IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 20 minutes, rated 6.6 by 344 cinematizens.
Genre: Mystery
Verdict: Go girl!
The titular Williams is the only plod who can open a door, notice the murder weapon, pick up the sticks, tie his shoes, and toss a coin. Accordingly, he is invaluable and he amazes his colleagues in blue with his perspicacity. Success has welded and wedded him to the job so deeply that even his fiancée, that firecracker Joan Blondell, takes a number and waits for him. She and Melvyn Douglas are a dynamic duo in search of script.
Murders, robberies, assaults that have baffled the plod department for years, these Williams resolves in five minutes between the battle of the sexes with Blondell, where he has no chance. She carries the picture.
Douglas and Blondell were paired in four films, and it is easy to see why. They have a rapport that shows in the timing, the sight-gags, and even the positioning. But in this case the producer seemed to think that was enough, provided they were surrounded by the contract character actors. Absentees include a script and a director. It seems much longer than feature length and feature length is too long for the story.
The writer thought it was funny to dress Williams in drag and use him as bait to trap a villain. The rumour mill has it that Douglas did not like this turn, and refused to shave off his moustache, leaving the director to put a veil on him. All of this commotion for a lame idea to begin with.
Blondell has 162 credits on the IMDb, starting in 1930 and ending in 1981. Her parents were in vaudeville and she took to the stage at age three, and never left it. Alongside the film career she also trod the boards — hitting Broadway at seventeen — throughout her career. The peak was the the 1930s and 1940s when there were roles for smart women who weren’t afraid to say so, and she did. She usually played the best friend of the Major Studio Talent and stole one show after another from the MST. She did ten movies a year at times, essentially playing herself in screwball comedies. Then came a dramatic role in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945) and she once again dominated the camera. Then the unforgettable Blue Veil (1951). She could not steal any scenes in Desk Set (1957) but she still sparkled with Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracey.
Among my favourites, as well as those mentioned above, are Office Wife (1930), I Want a Divorce (1940), Model Wife (1941), Cry ‘Havoc’ (1943), The Corpse Came C.O.D. (1947), and Nightmare Alley (1947). With Douglas, in addition to this title, she did There’s Always a Woman (1938), There’s That Woman Again (1938), and Good Girls Go To Paris (1939).
She went into television in the 1950s and pretty much stayed there. The work, she said, was easier and the money steady.
GoodReads meta-data is 672 pages, rated 4.1 by 865 litizens.
Genre: History.
Verdict: Genius at work.
From 7 December 1941 the bad news began and continued: Pearl Harbor, Guam, Wake, Attu, Manila, Bataan, Corregidor, Malaya, Singapore, Puna, HMS Prince of Wales and Repulse with more everyday. In that context Doolittle’s Raid in April 1942 was a welcome harbinger of things to come.
While the man had a PhD he was not that Dr Dolittle. Get that, and get it straight!
James Doolittle (1896-1993) caught the flying bug as a child and went to Ohio as a teen to learn to fly where his teacher was Orville Wright. He signed up for the US Army Air Corps in 1917 but did not make it to Europe, however, he stayed in the Air Force because that was where the airplanes were and at the time the Air Force was trying to establish itself.
He became a test pilot avant le mot and soon was a celebrity, making and breaking flying records of speed, distance, endurance, and complexity. Much stemmed from his reckless, devil-may-care attitude in the air but as he matured he earned an undergraduate engineering degree from the University of California, and then a PhD from MIT. He began to rely on homework, stress tables, meteorological reports, wind tunnel tests, vector analysis, and pounds per square inch measurements while devising new instruments to fly further, faster, and in impossible circumstances.
If Antoine Saint-Exupéry was the poet of the sky, Doolittle was the scientist. Among the developments to which he contributed are the barometric altimeter, the aerial gyroscope, and avgas. When he married and children came he needed more money than the Air Force could pay so he sold himself to Shell Oil where he developed avgas for the burgeoning airline industry. It boosted power on existing aircraft by 35% and sold itself almost overnight.
He also pioneered the hood, that is, flying blind on instruments alone. To do this he designed and built prototype instruments and controls and then did demonstrations, taking off, flying a fixed course, and landing exactly back at the point of departure. He did not patent any of his innovations and so had no financial reward. That was not the point. The point was to fly.
By 6 December 1941 he was certainly the most famous aviator in the country, succeeding Bill Mitchell who had died and Charles Lindbergh who had gone into politics. He had proven three things: he was an innovator, he could do things with an airplane no one else could, and he could teach others to do them, too.
Now add the insight of a naval staff officer that medium range bombers might conceivably take-off from the deck of an aircraft carrier. The seeds were sown for an attack on Japan.
There were many technical problems to overcome: the bombers need twice the length of the deck to take off, their flight range was half the minimum required to get to safe place in China. To get the bombers to Japan the aircraft carrier would have to be within 400 miles of Target Tokyo, well within the range of Japanese patrols. With its deck crowded with bombers, the carrier would be defenceless. To protect it with escorts would add ships and increase the chances of detection and risk even more precious assets. And so. For every solution there was a catch.
There were also strategic objections to overcome. Did the US Navy want to risk one of its few aircraft carriers and its crew of two thousand salts on an untried mission of no lasting importance? Could such a complex plan be kept secret? Would the Army Air Corps give up scarce bombers to such a cockeyed mission? What was the weather like in the North Pacific? Who had maps of Tokyo? Most of all, could take-off even be done?
From the start one thing was obvious: it was a one-way mission. Taking off from a flight deck might be possible with modified aircraft, but landing a B-25 on one was impossible.* The arresting gear used for deck landings would rip the tail off the bombers turning them into cannon balls which would then topple into the sea at best, or crash into the command island killing the crews and more.
Aircraft designed to land on carrier have reinforced tails to accommodate the jerk of the arresting line. To manufacture B-25s with that kind of reinforcement would take months, and then with the reinforcement they would be then too heavy to lift off the decks. Always a catch.
More homework followed when Doolittle got the job. He studied the weight of fuel versus the gain of thrust on takeoff and range in the air, factoring in the weight of the fuel tanks themselves, the ship’s speed on launch from the deck. He also considered the body weight of the flight crew and the instruments. He set a maximum weight for the crew members, and stripped the planes of armour, weapons, padding, and much else, including transmitters since radio silence was to be the rule.
He also lobbied hard to get the operational command on the grounds that to train and motivate the crewmen they had to know he was coming with them. This appointment proved to be the hardest sell because General Hap Arnold of the USAF thought Doolittle’s genius was too valuable to risk on what, when all was said and done, was a demonstration. The decisive factor was Doolittle’s reputation. When volunteers were solicited for a secret and perhaps fatal mission there were few takers until his name was mentioned, and then other flyboys were ready to go with the great Doolittle and volunteers flooded in for the unknown. Once that happened, he had to go.
There are many more details about the engineering, logistics, and planning with the attendants SNAFUs. These are best read. Some are a sad reminder that McKinsey management has been with us for a long time. Stories about foot powder and carburettors are reminders that even in war, even in a top priority most secret project, even in a rigid hierarchical chain of command there is scope for individuals to gum up the works by putting process before product, which in this case surely lead to the death of the members of at least one crew. I particularly liked the instance of Doolittle, in a rush, refusing to fill out a feedback questionnaire after the planes were poorly serviced at the Alameda Naval Air Station, and then being threatened with court martial for not providing customer feedback. McKinsey management at its best.
He was in a rush because a host of considerations, chief among them was that the weather in the North Pacific yielded a window over Tokyo of about ten days. It was do it then or miss the chance for months and who knows how far the Japanese might have advanced by then.
While the purpose of the attack was to bolster American morale it had two strategic results that had not been fully anticipated arising from the Japanese conclusion that the B-25s had taken off from barren Midway Island. First, the Imperial Navy was pulled back many hundreds of miles to patrol more intensely the home waters to prevent another attack. Second, Midway became a goal, and attacking it, long on the cards, was rushed with the resulting Japanese defeat because preparations were hastily executed.
Thus, the raid, first, softened the perimeter of Japanese advance making possible the US build up around Midway to be undetected by the Japanese and, second, precipitated a rash Japanese attack that led to a major defeat leaving the Imperial Navy unable to take the offensive again. That latter result meant the Japanese plan to occupy Fiji, Noumea, and Tonga to cut the seaway from Australia and New Zealand to the United States was abandoned.
The book has nearly minute-by-minute details of the flight, bombing, fate, and survival of the crew men. It bulks the book out.
The most difficult task was the takeoff of a fully loaded bomber with vast amounts of extra fuel (see 5 below). None of the pilots had ever taken off from a carrier before. Such was the secrecy that this had not been practiced. The USS Hornet steered into the wind with mountainous heavy seas rolling at it. When the Flight Controller gave the green light to each plane at launch, the prow of the ship was down and at the end of flight deck the forthcoming wave filled the pilot’s cockpit screen. The aim was to time each takeoff so that the aircraft reached the end of the deck as the Hornet rose from the trough. Note also that many of the flight crewmen had been seasick for days.
Doolittle went first.
Despite the meticulous planning much went wrong.
The weather was terrible for man, plane, and ship. Far worse than anticipated based on the sketchy history of weather in the area.
The plan was to launch the planes at 400 miles from Tokyo and to fly on to China. That was easily possible in the modified aircraft. It was even possible at 600 miles on Doolittle’s calculations. But when detected by Japanese patrols, the flotilla was 800 miles away. The naval commandeer did not want to risk his ships and ordered the launch. It was now or never. Doolittle gave the crewmen the chance to back out but none took it. (There were extra crews onboard.)
At that distance and in that weather, once airborne there was no fuel to waste in coming into a formation. It became every airplane for itself.
Nor was there fuel to hold in position and recalibrate compasses which had demagnetised on the steel hulled aircraft carrier. In addition, recalibrating would have required using radios to re-set with the aircraft carrier below, and that traffic would surely now be heard by the Japanese patrols. Once aloft each aircraft flew alone by dead reckoning.
The rough weather, the iffy takeoffs, and the untried nature of the fuel bladders crammed into every nook and cranny of the aircraft proved unequal to the test and many seeped fuel into the aircraft. They used field dressings to stem the leaks.
The iffy takeover led to cracks in the plexiglass nose on some aircraft which had been hit by flying debris on the deck. They stuffed flight jackets into the holes.
The result was that nothing thereafter went according to plan. Though the weather over Japan on the day was fine, the crews were lost, and only with luck found targets.
Because of the secrecy surrounding the plan they had done little bombing practice, and on the day seldom hit the targets they found. The Japanese public neither expected nor prepared for bombing and crowded the streets to watch what many thought was a drill. Civilian casualties mounted.
If they could not find the assigned targets in the day time over an orderly Japan, it was impossible to find the Chinese airfield hours later in flak-damaged aircraft in the dark with the fuel indicator on Empty. Some crashed landed on sandy beaches and pastures, while other crewmen bailed out. The only B-25 from the raid that remained whole went to Russia where the crewmen were imprisoned to honour Soviet neutrality with Japan.
Few of the arrangements in China for the flyers had in fact been made, and in any event they could not find the meeting points. Some were injured in the crashes or parachute landings. Again secrecy hampered the efforts that were made in China. To confuse the Japanese, secrecy remained the order of the day for a long time. Despite the efforts of the free press to reveal all to its enemies.
The Japanese reprisals in eastern China in the search for the downed flyers were extensive and brutal. One Red Cross estimate put the death toll at 250,000.
Plan versus reality.
Some of the crewmen were captured by the Japanese, one plane landed in Vladivostok in neutral Russia, and the rest crash landed or bailed out in China, as did Doolittle himself. When he made it t0 safety he bent every effort at recovering his crewmen and that continued throughout and after the war in recovering the bodies of the eight that perished.
Two things I had not appreciated before reading this book emerged. One, that interning Japanese-Americans on the West Coast probably saved some of their lives. The public reaction, outcry, and hostility to Japanese after 7 December 1941 was nearly out of control — and many local officials did not want to control it. Vigilantes were primed and ready to exact their vengeance on anyone whom they took to be Japanese. In the luxury of hindsight the internment is now pompously condemned.
Two, I had not realised just how popular in Japan was the attack on Pearl Harbor. The author amasses an extensive cross section of film and newspaper, as well as memoir material, to show that the Nippon public was delirious with joy at the destruction recorded by the gun camera on the Zeros, including the strafing of the Tripler Military Hospital (the other pink palace on Oahu). Just as earlier the Japanese movie-going public had been delighted by the rapine, murder, and destruction in China, where contests in bayoneting bound Chinese prisoners were filmed like sporting events and shown in Japanese theatres to the cheers of the audiences. Footage is on You Tube for those with strong stomachs. I expect that there are Chinese today who have not forgotten this fact.
Dr Dootlittle is front left.
Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle is easy to spot in the photographs of the time. He was invariably, at under 5’ 2” tall, the shortest man in any picture. Compared the shambling bear Antoine de Saint-Exupéry he was an elf, though their paths never crossed. Or did they, I discovered that Doolittle was in Algeria in 1943 and St Ex was there in February 1944. A lot of time and a big country to be sure.
I noticed that the release date of film I commented on earlier coincided with Doolittle’s Raid and that got me thinking about it and shopping on Kindle for some reading. Of the many titles available I chose this in the hope it would be dispassionate, informative, and explanatory. It is but the minute-by-minute detail was too too much information for this reader.
Author James Scott
*The B-25 is called the Mitchell after Billy Mitchell who was courtmartialed in 1925 and drummed out of the army for his endless advocacy of airpower in the next war. After his death all was forgiven. At the time it was the only Army Airforce airplane named for a person.
IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 7 minutes, rated 6.4 by 69 cinematizens.
Genre: Mystery
Verdict: Snappy
The ingredients are a closed passenger train from Paris to Istanbul with two incognito journalists after the same vanilla scoop.
The journalists conceal their identities and purpose from each other and from the subject of their inquiries played by Paul Lukas. I never did grasp what the newshound were after from Paul, and neither did they I suppose.
Since there seemed to be no point, instead we have an incompetent assassin in Sascha bested by a bumptious bodyguard. Musical interludes lighten the tone, as the journalists collide. There are disguises, mistaken identities, a cake, a tandem bicycle, yodelling, and more.
An agreeable distraction from the news of the day.
IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 3 minutes, rated 6.5 by 39 cinematizens.
Genre: Mystery.
Verdict: Too many change-ups.
Mr D is the ace of the pitching staff of the World Series team in town to see how the Bums will beat themselves this time. He walks the streets of New York City alone and enters Baghdad Way (aka Coney Island) , a fictional and exotic part of the Big Worm where all nations mix and the streets are lined with sideshows because there is no main event.
Two young baseball fans recognise Mr D, and he obliges at a throwing booth where he meets Her. She is hiding there in plain sight from evil saboteurs led by a kindly, crippled spinster later called Achilles. (I kid you not.)
Pointless back and forth occurs as the clock slows to Dali time. The whole is less than the sum of parts. Lloyd bubbles with energy as Mr D. Irene Hervey as Her gives a good performance of someone frightened, confused, and determined. J. Carrol Naish is on the money as the Professor (Emeritus) who is crazy like a fox. And Ann Gillis as Joey (Josephine) the baseball nut steals the show. She made her first film when she was seven and her last was Space Odyssey: 2001 (1968).
Despite the players, the whole thing dragged and dragged. There was a nice twist toward the end with Achilles but even that was undercooked.
There is no baseball in it, though it ends with a charming scene as Mr Dynamite pitches a game for Joey. I started to say it ‘regrettably’ that there was no baseball in it, but when I think of the hash made of baseball in other movies, perhaps that was for the best. Though how the ace of the staff visiting from distant St Louis for the World Series could wander the streets alone, smoking, was a mystery to me. No friends, no roommate, no manager, no curfew, no nothing to interfere with his gallivanting around day and night.
IMDb meta-data is run time of 1 hour and 34 minutes, rated 6.6 by 379 cinematizens.
Genre: Mystery.
Verdict: Snappy.
The usual suspects gather for the Otranto train at the Gare de Lyon, the British aristocratic wife making off with an oily paramour, a twitchy Pomme who never lets go of a battered briefcase, the American glamour puss with her brassy manager, a moustachioed French police officer, an arrogant British business stereotype who bullies his grovelling assistant, a languid Major Strasser with a reluctant offsider, a Scots golfer who won’t shut up, a woman of a certain age with a dachshund, and assorted boors and bores. No boars were sighted.
We see much hustle and bustle at Le Gare as luggage is loaded, provisions for the restaurant car are manhandled into place, cabins are primped, engine valves are checked, moving parts oiled, dining car tables set, and as one baggage cart rolls along an attendant pastes on destination labels for Rome, including one carefully applied to the tag on dachshund who is riding along on top. There are many such touches from director Walter Forde.
As passengers gather reading material, all of them having forgotten their iBooks, over the shoulder of one we read in a newspaper that a Van Dyke painting has been stolen. Several passengers, it emerges, have an interest in Dick’s painting. The police officer is insulted that such a priceless work should have been stolen in Paree! The business stereotype had been thwarted in the attempt to buy it and has schadenfreude in seeing that it has been stolen from the successful purchaser. Twitcher who thought he was being so cool and nonchalant has to be the thief. No one but a thief could try so hard to appear indifferent.
Then there is Major Strasser who followed Twitcher with the knowledge that he is the thief, and Strasser proposes to relieve the Twitter’s guilty conscience by stealing the painting from him. His offsider is game for that but it emerges that Strasser also plans to use Twitcher as a literal cut-out. [Figure it out.] The offsider is not happy at that prospect, less so when he bumps into Glamour Puss in the corridor and they remember old times before the movie began.
There is a marvellous scene when Twitcher is lured into a card game to pass the time, and meets Strasser — again, recognising each other, without a word, for what they each are: the Twitcher a clever thief, and Strasser a satanic villain. Strasser’s malevolence behind the charming smile is tour de force acting.
The briefcase is mislaid that brings the business stereotype into the action along with his groveller. Offsider decides to split. Strasser kills Twitcher. The police officer investigates and Strasser charms his way into the suspension of belief in another remarkable gambit.
When finally cornered he either tries to escape by jumping off the train or committing suicide I could not tell what the screenwriter’s intention was. Maybe the director just yelled ‘Cut!’
Throughout the momentum of the hurdling train is cross-cut into the action to give a sense of urgency. It passes through Swiss border control and enters Italy where the carabinieri board the train to assist the French police officer to comb his moustache.
This is one of the first mystery train films, and many more have since followed in its tracks. It was re-made in France in 1950.
Conrad Veidt played the villain, Strasser, perfectly. Connie been in the German Imperial Army on the Eastern Front in World War I, and as he recovered from wounds he hung around the theatre where his wife worked, and in time became himself an actor on the stage and then in silent films. When race registration begin after 1932, his wife was Jewish, and so he claimed that he was, too, to support her, though he was not. In his words, ‘to do otherwise was to renounce her,’ and this he would not do.
This stand ended his film career in Germany within a matter of minutes and the pair of them started to learn English and fled to London. Along with a number of British and expatriate actors later he moved on to Hollywood to promote films that might help persuade neutral America into the war on the English side. He played evil Nazis more than a dozen times. This was an easy step since in his silent movie career he had played the Devil in None of the Woman Born [1918] and Kurfürstendamm [1920], Lucifer in Satan [1920]), and Death in Unheimliche Geschichten [1919]. He died in 1943. He would have been a perfect foil for Max in the Seventh Seal.
IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 5 minutes of runtime, rated 5.9 by 467 cinematizens.
Genre: Mystery.
Verdict: Foggy.
In a dense fog on the Golden Gate Bridge walking from There to Where, Nina Foch sees a man set upon by thugs and screams….herself awake to find that the noise has brought to her hotel room door the very man of whom she dreamed! Seeing Nina lying there, Dreamboat has enough sense not to rock.
She is an Army nurse on R and R, albeit nothing is made of her experiences, perhaps, in the Pacific. The bloodbath at Iwo Jima had ended only a fortnight before the release date of this balderdash, so maybe she is on leave from that inferno. DreamBoat is a Top Hush-Hush guy who cannot shut up.
Because he can speak Hollywoodese, DreamBoat is charged with a super secret mission to Japanese occupied Hong Kong to buy jade for Otto. Sure he will fit in. Abstracting that jade will crush the Nips, intones Otto as only he could, and lead to final victory. There is a reference ‘to our allies, the Chinese.’ Recognition of Allies is rare in Hollywood and so noteworthy. (It is altogether unknown in Washington D.C. with one exception: The haunting Korean War Memorial.)
DreamBoat and Nina
Though DreamBoat can tell her nothing of his mission and does so at great length, Nina pledges to stay dry until he returns, but no sooner does he set off than he is set upon. It is child’s play in trapping him.
Nina knows something is up and goes to the secretive Otto by finding him in the telephone book under SPIES but Otto feigns ignorance and leaves it at that. No wonder the Japanese held out so long with spies like this. Then as scriptwriting would have it, the opening dream sequences is played out for (un)real. With me so far? Still Otto smokes his pipe.
The man Trappers are Caucasians with enemy accents who hole up in ChinaTown. They Nina-nap her to blackmail DreamBoat into handing over the super-duper top secret jade order, and he would if he could, but… In the stunt fight on the Bridge it fell into the void.
There are some nice touches as both sides try to dredge it up from that void. Once again it is child’s play to outwit DreamBoat, though by this time Otto’s pipe has gone out and he is stirred to action. Why DreamBoat did not turn to Otto in the first instance is down to SOP which in this case means Stupid Operating Procedure, a favourite of scriptwriters.
Nina seems indifferent to being trussed up and threatened, but none of that is related to her experiences as an Army nurse. More’s the pity.
With the help of some local Chinese, our allies, Otto rescues her as DreamBoat postures.
It was Budd Boetticher’s first director’s credit and it shows around the edges. Budd later made some of the best Westerns that are bleak in style and complex in morality. These include Decision at Sundown (1957), Buchanan Rides Alone (1958), Ride Lonesome (1959), and Comanche Station (1960). Each of these titles is discussed elsewhere on this blog. He developed a fascination with bullfighting and directed and wrote at least five movies on that theme.
The film at hand was released on 5 April 1945, four days after the start of the Typhoon of Steel on Okinawa that cost 77,000 US casualties and even greater number of Japanese. There would have been plenty of nursing needed there.
IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 3 minutes, rated 6.2 by 77 cinematizens.
Gerne: Mystery.
Verdict: Lord Peter appears.
We know from the get-go in this inverted krimi who dun it, where, how, and why. How long will it take Plod to get there is the question?
The story open in a boat-train hotel in Old Blighty as Blackmailer is coercing Married Woman to abscond to France with him by referring to the amorous emails she wrote to him. He is short, overweight, warty, and rude. No wonder she forsook the tall, dapper, polite, forthright John Loder for this tripe. Credibility starts low.
The pace accelerates when a second victim confronts Blackmailer and after some useless dialogue throttles him. Victim proceeds to stuff corpse into a steamer trunk left behind by the Marx Brothers and he then carries the trunk downstairs as if he were a porter, bent under the weight and obscured by the bulk past the reception desk, where Lord Peter Wimsey is making fatuous remarks. His Lordship does notice that the porter’s trousers have a well-ironed crease in them and that is most unusual for a navvy.
The trunk is labeled for Married Woman and shortly her Absent Husband catches up with her and they have a reconciliation of sorts. He goes upstairs to settle the hash of Blackmailer in the room where he mistakes murderous Victim for Blackmailer and fisticuffs ensure. Blackmailer gets away.
Husband and Woman take the train to Southampton and then the ferry to Le Havre where French officials cannot levy an import duty on the corpse in the trunk and send it back to England along with Husband and Wife. Lord Peter who has observed all this joins them in returning with his man Bunter.
While the circumstantial evidence against Absent Husband is great, after seeing his Eton tie Inspector Parker (Wimsey’s brother-in-law) does not believe him guilty.
Spoiler ahead.
Parker and Wimsey decide to investigate further and enlist the aid of the railroad which assigns to the case…. wait for it… the murderous Victim who is a company employee. He can hardly believe his luck. Only Absent Husband saw him and now Victim is in a position to shift the blame on him.
He has his wife, who evidently is complicit in both the blackmail and murder, chat up Married Woman and plant seeds of doubt about Husband’s guilt. Just causal like. Being a screenwriters twit Married Woman swallows the bait, but both Husband and Wimsey see a set-up in that causal conversation and re-double their efforts. Husband chases around and Wimsey makes fatuous remarks non-stop. Whew!
There is a superb scene in a nocturnal rail yard where Victim and Husband duke it out, and accidentally release the brake on a gigantic steam engine which then rolls ever so slowly, silently, and implacably onward. This attack on Husband convinces everyone the Victim is the Villain and in time he is netted after another barrage Wimsey’s verbiage.
There are some nice procedural touches as when Wimsey realises that the railroad detective (psst, Victim-Villain) knew the room number was 9, even after the numeral was removed. Likewise the denouement in the railway baggage car with the geese is a keeper.
Does the title refer to the body in the trunk which is removed in the first fifteen minutes, or what? It seems an early talkie because often the characters face the camera square in closeup to deliver the lines.
This was the first film adaptation of Dorothy Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey. Many more followed. I particularly liked the Ian Carmichael personifications 1972-1974 in part because of the bond between his Wimsey and Bunter. While Bunter appears in this film he is not developed, nor Wimsey’s attachment to him explained.
IMDb meta-data is runtime 59 minutes, rated 6.1 by 63 cinematizens
Genre: Mystery
Verdict: Neato
When tall, distinguished-looking, baritone Colonel Hicks goes to hire a Private Dick he brooks no nonsense. Though he has no appointment he wants to ‘see Mr. B. Prentice right here! Right now!’ as he pushes past Iggy (on whom more below) in the anteroom and bursting into the inner office….to find that the ‘B’ is for Belinda! ‘Holy scriptwriting,’ he cried! ‘A dame!’ Giving himself a full-body shake he pressed on since Prentice came highly recommended by the police. [Psst, her father is captain of detectives. Is this insider trading?]
Hicks wants to know what his son is spending so much money on, but Hicks does not want to pry by asking the scion. He would rather hire a spy. Hicks is a lot of things but one of them is not smart.
Earlier we had seen Belinda dust off Canino, and that is no easy task, but she handled his gat with the ease of practice. The director sent Canino back to thug school to revise his act. On whom more below.
No sooner does Belinda hit the bricks than Hicks bites the dust alone in his study. It was a case of overkill, there was a heart attack, there was syringe, there was a very sharp letter opener, there was a television broadcast of Pox News. No one could survive a conjunction of events that lethal.
Iggy en route.
Now B turns her talents to figuring out who dun it. There is some to’ing and fro’ing and Iggy, the muscular ex-Marine offsider, is as quick on the update as B herself is. It is a good team and I am sorry to say this was a once-off pairing. Iggy is not played for laughs and comes through for her more than once and she he. This was one of the few times William Haade got to do anything but flex the pecs. He turned bad after this gig and was a villain in Key Largo (1948).
She starts with the obvious, the handsome, confident, wealthy young son who is as clueless as a Murdoch Bot Prime Minister.
There are many herrings: a sister who is secretive and pouty, a butler who looks shifty when the police are around, a shyster lawyer, an emeritus professor, and the family doctor who missed the syringe and the letter opener when he signed the death certificate as a heart attack. Then there is Canino. Is he an entrepreneurial, franchise, or a contract thug?
There are some nifty lines as when Canino invites himself to sit at Belinda’s table in a restaurant and put his snap-brim fedora carefully on the table. She tells him, she does not ask, to remove the hat because she is allergic to dandruff. He then gives her a glimpse of the gat among the dandruff under the hat. She is as cool as ice, and soon deals with him.
Here are a few other bon mots:
‘Trying to keep a stiff secret is like hiding the Statue of Liberty in a phone booth.’
‘Even lambs become lions is the stakes are high enough.’
‘Don’t get frisky or I’ll put this gun where he least expect it.’ [Still puzzling on that place.]
Waitress: ‘He’s a bad egg.’
Belinda: ‘I’ll scramble him good.’ [And she did.]
I never did figure out who did what and the explanation she gives at the end was no help, but they mostly lived happily ever after. The handsome male lead does nothing but posture in a neato switch with the duties usually assigned to the female lead.
‘Canino,’ you ask? He was the unforgettable villain in The Big Sleep (1946) played by Bob Steele. He went up against Bogey again in The Enforcer (1951). Bob racked up more than 244 credits on the IMDb. He could make the word ‘Please’ sound like a mortal threat. Whenever his name appears in the credits a good dose menace follows. Believe it or not, Ripley, he started out in comedy.
It was a studio mill production from Republic before its president bankrupted the company trying to make the statuesque but wooden Vera Ralston a star. This affair is discussed elsewhere on this blog. Get clickin’ for the goss. It is also the studio with which John Wayne started.
IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 13 minutes, rated 7.1 by 21,656 cinematizens.
Gerne: Horror
Verdict: Masterpiece
A ruminative tale of undying love perfectly directed by Karl Freund, a cinematographer who conveys meaning, emotion, and conviction through lighting, silence, and stasis. No strange camera angles, framed shots, or cross cuts. The titular Mummy is never seen entire. This film has nothing to do with the host of derivative imitators that followed.
While mummies (but not daddies) had a prior history in a novel by Bram Stoker and a 1918 silent film by Ernst Lubitsch, it was only after Howard Carter found Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922 that the Egyptian craze occurred, and with it Mummies went big. There is a recent episode of Lord Bragg’s podcast on In Our Time about this finding for the cognoscenti.
Brit boy reading what he shouldn’t.
In the film a bumptious Brit reads out the sacred ritual, which his elders advised him not to do, so we knew he would do it, and that precipitates the events that follow. Imotep was consumed by love for Zita but she was an anti-vaxxer and when measles killed her, Immy stole the sacred scroll to re-animate her, but just as he was about to utter…. The cops busted him and he was sentenced to be buried alive or watch the President in Thief talk. He chose burial.
We see the start of his burial when he is being wrapped in linen and it is enough. Whew! (Note no fly was included when he was wrapped and that caused a problem because even mummies have to go.) The scroll he violated is buried with him in an unmarked hole in the ground. The Brits find this and as above, set the ball rolling. Then time passes.
Ardath Bey appears from nowhere a decade later and tells another Brit crew where to dig to find the good stuff. They do and they do. Strangely Arath wants no baksheesh and slips away only to return when all the accoutrements are displayed in the Cairo museum (which Kate has visited). It is an other-worldly portrayal of this leathery man with the posture of a sergeant major and the manners of a European diplomat, yet before whom dogs recoil and a Nubian warrior swoons, that carries the picture.
When Zita appears Ardath is sure she is the reincarnation of his love of three plus millennia before and sets about joining with her. [Down, fraternity brothers, not like that!]
Ardath makes eyes at her as only he can. Move over, Bela. Ardath has an iTV cleverly concealed in a cooling, reflecting pool where he observes others. When senior Brit decides to burn the animating scroll, Ardath, finishes him off with murderous thoughts! Good thing the fraternity brothers cannot do that to the professors who keep failing them for being drunken dolts.
Likewise David Manners, as the hero, is threatened. Zita falls under Ardath’s hypnotic sway and…
The sepulchral atmosphere throughout is suffocating. One almost feels the drying heat and congestion. When the young Brit goes nuts, that seems the right reaction. The lighting and camera use details, like a single eye opening, the dog balking, or Ardath’s glowing stare, to suggest menace. These are silent, static images from which the viewer cannot turn away. Karloff as Ardath manipulates the Brits with ease. The three thousand seven hundred year flashback in the iTV reflecting pool is a movie within a movie worthy W. D. Griffith. Zita is exotic and divided. She is both captivated by Ardath and repelled by him.
She is saved in the end not by Hero but by a direct appeal to the ancient Egyptian gods whom Ardath offended in the first place: Marvellous irony in that. Even when they have finally figured it out the Brits, mighty colonists that they are, cannot stop it.
It was released on 22 December in time for Christmas 1932 in the Great Depression. Karl Freund concentrated on cinematography and shot Metropolis (1927), All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), Dracula (1931), The Good Earth (1937), Tortilla Flat (1942), Key Largo (1948) among many others. He also developed techniques for filming television programs that remain current despite all the technical changes.
At the time Universal was making Horror its genre of choice with Dracula (1931) and Frankenstein (1931), followed by Island of Lost Souls (1932), and Republicans in the Senate, but these films — apart from the last one — had literary antecedents, whereas The Mummy sprang whole from the screenplay by Nina Putnam. If only she had residual rights to the hundreds of imitations that followed, including some recent egregious examples, she would have been a zillionaire. She was an accountant by day and some say she devised the IRS 1040 tax form when she worked at Treasury. It is still in use, sad to say.
IMDb meta-data is 59 minutes of runtime, rated 6.0 by 301 cinematizens
Genre: Horror
Verdict: Some nice touches
A world weary Bar Owner (BO) in the heart of the Dark (because is little is known about it) Continent in Bakunda on the Unseen River, perhaps, in southern Chad speaks in riddles. We know from the get-go he is…The Vampire. What else could explain his clean clothes, perfect diction, and shy mien.
BO is urbane, European, hyperthyroid, patient, and oblivious of either money or sex. ‘What is wrong this guy, indeed,’ chorused the fraternity brothers! Meanwhile, locals — not the Europeans — are dying from bites in the throat. Got it, so far?
While the six Hollywood Europeans we see, including the studio-contracted woman who has the screaming and fainting duties of the era, stand around, the natives are sure a demon is loose. They use their iDrums to communicate. The Europeans are sure it is an animal and set out to trap it. Fewer return none the wiser.
Meanwhile, we see that the BO can bug his eyes out something incredible, even more than the fraternity brothers do when a professor assigns r-e-a-d-i-n-g! (‘As if!’) When bug-eyed, BO is dangerous.
It takes Hero a while to figure it out and then he falls sway to the bug-eyes himself. His will is so weak he might have been acting the part written for the screamer. That is nice since it is usually the woman who succumbs, though to be unfair she, too, does later but Hero was first to go all silly putty.
There is a neat shot when we, along with the native servant, see the tea cup in the mirror but not BO’s hand holding it. Though surprised Native does not go all stereotype but instead begins to realise well before the Europeans what has to be done, namely calling Buffy! This is another nice touch endowing the black servant with wit, self-control, and insight. Credit the writer for this touch.
‘You are in my power!’
Another very noir scene has BO’s shadow following a minor ruffian and encompassing him as he — BO — has a bite to drink. This is the first European to get it. Had this scene been in an A-film, it would be studied in film schools for the superb staging. Credit the director for this touch.
BO plays his role as the life-weary (ghost) vampire straight with no melodrama, if anything it is under-acted, and the more effective for it. Credit the actor for this touch.
The natives are shown to be well ahead of the Europeans in sussing the deal and acting against it, however Africa is presented as a sensational mash-up of witchcraft, voodoo, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Bunkimism, rather like an ABC news report.
Leigh Brackett
The screenplay was a rarity of 1940s Hollywood: written by a woman, Leigh Brackett, who also wrote the Big Sleep (1946), Rio Bravo (1959), Hatari! (1962), and Stars Wars (1980), and many episodes of TheRockford Files. She also published a host of Sy Fy short stories, and was married to Captain Future himself, Edmond Hamilton.
The gaunt and ever morose John Abbott played the Ghostly Vampire BO with measured ennui. He did many television program and will be recognised by viewers without knowing his name. He was delightful as the embezzling Shakespeare quoting Studio Head in The Falcon in Hollywood (1944). Despite a mien of MittelEuropa he was born Albert Chamberlain Kefford in Kensington, London England and worked in the British Embassy in Moscow during World War II before landing in Hollywood. Regrettably his service in Moscow haunted him later when the real Monster of Hollywood HUAC went looking for cheap headlines and he was blacklisted for a time.
This film was released on 21 May 1945 in the middle of the Typhoon of Steel on Okinawa which saw 75,000 American casualties on this tiny island. The Japanese losses were equal if not even greater. That action was taken to indicate what an invasion of Japan would be like. Beyond hyperbole.
