Category: Film Review

Escape in the Fog (1945)

IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 5 minutes of runtime, rated 5.9 by 467 cinematizens.

Genre:  Mystery.

Verdict:  Foggy.

In a dense fog on the Golden Gate Bridge walking from There to Where, Nina Foch sees a man set upon by thugs and screams….herself awake to find that the noise has brought to her hotel room door the very man of whom she dreamed! Seeing Nina lying there, Dreamboat has enough sense not to rock.

She is an Army nurse on R and R, albeit nothing is made of her experiences, perhaps, in the Pacific.  The bloodbath at Iwo Jima had ended only a fortnight before the release date of this balderdash, so maybe she is on leave from that inferno.  DreamBoat is a Top Hush-Hush guy who cannot shut up.

Because he can speak Hollywoodese, DreamBoat is charged with a super secret mission to Japanese occupied Hong Kong to buy jade for Otto. Sure he will fit in. Abstracting that jade will crush the Nips, intones Otto as only he could, and lead to final victory.  There is a reference ‘to our allies, the Chinese.’   Recognition of Allies is rare in Hollywood and so noteworthy.  (It is altogether unknown in Washington D.C. with one exception: The haunting Korean War Memorial.) 

Though DreamBoat can tell her nothing of his mission and does so at great length, Nina pledges to stay dry until he returns, but no sooner does he set off than he is set upon.  It is child’s play in trapping him. 

Nina knows something is up and goes to the secretive Otto by finding him in the telephone book under SPIES but Otto feigns ignorance and leaves it at that.  No wonder the Japanese held out so long with spies like this.  Then as scriptwriting would have it, the opening dream sequences is played out for (un)real.  With me so far? Still Otto smokes his pipe.

The man Trappers are Caucasians with enemy accents who hole up in ChinaTown.  They Nina-nap her to blackmail DreamBoat into handing over the super-duper top secret jade order, and he would if he could, but…   In the stunt fight on the Bridge it fell into the void.

There are some nice touches as both sides try to dredge it up from that void.  Once again it is child’s play to outwit DreamBoat, though by this time Otto’s pipe has gone out and he is stirred to action.  Why DreamBoat did not turn to Otto in the first instance is down to SOP which in this case means Stupid Operating Procedure, a favourite of scriptwriters. 

Nina seems indifferent to being trussed up and threatened, but none of that is related to her experiences as an Army nurse. More’s the pity.  

With the help of some local Chinese, our allies, Otto rescues her as DreamBoat postures.  

It was Budd Boetticher’s first director’s credit and it shows around the edges.  Budd later made some of the best Westerns that are bleak in style and complex in morality.  These include Decision at Sundown (1957), Buchanan Rides Alone (1958), Ride Lonesome (1959), and Comanche Station (1960). Each of these titles is discussed elsewhere on this blog.  He developed a fascination with bullfighting and directed and wrote at least five movies on that theme. 

The film at hand was released on 5 April 1945, four days after the start of the Typhoon of Steel on Okinawa that cost 77,000 US casualties and even greater number of Japanese.  There would have been plenty of nursing needed there. 

The Silent Passenger (1935)

IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 3 minutes, rated 6.2 by 77 cinematizens.

Gerne:  Mystery.

Verdict: Lord Peter appears.

We know from the get-go in this inverted krimi who dun it, where, how, and why.  How long will it take Plod to get there is the  question? 

The story open in a boat-train hotel in Old Blighty as Blackmailer is coercing Married Woman to abscond to France with him by referring to the amorous emails she wrote to him.  He is short, overweight, warty, and rude.  No wonder she forsook the tall, dapper, polite, forthright John Loder for this tripe.  Credibility starts low.

The pace accelerates when a second victim confronts Blackmailer and after some useless dialogue throttles him.  Victim proceeds to stuff corpse into a steamer trunk left behind by the Marx Brothers and he then carries the trunk downstairs as if he were a porter, bent under the weight and obscured by the bulk past the reception desk, where Lord Peter Wimsey is making fatuous remarks.  His Lordship does notice that the porter’s trousers have a well-ironed crease in them and that is most unusual for a navvy.  

The trunk is labeled for Married Woman and shortly her Absent Husband catches up with her and they have a reconciliation of sorts.  He goes upstairs to settle the hash of Blackmailer in the  room where he mistakes murderous Victim for Blackmailer and fisticuffs ensure.  Blackmailer gets away. 

Husband and Woman take the train to Southampton and then the ferry to Le Havre where French officials cannot levy an import duty on the corpse in the trunk and send it back to England along with Husband and Wife.  Lord Peter who has observed all this joins them in returning with his man Bunter.  

While the circumstantial evidence against Absent Husband is great, after seeing his Eton tie Inspector Parker (Wimsey’s brother-in-law) does not believe him guilty.

Spoiler ahead.

Parker and Wimsey decide to investigate further and enlist the aid of the railroad which assigns to the case…. wait for it… the murderous Victim who is a company employee.  He can hardly believe his luck.  Only Absent Husband saw him and now Victim is in a position to shift the blame on him. 

He has his wife, who evidently is complicit in both the blackmail and murder, chat up Married Woman and plant seeds of doubt about Husband’s guilt.  Just causal like.  Being a screenwriters twit Married Woman swallows the bait, but both Husband and Wimsey see a set-up in that causal conversation and re-double their efforts.  Husband chases around and Wimsey makes fatuous remarks non-stop.  Whew!

There is a superb scene in a nocturnal rail yard where Victim and Husband duke it out, and accidentally release the brake on a gigantic steam engine which then rolls ever so slowly, silently, and implacably onward.   This attack on Husband convinces everyone the Victim is the Villain and in time he is netted after another barrage Wimsey’s verbiage.  

There are some nice procedural touches as when Wimsey realises that the railroad detective (psst, Victim-Villain) knew the room number was 9, even after the numeral was removed.  Likewise the denouement in the railway baggage car with the geese is a keeper.  

Does the title refer to the body in the trunk which is removed in the first fifteen minutes, or what?  It seems an early talkie because often the characters face the camera square in closeup to deliver the lines.  

This was the first film adaptation of Dorothy Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey.  Many more followed.  I particularly liked the Ian Carmichael personifications 1972-1974 in part because of the bond between his Wimsey and Bunter.  While Bunter appears in this film he is not developed, nor Wimsey’s attachment to him explained.  

Exposed (1947)

IMDb meta-data is runtime 59 minutes, rated 6.1 by 63 cinematizens

Genre:  Mystery

Verdict: Neato

When tall, distinguished-looking, baritone Colonel Hicks goes to hire a Private Dick he brooks no nonsense.  Though he has no appointment he wants to ‘see Mr. B. Prentice right here! Right now!’ as he pushes past Iggy (on whom more below) in the anteroom and bursting into the inner office….to find that the ‘B’ is for Belinda!  ‘Holy scriptwriting,’ he cried!  ‘A dame!’ Giving himself a full-body shake he pressed on since Prentice came highly recommended by the police.  [Psst, her father is captain of detectives.  Is this insider trading?]

Hicks wants to know what his son is spending so much money on, but Hicks does not want to pry by asking the scion.  He would rather hire a spy.  Hicks is a lot of things but one of them is not smart.

Earlier we had seen Belinda dust off Canino, and that is no easy task, but she handled his gat with the ease of practice.  The director sent Canino back to thug school to revise his act. On whom more below. 

No sooner does Belinda hit the bricks than Hicks bites the dust alone in his study.  It was a case of overkill, there was a heart attack, there was syringe, there was a very sharp letter opener, there was a television broadcast of Pox News.  No one could survive a conjunction of events that lethal.  

Now B turns her talents to figuring out who dun it.  There is some to’ing and fro’ing and Iggy, the muscular ex-Marine offsider, is as quick on the update as B herself is.  It is a good team and I am sorry to say this was a once-off pairing.  Iggy is not played for laughs and comes through for her more than once and she he.  This was one of the few times William Haade got to do anything but flex the pecs.  He turned bad after this gig and was a villain in Key Largo (1948).   

She starts with the obvious, the handsome, confident, wealthy young son who is as clueless as a Murdoch Bot Prime Minister.

There are many herrings: a sister who is secretive and pouty, a butler who looks shifty when the police are around, a shyster lawyer, an emeritus professor, and the family doctor who missed the syringe and the letter opener when he signed the death certificate as a heart attack.  Then there is Canino. Is he an entrepreneurial, franchise, or a contract thug? 

There are some nifty lines as when Canino invites himself to sit at Belinda’s table in a restaurant and put his snap-brim fedora carefully on the table.  She tells him, she does not ask, to remove the hat because she is allergic to dandruff.  He then gives her a glimpse of the gat among the dandruff under the hat.  She is as cool as ice, and soon deals with him.  

Here are a few other bon mots:

‘Trying to keep a stiff secret is like hiding the Statue of Liberty in a phone booth.’

‘Even lambs become lions is the stakes are high enough.’

‘Don’t get frisky or I’ll put this gun where he least expect it.’  [Still puzzling on that place.]

Waitress: ‘He’s a bad egg.’

Belinda: ‘I’ll scramble him good.’  [And she did.]

I never did figure out who did what and the explanation she gives at the end was no help, but they mostly lived happily ever after.  The handsome male lead does nothing but posture in a neato switch with the duties usually assigned to the female lead. 

‘Canino,’ you ask?  He was the unforgettable villain in The Big Sleep (1946) played by Bob Steele.  He went up against Bogey again in The Enforcer (1951).  Bob racked up more than 244 credits on the IMDb.  He could make the word ‘Please’ sound like a mortal threat.  Whenever his name appears in the credits a good dose menace follows.  Believe it or not, Ripley, he started out in comedy.

It was a studio mill production from Republic before its president bankrupted the company trying to make the statuesque but wooden Vera Ralston a star.  This affair is discussed elsewhere on this blog.  Get clickin’ for the goss. It is also the studio with which John Wayne started.   

The Mummy (1932)

IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 13 minutes, rated 7.1 by 21,656 cinematizens.  

Gerne: Horror

Verdict: Masterpiece

A ruminative tale of undying love perfectly directed by Karl Freund, a cinematographer who conveys meaning, emotion, and conviction through lighting, silence, and stasis.  No strange camera angles, framed shots, or cross cuts. The titular Mummy is never seen entire.  This film has nothing to do with the host of derivative imitators that followed.  

While mummies (but not daddies) had a prior history in a novel by Bram Stoker and a 1918 silent film by Ernst Lubitsch, it was only after Howard Carter found Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922 that the Egyptian craze occurred, and with it Mummies went big. There is a recent episode of Lord Bragg’s podcast on In Our Time about this finding for the cognoscenti.   

In the film a bumptious Brit reads out the sacred ritual, which his elders advised him not to do, so we knew he would do it, and that precipitates the events that follow.  Imotep was consumed by love for Zita but she was an anti-vaxxer and when measles killed her, Immy stole the sacred scroll to re-animate her, but just as he was about to utter….  The cops busted him and he was sentenced to be buried alive or watch the President in Thief talk.  He chose burial.   

We see the start of his burial when he is being wrapped in linen and it is enough.  Whew!  (Note no fly was included when he was wrapped and that caused a problem because even mummies have to go.)  The scroll he violated is buried with him in an unmarked hole in the ground.  The Brits find this and as above, set the ball rolling. Then time passes.

Ardath Bey appears from nowhere a decade later and tells another Brit crew where to dig to find the good stuff.  They do and they do.  Strangely Arath wants no baksheesh and slips away only to return when all the accoutrements are displayed in the Cairo museum (which Kate has visited).  It is an other-worldly portrayal of this leathery man with the posture of a sergeant major and the manners of a European diplomat, yet before whom dogs recoil and a Nubian warrior swoons, that carries the picture.   

When Zita appears Ardath is sure she is the reincarnation of his love of three plus millennia before and sets about joining with her.  [Down, fraternity brothers, not like that!]

Ardath makes eyes at her as only he can.  Move over, Bela. Ardath has an iTV cleverly concealed in a cooling, reflecting pool where he observes others.  When senior Brit decides to burn the animating scroll, Ardath, finishes him off with murderous thoughts!  Good thing the fraternity brothers cannot do that to the professors who keep failing them for being drunken dolts.  

Likewise David Manners, as the hero, is threatened.  Zita falls under Ardath’s hypnotic sway and…   

The sepulchral atmosphere throughout is suffocating.  One almost feels the drying heat and congestion.  When the young Brit goes nuts, that seems the right reaction.  The lighting and camera use details, like a single eye opening, the dog balking, or Ardath’s glowing stare, to suggest menace. These are silent, static images from which the viewer cannot turn away.  Karloff as Ardath manipulates the Brits with ease.  The three thousand seven hundred year flashback in the iTV reflecting pool is a movie within a movie worthy W. D. Griffith.  Zita is exotic and divided.  She is both captivated by Ardath and repelled by him. 

She is saved in the end not by Hero but by a direct appeal to the ancient Egyptian gods whom Ardath offended in the first place: Marvellous irony in that.  Even when they have finally figured it out the Brits, mighty colonists that they are, cannot stop it.   

It was released on 22 December in time for Christmas 1932 in the Great Depression. Karl Freund concentrated on cinematography and shot Metropolis (1927), All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), Dracula (1931), The Good Earth (1937), Tortilla Flat (1942), Key Largo (1948) among many others.  He also developed techniques for filming television programs that remain current despite all the technical changes.  

At the time Universal was making Horror its genre of choice with Dracula (1931) and Frankenstein (1931), followed by Island of Lost Souls (1932), and Republicans in the Senate, but these films —  apart from the last one — had literary antecedents, whereas The Mummy sprang whole from the screenplay by Nina Putnam.  If only she had residual rights to the hundreds of imitations that followed, including some recent egregious examples, she would have been a zillionaire. She was an accountant by day and some say she devised the IRS 1040 tax form when she worked at Treasury.  It is still in use, sad to say.

The Vampire’s Ghost (1945)

IMDb meta-data is 59 minutes of runtime, rated 6.0 by 301 cinematizens

Genre:  Horror

Verdict:  Some nice touches

A world weary Bar Owner (BO) in the heart of the Dark (because is little is known about it) Continent in Bakunda on the Unseen River, perhaps, in southern Chad speaks in riddles.  We know from the get-go he is…The Vampire.  What else could explain his clean clothes, perfect diction, and shy mien.

BO is urbane, European, hyperthyroid, patient, and oblivious of either money or sex.  ‘What is wrong this guy, indeed,’ chorused the fraternity brothers!   Meanwhile, locals — not the Europeans — are dying from bites in the throat.  Got it, so far?  

While the six Hollywood Europeans we see, including the studio-contracted woman who has the screaming and fainting duties of the era, stand around, the natives are sure a demon is loose.  They use their iDrums to communicate.  The Europeans are sure it is an animal and set out to trap it.  Fewer return none the wiser.

Meanwhile, we see that the BO can bug his eyes out something incredible, even more than the fraternity brothers do when a professor assigns r-e-a-d-i-n-g!  (‘As if!’)  When bug-eyed, BO is dangerous.  

It takes Hero a while to figure it out and then he falls sway to the bug-eyes himself.  His will is so weak he might have been acting the part written for the screamer. That is nice since it is usually the woman who succumbs, though to be unfair she, too, does later but Hero was first to go all silly putty.   

There is a neat shot when we, along with the native servant, see the tea cup in the mirror but not BO’s hand holding it. Though surprised Native does not go all stereotype but instead begins to realise well before the Europeans what has to be done, namely calling Buffy!  This is another nice touch endowing the black servant with wit, self-control, and insight.  Credit the writer for this touch.

Another very noir scene has BO’s shadow following a minor ruffian and encompassing him as he — BO — has a bite to drink. This is the first European to get it. Had this scene been in an A-film, it would be studied in film schools for the superb staging.  Credit the director for this touch. 

BO plays his role as the life-weary (ghost) vampire straight with no melodrama, if anything it is under-acted, and the more effective for it.  Credit the actor for this touch.

The natives are shown to be well ahead of the Europeans in sussing the deal and acting against it, however Africa is presented as a sensational mash-up of witchcraft, voodoo, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Bunkimism, rather like an ABC news report. 

The screenplay was a rarity of 1940s Hollywood: written by a woman, Leigh Brackett, who also wrote the Big Sleep (1946), Rio Bravo (1959), Hatari! (1962), and Stars Wars (1980), and many episodes of The Rockford Files.  She also published a host of Sy Fy short stories, and was married to Captain Future himself, Edmond Hamilton.

The gaunt and ever morose John Abbott played the Ghostly Vampire BO with measured ennui. He did many television program and will be recognised by viewers without knowing his name.  He was delightful as the embezzling Shakespeare quoting Studio Head in The Falcon in Hollywood (1944).  Despite a mien of MittelEuropa he was born Albert Chamberlain Kefford in Kensington, London England and worked in the British Embassy in Moscow during World War II before landing in Hollywood. Regrettably his service in Moscow haunted him later when the real Monster of Hollywood HUAC went looking for cheap headlines and he was blacklisted for a time.

This film was released on 21 May 1945 in the middle of the Typhoon of Steel on Okinawa which saw 75,000 American casualties on this tiny island.  The Japanese losses were equal if not even greater. That action was taken to indicate what an invasion of Japan would be like.  Beyond hyperbole.  

The Pharaoh’s Curse (1957) 

IMDB meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 6 minutes, rated 4.7/10 by 511 cinematizens.

Genre: Boring

Verdict:  Ibid.

The audience is restless and Captain Storm with no first name tries to tame it riding off into the Mojave desert with Miss Canfield.  Ziva appears and disappears into and out of nowhere which leads Storm to close questioning, but not as close as the fraternity brothers had hoped. 

Out there in the Burbank backlot they find …. sand, a lot of it. While all the accoutrements are allegedly British (see below for more on the accoutrementa) all of the principals are Yankee Doodle but at least they do not affect pretend-accents.  Storm is impossibly handsome but remains stiffly correct at all times with Miss Canfield.  

They find the diggers desecrating tombs and stealing, ah, exporting, ancient Egyptian artefacts, even a tomb with many dire threats in the cartouches that adorn it does not stop them.  The Europeans dismiss such superstition, but not the mandatory Egyptian present who goes all pale and wobbly like a Republican Senator getting orders from President Putin.   

By the osmosis of screenwriting the spirit of the long dead Pharaoh passes into the body of this Gypo who goes all mummy right down to the linen wraps and proceeds to drink blood, first from the horses then the Red Coats: Red Coats = red blood.  See, just like the aforementioned Senator: A bloodsucker. The stalwarts chase him around the one-set corridor as their number dwindles, along with any interest of viewers, to … the End.

After all the chasing Mummy is revealed to be wearing striped pyjamas!  No wonder he did was angry. Will no one respect the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on the hotel burial chamber door?  The desecraters get their deserts, slurp, and then the swaddled Gypo retires, or something.

The medic says ‘eviscerated’ when he means ‘ex-sanguinated.’  The Brit uniforms in this 1902 setting are American WWII Army surplus. They venture into the trackless desert of Bronson Canyon on horses, not camels.  And so on and on.  There are able supporting actors in the cast like Ben Wright and Guy Prescott who have nothing to do.  It is a throwback in story and staging to 1940s curse of the Mummy films done so badly it is wonder it had a theatrical release in February 1957 in the same month that a mesmerising Seventh Seal opened.  How’s that for a comparison:  4.7 for this and 8.2 for the latter.  Even so, 4.7 seems way too high for something that cannot be watched, though reading the User Reviews on IMDb confirms my faith in the idiocracy.   

Murder by the Clock (1931) 

IMDB meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 16 minutes, rated 6.3 by 229 cinematizens.

Genre: Old Dark House wanna be.

Verdict:  Femme très fatale.

Holding court in an Old Dark House, elderly Russian mother Putin confronts her two adult sons, both Republican Senators, one a retard and the other a spineless alcoholic.  Decisively she decides then and there to leave her considerable fortune, acquired how is unknown, to the spineless alcoholic who has a very blonde wife in slinky silk and cosy furs.  Elderly Mother is hale and hearty and it may be many years before she croaks.  (Not now, sniggered the fraternity brothers.)

Fearing pre-mature internment in the gigantic family mausoleum across the street Elderly Mother has a baleful horn installed there for her to trigger if she wakes up dead.  Well, anyway.  

She signs the will in front of the assembled leeches and so signs her own death warrant. Blonde wife with the subtlety of a sledgehammer reminds sodden husband-son that Elderly Mother may live on for years before they see a thin dime so that she can buy new shoes and a sofa. The prospect of years and years and years of Blonde nagging is more than he can bear. 

He comes home the next day to tell her that he has murdered his mother.  Another day at the office.  Blonde feigns shock and surprise but speeds to her paramour to encourage him, without quite saying it, that now is the time for him to murder the husband, which he does.  Then she turns to the retard and encourages him to murder the paramour without quite saying it in express words.  She will do anything to get those $5,000 Christian Louboutin stiletto shoes encrusted with blood diamonds!  Move over Imelda!  And that sofa of human skin.  

Paramour is new to murder and does not quite finish the job on husband so Blonde takes over (and makes a rookie mistake herself).  

While all these bodies are piling up Plod is nosing around, and Blonde tries her wiles on him, but he is a eunuch and his first friend does not respond.  Her full frontal advances convince him she is up to no good, after all he has looked in the mirror and he knows that he is not in her looks league.  Thereafter follows a cat-and-mouse game between Blonde and Plod. Bernie Olds figures as a beat cop before he got promoted to plain clothes in the Maltese Falcon (1941) and dropped the phoney Irish accent.  Plod never does find the one secret passage in this wanna be Old Dark House, and has to be lead to it by someone or other.  

The mausoleum horn figures in the denouement, after which Blonde goes off in cuffs to suborn the judge and jury into a not guilty finding, so she can find someone to murder Plod.  Say what you like about her, she doesn’t quit.  

Lilyan Tashman as Blonde is ruthless, unscrupulous, and selfish enough to be Republican Senate Leader.  Plod is hopeless enough to be Barnie.  

In 1931 talkies were still developing and it shows here.  Each actor stands still and articulates the lines slowly and clearly.  Movement and dialogue are kept separate.  

The Strange Case of Doctor Rx (1942)

IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 6 minutes, rated 5.4 by 287 cinematizens. 

Genre: Mystery

Verdict:  5.4!  Inflation!  

Smooth PI takes an assignment.  An avuncular defence attorney who is successful in getting guilty villains off hires him.  Why?  No sooner are his guilty felon clients found not guilty by a jury of evangelicals, then they are murdered by strangulation.  Fearing that this mortality rate will harm his future business with villains he offers Smooth a wad to find the culprit.   

Smooth has no hesitation in taking the lucre from this representative of murderous villains.  However his new Wife objects, not on moral grounds, but because it will keep Smooth out at nights.  This is national news in the rags.  [Sure.] Indeed, Smooth’s every move is news and splashed over the Murdoch newspapers from the Props department.  Is he Princess Di in disguise?  

Plod is not motivated to investigate these killings.  But then one Plod is Shemp Howard busy looking for the other two stooges.  (Interest waning…)

Wife interferes with Smooth’s investigation.  Being independently wealthy Smooth lives in a palace with Mantan Moreland as a valet, whose acting talent exceeds that of Smooth, despite the despicable stereotype.  Lionel Atwill is utterly wasted as a red herring.  Wife shows some spark, dimmed by the tiresome constraints of the day that consign her fainting and screaming.

Smooth and Wife amuse themselves by phoning in false alarms to Plod.  [Sure.]  

Then a Republican in a wrap-around hoodie kidnaps Valet and Smooth and prepares to….[shudder] transfer Smooth’s brain — if it can be found — into Ray Corrigan wearing a gorilla suit.  ‘Poor Ray,’ cried the fraternity brothers!  Valet looks on, sweating, pale, and bug-eyed.  Smooth seemed bored by the whole mad scientist shtick.  What’s going on within the hoodie is unknown to the scriptwriter and stays that way.  Then by the miracle of a screen dissolve, Smooth is lounging in a hospital.  Valet has his eyes popped back in.  Wife screams and faints on cue. 

When asked how he got away from Dr GOP, Smooth says, with refreshing and irritating, honesty that he does not know (because it was not in the script).  Later when asked how the poison simulated strangulation he gives the same answer.  (Some coroner.)  

According to Rule One of the B-picture Krimi Writer’s Manual, the least likely suspect did it.  Yes, it was the avuncular lawyer and masked surgeon who got the villains off, then murdered them, and was preparing to swap Smooth for Ray, as above.  No more ‘Mr Nice Guy’ for him!  

Why Uncle did it is because…[gobbledygook].  Why he left a note initialed Rx with every corpse is never explained.  Like much else: Like why I watched it to the end.  Incredulity, perhaps, that it was so incomplete, haphazard, and uninteresting.  Could that level of incompetence be sustained for the entire running time, I asked?  Yes, I answered.  Bear that in mind when considering the White House.  

When Smooth is asked how he sussed it out, he says….. [see above].  

It was released on 17 April 1942.  The next day newsreels described Lt Colonel James Doolittle’s one-way mission to bomb Tokyo.  Doolittle had an MIT PhD in engineering and applied that to avionics. By some miracle 71 of the 80 volunteer flight crewmen survived.  The raid had no tactical effect on Japan doing little damage, but it did have a strategic effect that is sometimes neglected.  A few bombs fell within a kilometre of the Emperor’s palace, causing the Imperial Navy to pull back more than a thousand nautical miles from the Eastern and Southern Pacific the more intensely to patrol nearer Japan to forestall another such attack. That retreat allowed the American build up of shipping in the mid-Pacific, e.g., Noumea, and eased shipping to and from Australia and supported ANZAC combat in the Solomons and New Guinea.  

In addition, and in the main the raid raised US morale in the steady diet of bad news for months – Pearl, Manila, Bataan, Corregidor, Guam, Attu, Wake…  Morale and the demonstration the Japan could be hit, these were the two purposes of the raid and it succeeded on those scores.  Taking off in an armed B-25 from the deck of the USS Hornet has to be seen (on You Tube) to be believed.  The deck was less than half the prescribed length of the runway for these aircraft when loaded with bombs. They certainly could not land on the flight deck and so had to fly over Tokyo for a few minutes and ditch at map co-ordinates in China.  

Japanese reprisals against Chinese civilians as they searched for the down pilots led to tens of thousands of rapes and murders.  While such a search had been anticipated, the scale and savagery of it surpassed any expectation. Japanese history, I am told, is silent on such reprisals but long on the damage done by Doolittle’s Raid.  

Phantom of Chinatown (1940)

IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 2 minutes of runtime, rated 6.2 by 449 cinematizens.

Genre:  Mystery

Verdict:  Odd Coupling

At Southern University up north learned professor John or Cyrus Benton (the props department could not make up its mind about his first name) back from a harrowing expedition to the Gobi Desert in the interior of Mongolia gives a lecture — the fraternity bothers fell asleep instantly at this point — on his discoveries, which include…[gasp] a map to the Ming emperor’s legendary temple of Eternal Shopping Mall.  With the lights dimmed for PowerPoint he talks while the film of the expedition runs behind him.  

Dimmed lights, steady drone, cool night air, no wonder the fraternity boys dropped off. 

As Prof’s lugubrious presentation nears the punch line…he keels over and a mêlée ensues as everyone tries to take a selfie with the corpse, because corpse he is.  Plod arrives and declares it a natural death due to PowerPoint overexposure, but Mr James Lee Wong soon undermines that conclusion.    

Casting notes:  Grant Withers plays Plod as only he can: a perfect fit.  This Plod is loud, impatient, stupid, patronising, inept, ranting, incoherent, slow-witted, pompous, inconsistent. and a fool.  In short, he is presidential material.  Withers played this stereotype repeatedly, and he must have brought his own felt hat because he always has it on.  

Boris Karloff played Mr James Lee Wong in five previous film with quiet dignity, a respectful authority, and a certain dry wit.  Karloff’s contract ended and with a contempt for the viewing public now equaled everyday by the News Corporation, the studio cast the diminutive Keye Luke as Wong.  Not even as the nephew of Wong but Wong himself.  Still it is the first, and for years the last time, a Chinese actor was cast to play a Chinese lead.  Progress of a sort.  But in this rendition Number One Son does not have the gravity or grace of Karloff.  He does, nonetheless, hold his own against the village idiot Plod, but that is not a high bar.  

The ethereal Lotus Long is cast as Benton’s loyal assistant Win Len, and endures some of Plod’s groping efforts at humour.  For that alone she deserves a round of applause.  He is clumsy, vulgar, and oafish as he dismisses Chinese as savages, and she is glacial and reserved as he tweets out garbled non-sequiturs.  Now who does he remind me of….  

There is another point when Plod is yucking it up about taking anything Chinese seriously apart from Chop Suey when one of the villains no less points out to him that Genghis Khan ruled the world long before Europeans were using soap. [Was this a personal hygiene hint?] It is all way beyond the fourth grade level Plod attained by cheating.  Presidential indeed. 

Going for gold, Plod makes a meal of the absurdity of burying any Chink in a tomb and then digging it up.  Mr Wong replies that a Chinese expedition is scheduled to dig up George Washington soon.  That comparison passes way over Plod’s head.  

These are pretty pointed remarks though they are passed off as throw-away lines. Let’s credit George Waggner who wrote the screenplay and director Phil Rosen for retaining and staging these lines.   

As between Plod and Wong, the race goes to Wong, but he lets Plod think he figured it out.  It may have been a step forward to cast a Chinese to play a Chinese lead, but Luke is not convincing, scowl though he might.  

Lotus Long was half-Japanese but from the latter 1930s she pretended to be Chinese to avoid the opprobrium increasingly directed at Japan. Thus, when most Japanese-Americans on the West Coast were interned, she was not.  Though in 1946 she played Tokyo Rose in a film of that name. She married a cameraman because he made her look so good, she said, and they stayed married for fifty-six years until his death.  She played Eskimos, red Indians, Chinese, Japanese, Hawaiians, and other stereotypes in a mere twenty credits.  She quit the business in the 1940s and devoted herself to philanthropy.  Cinematizens loss.  

Grant Withers played this painful fool so routinely the fraternity brothers have come to think that it is the real man.  Maybe he watched too many of his own 202 films. They certainly sap my will to watch.   

Rogues’ Gallery (1944) 

IMDb meta-data is 1 hour, rated 5.2 by 112 cinematizens.

Genre:  Mystery.

Verdict:  Fluff.

Emeritus Professor invents a Big Ear that can eavesdrop on a conversation anywhere in the world once he has the co-ordinates.  No wires, no transmitter, no credibility are required.  All EP needs is the shortwave signature of the spot, and every spot has a unique shortwave signature.  Is that what Google Maps is doing?  Uh huh.  Maybe the President in Thief can explain this.  

This is Big News! Hat and Snap are dispatched by the Daily Rag to get the scoopola.  Sure.  Hat is a no nonsense dame that stomps as she walks and Snap carries a really big iCamera.  Turns out Prof’s KPIs do not require him to talk to idiots so they get nothing.  For a scandal hound ‘No!’ is just the beginning and they barge around, first at the foundation headquarters and then the laboratory.  Sure.  

They take possession of the Top Secret plans for the gizmo. How this possession happens has to be seen to be disbelieved. They use the plans to extort interviews. [Media ethics have changed so little.]  During one interview a board member is shot dead. The flour is in the oil now, thickening the plot.  Hat is well known to Plod and in between praising her perspicacity he derides her intelligence.  Consistency takes a holiday. 

Snap makes clever use of his flashbulb camera to foil a heist of the plans.  Hat gets some good lines, like this exchange.

Plod: ‘Just because a man is cold to the touch doesn’t mean he’s dead.

Hat: ‘When I touch a man and he stays cold, then he is dead.’

In contrast to the dialogue there is an attenuated scene about trying to whistle that, well, where is The Whistler when he is need.  The efforts to whistle go on too long and are repeated to no purpose but to get that the magic hour for theatrical release.  Don’t blame the players, they did as directed, and the director can blame the screenplay, if there was one.  The buck stops there.   

Regrettably there are few Rouges and no Gallery.  The singular villain — Smiley — was there all along, bumping into Hat and Snap wherever they went.  It took these two Mensas an hour to connect the dots to the ever present Smiley who for reasons unknown to the scriptwriter persisted in hiding the stiff.  

It was released on 6 December 1944 when the US was fighting a two-front war with nearly a million men under arms.  B-29s began bombing Iwo Jima for the blood bath that would take place there in a month.  Meanwhile an all-out Japanese offensive had begun on Leyte to expel the invading Americans, and in Europe the Nazis were preparing for the offensive that in ten days would be called The Battle of the Bulge. The Pentagon dispatched the dreaded yellow and black telegrams everyday with many more to come.  In this context some inane light relief was certainly in order.