Author: Michael W Jackson

Midnight Manhunt (1945)

IMDb runtime is 1 hour and 4 minutes, rated 5.4/10.0  by 303 cinematizens.  

Genre: Mystery, comedy, bore

Verdict: Waxen, indeed.

Set-up: The ever menacing George Zucco shoots a man in a hotel room and makes off with a stash of diamonds.  All in silence except the: Bang, Bang!  Nice. Then the wounded man rouses himself, crawls, and lurches about like the fraternity brothers at a keg party.  Still without a word nor any background music. Nice. 

Cut to the conveniently located next door Wax Museum of Crime, where the twittery owner is closing up, as Leo Grocey holds up a broom, thus extending his acting repertoire. Meanwhile, feisty woman reporter rooms climbs the stairs to her crib where she finds the now dead man littering the hallway, instantly recognising him as the late unlamented Jimmy Hoffa and the thirty-point type headline she will get from this discovery; she decides to stash the body until a photographer from her paper can get there, giving her an exclusive with pixes.  Journalistic responsibility prevails once again. She types up the false facts while waiting.  

Zucco comes back because he left his Amex card on the victim or something.  The police poke around with the incompetence of a McKinsey manager.  A rival journalist appears to belittle the woman.  Leo continues to hold up the broom. (I lost a bet on that with the fraternity brothers.  Holding up a broom seemed to me to beyond Leo’s skill set.)  By turns they use the dead body as a prop, a taxi cab passenger, a seat, and so on.  All very amusing, … not.  Amusing was Charlie Chan at the Wax Museum (1940).  

There is nothing to work with in either the screenplay or the direction.  Ann Savage was a great player (see her chilling performance in Detour [1945]); she does breathe some life into the clichés in this story but only just. Zucco is wasted as a gunman. He is much more menacing without anything as mundane as a gat. The broom did not need Leo’s malapropisms. 

It was released on 25 July 1945, less than a month after the typhoon of steel at Okinawa harvested 82,000 US casualties, including more than a dozen generals. More Japanese soldiers and still more civilians died, as well. This blood bath convinced George Marshall that an invasion of Japan had to be avoided.  Pentagon planners had estimated a million causalities from an invasion They also assumed they would be American, as the depleted English and Dutch, the Chinese concentrated on each other, along with the duplicitous Russians would not contribute.  The Defense Department had signed contracts with Western Union to send ten thousand yellow telegrams a day telling wives, mothers, sisters, fathers that their soldier boy had been killed. In anticipation of such an apocalypse US Army Air Force personnel, including my dad, on Pacific Islands were being retrained as infantry to feed into the maw.  A biography of the titan George Marshall is discussed elsewhere on this blog.  

House of Mystery A (1934) and B (1961)

A.)  IMDB meta-data is 1 hour and 2 minutes (and it felt like a lot longer), rated a generous 4.9/10.0 by 241 time wasters.

Genre: No mystery to it.

Verdict:  B o r i n g. 

In 1934 a swaggering American adventurer defiles an ancient Hindu relic and is cursed.  He scoots with a dusky maiden and becomes a cripple – due to the curse, it seems. Meanwhile, the curse misfires and falls on those who funded his adventure, though none of them violated the relic.  Guilt by association it seems to be.  Two die.

Swagger, now in a wheel chair, has invited the surviving benefactors to his mansion – an old dark house, the fraternity bothers hoped – to sort things out. Sorting involves the investors having their necks broken. Dusky maiden goes about lighting incense to portend 1960s hippies.  More necks go crack.

Plod appears and makes Barney (remember Barney?) look smart.  More necks snap. Meanwhile a plumber lurks about the pipes. Got is so far?  If not, doesn’t matter.

Swagger blows it when he dismisses dusky maiden in preference to the snow white nurse.  Some nurse.  She doesn’t realise he can stand erect.  Dusky takes revenge with her house-trained gorilla who hides behind a sliding panel between murderous gigs.  The annoying insurance salesman saves the day. The end. About twenty minutes past endurable.  

If I got it right: Dusky and Swagger had used this ape to kill off the other investors, and were now finishing the job.  If so, why Swagger did not consider that the ape might be used against him is the real mystery here.  The other possibility is that Dusky was travelling around with her ape in the checked baggage and doing the killing while Swagger dallied with snow white.  Dusky then returns to find she has been displaced.  Yet she continues siccing the man in the ape suit on the other investors. See? Nope, me neither. 

Clay Clement as Swagger steals the show.  He goes from swaggering plunderer to pathetic cripple to scheming murder and then piteous victim.  Tour de force acting in a waste of celluloid.  

B.) IMDb meta-data is 55 minutes, rated 6.4/10.0 by 134 cinematizens.

Genre: Spooky

Verdict: Taut with a twist.  

Same title but this is a different story about a young couple who find a house for sale that is too good to be true for the price.  They find out why.

Vernon Sewell wrote and directed and it is tight and atmospheric with some fine players.  It has an ambitious double flashback which makes the summary tricky.  Suffice it to saying the empty house they find a woman who welcomes them and shows them around in a cold and detached manner of a McKinsey manager. They ask about the low price and she says some buyers have been put off …. by the ghost.

Ghost. Bah, hum bug. They have seen A Christmas Carol and ghosts don’t scare them, but how did such bunkum start, they ask.  First flashback is to another, earlier young couple who bought the house and found it odd, which leads to the second, nested flashback to the couple who built it. Mr. Builder was an electrical engineer who wired everything up to the max.  

Mrs Builder made off with another man, or did she?  It seems she didn’t.  An episode of Midsomer uses a similar plot device with home electricity. Then the engineer dies at his bench.  I never did fathom whether this was suicide, accident, murder, or fate. Or why the dog was there. But with his death the missing wife and lover turn up under garden gnomes.  Hmmm.

Earlier the first young couple have visitations from the engineer.  These are unnerving so they call in a ghost hunter, Colin Gordon, who bores ghosts to death with longwinded explanations done far better in The Stone Tape (1972). The fraternity brothers dropped off here.  Ghost Hunter is sure something spectral is present but it is beyond his gizmos so he calls in a medium who goes into a trance, which she calls a séance.  (Briefly conscious, the fraternity brothers shouted that a séance was a circle holding hands, not an old biddy closing her eyes.)

Spoiler.

The welcoming woman ends the story there and as the prospective buyers watch she transforms into the murdered wife and fades into the wall.  Superb.  

But of course in Sydney the only question is: How much was the house?  Was there a garage?     

The 1961 film was made as a B picture but was trimmed for television.  

Phantom Killer (1942)

IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 1 minute, rated 5.3/10.0 by 124 cinematizens.  

Genre: Mystery

Verdict: Snappy

It is nearly a word-for-word remake of The Sphinx (1933), which starred the incomparable Lionel Atwill.  This one limps long with Perry White as the villain. His scowl is as bland as the leading man Dick Purcell’s smile.  The bland threatens the bland.  

Dick knows, and I mean knows, that Perry is guilty despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary.  He knows this in his bones without ever having visited the crime scene, spoken to the police, or met Perry. He just knows. Yet his frail was sitting next to Perry at a banquet when one of the crimes occurred miles away. No matter, Dick knows what Dick knows, because he has read the script.  The fraternity brothers were not impressed.  They, too, have known things in their bones and been slapped for it.

Then there is the conspicuous grand piano which holds the key(s).  It is hidden in plain sight and everyone examines it, much to the discomfort of Perry; not very bright this Perry.  The police captain quickly susses it, though how and why goes to the grave with him.  Nonetheless his murder strengthens Dick’s bones and gives Warren Hymer a chance to act for once, and he takes it in a couple of scenes. He was usually played a foolish lummox but this time he made the most of a few minutes of serious screen time.  

In the denouement Perry got confused: is he left or right handed?  No matter.  I also got confused about which Perry was sitting on the sofa when the handwriting samples were reviewed, and I think Perry was, too. No matter. Nothing stopped director William Beaudine. 

William ‘One Shot’ Beaudine directed with his legendary economy.  He is credited with between 350 and 500 films by different sources.  A personal favourite is Jesse James meets Frankenstein’s Daughter (1966). So much better than his Billy the Kid versus Dracula of the same year.  [Psst, look up irony in the dictionary.]  Joan Woodbury sparkled as the frail and mercifully put Dick and his bones into the shade. Mantan Moreland played the stereotype to perfection as always.

Most of the critics’ comments linked to the IMDb entry are condescending, but I found it brisk and if one can ignore Dick and his bones, stomach Moreland’s dutiful efforts, forgive Perry’s limp-wristed villain, the rest of the cast carries it.  Hmm.  Put like that maybe 5.3 is too high.    

Bad news: there is no phantom. The title was an effort to trade on some other contemporary films that had that word in the title.  It is derivative, as well as a copy of the earlier film. 

It was released on 2 October 1942, while raged the first American offensive in the Pacific on Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands. The purpose of this campaign was to deny the Japanese the use of airfields within range of Australian shipping. It was here the PT-109 came to grief.  

The Death Kiss (1932)

IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 15 minutes, rated 6.0/10.0 by 854 cinematizens.

Genre: Mystery

Verdict: Intriguing

In the opening scene after a parting kiss from the glamorous leading lady the tuxedoed lead is shot and falls down. The camera pulls back to reveal the sound stage only five years or so after the first talkie. ‘Cut!’ yells the director.  He is no William ‘One Shot’ Beaudine and wants a second take. Is that suspicious or what?  As the actors slowly resume their floor marks, Mr Tuxedo continues to lie comfortably on the floor which is eventually noticed.  

You guessed it.  He’s dead, Jim.  That prop popgun was loaded, or was it?  Studio executives including a wasted Bela Lugosi would rather sweep Tuxedo under the carpet and go on.  Bad publicity, cost overruns, coffee breaks, and other KPIs are more urgent than a murder. No one can be more suspicious than Lugosi doing nothing.  All eyes are on him. He does nothing. Whoa!   

Meanwhile, Plod appears and proves inept.  At the same time a scriptwriter finds it amusing to make remarks and interfere with the investigation.  He has designs on the leading lady who seems to have had a motive to terminate Tuxedo’s life contract. Plod is only too happy to settle for the obvious.

What follows is a nice police procedural as Writer pieces it together while plod follows.  There are arc lights, battery acid, car tire prints, no finger prints where there should be, hotel bills, phone calls, a re-enactment, and a left-handed note.  All of that exposition was handled rather well, though the comic irritation studio Dick who accompanies Writer was surplus. This Dick is even dumber than Plod. The villain is of course the one least suspected.  See above.

Before there was a poverty row there was Tiffany Studios. Of more curiosity is the leading man, David Manners, who was born Rauff de Ryther Daun Acklom in Halifax Canada.  He had a short Hollywood career in the 1930s that included the lead in two classics: Dracula and The Mummy, but found it boring, and quit.  He continued to act in the theatre in New York City, and then retired to paint, garden, think, and live on the real estate investments he made with his movie income. Would that others retired early and spared the viewing public.  Send nominations for retirement to ….  

Speaking of Dracula, Bela Lugosi was born in Transylvania then in Hungary now in Rumania. He volunteered for the Austro-Hungarian Army in World War I in which service he was wounded three times on the Russian front. When the Russians left the war he was transferred to the Italian front. After the war, he became involved in communist agitation, eventually emigrating to the United States. He was a founder of the Screen Actors Guild. In the 1950s he was blacklisted and his career languished. None of the major studios would touch him for fear of HUAC reprisals. He had to take the roles offered by independent producers which inevitably sought to capitalise on his fame as Dracula.

Ladies Crave Excitement (1935)

IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 13 minutes runtime, rated 6.1/10.0 by 76 cinematizens.

Genre: krimi, comedy

Verdict: slam bam!

With the opening credits it starts with a bang and picks up speed from there.  Norman is a newsreel cameraman come rain, fire, flood, shipwreck, earthquake, or even more serious calamities like the IRS. His editor tries to rein him in but is undercut by his executive secretary in several amusing byplays.  He is the bad cop and she is the good cop, and everyone knows it.  

Made to do penance at a boring air show he ridicules a poor little rich girl who disrupts proceedings, only later to meet her incognito as a stable maiden. They team up to foil some racehorse dopers. Great fun follows.

Then it seems she has revealed his secret project to a rival, though in fact it was his rather confused and weak-willed but well-meaning assistant who did that.  Great fun follows.

Loved the confrontation with the villains in the editor’s office.  Loved the explanation of the assistant’s revelation.  Loved the last scene that starts at the altar and ends…..    

The connection of the title to the story, much to the disappointment of the fraternity brothers, is remote.

It is all so humane and sensible compared the simple-minded nonsense that Hollywood churns out now, made by and for prepubescent boys. The delightful everyman Norman Foster was a man of many parts, cinema star, stage actor, writer, director, and more. I recognised his voice from something but could not pin it down. Suggestions are welcome.   

Pilot X or Death in the Air (1936)

IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 9 minutes of runtime, 5.3/10.0 rated by 109 cinematizens.

Genre:  Mystery.

Verdict: [Drone.] 

The Setup:  In the early days of passenger planes a number of them crash, killing the passengers. This is bad for business. We are spared the number of deaths.  But each plane has eight to ten on board plus crew. We see crashed planes.  We see newspaper headlines.  We seen airline owners looking pained. We think of the Boeing Max. Then we cut to the interior of a plane aloft as a passenger sees a biplane approaching with guns blazing and an X on its fuselage.   Rat-a-rat and down goes the passenger plane.  Amid the burning rubble of the crashed aircraft before croaking a passenger describes this attack.

Now there is something to investigate and a government investigator comes who is seldom heard from thereafter, along with a psychologist, of course, and the greasy John Carroll. They narrow the search to five air aces who just happen to be in the neighbourhood of the last attack whom they invite to the Old Dark House for a confab.  It is an ecumenical group of stereotypes: one French hand kisser, one Prussian heel clicker, one English snob, one Canadian lumberjack, and one Yankee doodle. Their host is the manufacturer of passenger planes, his comely daughter, and her intended – Stanley Baker (again). There are underlings around but forget them.  

The shrink hides in a secret room behind a false panel from which he observes, records, pervs on the pilots. The whole house seems designed around this perving room. (The fraternity brothers wondered why they didn’t invite cheerleaders, altos, or the Sugar Babes.) 

Once the suspects are assembled the pitch is that they join forces in a dawn patrol to flush out and dispatch Pilot X who is giving them all a bad name. Sneakily the hosts do not reveal that they suppose he is one of the assembled aces who will then show his hand.  Nobody gives Stanley a second thought as he serves drinks, politely lets greasy Carroll grope his girl, turns on and off lights, plays Free Cell on his iPad, and is generally underfoot but self-effacing. Very suspicious, indeed.  The one who seems most innocent is always guilty in the playbook.   

One by one the pilots get toasted leaving the shrink none the wiser.  Whoa, they are running out of pilots so he thinks deeply one night and slowly, ever so s-l-o-w-l-y, begins to write down the name of Pilot X. Geez, what’d ya know? Before he can finish the sentence: T h e k i l l e r i s … .   He gets clonked.  How he figured it out is anyone’s guess. 

Bodycount :  many passengers, three pilots, and now the shrink. All hail McKinsey management: The payroll is certainly being cut.

Then by some means, perhaps a Twitter post, that escaped this viewer they find a picture of Stanley in a kraut uniform.  Huh?  Had they read the script they would have known that his name was Göring but that gave them no clue. Huh!  Any relation to Hermann by any chance?

While all the pilots flit around the deep one has been murdering far and wide. He kept his fighter plane up his sleeve, it seems. Where did he gas it up? Was a signature required for the UPS delivery of the ammunition? ‘Why’ is never explained, except maybe for fun. What is the fun in killing passengers on the unarmed plane?  About the same fun as shotgunning rabbits I suppose or machine gunning school kids.  Let’s ask the NRA.  (N.B. the last time I used those letters, NRA, in a blog post I later got a very polite email from an alleged NRA representative suggesting the errors of my ways. [Gulp.])

Greasy and Stanley have a sky duel and virtue prevails in this work of fiction.  The end.

There is a lot of (stock) aerial photography which is largely unfathomable.  Moreover, when the pilots ascend they all dress like Snoopy on a date with the Red Baron— leather jacket, white scarf, and goggles — and they all have pencil moustaches so the fraternity brothers could not tell one from another. 

Quiet Please, Murder (1942)

IMDb meta-data 1 hour and 10 minutes runtime, rated 6.5/10.0 by 238 cinematizens.

Genre: noir, krimi

Verdict: The tome is mightier than the gat.

The kindly library attendant says to the oily George Sanders that the priceless Shakespeare folio on display would only leave the building over his dead body.  Oily George obliges by shooting him in the back, stealing the folio, whistling while he works. Thereafter he engages in masochistic banter with his henchwoman. For 1942 it is surprisingly explicit about pain being pleasure. To lighten the tone he refers to her as Lady Dracula. 

George is a merciless but studious murderer who reads what he steals.  He cites Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, and Bugs Bunny with equal facility. This man knows the literature. 

George then makes copies of the stolen folio which Lady Dracula sells far and wide for him.  She is the cut-out, and knows it.  One buyer is Sidney Blackmer who is an intermediary for …. Hermann Göring in Berlin. In the middle of the war, Fat Hermann is buying books from the USA!  What a scumbag!  Sidney quickly realises the purchase is an excellent fake and wants the money back and a cut of future frauds.  

Sidney is chilling as on behalf of Fat Hermann he whispers threats to Lady Dracula who is caught in the middle and does not like it.  Sidney has her pegged, and George is only too willing to cut her loose, after all that is what a cut-out is for, though he personally is undaunted since he is has home court advantage and is just as ruthless as Fatty’s minions. See scene one above for proof. Regrettably Sidney and George do not have a scene together to see who could could do evil in a lower, icier key.  Sid went on to lead a coven in Rosemary’s Baby (1986). A promotion of sorts, I guess.

The affable Richard Denning stumbles into the triangle. All three players – Nazis, George and his gang, and Denning – meet in the public library to square the deal, each pursuing a separate agenda on which murder figures right after Apologies and Minutes from the Previous shoot-out.  While a member of George’s gang, Lady Dracula has her own agenda trying to arrange some mutually assured destruction among the other players, leaving her unscathed. It is more than a triple cross and that left the fraternity brothers baffled. (Situation Normal for them.) All of these villains and Denning wander around the vast public library from balcony (convenient for pushing someone off), the basement (handy for muffling gunfire), stacks (great for spying), and the front desk (for hiding behind) near closing time, when…..  

A wartime blackout drill plunges the whole crew into darkness in the library as the bodies fall this way and that.  Stabbing, shooting, garrotting, torturing all catalogued by the Dewey decimal system.  George’s fiendish plan includes a fake police investigation.  However, the fake investigation is so competent that Denning becomes suspicious for in B movies the cops are from the Keystone precinct so he soon figures out that it is ploy by the Oily One.  

In the ensuing mêlée the Nazis and George’s gang whittle each other down. Again there is a mild surprise at the end when Denning forsakes Lady Dracula to her unambiguous fate which is not left to the imagination.

The ubiquitous Byron Foulger is the twitchy Mr Walpole, librarian cum air raid warden, a marvellous veteran character actor with nearly 500 items on the IMDb who is instantly recognised by cinematizens, though he was often uncredited in the films.  It has to be said that Lady Dracula is no Spider Woman.  Gale Sondergaard would have dominated the film from this role with timing, poise, her own brand of menace, and enunciation. Our loss.

Dated 1942 it was released in 3 February 1944 at the height of the Pacific Island campaign.  Denning gives a nice speech about the home front. He should know since he was a US Navy submarine officer in the Pacific between 1942 and 1945 while the One-A John Wayne stayed home without any bone spurs.    

The Missing Lady (1946)

IMDb meta-data is run time 59 minutes, rated 4.9 by 72 cinematizens

Genre: Mystery

Verdict:  There is nothing to spoil with a spoiler. 

Off camera a collector of orientalia is murdered in his luxurious apartment and along with chopsticks a jade statuette of a lady is stolen. Plod in the form of West Point graduate James Flavin arrives and arrests Lamont Cranston who lives next door with his faithful bumbler. In the dumb sweepstakes, leaving aside the entire membership of the current Republican Party, this plod is The Champion.  (James should have stayed in the Army rather than play this crap.)  It takes him fifty of the fifty-nine minutes to realise that the missing lady is the statuette and not a dame. Of course, the real stupidity traces back to the scriptwriter who thought this was funny, one George Callaghan. Guilty as seen.  

The very name Lamont Cranston conjures magic to the cognoscenti (that’s me).  He is the Shadow.  THE SHADOW!  He knows what evil lurks in the heart of men!  This knowledge is the forbidden fruit of violating the NSW privacy laws. The same goes for Santa Claus.  Moreover, the Shadow has the power to cloud men’s minds.  Of course, the fraternity brothers, like viewers of Pox News, were born that way so it’s not that big a deal.    

Only one scene makes use of the Shadow’s much-anticipated shadow on a staircase.  It is excellent and in lieu of doing anything else creative it is shown a second time. Even the fraternity brothers noticed this repetition. And that’s it.  There is no clouding of minds, but rather this shadow dons a black cat suit under a trench coat or something. On the radio The Shadow had the power to cloud men’s mind, but on the screen he has the power to bore any and everyone.

While on radio Margo Lane is Lamont’s very clever and plucky helpmate who often turned the tables on villains who underestimated her, in this rendering she is vain imbecile in a series of hats no one wants to sit behind in the movie theatre.  Still if this film was playing, then hiding behind those hats might be a good idea. 

The cast is replete with surplus characters evidently from the producer’s extended family who contribute nothing to anything. With that ability they should have been in Congress.  

George Chandler played Lamont’s flunky.  He had been a doughboy in World War I and made a subsequent career out of fourth and fifth bananas in the old vaudeville phrase.  He racked up 462 credits on the IMDb. He was a regular on Lassie in the 1950s. HIs major claim to fame may be that he succeeded Ronald Reagan as President … of the Screen Actors Guild.

Kane Richmond played Cranston, sort of.  He was a poster boy with a jaw to park a car under, the confident manner of schoolyard bully, broad shoulders of a gym rat, and the dark good looks of a young wanna be. In short, one of scores of triers in Hollywoodland at the time.  His career highlights include: Spy Smashers (1942), Haunted Harbor (1944), and Jungle Raiders (1945). No more needs to be said.  

The comic relief was supplied by two sisters, Miss Effie and Miss Millie, who raced the elevators in the apartment building. The story, such as it was, being so trite, these two added some welcome distraction for which much thanks. Integrating their shenanigans into the story was beyond the scriptwriter.