Category: Film Review

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.  

My Alien Girlfriend (2019).

IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 12 minutes of treacle time, rated 5.2 by 142 members of the cast and crew.

Genre: SyFy and Boredom.

Verdict:  5.2!  Reverse that to 2.5.  

Every porker’s wet dream comes to the screen when Porky finds beautiful alien woman in his home, but he fails to make the best of the situation. She comes to her senses and leaves.  No less than three women way out of Porky’s league are after his ample dimensions.  Psst, he must signing the pay chicks. (The fraternity brothers insisted on that one.)

Bleaders know that my dedication to the Sy Fy cinemology is so great that I watch unwatchable films to the end, albeit with one eye and one ear. Evidence of this claim is that I watched Phobe: The Xenophobic Experiments (1995) to the bitter end.  Few, indeed, can or would admit that. See the comments on that celluloid elsewhere on this blog.  I persist sometimes to see if that level of stupidity can be maintained, and it usually is. But this time I met my match.  I could not go on so I FF-ed to the end, and even that was boring.  

I seldom watch contemporary Sy Fy because it substitutes cheap CGI for plot, story, character, interest, awe, wonder, and substituting an omniscient conspiracy for a plot.  Two cases in point are Picard (2020+) and The Orville (2017).  Trying to watch the above title served to confirm that conviction, though it lacked even CGIs.  

Not even Don Dohler has even reach quite this low.  Wait, no, I think the award for worst remains with Don Dohler.  One watches the Don’s works all the way to the end to see if the enthusiastic incompetence can be sustained the whole time, and he never lets one down on that score.  If you don’t know Don’s oeuvre, keep it that way. His films make those of Larry Buchanan look good, well, maybe not good, but not as bad.

Back to the film under review, I breached my rule when the Mechanical Turk suggested it, because I noticed it was produced by New Zealand Son Films, and, being literal minded, I thought it had something to do with Kiwiland from whence has come some very diverting and amusing cinema. Wrong.  A very big wrong.  This movie has nothing to do with New Zealand and New Zealand can be glad of that. (For those who do not know what a ‘Mechanical Turk’ is: tough.)

The production company has fourteen titles listed on IMDb. The thumbnail tags indicate a similar motif in several of them: Porky is confronted by a beautiful woman, more often than not naked.  He must sign lot of chicks, checks, and cheques.  Needless to say the fraternity brothers have ordered the entire set.  

The Amazing Mr Williams (1939)

IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 20 minutes, rated 6.6 by 344 cinematizens.

Genre: Mystery

Verdict: Go girl!

The titular Williams is the only plod who can open a door, notice the murder weapon, pick up the sticks, tie his shoes, and toss a coin.  Accordingly, he is invaluable and he amazes his colleagues in blue with his perspicacity.  Success has welded and wedded him to the job so deeply that even his fiancée, that firecracker Joan Blondell, takes a number and waits for him.  She and Melvyn Douglas are a dynamic duo in search of script.  

Murders, robberies, assaults that have baffled the plod department for years, these Williams resolves in five minutes between the battle of the sexes with Blondell, where he has no chance.  She carries the picture.

Douglas and Blondell were paired in four films, and it is easy to see why.  They have a rapport that shows in the timing, the sight-gags, and even the positioning.  But in this case the producer seemed to think that was enough, provided they were surrounded by the contract character actors.  Absentees include a script and a director.  It seems much longer than feature length and feature length is too long for the story.  

The writer thought it was funny to dress Williams in drag and use him as bait to trap a villain.  The rumour mill has it that Douglas did not like this turn, and refused to shave off his moustache, leaving the director to put a veil on him.  All of this commotion for a lame idea to begin with. 

Blondell has 162 credits on the IMDb, starting in 1930 and ending in 1981.  Her parents were in vaudeville and she took to the stage at age three, and never left it. Alongside the film career she also trod the boards — hitting Broadway at seventeen —  throughout her career.  The peak was the the 1930s and 1940s when there were roles for smart women who weren’t afraid to say so, and she did.  She usually played the best friend of the Major Studio Talent and stole one show after another from the MST.  She did ten movies a year at times, essentially playing herself in screwball comedies.  Then came a dramatic role in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945) and she once again dominated the camera.  Then the unforgettable Blue Veil (1951).  She could not steal any scenes in Desk Set (1957) but she still sparkled with Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracey.  

Among my favourites, as well as those mentioned above, are Office Wife (1930), I Want a Divorce (1940), Model Wife (1941), Cry ‘Havoc’ (1943), The Corpse Came C.O.D. (1947), and Nightmare Alley (1947). With Douglas, in addition to this title, she did There’s Always a Woman (1938), There’s That Woman Again (1938), and Good Girls Go To Paris (1939).

She went into television in the 1950s and pretty much stayed there. The work, she said, was easier and the money steady.

Espionage (1937)

IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 7 minutes, rated 6.4 by 69 cinematizens.

Genre:  Mystery

Verdict: Snappy

The ingredients are a closed passenger train from Paris to Istanbul with two incognito journalists after the same vanilla scoop.  

The journalists conceal their identities and purpose from each other and from the subject of their inquiries played by Paul Lukas.  I never did grasp what the newshound were after from Paul, and neither did they I suppose.  

Since there seemed to be no point, instead we have an incompetent assassin in Sascha bested by a bumptious bodyguard.  Musical interludes lighten the tone, as the journalists collide.   There are disguises, mistaken identities, a cake, a tandem bicycle, yodelling, and more.  

An agreeable distraction from the news of the day.  

Mr Dynamite (1941).

IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 3 minutes, rated 6.5 by 39 cinematizens.  

Genre:  Mystery.

Verdict:  Too many change-ups.

Mr D is the ace of the pitching staff of the World Series team in town to see how the Bums will beat themselves this time.  He walks the streets of New York City alone and enters Baghdad Way (aka Coney Island) , a fictional and exotic part of the Big Worm where all nations mix and the streets are lined with sideshows because there is no main event. 

Two young baseball fans recognise Mr D, and he obliges at a throwing booth where he meets Her.  She is hiding there in plain sight from evil saboteurs led by a kindly, crippled spinster later called Achilles.  (I kid you not.)  

Pointless back and forth occurs as the clock slows to Dali time.  The whole is less than the sum of parts.  Lloyd bubbles with energy as Mr D.  Irene Hervey as Her gives a good performance of someone frightened, confused, and determined.  J. Carrol Naish is on the money as the Professor (Emeritus) who is crazy like a fox.  And Ann Gillis as Joey (Josephine) the baseball nut steals the show.  She made her first film when she was seven and her last was Space Odyssey: 2001 (1968).  

Despite the players, the whole thing dragged and dragged. There was a nice twist toward the end with Achilles but even that was undercooked.  

There is no baseball in it, though it ends with a charming scene as Mr Dynamite pitches a game for Joey.  I started to say it ‘regrettably’ that there was no baseball in it, but when I think of the hash made of baseball in other movies, perhaps that was for the best.  Though how the ace of the staff visiting from distant St Louis for the World Series could wander the streets alone, smoking, was a mystery to me.  No friends, no roommate, no manager, no curfew, no nothing to interfere with his gallivanting around day and night.  

Rome Express (1932)

IMDb meta-data is run time of 1 hour and 34 minutes, rated 6.6 by 379 cinematizens.

Genre:  Mystery.

Verdict:  Snappy.

The usual suspects gather for the Otranto train at the Gare de Lyon, the British aristocratic wife making off with an oily paramour, a twitchy Pomme who never lets go of a battered briefcase, the American glamour puss with her brassy manager, a moustachioed French police officer, an arrogant British business stereotype who bullies his grovelling assistant, a languid Major Strasser with a reluctant offsider, a Scots golfer who won’t shut up, a woman of a certain age with a dachshund, and assorted boors and bores.  No boars were sighted. 

We see much hustle and bustle at Le Gare as luggage is loaded, provisions for the restaurant car are manhandled into place, cabins are primped, engine valves are checked, moving parts oiled, dining car tables set, and as one baggage cart rolls along an attendant pastes on destination labels for Rome, including one carefully applied to the tag on dachshund who is riding along on top.  There are many such touches from director Walter Forde.  

As passengers gather reading material, all of them having forgotten their iBooks, over the shoulder of one we read in a newspaper that a Van Dyke painting has been stolen.  Several passengers, it emerges, have an interest in Dick’s painting.  The police officer is insulted that such a priceless work should have been stolen in Paree!  The business stereotype had been thwarted in the attempt to buy it and has schadenfreude in seeing that it has been stolen from the successful purchaser.  Twitcher who thought he was being so cool and nonchalant has to be the thief. No one but a thief could try so hard to appear indifferent.  

Then there is Major Strasser who followed Twitcher with the knowledge that he is the thief, and Strasser proposes to relieve the Twitter’s guilty conscience by stealing the painting from him.  His offsider is game for that but it emerges that Strasser also plans to use Twitcher as a literal cut-out.  [Figure it out.]  The offsider is not happy at that prospect, less so when he bumps into Glamour Puss in the corridor and they remember old times before the movie began.        

There is a marvellous scene when Twitcher is lured into a card game to pass the time, and meets Strasser — again, recognising each other, without a word, for what they each are: the Twitcher a clever thief, and Strasser a satanic villain.  Strasser’s malevolence behind the charming smile is tour de force acting.

The briefcase is mislaid that brings the business stereotype into the action along with his groveller.  Offsider decides to split.  Strasser kills Twitcher.  The police officer investigates and Strasser charms his way into the suspension of belief in another remarkable gambit.  

When finally cornered he either tries to escape by jumping off the train or committing suicide I could not tell what the screenwriter’s intention was.  Maybe the director just yelled ‘Cut!’

Throughout the momentum of the hurdling train is cross-cut into the action to give a sense of urgency.  It passes through Swiss border control and enters Italy where the carabinieri board the train to assist the French police officer to comb his moustache. 

This is one of the first mystery train films, and many more have since followed in its tracks.  It was re-made in France in 1950.

Conrad Veidt played the villain, Strasser, perfectly.  Connie been in the German Imperial Army on the Eastern Front in World War I, and as he recovered from wounds he hung around the theatre where his wife worked, and in time became himself an actor on the stage and then in silent films.  When race registration begin after 1932, his wife was Jewish, and so he claimed that he was, too, to support her, though he was not.  In his words, ‘to do otherwise was to renounce her,’ and this he would not do.  

This stand ended his film career in Germany within a matter of minutes and the pair of them started to learn English and fled to London.  Along with a number of British and expatriate actors later he moved on to Hollywood to promote films that might help persuade neutral America into the war on the English side.  He played evil Nazis more than a dozen times. This was an easy step since in his silent movie career he had played the Devil in None of the Woman Born [1918] and Kurfürstendamm [1920], Lucifer in Satan [1920]), and Death in Unheimliche Geschichten [1919].  He died in 1943. He would have been a perfect foil for Max in the Seventh Seal.  

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.