Month: December 2019

The Rogues’ Tavern (1935)

IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 10 minutes, rated 5.1/10.0 by 333 cinematizens. 

Genre:  Old Dark House

Verdict: A well lit Old Dark House.

Wallace Ford rocks up at the Rogues’ Tavern, aka the Old Dark House, with his fiancée to cross the state line for a quickie … wedding.  With that mind and little else, they could not pass by a place called Rogues’ Tavern. the more so one possessed of a possessive apostrophe.  Wallace does his best, as always, to inject some energy and wit into the catatonic proceedings.  This is a classroom specimen for a film school assignment:  which is worse?  The leaden direction or the directionless screenplay.  Tough call there. 

Gathered at the Tavern (which had none of the furnishing that the word ‘tavern’ calls to mind, spilled beer, overflowing ashtrays, dart boards, big screens, buxom barmaids, a fetid atmosphere) where an assortment of crooks sit around looking crooked in very long takes.  After the third take, the fraternity brothers dozed off. 

Along for the fun – aside: that’s an ironic comment – is a femme who reads tarot cards like the telephone book.  Slowly without inflection.  More very long takes of her looking at the camera.  

There is a dog howling on the sound track, perhaps pained by watching the film, a face peering in the windows from behind coke bottle bottom lenses.  It did not require a degree in scriptwriting to recognise the colour of these herrings.  

These are the high points. The rest is worse. Believe it or not, Ripley! 

But, as every review of this sludge notes, it has a surprise ending, which, while nothing can redeem the sludge, certainly demands and gets attention. The villain has a lot to say and says it, though a few lessons from Bart Simpson on maniacal laughing would have helped. The last one standing was of course the villain but even so the speech is a rarity.  That may explain the inflated rating of 5.1 when nothing else could.  

Wallace Ford had a biography more tortured than any imagined by Charles Dickens.  That is hard to square with the sunny disposition he always projected on the screen.  Born in England an unwanted baby he was taken into an overflowing foundling home.  In a few weeks he was packed with others and dispatched to a colonial orphanage in Toronto from whence he was enslaved to seventeen foster homes before he ran away to join the circus, more or less literally – The Winnipeg Kiddies. While a teenager he and a pal rode the rails to New York.  Along the way, his pal was killed in a rail-yard accident hopping freight trains in a switching yard and Wallace took his name as a tribute. Stage struck, his fresh face, energy, willingness to do anything got him work on Broadway and led to his two hundred IMDb credits. In Hollywood he starred in B movies and when these evaporated he became a character actor in movies and then a regular guest star on television. 

The Mummy’s Hand (1940)

IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 7 minutes, rated 6.1/10.0 by 3170 cinematizens.  

Genre: comedy, horror (like much of life, an odd combination)

Verdict: Clichés along the Nile.

While The Mummy (1932) is a subtle romantic film about love across the  millennia with the title figure in only one scene, The Mummy’s Hand is the film that spawned all the clichés that have followed in The Mummy’s Tomb (1942), The Mummy’s Ghost (1944), The Mummy’s Curse (1944), The Mummy’s Homework (1955)…..  and which are still repeated in re-makes.  A title search on IMDb yields 200 title hits.  

In this outing the mummy stumbles around at treacle pace like a concussed NFL lineman, trailing bandages with the use of only one arm, and that hand.  His victims have to lie quietly while he sets upon them, and per the director’s orders they do, one after another. 

To begin at the beginning, in Cairo two down-and-out Yankees come across a clue to a rich tomb — X marks the spot! — and set out to pillage it in the American way.  Locals demur but lack the dosh to recruit the Magnificent Seven. Instead they turn to the curator at the local museum, George ‘Shiver’ Zucco, whose paladin is the titular escaped anatomy school specimen who lumbers around.  So mysterious are the Tanna leaves which sustain Lumber that Wikipedia says they are fictional. Ha! False fact!  They are as real as anything the president in thief says.  

While the plot starts out like The Treasure of the Sierra Madres (1948), it lacks the soul of that memorable film. This one is played for laughs. Cecil Kellaway appears with a peppery daughter to add to the fun, and they sure do.  Square Jaw is accompanied by the breezy Wallace Ford, whose mugging steals a few scenes but Kellaway holds his own and Marta, the daughter, makes an impressive entrance with six gun in hand. These four set off across the desert. These are the Tomb Raiders heading for Tombstone!  

For what facts are worth these days, this film does not continue the storyline of The Mummy and ergo is not a sequel though it is routinely called that by those who uphold the contemporary standards of journalism.   

Invasion (1965)

Genre: Sci Fi

IMDb meta-data is 1 hour 22 minutes of runtime, rated 5.6/10.0 by 324 cinemtizens.  

Verdict: nicely done.  

On a quiet country road in the Yorkshire Dales a dazed individual steps out of the mist in front of a car, and gets walloped. (He had to wait a long time for a car to come along that road.) The driver takes Victim to the hospital and talks to the police after salting away his companion paramour.  Of whom more later.

Meanwhile, some British National Servicemen are asleep at the switch when a blip occurs on the radar, and continue sleeping when the electric power goes off and on and off.  These chaps are the Isles first line of defence if the Cold War got Hot.  SSSh, don’t disturb them. These are the same ones in X The Unknown (1956) and it stayed that way as far as they were concerned.   

Plod comes to investigate the scene of the accident and finds the now trigger-happy soldiers prowling around.  A cast of familiar faces crosses the screen: Barrie Ingham, Glyn Houston, Valerie Gearon, and Lyndon Brook – it began to look like an episode of Z Cars. [Sigh, if only].

The plot thickens when at the hospital Victim who looks Chinese, has no blood, and — most suspicious of all — wears a latex suit straight out of a 1970s exercise video.  The Chinese nurse in residence in this rural hospital, after a glance, says he is not Chinese, despite appearances. What will he say about her when he regains consciousness? Well they all look alike and later when an imposter takes this nurse’s place no one else notices the switch.  (Not even her since we never see her again. Loose end or what? Wake up the Continuity Editor.)

Square Jaw sweats a lot in the effort to be reasonable. Victim is a talkative alien who says he was taking some prisoners to the galactic slammer when his low-bidder built UFO blew an O-ring and he had to crash-land on the Third Rock. In the subsequent confusion his two charges — two equally bloodless women, who are also not human, but are women, nonetheless (figure that one out) — got away.  All this explaining did in the fraternity brothers. Mind you their interest had waned since the reading matter of the radarman was left behind.   

Many dark atmospheric shots of figures watching, womanly figures. They scare the car driver to death.  Oops.  We come in peace, and all that.  

Meanwhile, the hospital heats up, and up, and up.  Now everyone is sweating including Square Jaw.  It seems Victim likes heat and he keeps turning up the thermostat on the central heating.  Sure, like an NHS country hospital would have central hearing in 1965, let alone such advanced technology as a thermostat.  Victim also wants privacy and the hospital is surrounded by a forcefield.  The McKinsey trained hospital manager knows a KPI when he sees one and he sees in this alien publicity, funding, and, let’s not forget, promotion, the keyest of all KPIs.  A devotee of Pox News he does not believe in science, still less than anything he cannot see, so he get into his Austin saloon and speeds off … smack into the forcefield.  In the days before the Red Queen made everyone buckle up he went right through the windscreen to his final KPI, as in Killed Performing an Indicator.* That sobers everyone up.  They came in peace. Now two dead.  

Somewhere out in the countryside the National Servicemen smoke cigarettes and look bored, as do viewers at this stage.  The light is too poor out there for further reading.  

Then the page of the screenplay turns, and the doctors begin to think that Victim may be the villain, and the two others are the police making a terrible job of looking for him. Well, why not, that makes as much sense as anything else.  

Two things standout.  The hospital switchboard operator gets hysterical and has to be slapped into sense by one of the doctors. The slapping doctor is a she. The hysterical women is a standard feature of this genre but that is the only time I can recall seeing the mandatory slap delivered by a woman in authority.  Nice twist. Though the only reason the operator is there is to get slapped. It would have been even better if she had slapped an hysterical man.  For that, we are still waiting. Second, Square Jaw saw The Third Man (1949) and is inspired to take to the sewers to evade the forcefield and retrieve his iPhone or something. He slogs back and forth between sceptic tank and well for no discernible reason but an actor has got to do what a director tells him to do.   

Victim makes a run for it, and the alien women (the not human ones, probably Kappas, muttered the fraternity brothers) explain they are the Law and he is the Villain. One of the doctors goes all Stockholm Syndrome and follows Victim cum Villain to the downed spacecraft and after he ditches her he boards and fires up.  But in the sky his ship is blown up. Was the Law in another ship blasting him, or did he hit another forcefield?  Or was the low-bid contractor at it again. We’ll never know.  

There is also a faint hint earlier that the inhuman women run the show where Victim comes from, but that is never developed.  Still it is intriguing for a while when Victim asks with incredulity ‘She/ does what you tell her?’ when a male doctor directs a nurse to bring water.  (Warning: Men, do not try this at home.)

The use of Asian talent is the most obvious distinction of the film: Yoko Tani, Ric Young, and Tsai Chin got a gig out of it.  It catches the eye but is not integrated into the plot or character.  

The reviews I scanned are condescending, but I rather liked this low key approach. The direction is not Val Guest standard and there is treacle time, especially at the start when many of the actors move as if underwater.  The screenplay is not Nigel Kneale level but it has more intellectual bite than most of this ilk. But in the end too much was left unexplained.  Why was the driver’s paramour such a zombie?  And why was she there at all?  Did the cat do it?  Who fenced up the forcefield? Why don’t the doctors notice the switch of nurses?  Who let the dogs out?  If the inhuman women are Law why don’t they go all Dirty Harriettes and get their man?  What is the ISO rating of that hospital?  Why are the aliens Lysterians?  Why not Republicans?  What does the title have to do with the story?  Best for last: Who cares anyway?  

*A biography of the Red Queen is discussed elsewhere on this blog.  Get clicking.

Seven Days to Noon (1950)

IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 34 minutes, rated 7.1/10.0 by 1290 cinematizens.

Genre:  Atomic.

Verdict:  Compelling.

Dr Memory has a crisis of conscience about what god hath wrought and writes a letter to the PM threatening a surface nuclear test in Westminster.  Amid the flotsam of nut case threats that flow into the PM’s office, a routine investigation follows, led by the brisk, decisive, and focussed Quatermass. Don’t blink and there is a gangly Joss Ackland, cocking his head, in one scene.  

The staging is marvellous and the tragi-comic woman with whom Mr Memory shacks up is a humane touch.  He threatens Armageddon; she fusses over her cavalier terrier dog. Earlier the boarding house owner wrangles a herd of cats.  These snippets of ordinary life relieve much of the tension; although they do not give Memory pause, they do give the viewer perspective.  Then there are the sight gags, the man in the sandwich boards trying repeatedly to board a train, or the Tommie rifling clothes.

Such detached subtlety is a million miles from the grind-it-in-their-faces approach of Hollywood these days. 

In this work of fiction the representatives of the media are presented as sober and responsible, rather than first fomenting hysteria, then trading on it, and finally denouncing the hysteria and panic they do so much to cause. More fiction:  The political leadership is calm and the army disciplined (almost).  Where are the McKinsey managers in all this, history will ask.  

But Memory’s moral crisis is not developed.  None of the others give it a moment’s thought.  Yet Robert Oppenheimer and Andrei Sakharov were just two of many atomic scientists at the time who did worry about the world they had made.  Biographies of both these scientists are discussed elsewhere on this blog.  Get clicking. The film was released in July 1951 when the Cold War was hot in Korea and tense in Berlin. 

The film is all the more focussed for not having big name stars in it to distract attention from the story.  Unlike Dunkirk (2017) there is no Kenneth Branagh of the day taking off his hat and putting it back on again and again to steal scenes. Does he really need to do that?  Evidently, yes. 

The Boutling Brothers performed magic in this film.  The crowd scenes, the evacuation, the military patrols, the empty streets, the reflection in the widow, Paddington Station, all touches of a master like Hitchcock done on a pittance.  They have a long string of well known and much loved films to their credit, e.g., The Outsider (1948), Private’s Progress (1956), The Risk (1956), I’m All Right, Jack (1959), and Heavens Above! (1963) in which they ridiculed sacrosanct institutions like church, social class, army, and state, and in others in which moral dilemmas were front and centre without any preaching.  Among the actors they repeatedly cast was Victor Madden who does his nervous twitch on command first in the pub and then outside the church. 

The Night My Number Came Up (1955)

IMDb is runtime 1 hour and 34 minutes, rated 7.1/10.0 by 787 cienmatizens. 

Genre:  Fantasy, Mystery, Thriller, one or all of the above.

Verdict: Nicely done.

A routine flight full of British character actors (Alexander Knox, Denholm Elliott, Michael Redgrave, Sheila Sim, and more, abetted by Michael Hordern) goes awry in the waning days when Britain still pretended to be a world power before James Bond took that nostalgia duty.  Leaving from a very Brit Hong Kong for Tokyo they stop at Okinawa for fuel. From blooded Okinawa they will overfly devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki to perv on the atomic wastelands.  At least two of the characters had been imprisoned by the Japanese and a little perving has appeal to them. 

Foreboding was generated by a prologue about a lost flight, way off course, and a passer-by with a dream, hence the fantasy element. 

We all know that things will go wrong, and some of the passengers are worried about that dream.  (Yes, it is confusing isn’t it.)  Are dreams premonitions or indigestion?  Deep.  Will knowledge of this dream be reflexive?  Will it effect how people act and become self-fulfilling?  That seems to be the point.  That theme is later played out in miniature with the pilot.  

Once on board the film becomes an examination of the characters from the withdrawn RAF veteran, the naive stenographer, the worried Sinologist, the brash business stereotype, the two Tommies who get off at Okinawa, the unflappable Air Marshall, and the comatose Ambassador.  Nigel Stock who went on to Amsterdam is superb as the pilot when he reminds the Air Marshall who is in charge right here, right now. Victor Madden is wasted as the flight engineer serving tea. Not once does he go all twitchy as only he could do. The flight seems to take real time.

There is also a corker of a last line about being lost and then found. 

Midnight Manhunt (1945)

IMDb runtime is 1 hour and 4 minutes, rated 5.4/10.0  by 303 cinematizens.  

Genre: Mystery, comedy, bore

Verdict: Waxen, indeed.

Set-up: The ever menacing George Zucco shoots a man in a hotel room and makes off with a stash of diamonds.  All in silence except the: Bang, Bang!  Nice. Then the wounded man rouses himself, crawls, and lurches about like the fraternity brothers at a keg party.  Still without a word nor any background music. Nice. 

Cut to the conveniently located next door Wax Museum of Crime, where the twittery owner is closing up, as Leo Grocey holds up a broom, thus extending his acting repertoire. Meanwhile, feisty woman reporter rooms climbs the stairs to her crib where she finds the now dead man littering the hallway, instantly recognising him as the late unlamented Jimmy Hoffa and the thirty-point type headline she will get from this discovery; she decides to stash the body until a photographer from her paper can get there, giving her an exclusive with pixes.  Journalistic responsibility prevails once again. She types up the false facts while waiting.  

Zucco comes back because he left his Amex card on the victim or something.  The police poke around with the incompetence of a McKinsey manager.  A rival journalist appears to belittle the woman.  Leo continues to hold up the broom. (I lost a bet on that with the fraternity brothers.  Holding up a broom seemed to me to beyond Leo’s skill set.)  By turns they use the dead body as a prop, a taxi cab passenger, a seat, and so on.  All very amusing, … not.  Amusing was Charlie Chan at the Wax Museum (1940).  

There is nothing to work with in either the screenplay or the direction.  Ann Savage was a great player (see her chilling performance in Detour [1945]); she does breathe some life into the clichés in this story but only just. Zucco is wasted as a gunman. He is much more menacing without anything as mundane as a gat. The broom did not need Leo’s malapropisms. 

It was released on 25 July 1945, less than a month after the typhoon of steel at Okinawa harvested 82,000 US casualties, including more than a dozen generals. More Japanese soldiers and still more civilians died, as well. This blood bath convinced George Marshall that an invasion of Japan had to be avoided.  Pentagon planners had estimated a million causalities from an invasion They also assumed they would be American, as the depleted English and Dutch, the Chinese concentrated on each other, along with the duplicitous Russians would not contribute.  The Defense Department had signed contracts with Western Union to send ten thousand yellow telegrams a day telling wives, mothers, sisters, fathers that their soldier boy had been killed. In anticipation of such an apocalypse US Army Air Force personnel, including my dad, on Pacific Islands were being retrained as infantry to feed into the maw.  A biography of the titan George Marshall is discussed elsewhere on this blog.  

House of Mystery A (1934) and B (1961)

A.)  IMDB meta-data is 1 hour and 2 minutes (and it felt like a lot longer), rated a generous 4.9/10.0 by 241 time wasters.

Genre: No mystery to it.

Verdict:  B o r i n g. 

In 1934 a swaggering American adventurer defiles an ancient Hindu relic and is cursed.  He scoots with a dusky maiden and becomes a cripple – due to the curse, it seems. Meanwhile, the curse misfires and falls on those who funded his adventure, though none of them violated the relic.  Guilt by association it seems to be.  Two die.

Swagger, now in a wheel chair, has invited the surviving benefactors to his mansion – an old dark house, the fraternity bothers hoped – to sort things out. Sorting involves the investors having their necks broken. Dusky maiden goes about lighting incense to portend 1960s hippies.  More necks go crack.

Plod appears and makes Barney (remember Barney?) look smart.  More necks snap. Meanwhile a plumber lurks about the pipes. Got is so far?  If not, doesn’t matter.

Swagger blows it when he dismisses dusky maiden in preference to the snow white nurse.  Some nurse.  She doesn’t realise he can stand erect.  Dusky takes revenge with her house-trained gorilla who hides behind a sliding panel between murderous gigs.  The annoying insurance salesman saves the day. The end. About twenty minutes past endurable.  

If I got it right: Dusky and Swagger had used this ape to kill off the other investors, and were now finishing the job.  If so, why Swagger did not consider that the ape might be used against him is the real mystery here.  The other possibility is that Dusky was travelling around with her ape in the checked baggage and doing the killing while Swagger dallied with snow white.  Dusky then returns to find she has been displaced.  Yet she continues siccing the man in the ape suit on the other investors. See? Nope, me neither. 

Clay Clement as Swagger steals the show.  He goes from swaggering plunderer to pathetic cripple to scheming murder and then piteous victim.  Tour de force acting in a waste of celluloid.  

B.) IMDb meta-data is 55 minutes, rated 6.4/10.0 by 134 cinematizens.

Genre: Spooky

Verdict: Taut with a twist.  

Same title but this is a different story about a young couple who find a house for sale that is too good to be true for the price.  They find out why.

Vernon Sewell wrote and directed and it is tight and atmospheric with some fine players.  It has an ambitious double flashback which makes the summary tricky.  Suffice it to saying the empty house they find a woman who welcomes them and shows them around in a cold and detached manner of a McKinsey manager. They ask about the low price and she says some buyers have been put off …. by the ghost.

Ghost. Bah, hum bug. They have seen A Christmas Carol and ghosts don’t scare them, but how did such bunkum start, they ask.  First flashback is to another, earlier young couple who bought the house and found it odd, which leads to the second, nested flashback to the couple who built it. Mr. Builder was an electrical engineer who wired everything up to the max.  

Mrs Builder made off with another man, or did she?  It seems she didn’t.  An episode of Midsomer uses a similar plot device with home electricity. Then the engineer dies at his bench.  I never did fathom whether this was suicide, accident, murder, or fate. Or why the dog was there. But with his death the missing wife and lover turn up under garden gnomes.  Hmmm.

Earlier the first young couple have visitations from the engineer.  These are unnerving so they call in a ghost hunter, Colin Gordon, who bores ghosts to death with longwinded explanations done far better in The Stone Tape (1972). The fraternity brothers dropped off here.  Ghost Hunter is sure something spectral is present but it is beyond his gizmos so he calls in a medium who goes into a trance, which she calls a séance.  (Briefly conscious, the fraternity brothers shouted that a séance was a circle holding hands, not an old biddy closing her eyes.)

Spoiler.

The welcoming woman ends the story there and as the prospective buyers watch she transforms into the murdered wife and fades into the wall.  Superb.  

But of course in Sydney the only question is: How much was the house?  Was there a garage?     

The 1961 film was made as a B picture but was trimmed for television.  

Phantom Killer (1942)

IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 1 minute, rated 5.3/10.0 by 124 cinematizens.  

Genre: Mystery

Verdict: Snappy

It is nearly a word-for-word remake of The Sphinx (1933), which starred the incomparable Lionel Atwill.  This one limps long with Perry White as the villain. His scowl is as bland as the leading man Dick Purcell’s smile.  The bland threatens the bland.  

Dick knows, and I mean knows, that Perry is guilty despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary.  He knows this in his bones without ever having visited the crime scene, spoken to the police, or met Perry. He just knows. Yet his frail was sitting next to Perry at a banquet when one of the crimes occurred miles away. No matter, Dick knows what Dick knows, because he has read the script.  The fraternity brothers were not impressed.  They, too, have known things in their bones and been slapped for it.

Then there is the conspicuous grand piano which holds the key(s).  It is hidden in plain sight and everyone examines it, much to the discomfort of Perry; not very bright this Perry.  The police captain quickly susses it, though how and why goes to the grave with him.  Nonetheless his murder strengthens Dick’s bones and gives Warren Hymer a chance to act for once, and he takes it in a couple of scenes. He was usually played a foolish lummox but this time he made the most of a few minutes of serious screen time.  

In the denouement Perry got confused: is he left or right handed?  No matter.  I also got confused about which Perry was sitting on the sofa when the handwriting samples were reviewed, and I think Perry was, too. No matter. Nothing stopped director William Beaudine. 

William ‘One Shot’ Beaudine directed with his legendary economy.  He is credited with between 350 and 500 films by different sources.  A personal favourite is Jesse James meets Frankenstein’s Daughter (1966). So much better than his Billy the Kid versus Dracula of the same year.  [Psst, look up irony in the dictionary.]  Joan Woodbury sparkled as the frail and mercifully put Dick and his bones into the shade. Mantan Moreland played the stereotype to perfection as always.

Most of the critics’ comments linked to the IMDb entry are condescending, but I found it brisk and if one can ignore Dick and his bones, stomach Moreland’s dutiful efforts, forgive Perry’s limp-wristed villain, the rest of the cast carries it.  Hmm.  Put like that maybe 5.3 is too high.    

Bad news: there is no phantom. The title was an effort to trade on some other contemporary films that had that word in the title.  It is derivative, as well as a copy of the earlier film. 

It was released on 2 October 1942, while raged the first American offensive in the Pacific on Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands. The purpose of this campaign was to deny the Japanese the use of airfields within range of Australian shipping. It was here the PT-109 came to grief.