Author: Michael W Jackson

IMDb meta-data is run time a snappy 1 hour and 1 minute, rated 6.2 by 151 cinemitizens.
Released on 1 December 1944.
Genre: Noir, Comedy.

Verdict: All singing, all dancing gal pals do what has to be done.
To dispel superstitions about a mansion where a murder took place twenty years ago, the family puts on a party for family and friends. As the guests gather and cavort, the upstairs Blue Room, where the deed occurred is nonetheless kept locked.
Brash, a young suitor for Daughter, insists that he spend the night in the Blue Room to prove it is safe. This kNight errant hopes to win patronal favour for his matrimonial suit by this exploit. Sure, that is understood but safe from what?
Thereafter the plot thickens. The next morning, though the bell in the Blue Room rings for the butler, no one is there in the Blue Room when the ever typecast butler Edwards enters. Bernie OIds on loan from countless other cop shows, comes to investigate but makes no progress, apart from chewing on a toothpick. Brash has disappeared.
The sleuthing is taken over by the three Jazzy-belles on hand to entertain the guests. These wisecracking gal pals mix song with inference and dance with investigation. They are amusing. The music has zest. The dancing is Olympic standards. Very diverting. All so much better than say the Ritz Brothers, originally contracted for this film before they got a better offer.
Needless to say there is a villain, and it is a he, the one least suspicious. Of course.
For once Ian Wolfe as the eternal butler gets some good lines and moments on camera, and he makes the most of them.
The Jazzy-belles carry the picture, a scratch group assembled for this film, it seems: Grace McDonald, Betty Kean, and June Preisser. Two of them had short careers but McDonald continued in television into the 1980s.

A rarity then for the time with these three as the principal players.
The screenplay confused the fraternity brothers. At one point, speaking of the death in the Blue Room, a member of the family says no one knows how the victim, her father, died. Later her brother says their father was shot. In both cases the attending physician is present along with several others. Throughout there is friendly ghost in attendance who is not integrated into the story but is there for comic irritation.
As this film made it way across the country, the newsreels that preceded it would have carried the news of the enormous and ominous reverses Allied Armies began to suffer in the Battle of Bulge.

IMDb meta-data is runtime a brisk 1 hour and 18 minutes, rated at 6.5 by 1155 cinemitizens.
Genre: Noir, Mystery

Verdict: Noir at its best.
Babe is a two-year widow who starts hearing his dead husband’s voice in the air without a BlueTooth headset. Oh Oh. This irritates Richard Carlson, her new suitor. She has an Ingenue sister who lives with her in a mansion on a cliff top. Where else?
Walking on the beach below one night, she encounters Mr X, who tells her about herself for he is a medium and sensitive to her vibrations. [There were snickers from the fraternity bothers at his point.] The Viennese Mr X oils his way into her life.
He is an utter cynic, having planted an accomplice as a maid in the mansion to glean information. His aim is to separate this widow from a lot of moolah. Ingenue falls in love with him and his oily ways. Widow is perplexed by it all.
A séance is arranged in Oily’s wired up studio. The party is crashed by Carlson and the private dick he has employed. The crashers insist that the show go on; Oily tries to grease his way out of it to no avail. His hand is forced and the lights go down. Then….
The dead husband appears to all. No one is more amazed than the amazing Mr X in a star turn.
Seems husband has had several widows pining for him and he has plans to reduce the number. The plot twists even more, and Oily discovers, to his own surprise, that there are some things he will not do for money. Ingenue figures it all out and ….
It is a master class in creating an atmosphere heavy with mystery and peopling it with rounded characters yet including all the clichés, to wit, a crystal ball, a turban, and a raven. All in just over one hour of runtime.
The dead husband is menacing and ruthless. The private dick has a sense of humour. Carlson is so earnest that he made the fraternity brothers feel guilty. Ingenue is so enthusiastic it is hard to take. Babe is so perplexed that she must have been reading some of Martin Heidegger hieroglyphs.
But the real star of the show is the camera, and the lighting that emphasises the air of mystery and confusion. Harvard graduate Bernard Vorhaus directed. He is another victim whose career was blighted by the HUAC, the monster that roamed Hollywood off camera for far too long. He gave David Lean his first job in movies. After being black listed Vorhaus went to England with his Welsh wife and changed careers, working on home renovations. Our loss.

IMDb meta-data is Dali time of 1 hour and 10 minutes, rated a generous 3.0 by 837 cinemitizens.
Genre: Sy Fy, Horror, Boredom
Verdict: Incredible alright.

Here is the deal. John Carradine wants to touch the bottom of his career and so manufactures a diving bell and sends four nitwits to the bottom in it, two of each. That sounds a lot better than it is.
The first ten minutes is stock footage of the ocean. Thereafter the characters line up against a semi-circular wall and talk. Sometimes the wall is supposed to be in the mansion sized diving bell, sometimes in a Titanic ballroom on the tugboat transporting the bell, sometimes in Carradine’s California Marine Institute arena, and sometimes in the Golden Caves of Arizona.
Now, no one move!
Once aligned no one moves so that the focus does not have to be pulled again.
Is it Post-Modern? It does not privilege intelligence or interest over static and boring.
The four descend and get stranded, but that is all right because they find submarine caves rich in oxygen. Forty minutes of stumbling around and they encounter Santa Claus whose sleigh went down over water. He says he got there the same way they did. Evidently he acted in an earlier Jerry Warren movie. Poor guy.
They stand and talk, talk and stand, and, for a change of pace, stand and talk. Then thanks to a cut away, they are rescued by the second diving bell Carradine had up his sleeve.
Never have the words ‘The End’ been so welcome.
There is no tension. That two nubile women and two virile men are about to die in the caves, produces nothing but boredom in them and in us.
They read the script.
That the bearded Santa spies on them and has strange ways, leads to nothing. That they are rescued is done off-camera so there are no heroics there. Indeed the only mystery is why Robert Clarke keeps taking his shirt off and putting it back on again. The fraternity brothers counted three times, but they may have missed one when the beer keg popped.
Carradine is as always Carradine of the compelling mien and voice, but there is nothing for him to do and he does it — nothing. Lois Lane is there with even less to do. For the rest of the cast, this is their ‘Best Known For’ entry on the IMDb.
Written, produced, and directed by Jerry Warren who enjoys the reputation on IMDb as the auteur of cheap and ridiculous horror movie quickies. His CV includes ‘The World of Bat Woman,’ ‘Teenage Zombies,’ and ‘Terror of the Blood Hunters,’ each of which orbits a rating of 3, as does the waste of space at hand.
It was finished in 1957 but not even the Lippart Brothers would distribute it so it languished for two years before being paired with another turkey and released for the Drive In market confident no one would see it.
The fraternity brothers thought petrification happened to them while watching this drab and pointless use of celluloid.

IMDb meta-data is runtime 1 hour and 5 minutes, rated 6.7 by 336 cinemitizens.
Genre: Noir, Horror, Comedy.

Verdict: Spooky and snappy.
It was a dark and stormy night as moody, muddy, and misty camera angles play over the dark mansion when a gun shot is heard from within. The front door of the mansion opens and three men emerge from it hefting a bundle into the trunk of a car and drive off. Through the wind and lightning the camera follows. They extract a deadman from the trunk and bury him on the vast grounds of the estate, while in the bushes they are silently observed by a solidarity and soggy onlooker. Whew! All of this before a word is spoken.
While this is going on, excited Daughter returns to the mansion to announce her wedding, finding her step-mother distracted, as her damp father and his two retainers return from their secret nocturnal errand. Bubbling though she is, Daughter realises something is amiss, the more so later when a spectral figure fires a gun at her while she lies abed. In the subsequent fuss, Father, Step-Mother, and retainers deny a shot was fired, while casting side-long glances at each other.
Despite being treated like an hysterical child, Daughter knows what she saw, and off-camera she places a secret phone call to the 4F Michael Shayne. Who else!
There is fine cinematography of the old dark house, the constant rain with thunder and lightning, and most of all the spooky and spectral figure who keeps reappearing in the night, he of the title.

There is much to’ing and fro’ing, mistaken identities, a bemused butler, a befuddled lawman, an intrigued undertaker, a pompous father, a scheming step-mother, a strange laboratory in the basement, plotting retainers, all in all it is a veritable school of red herrings in which Shayne fishes.
This is an entry in the Michael Shayne series started in 1940, starring Lloyd Nolan as the eponym.

He made a career out of playing the New York City Irishman, following in Pat O’Brien’s footsteps, though he was born and reared in San Francisco, attending Stanford University until catching the acting bug. He spent virtually no time in NYC, least of all Flatbush and Brooklyn, except for location filming. While his Irishisms are gratuitous in this film, he delivers them with an effortless panache. He is described as ‘an actor’s actor,’ whatever that means.
The excellent screen play was by Arnaud d’Usseau, California born, but who took this name for caché, says inter-web gossip. He was later black-listed thanks to the efforts of Elia Kazan, which brought d’Usseau’s career to a premature end.
Released on 1 May 1942, within a week Corregidor surrendered and 12,000 GIs became POWs to join a like number captured on Bataan. You would never know the war was on watching this film, which perhaps was the aspiration of the filmmakers, because none of the news at the time was good and it got worse. As the film travelled the country the news reels preceding would have covered Corregidor. The Bataan Death March was censored until 1944.

IMDb runtime an eternity of 1 hour and 2 minutes, over-rated a generous 6.0 by 1147.
Genre: Sy Fy
The earth does not scream.
Verdict: A quota quickie in every way but fact.
The set-up is a nice opening with a British Rail train, late as usual, ploughing off a bridge because the engineer is dead at the controls. (Union rules mean a dead driver cannot be fired.) Then an airplane does the same with a dead pilot at the controls. (Same union rule.) A bowler-hatted gentleman at a train station, who failed to notice the dead bodies littering the platform, keels over. There follows pan shots of village streets with folks who fell dead in their tracks, the newspaper delivery boy, a lady shopper at a green grocer, a bus driver, and so on.

This is nice and there is no sound to distract. The silence makes it more ominous.
Into such a village of the dead drives Worster in a Land Rover, as he exits the vehicle he takes out an Enfield rifle. Whoa. He helps himself to food at a shop and then a drink in a pub, stepping over and around the littered bodies. As he sips in the pub he is accosted by Dennis Price, whom I could not take seriously as a villain, but villain he is. For a start he is in the company of a lady who is not his wife, but whom he introduces as his wife, and we know she is someone else’s wife! Go figure. On this subject there is more tittle-tattle to follow. Read on.
Later they are joined by a young couple. Thus we have gathered in the village of Otranto the crew. Worster is an American among the Brits. Ok. He claims to be a test pilot with the Vertical Take Off and Landing project, the Harrier Jump Jet as it was later called. That was a nice topical reference, but, hey, Worster is forty-nine (49, for those who cannot read words) and long in the tooth and grey in the hair, and large of the waistline for a flyboy and it shows in his leaden movements. Then we have Dennis without menace. His companion is Old Virginie, and she is forty-five. They are joined by a couple in their late twenties. Thorley Walters and his companion are also there to add the buffoon touch to the gathering.
They make an uneasy alliance and try to infer what has happened. The conclusion is that there was a gas attack and those, like themselves who survived, were sealed up somewhere, the pilot in an airplane, the villain and his moll is sealed room, and so…(I forget what the others said). (This quarantine also figures in the superior ‘The Night of the Comet’ (1984) reviewed elsewhere on this blog.) The gas has now dissipated.
Ah ha! The pilot was in a plane, but one of those was shown in the lead-in…and he was dead at the controls. How come Worster did not cack it, too, chimed the fraternity brothers. Dunno.
The young woman is pregnant and Old Virginie is assigned to look after her because she is a woman and women know about such things. To her credit she denies such knowledge, but the chaps disregard this is the best style of the times. While they are drinking themselves into oblivion in the pub they see strange figures in the streets. The requisite hysterical woman in their number rushes out, and has to run after and after, in her six inch high heels, the Reynolds Wrapped creatures, who are oblivious to her until she grabs one. It is a nice moment when it turns and reveals itself to be … a Republican Congressman and zaps her.

Another Brexit voter exits.

Zap! The others observe this zapology from a distance.
Later in a twist some of the dead rise as white-eyed zombies and there is one nice moment of tension when Old Virginie hides in a wardrobe from one such zombie. Being dead, they have an excuse for their leaden motions. Along the way Thorley also gets zapped, or did he. Can’t remember. Dennis without menace is offed. That leaves the young and old couples, plus the newborn baby.
Later these Reynolds Wrappers move like lead, even slower than Worster, and seem to be deaf, dumb, and blind as well as Republican. If their mission is to finish off the survivors of the gas attack in a search and destroy mission they have failed the KPIs miserably. It turns out they are robots controlled by radio transmission from a conveniently located tower which Worster blows up (because as a test pilot he is also a demolition expert) and that frees the local area of this scourge. Whew!
What next? They will find a plane and fly around to attract the attention of other survivors. Huh? Won’t that attract the attention of other Reynolds Wrappers, too? And the plane we see take off is a four engined Constellation that needs a long hard runway. It will not bob down to pick a few folk standing around an SOS sign.
The end.
Worster and Old Virginie (she being Brit) were married in 1951, more than a decade before they teamed up in this outing and they stayed married until her death in 1992.
It was not a quota quickie, as explained elsewhere on this blog, but it has some of the qualities in the cheap production and gratuitous insertion of an American actor from the C-list, and it was distributed by Lippart, a well-known bottom feeder. The chatter on the inter-web is that Old Virginie went back to England for family reasons and Worster came along and they did this film to pay for the trip.
It fits the Brit practice of Sy Fy in rural settings. Long before Midsomer Murders the English countryside was a strange place where strange thing happened to the strange people who are there. It was also cheaper to film that.

IMDb meta-data runtime is 1 hour and 27 minutes, rated way too high 7.0 by 1401 cinemitizens.
Genre: Sports, Comedy, Romance, Sy Fy, Nothing

Verdict: Odd and off.
The set-up is this. Ray is a college chemistry professor engaged to the dean’s daughter, working on a consultancy to treat timber to repel pests, borers, fraternity brothers, insects, boors, and any and all of the above. This job will win the dean’s approval by bringing much needed funding to the college and so his consent for the hand and what is connected to it of his daughter.
Into this neat plan intrudes a baseball, hit through a window in the Chem Lab, that obliterates the project, including note books, etc. Depressed, Ray cleans up and notices that the baseball, which got soaked in a solution, is now repelled by wood. It just so happens that Ray is a baseball fan of the First Water and decides this is the way to fortune. He will become a baseball pitcher no one can hit, make dosh, marry daughter …. the end.
While the supporting players were dandy, including the very young skipper from ‘The Minnow,’ the story left me cold. Very cold. There were two reasons, one odd and the other off.
The odd one first to get it out of the way is this. When Ray got on the team in St Louis everyone refers to him as the Kid. He becomes Kid Kelly. Right. A 44 year-old kid, making him older than any other player on the St Louis rosters the time time. Yes, I checked for both the Browns and the Cardinals. Some kid. By the way, Ray was 44 and his romantic interest, Jean Peters was 23 at the time. Make of that what one will.
The 44 year-old kid.
The off irritant is that Ray’s secret was ball tampering. Such ball tampering as Ray gets up to when he rubs the solution on the baseball was outlawed in 1920. End. Illegal. This dead obvious fact any baseball fan in the theatre would know is never broached, skirted, or implied. Huh?
That ball-tampering solution is what gets it a Sy Fy tick.
A slight redemption occurs at the end when Ray notes he made more money in one baseball game than a year of teaching chemistry. Think about that today when athletes make more money individually than entire colleges faculties put together and then tripled.
Ray seems hopelessly inept pretending to be a baseball player. Clearly, like Gary Cooper as Lou Gehrig, he had never played baseball in his youth. Yet Ray at least had been as sportsman in his native Wales, and become a member of the Household Cavalry in 1928. That is indicative of his horsemanship. The Great Depression ruined his family and he took to acting for a crust. It seems he slept his way into pictures. He wore a toupee from his mid-thirties and so would have sported it in this picture.
Jean Peters sparkles in this small role but she quit when she married Howard Hughes and disappeared into Santa Monica hills seldom to be seen again. Though the ever reliable Wikipedia has it that the hilltop life was boring and under aliases she did one or more degrees at UCLA.
But the best performance in this movie, and in most others he graced, comes from Paul Douglas whose blue collar approach seems so fresh and direct compared to the ever twitchy Milland. Blue collar Douglas came to affect, but he was born to a wealthy Philadelphia surgeon who sent him to Yale where Paul rebelled, as sons do, and instead played semi-professional football. That led to sports journalism, newspapers and then radio. He liked an audience and soon dabbled in amateur theatrics…and made his way to Hollywood. Many of his films involved sports, like the whimsical and much redone ‘Angels in the Outfield’ (1951).
My glance fell on some of the reviews linked to the IMDb entry and I am moved to remark again on the human condition. One opinionated reviewer huffed and puffed about the film, and was particularly critical of the title because it is never explained. That reviewer needs to get out from under the rock more often. What happens every spring? Even the fraternity bothers know that. Well, two things. One it is the mating season and hence Ray’s round-about courtship of daughter. More importantly here, the baseball season starts!