IMDB meta-data is 1 hour and 5 minutes, rated 5.5 by 188 cinematizens.
Genre: Horror.
Verdict: 2D (derivative and dreary)
Beret-wearing cool cats are on the prowl in a studio set of one street of fin de siècle Paris. So? Handsome, after years in the mysterious Orient, returns to Paris and publishes a novel. So? While called a novel the book’s pages reveal all about a cooked-up trial twenty years before. So deep and dark was this Dreyfus trial that all records were sealed for a long time to protect the guilty. Yet here are all the details in Handsome’s novel. Sacré bleu!
The book sells and the publisher rakes in the francs. However, the forces of order in Gerald Mohr pursue Handsome who wrinkles his brow. All the chaps have RAF pencil moustaches which they compare in a Mo-off.
Periodically, Handsome has blinding headaches (when reading the tax notices) and Jules Verne visions of snow and ice, lightning, and what looks like a re-entry space capsule bobbing in an ocean, a scene repeated at least three times. Coinciding with these blackouts bad meow occurs.
The first victim is the archivist charged with sitting on the secret trial records. Hmm, Sureté Plod is sure Handsome has a motive, assuming he purloined the info found in the novel from the victim and then topped him to seal his lips. (To do that Handsome turned himself into a cat to murder this aged archivist. Sure.) The plot thickens when Handsome breaks with fiancée who is then murdered. The archivist and the belle were clawed to death off camera. Again Plod looks to Handsome, who, rejecting the fraternity brothers’ offer to alibi him, cannot account for his whereabouts, and never does, by the way.
Next to go is the IRS officer who sent the tax bill. (Just kidding.)
Handsome at his most winsome.
Meanwhile, Handsome has taken up with the daughter of his agent who thereafter faints, screams, and swoons on direction, though even she is wondering what is going on with Handsome. Only his mentor knows he is innocent. See if you can figure out why. Nudge. Nudge.
The film includes a bar fight with balsa wood furniture, sugar glass, and a back-projected chase in horse-drawn wagons straight out of Stagecoach. What’s the genre again? That stalwart of the dusty trail John Dehner appears in the bar fight, having wandered in from the set of a Western in the adjoining sound stage.
Professor Newton in full flights.
There is a marvellous scene when on leave from Rocky Jones’s Space Ranger Professor Newton explains to Plod that once every now and again Jupiter aligns with the Super Bowl and then by the conjunction of bollox transmigration from cat to man occurs. Why cats? (Why care?) The scriptwriter did not know either. The scene is amusing for the enthusiasm of the Prof for the nonsense, the credulity of the Chef de le Sureté, and Mohr’s sarcastic eye-rolling. While the critics linked to the IMDb label this scene as Nonsense on Stilts, it may remind some of decanal budget meetings when nonsense is gravely set forth and all mortals must pretend to believe it.
When Handsome goes Jules Verne again, Daughter goes to Mentor for help and he obliges. It takes no brains to see what is coming at this point. Ontario’s own Douglas Dumbrille is Mentor; as always, he nails it.
We never do find out what Handsome was doing during his headache absences nor what the space capsule has to do with him. Nor do we care. We do not find out about the secret trial either, but who cares.
John Dehner compiled 287 credits, having started as an animator in the Disney business. Boomers will recognise him instantly from a myriad of television roles.
IMDb meta-data is 56 minutes runtime, rated 5.2 by 191 cinematizens.
Genre: Horror.
Verdict: Neither valley, nor zombie.
The blood bank is losing stock and no one knows why. Young doctor and comely nurse decide to find out why. Then the bodies start turning up in the wake of a shadowy caped figure. The cape is the clue. Bad. If ever I see a dean wearing a cape, I skedaddle.
Plod arrives and leaps to the screenwriter’s conclusion that Doctor and Nurse have been playing corpses. Everywhere they go from a creepy dark house to a graveyard mausoleum the caped shadow is there first and more corpses appear. Plod is thus convinced of their guilt, even when his superior officer castigates him for jumping to conclusions and orders their release, because he has read the script to the end and knows they are innocent.
Spoiler.
Turns out Capeman was never quite dead but faked his death. He had been sentenced to death for splitting infinitives about which we know nothing. His loyal brother has since been snitching blood to sustain him, but the Caped One wants a better blend and goes shopping on his own. Since he was never dead, though undead, he is NO zombie. This convolution dazed the fraternity brothers.
The print I watched on You Tube was so murky no valley was visible nor did it figure in the plot.
Ian Keith
Of passing interest is that Capeman was played by the cadaverous Ian Keith who vied with Bela Lugosi for Dracula roles but invariably lost out to the Magyar for the simple reason that the destitute and desperate Lugosi worked for peanuts. And he had those eyes. Those who think this movie is a stinker should try Catman of Paris (1946). I know I am going to.
IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 10 minutes, rated 6.3 by 1857 cinematizens.
Genre: Horror.
Verdict: Moments.
In upstate New York mild mannered, absent-minded Emeritus Professor jaywalks and gets badly clonked by a speeding car carrying a mortally wounded Gangster. Prof and Gangster ride together to the hospital in the same ambulance.
In the OR Dr Boris Karloff prepares needles and knives. (Pssst, at this point it helps to know that the screenplay was by Curt, Kurt, and Curtis Siodmak.) Borrie sees that Prof is toast while Gangster has a chance. This is the opportunity Borrie has been waiting for to prove his theories about …. brain transplants. Yep. By the science of scriptwriting Borrie digs out Prof’s grey cells and mashes them into the Gangster cranium along with the rest of the plumbing.
Several questions arise. Pay attention.
Did Borrie transplant all of Prof’s brain or just some Free Cells? What did he do with the Gangster’s brain already in residence? Does the answer to the latter question explain dinner?
Stanley Ridges
The transformation of the bumbling Prof into the sneering, murderous dean, ah oops, gangster is to behold. There is an internal war for his soul within this man with two brains when Prof puts his head in his hands in anguish, and then recovers himself as Gangster. It is remarkable transition scene. One of the best this jaded hack has ever seen. Regrettably it is marred by the director’s decision to change slightly Prof/Gangster hair colour and the disappearing (and later reappearing) pince-nez glasses. Those distractions are distracting, and quite unnecessary to the tour de force acting at this point by the Stanley Ridges.
A Dr Jekyll and Mister Hyde conflict follows. Borrie connives to bring out Gangster in Prof to lead him to the loot of the last heist, dreaming of using this ill-gotten nationally competitive research grant moolah to further his research into brain transplants for other movies. The matter is urgent because there are so many idiots around. See, nothing has ever changed.
There are complications from a wife and a daughter who get all moral.
There is a convoluted twist at the end, which is where the picture started with Borrie getting a chair endowed with electricity.
The end.
Siodmak returned to the brain transplant theme in his later work, some of which is discussed elsewhere on this blog.
The gossip is that Bela Lugosi was cast as the brain doctor with Karloff to play the split personality professor, but frictions among director Arthur Rubin and the two actors led to a last minute switch that put Lugosi in a minor role as a thug (and thereby totally wasted), made Karloff the doctor, and brought in journeyman Ridges as Prof. In the end it paid off with Ridges’s marvellous transitions.
IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 12 minutes of treacle time, rated 5.2 by 142 members of the cast and crew.
Genre: SyFy and Boredom.
Verdict: 5.2! Reverse that to 2.5.
Lighting is not one of the strong points of the production.
Every porker’s wet dream comes to the screen when Porky finds beautiful alien woman in his home, but he fails to make the best of the situation. She comes to her senses and leaves. No less than three women way out of Porky’s league are after his ample dimensions. Psst, he must signing the pay chicks. (The fraternity brothers insisted on that one.)
Bleaders know that my dedication to the Sy Fy cinemology is so great that I watch unwatchable films to the end, albeit with one eye and one ear. Evidence of this claim is that I watched Phobe: The Xenophobic Experiments (1995) to the bitter end. Few, indeed, can or would admit that. See the comments on that celluloid elsewhere on this blog. I persist sometimes to see if that level of stupidity can be maintained, and it usually is. But this time I met my match. I could not go on so I FF-ed to the end, and even that was boring.
I seldom watch contemporary Sy Fy because it substitutes cheap CGI for plot, story, character, interest, awe, wonder, and substituting an omniscient conspiracy for a plot. Two cases in point are Picard (2020+) and The Orville (2017). Trying to watch the above title served to confirm that conviction, though it lacked even CGIs.
Not even Don Dohler has even reach quite this low. Wait, no, I think the award for worst remains with Don Dohler. One watches the Don’s works all the way to the end to see if the enthusiastic incompetence can be sustained the whole time, and he never lets one down on that score. If you don’t know Don’s oeuvre, keep it that way. His films make those of Larry Buchanan look good, well, maybe not good, but not as bad.
Back to the film under review, I breached my rule when the Mechanical Turk suggested it, because I noticed it was produced by New Zealand Son Films, and, being literal minded, I thought it had something to do with Kiwiland from whence has come some very diverting and amusing cinema. Wrong. A very big wrong. This movie has nothing to do with New Zealand and New Zealand can be glad of that. (For those who do not know what a ‘Mechanical Turk’ is: tough.)
The production company has fourteen titles listed on IMDb. The thumbnail tags indicate a similar motif in several of them: Porky is confronted by a beautiful woman, more often than not naked. He must sign lot of chicks, checks, and cheques. Needless to say the fraternity brothers have ordered the entire set.
Of late there have been a few intemperate remarks about Australian foreign aid in the context of the continental fires. As usual with followers of Pox News, the facts are lost in the red haze of outrage.
Still the facts do count.
Australia’s foreign aid is about half per capita that of the UK. That is, it is not generous. In turn, the UK per capita amount is about half that of Sweden per capita.
Nor is it a free gift. Nearly all the aid is invested in projects (clean water, sanitation, roads, ports, schools, hospitals, training) the materials for which are purchased in Australia. The water purification plants are bought from Australian suppliers. The nurses training is delivered by Australian schools. That is, the money is spent in Strine.
In building projects, Australian firms are the preferred contractors, and secure the bulk of the business.
The vast majority of the aid money is invested near Australia, e.g., the Solomon Islands, Fiji, Timor, Tonga, Nauru, and the like. The strategy is to make a buffer from the increasing Chinese influence in the South Pacific. The aim is to make lasting friends with the neighbours and to strengthen them to resist Chinese blandishments. (Look it up.) I taught a number of students from these parts whose education in Australia was made possible by Aid projects. In that sense, part of my salary came from the Aid budget.
At no time are suitcases of dollars handed over contra Pox News.
All of this and more can be gleaned from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade web site in five or ten minutes. Of course, that is too taxing for a Pox journalist.
The Solomon Islands, Timor, Tonga, Nauru and the like are in no position to come to Australia’s assistance in the fire crisis. Pay a visit to one of these places to see why.
Yes, the paper total is four billion sunbaked Strine dollars, but few of those bucks leave the country. Moreover, to put that total in perspective the twelve-kilometre tram line I took today back from the blood bank today cost over one billion of those self-same dollars. That makes it comparable to the sports stadia that state governments continue to build for football games most of us will never see. The total cost of WestConnex, should it ever be completed, will probably dwarf the annual foreign aid budget as it moves Sydney traffic jams from one place to another.
One cannot escape the feeling that part of the repeated and ritualistic outrage of the Poxes at foreign aid is racist. We are giving our white dosh to darkies!
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.
