IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 1 minute runtime, rated 5.0 by 128 cinematizens.
Genre: mystery
Verdict: Oh hum.
A series of robberies on the Midnight Limited train from New York City’s Grand Central Station have plod mystified. It is so dire that the Railroad is in danger of having to offer compensation to the victims. Rather than admit liability the company sends in the comatose John ‘Dusty’ King who reads his lines off cue cards without inflection.
Dusty checks to see if he has a pulse. Nope.
Marjorie Reynolds is one of the victims, and she lights up the screen, casting Dusty into the shade. Gratuitous racial stereotypes recur. Dusty lays a trap. By means unfathomable it works. The end.
There are some nice touches. The method by which the villain gets on and off the train is neat though I have seen it done better in Terror by Night (1946). I. Stanford Jolley is, as always, a greasy villain.
He had 370+ credits on the IMDb, the last in 1974.
Reynolds never quite made the A list but she stole the show in Ministry of Fear (1944) directed by Fritz Lang. She also had the female lead in Holiday Inn (1942), her only other A film lead. Tant pis.
IMDb mea-data is 1 hour and 4 minutes, rated 4.6 by 135 cinematizens.
Genre: Mystery
Verdict: Droll
It starts with a bang! A shot rings out and a woman with a gat flees the nocturnal scene, accosting a passing motorist who is so flustered to have a pistol poking in his neck that he drives into a wall and wakes up suspected of murder. Yikes!
Note. Keep back door locked when driving through movie sets. We always do.
To clear himself he has to find the frail, which he does right where she picked him up, and they join…forces to clear each other. There is much banter on the way to the inevitable.
Mustachioed plod is so low key that he becomes a chorus merely content to observe and comment, but at least he is not a flat-footed oaf as police are usually portrayed in these B films despite the injunction in the Hayes Code that required respect for law and order. In 1944 movie I was somewhat surprised to see that mo’ at a time when the clean-shaved army look was the patriotic norm.
‘What about the seven doors?’ asked the fraternity brothers when they regained consciousness. The murder occurred in a small shopping mall with seven shops each with a door around a sunny courtyard. That makes seven doors. Got it?
The frail sells hats, there is a silversmith, an art dealer, a furrier, a photograph, an antiquarian, and a forgotten. While the mall is well lit, airy, and open, there is a basement which is dark, dank, and creepy where much of the action occurs. Well, it may have occurred there but the print I watched on You Tube was so poor all the basement scenes were either inky or murky, and in either case muddy.
The specialism of each merchant figures in the story. Ditto what they might have in the basement. Nice and neat.
Chick Chandler stars, an accomplished second banana, and this is one of a few leading roles in his 185 IMDb credits. As with the other players, this unknown film is one of the three he is ‘Best Known For.’
It opened on 16 August as the Canadian First Army broke through the Falaise Gap in Normandy while in the Pacific the Seventh US Army Air Force, including my dad, set up in Guam, despite the continued combat with Japanese left on the island, for long range missions over Japan.
IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 14 minutes, rated 6.8/10.0 by 148 cinematizens.
Genre: Mystery, Sy Fy
Verdict: Easy viewing.
The set-up: Everyman Richard Carlson stops for gasoline on a rainy night and when he gets back in the car, there is a drenched, bug-eyed Martin Kosleck (on whom more below) cowering in the back seat. Carlson is persuaded to give Bug-eyes a lift and a room at the first hotel they find in the storm.
The plot thickens when Bug-eyes is murdered in the room while Carlson is doing his nails or something. The plods arrive on cue and clamp him in irons, well they try to, but he escapes and takes the redoubtable Nancy Kelly hostage, sort of. It is all Stockholm Syndrome thereafter.
To clear himself with the law Carlson must crack the case by tracing the path of Bug-eyes back to the asylum from which he escaped. The nuthouse is full of nuts to be sure, and there are some Keystone Kops involved. Bug-eyes passed the word to Carlson before he croaked: ‘G 47!’ It is open sesame when he says that…. but the door slams shut behind him!
There is one very nice stunt when Carlson leaps from a speeding car onto an auto transporter and then later rolls a vehicle off the back of it at highway speed. Not sure I have seen that before, and certainly not in a film made in late 1941 without any CGI. Most of all there is Nancy the hostage who dominates the screen with her sass and feisty temper. Yet somehow they become unintentionally married! ‘Go girl,’ yelled the fraternity brothers!
He went that way!
The reference to patriotic panties got the attention of the bros, ever so briefly. A sales lady spruiks them with a V for Victory embroidered on the article and she refers to ‘fine silk for Uncle Sam.’ Stop! The silk would have been Japanese, and by 1939 many manufacturers had substituted rayon for Japanese silk because customers were boycotting Japanese products, and the rayon was cheaper and more readily available.
There is a nice plot twist at the end, which surprised this jaded viewer. That is what gets the Sy Fy tick above. The 19 January release implies production in November of 1941, leading to the conclusion that the nefarious Nazis were a late add to the script after Hitler declared war on the United States on 9 December 1941. (Why did he do that? I have always wondered. Send five box tops with the answer.)
Martin Kosleck (a Polish Jew refugee) made a Hollywood career playing Nazis, Göbbels alone five times.
Marty at work.
Nancy Kelly (1921-1995) appeared on camera for the first time 1926 and for the last time in 1977. She was one of the few cute child actors to make the transition to maturity, albeit with a ten-year hiatus in the early 1930s. She gets top billing here in the credits, and rightly so. In addition to film, she also acted on radio and Broadway. Her good sense is evidenced in that she quit in 1977.
Siodmak directed, in this case not Kurt or Curt or Curtis, but Robert Siodmak, no relation to Kurt or Curt or Curtis.
Robert Siodmak
Though how they co-existed in Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950s is a puzzle. I am sure the one was often confused for the other, but their biographies on IMDb make no reference to the other. Despite the name and the techniques of German Expressionism this Siodmak was from Memphis Tennessee, born and bred, albeit in German Town (been there). He did specialise in Noir and visited Germany to learn techniques in the 1930s. The highpoint of his career might have been the mysterious The Killers (1946).
IMDb meta-data is 1 hour 9 minutes runtime, rated 5.8 by 378 cinematizens.
Genre: ODH ( = Old Dark House)
Verdict: Curve balls two.
A playwright and his producer with a comic irritant assistant are driving through a storm when they come to downed tree blocking the road while behind them flood waters are rising. They seek shelter in a conveniently located nearby Old Dark House.
The owner reluctantly bids them enter and offers a meagre hospitality to these strangers. They join a tuxedoed party of five or six, the fraternity brothers were in charge of counting. The travellers change out of their wet clothes into tuxedoes, what else.
One of the resident ladies appears walking in a trance, and there is talk of a ghost. Doors open and close by themselves. Furniture moves. Creaks and bumps are heard. Producer and assistant get shivery.
Then Madame Trance turns up dead. Dead!
Spoiler One.
It turns out all the ODH residents are actors hired by motoring playwright to put on this show to convince the accompanying producer to fund a new play. He arranged for the tree to be down (tough cookies for other drivers) while the storm was a lucky coincidence.
However, the death of Madame Trance was NOT in the script! The charade is revealed.
The tables now turn themselves. Producer and Assistant, once tricked, now stubbornly persistent in supposing the death is faked as part of the play, while the players and writer are alarmed at this ad libbing.
Get it? If not go back over the previous two paragraphs with your finger and read it again word-by-word to yourself.
Then after much loud knocking a uniformed guard from the inconveniently located nearby booby-hatch appears to announce that a homicidal maniac has been returned to the care of the community. He proceeds to search the house. Meanwhile, alert observers have noticed the eyes of painting above the fireplace moving and fingers on door handles. Get it? If not, repeat as above.
More members of the house party fall down dead, and in the ensuing consternation their cadavers disappear. The body count of missing bodies increases. Needless to say the telephone line was cut. The automobiles disabled.
Ten little indians gathered and counted off. Two gone already.
Spoiler Two.
More pounding at the front door yields two more booby-hatch guards who say that the escaped maniac dressed as a guard. Gulp! Get it?
First Guard (FG) is the nut job and he has been roaming around the house for hours, during which he found the hidden chambers, sliding panels, concealed passageways, torture chamber, and cobwebs. Behind the eyes on the painting they find secret passages and rooms. At last!
We cut away to FG with an audience of the disappeared all trussed up. None were killed but drugged to simulate death to the others upstairs. Now FG proclaims his genius and prepares to operate on the host with his many knives, scalpels, and wire cutters that he carried off from the loony bin. Sure.
In the nick (get it?) of time the other two guards with playwright et al. arrive and dis-knife him.
The End.
I liked the double twist but I wanted more spooky ODH stuff. It lacks atmosphere and tension. Some of the dialogue is sharp but these quips do not propel the story. Madame Trance was convincing in her limited screen time but the insipid female lead was…. Just about absent.
IMDb metadata is runtime of 1 hour and 7 minutes, rated 5.1/10.0 by 49 cinematizens
Genre: mystery
Verdict: Oh hum
Stanley Banks before he retired and became the Father of the Bride heads the code breakers in DC whose main interest seems to be lunch. Everyone has military ranks apart from the secretary whom Stanley aims to make Mother of the Bride just as soon as this case is over. (Psst! Though a Mrs Ames is already on the scene.) Wait, what case is that? The Coors Silver Bullets? No, then the fraternity brothers lost intent in right there.
Some Asians are up to no good. Before the code can be broken it has to be translated from the Kanji characters into Indiana English. Every time the code breakers get a break the Asians get a fast-break ahead again. How do the devils do it?
Spoiler. No red blooded, white skinned code breaker can read those chicken scratches so they hire off the street a translator named Arlie. He comes and goes as he pleases in their top secret super hush-hush headquarters guarded by a watchman who cannot see over his open mouth on the rare occasions when he is awake. It turns out Arlie is one of the code makers and he doctors his translations to throw off the code breakers! He disguises himself by wearing glasses. What a devil!
It takes the top notch code breakers an hour and several deaths to figure out that someone — who could it be? — is reading their mail even before they do: They of unmatched wisdom.
What is interesting is the romance between Arlie and fellow conspirator Lia (who is played by the aforementioned Mrs Ames). The scenes between these two are genuinely touching and played superbly in this otherwise bland production from the brothers Warner. I wanted to know more about Arlie and Lia, where they came from, how they met, what motivated them, what they hoped to achieve, where would they go in the future, what cellphone plan did they have? So many questions. Gerald Mohr also does a nice turn as the traitorous Republican pilot.
No such interest was sparked by Stanley and his crew. There are, by the way, no scenes in Panama. In contrast see Charlie Chan in Panama (1942).
Some of the simis on the IMDb suppose the villains are Chinese. Oh hum. Japan had invaded China in 1937 and many Chinese got help and encouragement from Americans. Much more likely the intention was to make the audience, if such there was, think they were Japanese, but nothing explicit was noticed by this auditor during occasional periods of attention.
