Author: Michael W Jackson

IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 28 minutes, rated 6.9 by 2455 cinematizens. 

Genre: ODH (Old Dark House)

Verdict: Curate’s egg. 

An heiress is reunited with her long lost father, accompanied by her friend, Joan ‘Firecracker’ Blondell, who steals the show, as usual.  Roland Young is her hapless victim. Don McBride plays the hopeless Plod, again for the hundredth time.  

Death is only the beginning for Joan, returning as a ghost.  Firecracker saves the day when she clobbers the villain.  She recruits Roland to help.  Eddie (Rochester) Anderson plays the black stereotype, pining for Mr Benny; nonetheless, he has the best line in the film – ‘every hair on my (fur) coat is standing up.’

Daddy’s house is replete with suspicious stereotypes starting with that master of menace, that doctor of dread George Zucco, a grim house keeper, an icy butler, and more.  They all skulk around looking for the plot with no success. Later there are trap doors, sliding panels, and hidden passages.  

The villain goes around in an invisible man get-up with a cape. This is a look that will catch on Newtown.  It has quite a twist at the end which remains my little secret.  

Much, too much, is played for slapstick. The heiress is the luminous Carol Landis. Her duties include posing, fainting, and screaming. She had 49 credits. The best in my book is It Happened in Flatbush (1942).  At 29 she committed suicide with an overdose of drugs after five failed marriages, the first at 15, recurrent but unspecified health problems, depression, and a stalled career.  Tant pis.

What Topper has to do with it is anyone’s guess.  Anyone?  

It was released on 21 March 1941. At the time Australian troops participated in the Siege of Giarabub in Libya.  

Genre: Mystery

IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 2 minutes, rated 6.1 by 102 cinematizens.

Verdict:  S l o w.

Philo needs vitamins to perk up.  He is slow as molasses in this outing. stopping in front of every mirror to check his pencil mo, or so it seemed.  I have never warmed to Mr Vance.  Maybe it is that first name: Philo. If ‘Phil’ was good enough for Marlow why isn’t for Vance? Mail your answers to someone else as soon as possible. 

Jewel thieves double cross each other, and Philo sorts them out with a very little help from Plod.  

Dan Seymour is always a good heavy but he is murdered in the first act, well…after that not much is left.  

The body count is high.  There are so amusing touches with the butler’s tweenager niece that single this screenplay out.  But not much else.

Released on 12 April 1947, the month that Jack Robinson broke the colour barrier in baseball in a one-man Iliad.  

IMDb meta-data is runtime 1 hour and 13 long minutes, rated the 5.4 by 1152 cinematizens.

Genre: Sy Fy

Verdict:  Jekyll and Hyde part.

Dauntless globe trotting foreign correspondent goes to interview a reclusive Japanese Mad Scientist in a lab located on a remote mountain fastness before returning to home and hearth.  In a step up from the norm, this Mad Scientist has a Fetching assistant rather than a deformed Igor(ess).  Journalist turns on the worldly charm by lighting cigarettes.  S-m-o-o-t-h.

Mad Scientist has been experimenting on his family and has succeeded in turning them into monsters.  Well, monsters are good, but he wants expand the boundaries of knowledge still more to control evolution or devolution.  The fraternity brothers wanted to rush some of these monsters.  

Mad Scientist has run out family and invites the journalist to hang around…the fetching assistant, while he prepares a new experiment!  In no time at all, well it seemed a lot longer, Foreign Correspondent gets an injection of (d)evolution juice in the neck!  While the drug is working he whines and dines Fetching, ignoring telephone calls from his New York wife to come home and fix the backdoor.  Whines is right.  He feels very sorry for himself.  

Then, like some deans I have known, Foreign Correspondent grows a second head!  Yes, if one dean is bad, imagine a double dose demanding budget cuts, throughput increases, and improved morale!  Two budget cuts!  Twice as much teaching! Twice as many research grants! Half as many staff. Dancing in the hallways!  

At the denouement there is an unexpected but rather striking division of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde into two creatures: the monster and the man, hence manster.  Oops, that is a spoiler. 

There are some discernible themes in this mishmash.  One is the Japanese culture is threatening, corrupt, lascivious, decadent, and it weakens the moral resolve of American Foreign Correspondent.  He goes all animal when overexposed to Japisms, Geishas, sushi, public bathing, sake, and…..[see Geishas above].  

Everyone smokes and drinks like real men.  His distant wife is a clinging vine.  Why Fetching shuts herself away on the mountain top with Mad Scientist is a puzzle and stays that way.  Correspondent spends a lot of time feeling sorry for himself because of how hardworking he is, yet the only thing we see him do is chat, drink, and smoke.  Exhausting!  The ostensible interview with Mad Scientist consisted of smoking and drinking.  No notes are taken, no information is imparted and Correspondent seems happy with that.

It is a Japanese production with United Artists shot in English with European leads. Currency restrictions meant profits from United Artists films shown in Japan could not all be taken out, so some was used to make films like this.  Though, rather unusual for the time, some of the extras speak Japanese, but all of the principle Japanese speak English.  

IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 26 minutes, rated 5.0 by 2321 cinematizens.

Genre: Sy Fy

Verdict: Cheap and nasty.

Near a secret research laboratory men are dying…of cardiac arrest…after sex.  Time to send in a top agent who flashes his way into the library. Cheap.

One of the best moments is a town meeting dominated by the beer-swilling bully.  Seems realistic to me.  

That top agent orders a pizza delivered while his new girlfriend is nearly raped. Nasty. He comes in time to beat up the three drooling NRA members, and another guy to keep in practice.  

The body count rises, but we see more deaths, than agent man is aware off, and he never does catch on.  S l o w.

By accident cosmic rays have turned the women at the laboratory into queen bees who seduce men into drones.  In the middle is a tedious documentary about bees to add to the pace.  Not.  

The film has hints of lesbianism, women’s liberation, Amazon warriors, safe sex, and stupidity to go with the sexploitation.  

For a comparison seen Roger Corman’s Wasp Woman (1959), though truth to be told those wasps were bees in disguise.

IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour 19 minutes, rated 3.80 by 1062 cinematizens.

Genre: Sy FY.

Verdict: Time stood still.

Mars Needs women again (see below).  Rather than place ads on Facebook to recruit airheads, they send a cute little Tardis space ship, three times as big inside as outside.  Head of Mission is a snide queen of the Nile abetted by a bald garden gnome with triple ears that you want to tweak.  

At the same time NASA, which is presented as a military operation, has found the perfect astronaut: handsome for photo ops, silent so as not to give anything away, and stupid enough accept this role.  He is great grandpa Data, an android.  This fact is super secret least the American public fail to support spending money on droids.

The two missions cross paths when Droid aborts, ejects, and bails over Puerto Rico!  Why? Good question. Would the answer be tax credits to film there?  There is a little travelogue of beaches and seaside.  

Nile’s minions in white overalls and fishbowl helmets round up party girls who seem to take it is all as part of the fun.  Meanwhile, Droid’s keepers have come looking for him. The trauma of the abort injured him and now, as a public service, he goes around strangling people listening to pop music.

Of the 79 minutes, perhaps 35 of them are stock footage of beaches and waves and USAF planes taking off, landing, parking, sitting, more sitting.  This footage insures there is no momentum or pace.  Splicing this free footage then shows the minders boarding one kind of jet in Miami, flying on another, and landing in San Juan in a third.  Mid-air refuelling we have all heard of, but mid-air passenger transfer was a new one.

Nile keeps a retreaded monster ITT for devouring bystanders as an accessory on the spaceship and Droid and ITT duke it out.  The fraternity brothers claimed the monster was a well-known Delt whose name they have forgotten, like their own some mornings.  

Noteworthy moments in this parson’s egg include:

1.When Droid froze at the press conference, and the assembled blood suckers did not seem to notice.

2.The following scene when Droid’s coif is peeled to reveal the heartless brain of McKinsey manager.

3.The several sidelong, sneering glances exchanged between Nile and her Gnome reminded me of the reaction of some one-time colleagues to any sensible suggestion.

4.The many bikini-clad Anglas who party-on.

5.The complete absence of Hispanics in Puerto Rico.

6.The many off-duty GIs who stand around at parade rest, earning a few dollars as film extras. Plus see point (4) above.

The end, these were such welcome words as I watched this film on Isle de Saint Vincent.

Mars seems to lurch from one shortage to another.  For proof see the following:

The Devil Girl from Mars (1954) – who come for men!

Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (1964) – who went with toys

The Night Caller (1965) – who has come for women

Mars needs Women (1967) – guess

Lobster Man from Mars (1989) – air

Mars needs Mums (2011) – guess

Now Mars needs Dogs, now that would be epic.

IMDb meta-data runtime of 1 hour and 31 minutes, rated 6.7 by 923 cinematizens.

Genre:  ODH wanna be (that is, Old Dark House).

Verdict: energetic clichés.

In mid-career a much published krimi writer seeks inspiration in a change of scene, and reluctantly moves to Greenwich Village with his vivacious and enthusiastic helpmate who has neither a career nor a mind of her own.  Credit Loretta Young’s extraordinary thespian talents to sell such a pretence.  He is the droll Brian Aherne who is reluctant because wanted to live by a lake or stream, not a busy street.

While he has published a lot of krimis, to judge from the piles he moves around, none has been a best seller or satisfying.

The apartment (old dark) House has a cast of boarders from the doleful owner, to the snoopy restauranteur, oily art dealer, the terrified ingenue with an over-protective husband, the hysterical cleaning woman…. but no black stereotype for which omission much thanks, though it meant no pay-check for Will Best.

It is a great cast that includes Charlie Chan Tolar as the police officer come to sort out the body in the garden. Spider Woman is also on hand, though underemployed compared to the turtle.

Good scenes include the bed clothes slowly slipping off….  In 1945 that must have been close the censorship line.  And it happens twice. And that’s the problem with the whole film: repetition.  

The sticking door was amusing the first three or four times but not thereafter, and certainly not at the fifteenth time with musical accompaniment.  The door is never explained and does nothing for the plot. 

The plot holes were many.  It was said that the corpus delicti in the garden was naked; if so why?  Where did the clothes go? What was the motive for that murder?  Indeed what was the whole blackmail narrative about?  How did any of that relate to the cab driver’s opening comment about hauling away two stiffs? Did any of it relate to the missing previous half-owner of the establishment? 

Released on 10 December 1942 there is no reference to war. In that month the Australian 7th Division pushed the Japanese from Buna, trailhead for the purgatory of the Kokoda Track.  More generally, the Afrika Korps was trapped (by forces that included the Australian 9th Division) in Tunisia, the Germans were encircled in Stalingrad, and the Japanese had lost Guadalcanal where Royal Australian Navy ships served). Hindsight reveals that it was the beginning of the end for them.

Literati note. These books were published late 1942. I have read them all.  What’s holding you back?

Le Silence de la mer by Vercors (Jean Bruller)  – an idealistic German soldier gradually realises the fake news he had accepted when billeted with a silent French family.

The Moon is Down by John Steinbeck – an austere dialogue about the time to act set in rural Norway. Completely different from his other novels, a roman à clef.

Crazy Horse by Mari Sandoz – a fictional autobiography of a reluctant charismatic leader.

Go Down, Moses by William Faulkner – the grief of the title figure when his wife dies and the actions of those around him the very Deep South. 

L’étranger by Albert Camus – Meursault stays ice cold under the blinding Algerian sun.