an inconsistent character—sometimes cold, sometimes sympathetic. Guilfoyle is fine, as is Leona Roberts as Ma Talbot, the kindly old washwoman who is actually the brains behind the wildcatters. Not a total waste of time, but not the quirky gem I was hoping for. [TCM]

THIS SIDE OF THE LAW (1950)

David Cummins is bedraggled, injured, and stuck at the bottom of an abandoned cistern on the Taylor estate, desperate to escape, and his story plays out in flashback. Just two weeks ago, he was a homeless man sentenced to 30 days in jail for vagrancy when out of the blue a lawyer named Cagle pays his fine and frees him, with one condition: Cagle thinks Cummins is a dead ringer for a rich man named Malcolm Taylor who has been missing for almost seven years, and he wants Cummins to impersonate him with his family. Malcolm is about to be declared dead, and Cagle thinks the wrong people will get the estate if that happens, so Cummins is to show up, claim he's Malcolm, and stick around long enough so Cagle can fix the estate inheritance. At Sans Souci, the Taylor mansion on a cliff, Cummins manages to fool the three relatives there: Malcom's weak-willed brother Calder, Calder’s sexy wife Nadine (with whom Malcolm has had an affair), and Malcolm's wife Evelyn, who seems to have been ignored by Malcolm. He gets a chilly reception as none of them are particularly happy to see him back, but soon Nadine realizes that David is missing a distinctive scar of Malcolm's and she threatens to expose him unless she can get in on the fix. When David tells Cagle, the lawyer arranges a meeting with Nadine and a series of machinations begin which wind up with Cummins in the cistern, one family member dead, and the others threatened by Cagle.

Despite a number of plot holes and a couple of bland performances, this is a good little B-gothic noir; it takes a little while to get going, but the last 20 minutes are fun. Kent Smith (as David/Malcolm) and Robert Douglas (as Cagle) are on the bland side—the part of the lawyer would have been perfect for someone like George Zucco to sink his teeth into. But Viveca Lindfors is fine as Evelyn, John Alvin is appropriately slimy as Calder, and best of all is Janis Paige who steals the movie as Nadine. One can argue about whether or not she fits the criteria for a noir femme fatale, but she is a strong presence and you wish to see more of her. Smith isn't bad, especially in the last half, but he doesn’t play a conflicted noir hero/anti-hero like John Garfield (FORCE OF EVIL) or even Tom Neal (DETOUR). The atmospheric camerawork helps, and the Warner Archive print is gorgeous. Pictured are Smith and Lindfors. [DVD]

THE BRASHER DOUBLOON (1947)

As the hot Mojave summer winds blow, detective Philip Marlowe (George Montgomery) is called out to the mansion of rich widow Mrs. Murdock (Florence Bates) to investigate the disappearance of a rare coin, a Brasher doubloon—no need to know what that means, it's just a McGuffin. Marlowe winds up meeting an interesting group of people in the course of the case. Murdock's young secretary Merle Davis (Nancy Guild, pictured at right with Montgomery), wearing Night of Bliss perfume, is flirty with Marlowe, then tells him she has a phobia of being touched, partly due to the harassment that Mrs. Murdock's late husband subjected her to—Marlowe offers to help her with her problem and she seems agreeable. But soon he discovers she has a secret: she accidentally pushed Mr. Murdock to his death from a high window during the Rose Parade. There’s also Murdock's slick but slimy son Leslie (Conrad Janis); coin dealer Elisha Morningstar, whose call about the doubloon alerted Mrs. Murdock to her loss; scarred thug Eddie Prue who tries to ransack Marlowe's office; Prue's boss Vince Blair, a club owner; and the German newsreel photographer Vannier who has been making money on the side through blackmail.  People get beaten up and killed, a counterfeit copy of the coin turns up, and some of Vannier's newsreel footage winds up playing a part in the finale.

Based on a novel by Raymond Chandler, this is a veritable encyclopedia of film noir tricks and techniques. There's an unstable, possibly unreliable woman who tells lies when it suits her (like Mary Astor's character in MALTESE FALCON), a man who is invited into the gumshoe's office only to cause trouble (like Peter Lorre's character in FALCON), an attempted beating of the detective (like poor Alan Ladd went through in THE GLASS KEY), and a convoluted plot that may or may not make sense (as in THE BIG SLEEP, with Bogart as Marlowe). This is a B-production and it shows in the fast pace and short length (72 minutes), and in the casting of Montgomery as Marlowe. I like Montgomery but he's no Bogart—he makes a rather lightweight private dick, and there's very little sense of danger (to him or from him). Still, the movie works largely due to the supporting cast: Bates is always fun in the "dragon lady" role, and Janis makes the character of the son more interesting than he should be. Guild is unconvincing as the femme fatale/heroine—the studio wanted her to be another Lauren Bacall though she would seem better suited to light B-comedies. But overall this is worth seeing for fans of noir or detective movies of the era. [DVD]

PORTLAND EXPOSÉ (1957)

George Madison owns the Woodland Tavern on the outskirts of Portland, Oregon, a nice, friendly town that is in the process of being overrun by a crime syndicate. A couple of thugs named Joe and Larry visit Madison and want him to install their pinball and gambling machines. When he refuses, they send out some phony labor protesters to picket in front of his establishment. George holds out for a while until they threaten to throw acid in the face of his teenage daughter Ruth. He gives in and soon the Tavern is hopping, although it's been overrun by gamblers and loud jazz music. Ruth's boyfriend Benny assumes that, because of her father's business, she's a girl of loose morals and one night, he tries some hanky-panky with her in the woods. She sends him away but is then cornered by Joe, who has done time for fooling around with underage girls—"Hopheads aren’t nothin' compared to what ails him," another character says—and he assaults her, though George saves her before Joe can get very far. George sends his wife and kids away and gets in contact with some labor union leaders who are also fighting against the mob. He agrees to pretend to cozy up to the thugs while wearing a wire to get evidence against them but soon the thugs smell a rat, and when Ruth reconciles with Benny and returns to Portland to attend a dance with him, she winds up in the middle between her dad and the bad guys.

This B-crime thriller isn't really in any way, shape or form film noir, but that’s how it's being sold on DVD. Hard-core noir fans won’t find much here but as a down-and-dirty crime melodrama, it's quite watchable. The setting, in a city but in a rural wooded area, is interesting. Edward Binns, familiar from well over 100 TV supporting roles, is serviceable as the average-Joe hero. Virginia Gregg, another TV face, doesn’t have much to do as his wife; Carolyn Craig is OK as the daughter, and the actor playing Benny is better (but uncredited). It's the villains that make this worth watching: Larry Dobkin, as Larry, makes his character seem like a slow-witted goon but vicious and smarter than he looks, and Frank Gorshin (the original Riddler on TV's Batman, pictured above) is spectacularly slimy as the child-molesting Joe. Joe Flynn (the captain on McHale's Navy) has a bit part as a good guy. There's a fun scene in the last half involving a sweet old lady who is actually a madam arriving in Portland to start up a business; she wants only good girls, "no dipsos, no hopheads." [DVD]

PRIVILEGE (1967)

I'm not quite sure what to make of this film, a satirical parable of pop culture and politics which has some good ideas but can't follow through on most of them. In the near future, pop singer Paul Jones is the new hot commodity. In his masochistic stage act, he is beaten and jailed, then freed but kept in handcuffs; he attacks his guards who then beat him up some more. All the while, he's singing and the teenage audience is yelling and cheering. We soon discover that Jones's act is actually subsidized by the ruling government in England, who see his show as catharsis for unmoored, violent youth who might otherwise be involved in protest or political agitation. Offstage, Jones is a passive cipher who always looks like he's on the verge of tears, his private life nonexistent, waiting for his handlers to guide his career to its next step. The only people who seem at all close to him are his bodyguard and a model (Jean Shrimpton) who is also his half-hearted girlfriend. When there's an apple glut, Jones does an ad to sell apples. More seriously, when the powers that be decide that the masses need to find God, Jones is set up as a pop messiah. The large open-air concert/crusade is the highlight of the movie, as Jones leads chants like, "We will conform," and does a rock version of the hymn "Jerusalem" while cripples are brought forward for healing. It's done like Leni Reifenstahl shooting a Billy Graham revival and the movie could have used more of this stylistic power throughout. The ending isn't quite as predictable as one might think—there is no explicit martyrdom, just a kind of slow fade as Jones finally rebels against his handlers—but the film really has nowhere to go after the big crusade scene. The ideas floating around about consumerism, pop culture, and politics are interesting, but the script could have used some tightening, and Jones (the original lead singer for Manfred Mann) doesn't make a very charismatic figure. [TCM]

THE SHANGHAI GESTURE (1941)

Shanghai is a bustling city of riches, vice, and decadence for those, we are told, "who wish to live between the lines of laws and customs." The heart of the city is Mother Gin Sling's casino, a magnificent pleasure palace in white, designed like Dante's circles of Hell, with a gaming table in a pit at the center where huge sums of money are won and lost every night. We first meet Dixie, a brassy blonde showgirl from Brooklyn stranded in the city. She is taken in by the dusky, passive Doctor Omar—he says he is a doctor of nothing, and others call him the poet laureate of Shanghai, though all the poetry he spouts is from Omar Khayyam—who gets her a job at the casino, though what exactly she does aside from wearing sexy dresses and making wisecracks is never made clear. Next we meet another newcomer to Shanghai, a dark exotic young woman who gives her name as Poppy Smith; she is more fragile than Dixie, but she's got money and a Russian man squiring her around town. She thinks the casino smells evil but it fascinated by it and by Omar. That night, Mother Gin Sling gets the bad news that she will have to shut down her establishment; it's part of a large lot of land bought by rich speculator Sir Guy Charteris. Realizing she cannot fight the deal, she instead tries digging up dirt on Charteris and discovers two interesting items: Poppy is his daughter (real name Victoria), and Charteris is actually a man named Dawson who was briefly married to Mother Gin Sling in her youth and who treated her badly. Mother plots to reduce Poppy to a shell of her former self by getting her hooked on drinking and gambling, and then on the casino's final night, the eve of Chinese New Year, she'll unveil the spectacle of Victoria's ruin to Charteris at a fancy dinner party. Things go as planned, but Charteris has a little secret of his own which casts everything in a different light for Mother.

Based on a notorious stage play, the Production Code people didn't want this movie made at all. In the play, the casino is a brothel, and the name of the main character is Mother Goddam. Lots of changes were made to get this material through the censors, but a strong atmosphere of decadence and corruption remains, and it doesn't take much reading between the lines to figure out what's what. Dixie (Phyllis Brooks) has clearly been hired as a prostitute; Omar (Victor Mature) is completely amoral and pretty much high all the time, on opium I assume; Poppy (Gene Tierney), after Omar is through with her, is certainly drug-addled as well. This film was the last hurrah of Josef von Sternberg, who would certainly have centered this film around Marlene Dietrich if he had made it a few years earlier. Though its stage origins remain obvious, the movie looks great. Long shots of the casino are stuffed with interesting detail—the main credits include an acknowledgement of the unsung extras, and indeed they are crucial in the building of atmosphere. The print I saw wasn't spectacular, but the rich blacks and overexposed whites come through well enough. 

This was an early lead role for Tierney, and while some critics complain that she overacts, I think she was wise to do so here, since her character is such a melodramatic soap-opera type. For the most part, Power barely registers since he has little to do besides look like he's in an opium haze all the time. The rest of the cast is fine, including Walter Huston as Charteris, Eric Blore as the bookkeeper who is on crutches the whole time (someone says to him, "Stop behaving like a disabled flamingo!"), Albert Basserman as a city official, and Mike Mazurki as a bare-chested sinister rickshaw driver. Best of all is Ona Munson, unrecognizable in Asian makeup as Mother Gin Sling (pictured). Her face is usually frozen in a sickly smile, but her voice (you can hear Belle Watling, her character in GONE WITH THE WIND, loud and clear) and mannerisms give full vent to her desires and frustrations. Things end well for no one (except maybe Omar who probably curls back up with his hookah), but the ending has just enough ambiguity to allow us to imagine that not all the guilty parties will pay for their crimes. Not a masterpiece, perhaps, but a must-see for classic-era fans.  [TCM]