Author: Michael W Jackson

Murder at Midnight (1931)

IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 9 minutes of runtime which is rated 5.4 by 310 cinematizens.

Genre: Mystery

Verdict: Oh hum.

During the Great Depression audiences found the filthy rich playing games.  Upstairs there were card games, and downstairs a playlet was enacted.  In the play a husband finds his wife in the arms of another man as the hall clock strikes midnight, and hubby pulls from his pyjama pocket the gun he always has with him in bed, and shoots paramour. (Cue NRA applause.)  It is all very stagey with the players just barely remembering their lines until…. Bang!  That was a nice touch.  Then the lights come up and we see the audience sitting around the vast parlour in easy chairs who applaud, with snide asides about the truth in play.  

Somehow the playlet is also a word game, and along with everyone else, I didn’t get it.  That may be why  the playlet is referred to as charades in the IMDb summary and all those that cut-and-paste from it by way of review.  But surely no game of charades has dialogue and props that go bang.  

The players take a bow, and drinks are served.  No one, but argus-eyed viewers like this modest scribe, seems to notice that the ostensible paramour is still lying on the floor for the longest time.  In the rush to booze at least one extra stepped over him.  The fraternity brothers admired that commitment to Lord Alcohol.  

But, yes, Jim, he is dead.  Lawyer Monty is present and calls Plod who orders people around, much to the indignation of the filthy rich who cannot see why a murder should interrupt their drinking.  More applause from the fraternity brothers at this point.

So far, so bland. 

But there are twists for it turns out that the homicide Plod was called before — repeat, before — the playlet was staged and that early phone call said there were two murders, not one. Egads!  (This is all confused because the clock was set to midnight to suit the playlet and in the confusion afterward not re-set, until Plod started plodding.)  

At that revelation much confusion consumes screen time until another shot is heard.  Gadzooks! Plod declares with satisfaction, ‘That’ll be the second body.’  (Nifty.) The plot thickens when a will goes missing.  Much lugubrious talking follows. The fraternity brothers snoozed on.  

When a supporting player finds a clue and says so, clonk follows as the body count increases.  Plod assigns a fraternity brother as a guard and he throws peanut shells on the floor.  The butler vacuums up the shells and in so doing finds and hides the will. See if you can guess where.  Brandon Hurst plays the butler to a T, as he often did.  Later the peanut eating is used to loosen the tongue of a reluctant witness who is a neatnik, and he tells all rather than endure the sight of a fraternity brother throwing peanut shells around. These are a couple of amusing wrinkles.  

 It’s an early talkie and it shows.  It is slow and much the dialogue is delivered to the microphone more than addressing any of the characters.  

We never do find out why the neatnik son was so mopey with his millions.  ‘Maybe his underwear were too tight,’ ventured the fraternity bothers, voicing one of their recurrent problems.  

Ever since the murder of Roger Ackroyd it is always the least suspicious character who is the villain and that applies here. (Though I know of at least one film version of Roger Ackroyd that changed that convention. Alas, nothing is scared.) The means of murdering the last couple of stiffs is ingenious and might have an application for the iPhone.  No spoiler on that.  It would take too long to explain to the technologically deprived. 

Aileen Pringle is top billed in this poverty row production. It was unusual at the time for a woman to be at the top of the bill, but then this is an undistinguished lot, most of whom are best known for this unknown film.  Don’t let it go to your head, Aileen.  

The Aztec Monster against the Humanoid Robot (1958).

(La momia azteca contra el robot humano)

IMDb meta-data is runtime treacle of 1 hour and 5 minutes, rated 2.5 by 2310 cinematizens.

Genre: Mexican.

Verdict: Seeing is not believing.  

The bug-eyed mad German scientist Professor Thermomix whips up a half-man, half-machine robot that looked strangely like Chani, including the arthritic walk, from The Devil Girl from Mars (1954), discussed elsewhere on this blog. No Asimov Laws will limit this concoction, that is for sure.  Why go to all that trouble?  Because Thermomix programs this Chani-Clone to enter a cursed Aztec Tomb and steal the Jade Taco. 

Not only is the tomb cursed but also it is guarded by a Lucha Libre champion dead-but-living Mummy.*  Got it so far? 

Turns out that Female Lead is the reincarnation of the undead but unalive Lucha Libre wrestler’s squeeze from a millennia ago, and she and Suave, her paramour, get mixed up in the doings.  I know I was mixed up by the doings.  

It just shows to go that Z-movies can be made everywhere and not just in Dallas.  Move over Larry Buchanan. This exercise had spawn south of the Rio Grande in The Curse of the Aztec Mummy (1959), Wrestling Women vs the Aztec Mummy (1964), Wrestling Women vs. the Murderous Robot (1969), and Mil Mascara vs the Aztec Mummy (2007).  These titles are hard to find, but be assured that I am looking far and wide.

A good Mummy franchise will never die.  But again the fraternity brothers ask, ‘Where are the Daddys?’

*Have you ever wondered where Lucha Libre champions do in retirement?  No, me neither, though I have suspicions of the physiotherapist who works me over.  

The Mummy’s Ghost (1944)

IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 1 minutes of runtime, rated 5.8 (!) by 2329 cinematizens.  

Genre:  Incredulity.

Verdict: Boredom.

George Zucco is brought out the Old Villains Home to assign John Carradine the thankless task of this movie.  Carradine travels to middle America where he turns Lon Chaney (you’d never know it to look at him) loose on the descendants of those who desecrated his Mummy’s tomb.  ‘Desecration’ is the right word for this film. 

The action takes place on the college campus replete with thirty-year old undergraduates, including Kansas City’s own Robert Lowery from Missouri.  It just so happens — ah huh — that the librarian whom he pursues is Egyptian, but she freezes when that subject of Egypt arises.  She keeps a pet terrier in the library in which she shows no interest whatever, but which saves the day later, sort of.  

Across the quad Prof is steaming tana leaves for lunch. Bad! Steamed tana leaves are not a good idea, Prof!  They are worse than kale.  (Nothing is worse than Tuscan cabbage.)

Once Mummy Chaney gets the scent of lunch there is no stopping him.  The aim is to reincarnate his long dead love into the Gypo bookworm noted above.  There is a nice touch when after her first brush with Mummy a white streak appears in her hair.  Bob is too discreet to mention it but she does not seem to notice it either.  Is she the only woman who does not look at a mirror?  As Lon draws nearer her hair gets progressively whiter with neither comment from others nor reaction from her.  The point being…..?

It has a surprisingly downbeat ending when without a GPS Mummy Chaney, struggling under the load as he carried her off, wanders into a swamp and the two sink to the bottom as quickly as did this film.  She may not have been that heavy but since he had only one arm and one leg was always dragging for reasons now forgotten.  Bob shrugs it off and with the terrier walks away.  Neither sadder nor wiser, as the rest of his career shows. 

Barton (General Martin Peterson) MacLane for once is allowed to act, rather than just bellow, and he is quite effective as the Plod up against the unbelievable long before he was drafted in I Dream of Jeannie (1965-9).  Director Reginald Le Borg had a fifty-year career cranking out ninety-two pictures like this one.  He must have offended the karma gods big time to have to do that.  Carradine is, as always, Carradine.  

The Mummy’s Tomb (1942) 

IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 1 minute, rated 5.8 by 2560.

Genre: Horror.

Verdict:  Horrible, all right.

This waste of time is a sequel of The Mummy’s Hand (1940) with about fifteen minutes of footage from the earlier film inserted, and at the end further footage from — believe it or not — Frankenstein.   All expenses spared.  Junior Chaney gets the first of three outings in a wraparound linen suit.  Universal made two more Mummies but not a single Daddy.  How fair is that?  

It open with a flashback to the earlier film and then we discover that the Mummy is still looking for that lost contact lens, shuffling around, stooped, and lost.  

In a lifeless production Turhan Bey brings a little spark to the role of the mad priest. While George Zucco reprises his role in the inserted footage, but he is offed before he can do much for this title.  Both are good players but they have nothing to play here. 

Loved the idea that Bey checked the Mummy as excess baggage when he took it Stateside to exact revenge on the violators of the Mummy’s Tomb.  No doubt he had to claim it at the outsize booth where golf clubs, skis, and the roll-down screens of sales reps accumulate. The rent-a-mob from Frankenstein settled things at the end.   

It was released on 23 October 1942 during the Guadalcanal Campaign where Jack went into the water while secret meetings and arrangements were afoot for Operation Torch in North Africa.  On the Eastern Front, Hitler ordered that the Hotel Astoria in Leningrad be spared to host a victory dinner after the Nazis occupied that city.  There is a plaque in the lobby explaining this which we saw in 2016.  

The Face of Marble (1946)

IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 12 minutes of runtime, rated 5.0 by 283 cinematizens.

Genre: Horror.

Verdict:  Straight.

In a cliff side mansion on the sea with his wife and faithful associate attended by a black Stereotype and mumbling Housekeeper, Dr John Carradine strives to reanimate the dead!  Originality is not in the air.  Their lab is the usual high school science room with cathodes, knobs, capacitors, switches, and such.  These two should order some real gear from the Innovations catalogue.  

They proceed slowly until one day the sea washes up a dead fisherman, whom they carry up to the lab, slap on the table, wire him up, and zap!  It works!  He rises and takes one step, and collapses into a heap of….. Carrara marble.  Gobbledegook explanation follows.  

Having felt the power of giving life, Carradine wants to try again.  But where to get a stiff?  He looks around.  No, not wife to whom he seems devoted despite the fact that she spends her little screen time sitting on the lap of faithful Associate even while he is standing up.  Carradine does not seem to notice this fact.  Near sighted I guess.  Meanwhile, scowling Housekeeper incants voodoo nonsense which seems to be aimed at procuring Associate for Wife.  Nor does Carradine consider the Housekeeper or Stereotype for stiffness. 

The plot thickens when Associate’s own Misses appears.  Both Wife and Housekeeper go all voodoo in response.  Carradine does not seem to notice any of the chanting.  Deaf as well as near sighted it would seem.

Then Doctor Professor Carradine decides to stiffen the faithful Great Dane, Brutus, for his next experiment.  The SPCA has his number; I know because I ratted him out.  Before the SPCA can get to him, Carradine reanimates Brutus who is barking mad at missing dinners from now on, but as he is on a ghost diet he can walk through walls.  This is the money shot of the film and it is accordingly repeated three or four times.  It is certainly nicely done.

Meanwhile, Wife finds out that Carradine murdered her pet dog, and she is pretty mad, too.  The ghost dog howls off camera and Carradine and Associate pretend not to hear it.  Both are now deaf.  

Off and on, local Plod comes around wondering how a marble fisherman washed up.  

A ruckus follows and somehow (I forget how) Wife dies.  ‘No problem,’ says Carradine, slaps her on the table, wires her up, and zap. By this time Associate wishes he was in another movie and tries to leave but he is too deep with SPCA to pull out now.  

Spoiler!

If you have followed the story so far, well,….sympathies.  

Reanimated Wife is manipulated by Housekeeper on behalf of the SPCA to kill Carradine.  She does. Since she is now spectral there are no fingerprints.  Plod fastens onto Associate.  Somehow or other it ends.  One has to admire the straight-faces of the actors as they regurgitate the lines of this gibberish. It reminds me of those McKinsey management briefings.   

Carradine was a slave to the Pasadena stage company he founded and worked himself relentlessly into his dotage to pour money into it.   He played many a good scientist and many a bad one.  In the post-World War II world he came to embody the good and bad of science.  Here he is not mad or bad but dedicated, hard-working, diligent, and, worst of all, humourless.  

Spider Woman Strikes Back (1946)

IMDb meta-data is 59 minutes runtime, rated 6.0 by 160 cinematizens.

Genre: Horror.

Verdict: Olé!

Spider Woman is blind and decrepit and needs a companion to supplement her faithful servant Rondo Hatton who is a deaf mute. In a small town in cattle country she employs a series of young lady companions who read to her and then are required to drink milk before bedtime. Ah huh, but what about that milk, asked the fraternity brothers for whom it is a strange drink?  The latest Companion finds Spider Woman at once both charming and formidable.  Indeed.  She is as welcoming as a crevice in a glacier, smooth, slippery, and deep.  Once upon a time the Family Spiders owned the land to the horizon but time and tide has seen most of it sold. 

Now cattle are dying and ranchers are selling and moving.  Doc Adams comes to investigate and sits on the patio to do so.  

Companion is edgy and soon enough….   Spoiler!  She realises Spider Woman is not what she seems.  Or rather is exactly what she seems: cold, ruthless, demented, Republican, blood thirsty, and crazy.  But who would believe newcomer Companion when Spider Woman has spent years charming the simple locals. Companion frets. Beau comes to the rescue, despite the fact that Companion had rebuffed Beau’s interest earlier.  

It seems Spider Woman, neither blind nor decrepit, dopes the milk, and then takes a blood donation from the sleeping Companion(s), until they are drained.  (Pedants note that there is nary a word about where the corpses go.) She does this not just because she is mean, though she is, but she is also using the blood to create a mad-cow virus to drive off the local ranchers while through a shelf-company she buys their land for a pittance to recover the lost Spider Family Web Estate.  She is starting to sound like some cabinet ministers I read about for whom public office is a private asset.  Spider-Man is a boy scout compared to Spider Woman!

 Sly, manipulative, dangerous, cunning, and sinister are the words that best describe the roles of Gale Sondergaard.  She played Spider Woman in three disconnected film.  It does not really matter.  She dominates any movie with poise, enunciation, and steel. She had a career on the Broadway stage and only reluctantly gave that up to move to California when her husband got a job there.  Once there her stage work prompted offers for films and off she went.  In my book she is one of the all-time greats of the silver screen.  

Rondo Hatton was a victim of poison gas in World War I trenches that led to the deformities that ruined and shortened his life.  His brooding silence is pitch perfect. His life and career are described in more detail elsewhere on this blog.  Search and ye may find.

Director Arthur Lublin kept things moving with  few memorable scenes as when the ostensibly blind Spider Woman feeds her plants. 

Catman of Paris (1946) 

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.)  

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.

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.

Valley of the Zombies (1946)

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. 

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.  

Black Friday (1940)

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?

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.