Month: December 2019

The Death Kiss (1932)

IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 15 minutes, rated 6.0/10.0 by 854 cinematizens.

Genre: Mystery

Verdict: Intriguing

In the opening scene after a parting kiss from the glamorous leading lady the tuxedoed lead is shot and falls down. The camera pulls back to reveal the sound stage only five years or so after the first talkie. ‘Cut!’ yells the director.  He is no William ‘One Shot’ Beaudine and wants a second take. Is that suspicious or what?  As the actors slowly resume their floor marks, Mr Tuxedo continues to lie comfortably on the floor which is eventually noticed.  

You guessed it.  He’s dead, Jim.  That prop popgun was loaded, or was it?  Studio executives including a wasted Bela Lugosi would rather sweep Tuxedo under the carpet and go on.  Bad publicity, cost overruns, coffee breaks, and other KPIs are more urgent than a murder. No one can be more suspicious than Lugosi doing nothing.  All eyes are on him. He does nothing. Whoa!   

Meanwhile, Plod appears and proves inept.  At the same time a scriptwriter finds it amusing to make remarks and interfere with the investigation.  He has designs on the leading lady who seems to have had a motive to terminate Tuxedo’s life contract. Plod is only too happy to settle for the obvious.

What follows is a nice police procedural as Writer pieces it together while plod follows.  There are arc lights, battery acid, car tire prints, no finger prints where there should be, hotel bills, phone calls, a re-enactment, and a left-handed note.  All of that exposition was handled rather well, though the comic irritation studio Dick who accompanies Writer was surplus. This Dick is even dumber than Plod. The villain is of course the one least suspected.  See above.

Before there was a poverty row there was Tiffany Studios. Of more curiosity is the leading man, David Manners, who was born Rauff de Ryther Daun Acklom in Halifax Canada.  He had a short Hollywood career in the 1930s that included the lead in two classics: Dracula and The Mummy, but found it boring, and quit.  He continued to act in the theatre in New York City, and then retired to paint, garden, think, and live on the real estate investments he made with his movie income. Would that others retired early and spared the viewing public.  Send nominations for retirement to ….  

Speaking of Dracula, Bela Lugosi was born in Transylvania then in Hungary now in Rumania. He volunteered for the Austro-Hungarian Army in World War I in which service he was wounded three times on the Russian front. When the Russians left the war he was transferred to the Italian front. After the war, he became involved in communist agitation, eventually emigrating to the United States. He was a founder of the Screen Actors Guild. In the 1950s he was blacklisted and his career languished. None of the major studios would touch him for fear of HUAC reprisals. He had to take the roles offered by independent producers which inevitably sought to capitalise on his fame as Dracula.

Ladies Crave Excitement (1935)

IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 13 minutes runtime, rated 6.1/10.0 by 76 cinematizens.

Genre: krimi, comedy

Verdict: slam bam!

With the opening credits it starts with a bang and picks up speed from there.  Norman is a newsreel cameraman come rain, fire, flood, shipwreck, earthquake, or even more serious calamities like the IRS. His editor tries to rein him in but is undercut by his executive secretary in several amusing byplays.  He is the bad cop and she is the good cop, and everyone knows it.  

Made to do penance at a boring air show he ridicules a poor little rich girl who disrupts proceedings, only later to meet her incognito as a stable maiden. They team up to foil some racehorse dopers. Great fun follows.

Then it seems she has revealed his secret project to a rival, though in fact it was his rather confused and weak-willed but well-meaning assistant who did that.  Great fun follows.

Loved the confrontation with the villains in the editor’s office.  Loved the explanation of the assistant’s revelation.  Loved the last scene that starts at the altar and ends…..    

The connection of the title to the story, much to the disappointment of the fraternity brothers, is remote.

It is all so humane and sensible compared the simple-minded nonsense that Hollywood churns out now, made by and for prepubescent boys. The delightful everyman Norman Foster was a man of many parts, cinema star, stage actor, writer, director, and more. I recognised his voice from something but could not pin it down. Suggestions are welcome.   

Pilot X or Death in the Air (1936)

IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 9 minutes of runtime, 5.3/10.0 rated by 109 cinematizens.

Genre:  Mystery.

Verdict: [Drone.] 

The Setup:  In the early days of passenger planes a number of them crash, killing the passengers. This is bad for business. We are spared the number of deaths.  But each plane has eight to ten on board plus crew. We see crashed planes.  We see newspaper headlines.  We seen airline owners looking pained. We think of the Boeing Max. Then we cut to the interior of a plane aloft as a passenger sees a biplane approaching with guns blazing and an X on its fuselage.   Rat-a-rat and down goes the passenger plane.  Amid the burning rubble of the crashed aircraft before croaking a passenger describes this attack.

Now there is something to investigate and a government investigator comes who is seldom heard from thereafter, along with a psychologist, of course, and the greasy John Carroll. They narrow the search to five air aces who just happen to be in the neighbourhood of the last attack whom they invite to the Old Dark House for a confab.  It is an ecumenical group of stereotypes: one French hand kisser, one Prussian heel clicker, one English snob, one Canadian lumberjack, and one Yankee doodle. Their host is the manufacturer of passenger planes, his comely daughter, and her intended – Stanley Baker (again). There are underlings around but forget them.  

The shrink hides in a secret room behind a false panel from which he observes, records, pervs on the pilots. The whole house seems designed around this perving room. (The fraternity brothers wondered why they didn’t invite cheerleaders, altos, or the Sugar Babes.) 

Once the suspects are assembled the pitch is that they join forces in a dawn patrol to flush out and dispatch Pilot X who is giving them all a bad name. Sneakily the hosts do not reveal that they suppose he is one of the assembled aces who will then show his hand.  Nobody gives Stanley a second thought as he serves drinks, politely lets greasy Carroll grope his girl, turns on and off lights, plays Free Cell on his iPad, and is generally underfoot but self-effacing. Very suspicious, indeed.  The one who seems most innocent is always guilty in the playbook.   

One by one the pilots get toasted leaving the shrink none the wiser.  Whoa, they are running out of pilots so he thinks deeply one night and slowly, ever so s-l-o-w-l-y, begins to write down the name of Pilot X. Geez, what’d ya know? Before he can finish the sentence: T h e k i l l e r i s … .   He gets clonked.  How he figured it out is anyone’s guess. 

Bodycount :  many passengers, three pilots, and now the shrink. All hail McKinsey management: The payroll is certainly being cut.

Then by some means, perhaps a Twitter post, that escaped this viewer they find a picture of Stanley in a kraut uniform.  Huh?  Had they read the script they would have known that his name was Göring but that gave them no clue. Huh!  Any relation to Hermann by any chance?

While all the pilots flit around the deep one has been murdering far and wide. He kept his fighter plane up his sleeve, it seems. Where did he gas it up? Was a signature required for the UPS delivery of the ammunition? ‘Why’ is never explained, except maybe for fun. What is the fun in killing passengers on the unarmed plane?  About the same fun as shotgunning rabbits I suppose or machine gunning school kids.  Let’s ask the NRA.  (N.B. the last time I used those letters, NRA, in a blog post I later got a very polite email from an alleged NRA representative suggesting the errors of my ways. [Gulp.])

Greasy and Stanley have a sky duel and virtue prevails in this work of fiction.  The end.

There is a lot of (stock) aerial photography which is largely unfathomable.  Moreover, when the pilots ascend they all dress like Snoopy on a date with the Red Baron— leather jacket, white scarf, and goggles — and they all have pencil moustaches so the fraternity brothers could not tell one from another. 

Quiet Please, Murder (1942)

IMDb meta-data 1 hour and 10 minutes runtime, rated 6.5/10.0 by 238 cinematizens.

Genre: noir, krimi

Verdict: The tome is mightier than the gat.

The kindly library attendant says to the oily George Sanders that the priceless Shakespeare folio on display would only leave the building over his dead body.  Oily George obliges by shooting him in the back, stealing the folio, whistling while he works. Thereafter he engages in masochistic banter with his henchwoman. For 1942 it is surprisingly explicit about pain being pleasure. To lighten the tone he refers to her as Lady Dracula. 

George is a merciless but studious murderer who reads what he steals.  He cites Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, and Bugs Bunny with equal facility. This man knows the literature. 

George then makes copies of the stolen folio which Lady Dracula sells far and wide for him.  She is the cut-out, and knows it.  One buyer is Sidney Blackmer who is an intermediary for …. Hermann Göring in Berlin. In the middle of the war, Fat Hermann is buying books from the USA!  What a scumbag!  Sidney quickly realises the purchase is an excellent fake and wants the money back and a cut of future frauds.  

Sidney is chilling as on behalf of Fat Hermann he whispers threats to Lady Dracula who is caught in the middle and does not like it.  Sidney has her pegged, and George is only too willing to cut her loose, after all that is what a cut-out is for, though he personally is undaunted since he is has home court advantage and is just as ruthless as Fatty’s minions. See scene one above for proof. Regrettably Sidney and George do not have a scene together to see who could could do evil in a lower, icier key.  Sid went on to lead a coven in Rosemary’s Baby (1986). A promotion of sorts, I guess.

The affable Richard Denning stumbles into the triangle. All three players – Nazis, George and his gang, and Denning – meet in the public library to square the deal, each pursuing a separate agenda on which murder figures right after Apologies and Minutes from the Previous shoot-out.  While a member of George’s gang, Lady Dracula has her own agenda trying to arrange some mutually assured destruction among the other players, leaving her unscathed. It is more than a triple cross and that left the fraternity brothers baffled. (Situation Normal for them.) All of these villains and Denning wander around the vast public library from balcony (convenient for pushing someone off), the basement (handy for muffling gunfire), stacks (great for spying), and the front desk (for hiding behind) near closing time, when…..  

A wartime blackout drill plunges the whole crew into darkness in the library as the bodies fall this way and that.  Stabbing, shooting, garrotting, torturing all catalogued by the Dewey decimal system.  George’s fiendish plan includes a fake police investigation.  However, the fake investigation is so competent that Denning becomes suspicious for in B movies the cops are from the Keystone precinct so he soon figures out that it is ploy by the Oily One.  

In the ensuing mêlée the Nazis and George’s gang whittle each other down. Again there is a mild surprise at the end when Denning forsakes Lady Dracula to her unambiguous fate which is not left to the imagination.

The ubiquitous Byron Foulger is the twitchy Mr Walpole, librarian cum air raid warden, a marvellous veteran character actor with nearly 500 items on the IMDb who is instantly recognised by cinematizens, though he was often uncredited in the films.  It has to be said that Lady Dracula is no Spider Woman.  Gale Sondergaard would have dominated the film from this role with timing, poise, her own brand of menace, and enunciation. Our loss.

Dated 1942 it was released in 3 February 1944 at the height of the Pacific Island campaign.  Denning gives a nice speech about the home front. He should know since he was a US Navy submarine officer in the Pacific between 1942 and 1945 while the One-A John Wayne stayed home without any bone spurs.    

The Missing Lady (1946)

IMDb meta-data is run time 59 minutes, rated 4.9 by 72 cinematizens

Genre: Mystery

Verdict:  There is nothing to spoil with a spoiler. 

Off camera a collector of orientalia is murdered in his luxurious apartment and along with chopsticks a jade statuette of a lady is stolen. Plod in the form of West Point graduate James Flavin arrives and arrests Lamont Cranston who lives next door with his faithful bumbler. In the dumb sweepstakes, leaving aside the entire membership of the current Republican Party, this plod is The Champion.  (James should have stayed in the Army rather than play this crap.)  It takes him fifty of the fifty-nine minutes to realise that the missing lady is the statuette and not a dame. Of course, the real stupidity traces back to the scriptwriter who thought this was funny, one George Callaghan. Guilty as seen.  

The very name Lamont Cranston conjures magic to the cognoscenti (that’s me).  He is the Shadow.  THE SHADOW!  He knows what evil lurks in the heart of men!  This knowledge is the forbidden fruit of violating the NSW privacy laws. The same goes for Santa Claus.  Moreover, the Shadow has the power to cloud men’s minds.  Of course, the fraternity brothers, like viewers of Pox News, were born that way so it’s not that big a deal.    

Only one scene makes use of the Shadow’s much-anticipated shadow on a staircase.  It is excellent and in lieu of doing anything else creative it is shown a second time. Even the fraternity brothers noticed this repetition. And that’s it.  There is no clouding of minds, but rather this shadow dons a black cat suit under a trench coat or something. On the radio The Shadow had the power to cloud men’s mind, but on the screen he has the power to bore any and everyone.

While on radio Margo Lane is Lamont’s very clever and plucky helpmate who often turned the tables on villains who underestimated her, in this rendering she is vain imbecile in a series of hats no one wants to sit behind in the movie theatre.  Still if this film was playing, then hiding behind those hats might be a good idea. 

The cast is replete with surplus characters evidently from the producer’s extended family who contribute nothing to anything. With that ability they should have been in Congress.  

George Chandler played Lamont’s flunky.  He had been a doughboy in World War I and made a subsequent career out of fourth and fifth bananas in the old vaudeville phrase.  He racked up 462 credits on the IMDb. He was a regular on Lassie in the 1950s. HIs major claim to fame may be that he succeeded Ronald Reagan as President … of the Screen Actors Guild.

Kane Richmond played Cranston, sort of.  He was a poster boy with a jaw to park a car under, the confident manner of schoolyard bully, broad shoulders of a gym rat, and the dark good looks of a young wanna be. In short, one of scores of triers in Hollywoodland at the time.  His career highlights include: Spy Smashers (1942), Haunted Harbor (1944), and Jungle Raiders (1945). No more needs to be said.  

The comic relief was supplied by two sisters, Miss Effie and Miss Millie, who raced the elevators in the apartment building. The story, such as it was, being so trite, these two added some welcome distraction for which much thanks. Integrating their shenanigans into the story was beyond the scriptwriter.  

The Mysterious Intruder (1946)

IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1 hour and 1 minute, rated 6.6 by 395 cinematizens.

Genre: Très noir

Verdict: Didn’t see that coming.  

It is fifth in The Whistler series but the eponymous Whistler figures only as an unbodied narrator at the start and finish.

Richard Dix is an unscrupulous PI (or is he?) who stumbles onto a significant opportunity.

When his loyal (god knows why) secretary chastens him to treat an ingénue nicely.  He says:  ‘When have I ever taken advantage of a client?’ To which she barks, ‘Whenever you could!’  In reply to which he shrugs and walks away.  This is our 1946 (anti-)hero.

Also rather noteworthy is the Brasher Doubloon surrogate: two wax cylinder recordings of Swedish opera soprano Jenny Lind (1820-1887).

The cylinders are unique in that Lind was never recorded, or so it was thought until this scriptwriter went work.  High culture in a second B feature is odd, indeed.  

Très noir, indeed.  Stay tuned for the last act to see why. No Spoiler here. 

This film series was a cross-over from the CBS radio series of The Whistler. 

Director William Castle imbues this film with atmosphere galore with low angle shots lit below from the front to add shadows as the characters face uncertainties. the shadows loom over all.  Then in contrast faces illuminated with a cigarette lighter are blank and cold.  The plot is full of twists and turns, betrayals and more with the body count to match all in just an hour, starting with the kindly old music store owner whom the ever reliable man-mountain Moose throttles.

In turn he is blasted later by parties to be known later.  But look out for Bernie Olds there.  

Charles Lane and Barton McLaine make a good pair of cops who, for once are no dummies, and they stir the pot to see who else gets it.  If the villains want to murder each other, that makes their lives easier.  N.B. Lane was one of Frank Capra’s character actors in many titles and he later tried to take the menace out of Dennis on television. Wesleyan University graduate, the bulky Barton MacLaine was the bad cop in The Maltese Falcon (1941), but also the romantic lead in the five of the nine Torchy Blane films playing second fiddle to Glenda Farrell from 1937-1939. 

MacLaine, Moose, and Olds were all Philip Marlowe’s friends and enemies.   

The Power of the Whistler (1945)

IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 6 minutes, rated 6.3 by 432 cinematizens. 

Genre: Noir

Verdict:  It had moments.

Richard Dix made six of the anthology films in The Whistler series and stars in this one as an amnesia victim who is assisted by a beautiful woman.  (Feigning memory loss, well the fraternity brothers have never had to pretend to that, but it has never helped them with the ladies as it does Dix here.)  The Whistler acts as narrator and occasionally as a Greek chorus.    

Dix was hit by a car and bumped his head, leaving him dizzy and confused when Beauty comes along and takes pity on him. They soon arrive at a modus vivendi well within the Hayes code.  He dons a frilly apron to make her breakfast.  Why are some aprons frilly you may ask? I know I did.  Send answers with five boxtops with answers someplace else.  

When not playing house, the pair of them try to recover his identity by using the detritus in his pockets and on his person: a ring with engraved initials, a florist’s receipt, a torn page with a telephone number on it, a newspaper cutting of a opera review, an unidentified key.  This forensic investigation was nicely done. No deus ex machina just sweat and shoe leather yields some results.      

But each time Beauty leaves the scene, Dix’s face changes from sunny but confused increasingly to cunning and determined, then there is the trail of corpses he leaves behind, which Beauty does not notice – at first.  The pet canary croaks in the night.  The tabby cat on the stoop is left for dead.  The squirrel in the park gets to close and – gone to the big acorn.  

In time Dix blurts a few things, and becomes more controlling of her as they set off for the sticks, upstate.  A few things are returning to his memory.  None good. There is a marvellous Midsomer scene where she deals with him using a pitchfork. Didn’t see that coming, and neither did he.  Loved his dialogue – later repeated almost word for word in some vampire films with that midget in the 1990s about how he was going to love her to death: Hers. Then came the pitchfork.  The fraternity brothers cringed, and vowed to stay away from barns.

Plod arrives to clear things up thanks to the initiative of Beauty’s sister.  The end. 

There isn’t any atmosphere or pace.  It sells on Dix’s unspoken changes and the forensic investigation in the early going, before he begins to recover his Killing Performance Indicators as a homicidal McKinsey maniac on the loose, frilly apron or not.  Dix, by the way, dug The Trans-Atlantic Tunnel (1935) discussed elsewhere on this blog. Get clicking’. He had a Best Actor nomination for Cimarron (1931).

For those who missed The Whistler, here are his opening words of the 642 radio broadcasts: ’I…am the Whistler, and I know many things, for I walk by night. I know many strange tales, many secrets hidden in the hearts of men and women who have stepped into the shadows. Yes… I know the nameless terrors of which they dare not speak!’  

This latter is surely a reference to McKinsey management.  

The Secret of the Whistler (1946)

IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 5 minutes run time, rated 6.5 by 326 cinematizens.

Genre: Noir

Verdict: Twisted

Middle aged man (MAM) meets Blonde Ice. Shiver! He’s loaded with his wife’s money which he is free to spend these days since Wife is off-camera bedridden. Blonde Ice plays him like a fish and he doesn’t know it, but his first friend does.  

MAM pays Blonde Ice to stand around skimpily clad while he pretends to paint her. The fraternity brothers found all this standing around fascinating.  

It comes to the MAM that when Wife croaks — fingers crossed —  in the near future, he and Blonde Ice will make two. What a genius to think of that all by himself with his first friend. Blonde Ice continues to play him.  

Then thanks to the miracle of modern screenwriting, Wife recovers.  Hubbie’s plan B involves poison.  Spoiler: Then there is the O’Henry twist at the end.  He didn’t do it but then he did do it. For that to make sense, watch the movie on You Tube. 

Virginia Leslie Gettman from Lincoln Nebraska took the nom de theatre of Leslie Brooks.  She plays Blonde Ice perfectly, never once indicating by word, deed, or look her gold-digging ways, yet the viewer knows it from the get-go. Nicely understated. She starred in Blonde Ice (1948), hence the sobriquet above, which does not view up to its arresting title. 

Director George Sherman turned out ten B features a year in his heyday.  He started in the film business as a mailroom sorter at Warners and was always there, ready and willing to do what had to be done.

Richard Dix as MAM is, as always, superb in the transformations from dutiful husband to puppy lover to wannabe adulterer to attempted murderer to the real thing.  In this role in particular he is well cast as he looks older than his years, and Blonde Ice, if not his first chance at lust, will certainly be his last. Ravaged by the bottle, Dix only lasted two more years.