Category: Film Review

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. 

Race to Mars (2007+)

IMDb meta-data is four episodes of 46 minutes each, rated 6..8 by 287 cinematizens.

Genre: Sy Fy fact

Verdict:  Only for Mars junkies.  

An international team (code for American, though all the actors are Canadian only one wears that flag patch in this Montréal production) embarks on a two year mission to Mars in 2030.  The trip is long, the arrival short.  Along the way the main obstacles are boredom and the shortcuts taken by the McKinsey-managed low-bid contractor.  Yes, it is all very realistic.  Produced by Discovery Canada, great pains were taken to get the science right.  It is shot in HD and looks great.  

Computer faults arise en route and have to be worked around, not once but twice.  ‘That should work’ fixes don’t (fix it) and more fundamental efforts are needed.  That is an IOS update while in flight.  I did warn them against Catalina, but as usual shouting at the screen has no effect.  

When the crew members were selected for compatibility they must have had some surgery because there is not a spark of sexual tension in the nine month close quarters voyage among the four men and two women.  Definitely rated G on that dimension.  There are a few expletives by way of compensation.  

The master narrative in the title is that the Chinese have sent a robot ship to Mars to drill for water (as the source of life).  Though launched shortly after the International Mission, the Chinese craft will get to Mars first.  Why?  Because it is robotic and without a human crew it can travel faster.  It does not need to provide artificial gravity.  It does not need to liftoff slowly so as not to crush the crew   It does not need a long and slow deceleration to allow the crew to adjust. It does not need to dock and change crafts for ascent and descent. The one bus will make all stops.  But will it get to water first, that remains to be seen. 

Much time and effort is expended in landing, assembling equipment, withstanding the first dust storm, and setting up the drill.  They do not do any exploring and there is never any discussion of that. No one wants to look around. Instead we have occasional views of travelling matte expanses.  (This was not filmed in either Jordan or Morocco and it shows. These countries are favourites for big-budget Mars scenery.) They were sent to drill, and drill they do.

One of the Red Shirts breaks his arm in arraying equipment, and that increases everyone else’s workload.  This is an industrial accident, not a Martian curse, and at this point the fraternity brothers passed out.  Later another low-bid contractor puts in an appearance when the drill breaks.  

Meanwhile the Chinese robot ship (very much like the cute little June bug spacecraft in Mission Stardust [1968], see comments on this film elsewhere on this blog) has struck….salt water.  There is so much salt that no life could exist in it.  Think Dead Sea and there it is.  Think of the Great Salt Lake.  No, wait, don’t.  Anyway the smarty-pants Chinese have come up with nada.  

Then off-camera, with the consent of ground control, suitably lagged for communication, our heroes get permission to cannibalise the Chinese rig for its drill, and they spend the best part of one forty-minute episode fitting it to their equipment, measured in inches, while the Chinese used abaci.  (Joke.)  

Not soon enough they hit water because their drill site is far away from the area the Chinese used and they have a geyser.  In fact, it is too much and it blows the rig apart and shrapnel kills the Red Shirt.  Much guilt follows, but no Christian ritual. 

Now they have water and it seems anti-climatic since the samples are sealed and will only be analysed later on the ground after this series has long ended.  Oh.  It is all race and no finish.  

Though there is much docking and rendezvousing which is passed in silence, and they start back when more computer failures threaten everything and no sooner is that fixed, then a damaged panel requires the Sy Fy mandatory EVA in which another member of the crew is injured.  Was their equipment built by Trabant?  Then they return to Earth orbit.  The End.  

No meteor showers, no flesh-eating plants, no exploding heads, no monsters of the deep, no creepy caves, no crappy special effects, just hard work and difficult decisions, industrial accidents, personal tensions, though the captain seems to wear his decisions lightly.  That seems far fetched in such small group.  The more so considering there is no military discipline in sight.  I would expect more blowback. The extra shifts, first to compensate for the injured crewman, then to adapt the Chinese drill, then to make the deadline for the departure window, exhausts everyone.  Tempers get shorter.  Personal hygiene is absent.  

I rather liked that low key approach, but the direction is leaden. The camera goes face-to-face for reaction shots every time a line is spoken.  One speaks and we get five reaction shots. It lingers while the actor remembers the next line, and then on to the next actors.  The result is that even the simplest scene is attenuated beyond its dramatic weight.  While the asinine comments in user reviews about it are just that, it is also true that the film invites this reaction with its lethargic pace.  It is one of slowest movies one is ever likely to see with the word ‘race’ in the title.  Every actor gets plenty of close-ups for the demo disc without advancing the story or deepening the character   

It was filmed in Montréal and I did not recognise any of the players but they all have extensive credits in Canadian television.  It won several Gemini Awards for being Canadian.  That the voice of ground control with an egregious Texas accent traces back to an Anglo actor from Montréal.  

It is so low key that only one external reviewer was linked to the IMDb page when I looked.  Moreover, or lessover there is not a single still photograph associated with the IMDb entry. This is the first time I have encountered that.

Murder in the Clouds (1934)

IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 1 minute, rated 6.0 by 186 cinematizens.

Genre:  Mystery

Verdict:  Go girl!

Clichés have to start somewhere.  Nebraska’s own Lyle Talbot before he descended to the ranks of character actors is Three Star, a hotshot flyboy who boasts, brags, and shows-off, reminds me of that midget.  We never do know if Three Star’s flying days began in the Great War, nor why he is called Three Star, apart from the three stars tattooed (it seemed) on his narrow, pasty chest. Why not four star? No room.  Or just Star?  Still I rather like it that there is no tedious backstory.  

Before LAX ate Westchester a number of small airports served Los Angeles, and one, now long gone, was at Glendale.  This drama takes place in the wide open spaces there.  

Three Star, after character-establishing antics, is assigned a top secret mission, while unnamed enemy agents listen in, and then Three Star promptly goes to a bar and gets into a fist fight set up by the nefarious villains, which he loses, three to one.  The next morning when he is a no-show for the top secret mission, there just happens to be another pilot right there to volunteer for it.  Guess!  Yes, this one is another plant by the unnamed enemy.  

The co-pilot for this flight is the callow younger brother of Ann Dvorak, the airline’s only cabin crew.  On board is an egghead with his invention, which is something to make boom, as if we are ever short of that.  Whoops!  The plane blows up in mid-air.  Was it a Boeing Max? Well maybe, but skulduggery is afoot.

To keep it simple, the plant pilot (after eating Mexican beans) gassed the crew and passengers, took the secret device, and parachuted out after setting a time bomb.  Kablooie!  Four dead ducks. Some design fault. 

Three Star with a nary a word of regret or apology sets out to recover the device, once it is not found in the wreckage.  So far, so standard.  

Here’s where it gets more interesting.  Dvorak, seeking information about her now missing brother, the co-pilot, gets taken in by the villains, led by the redoubtable Russell Hicks, tall, distinguished, thoughtful, cultured, impressive, avuncular, and evil.  Hicks and company trick her into helping them abscond with the device.  So they think.  

In fact, she soon realises their murderous larceny by accident and in a great scene thinks through in silence what she has heard and seen, and arrives at the conclusion to out trick them, and she does with a little help from the McGyver Manual. Marvellous!  

She had overheard the news that her brother was dead, but stifled the stereotypical consequent female hysteria in the screenwriters paucity of imagination and turned the tables on the villains.  Go girl!  

Three Stars then flies around for ten minutes at a time.  Remembers those underwater sequences in Thunderball (1965) that go on and on without advancing plot or character.  Ditto here.  It no doubt had novelty value at the time of release, 15 December 1934, and it is nicely done, but too much is too much (except for Dolly Parton and Arnold Schwarzenegger). 

Ann Dvorak had a reputation in Hollywood for being difficult, according to the Harvey Weinsteins of the day.  She was not compliant with his sort, whatever that may be, and, in addition, she resiled at the fluff she was forced to play and complained about it a lot.  One suspects that her attitude influenced the portrayal of this disciplined, resourceful, and determined heroine.  No doubt her personality was the result of reading too much, because her IMDb biography terms her a bibliophile who collected first editions.  

When she realised she was being paid the same as the juvenile actors in one film, she bought herself out of the Warner contract. Gutsy, indeed, in that fraternity.  The material was bad enough, but to be paid peanuts for it was the last straw.  Later she married a Brit and moved to Old Blighty where she drove ambulances during World War II in the Blitz.  No bone spurs were detected.  

The Shadow (1933)

IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 3 minutes, rated 6.1 by 99 cinematizens.

Genre: Old Dark House (Honourary). 

Verdict: It seemed longer.

N. B.  This is not  T-H-E  Shadow of Mutual Radio though the time coincides with the eponymous Shadow.  Confusing? This is a very British production quite independent of that radio program. Got it?  Repeat after me:  this is a shadow but not T H E Shadow.  

The Set-Up:  A masked figure has been blackmailing wealthy personages (see, it is a British film and they are personages, not just people), driving several to suicide.  Wow! What did he have on them! I’d like to know.  Where did he get it?  Wikileaks? Pox News? Is there more there?  These are all excellent questions that are never addressed by the stiffening lips. Instead the forces of order gather to protect these child molesting aristos.  Nothing ever changes.

Clues and leads are few, but one Scotland Yard stalwart lays a cunning trap for this murderous Shadow.  It is so cunning that One forgets to load his gat and the Shadow makes short work of him.  Dick One is a dead dick in the first five minutes.  Maybe not so cunning after all.  

A Second Dick is assigned the case and sets about annoying dialogue with the Head of the Criminal Investigation Branch, Sir Forgotten Name.  In the midst of the most terrible crime wave of the century (since if concerns wealthy personages being blackmailed for the heinous crimes they had committed) Name sets out for his country estate for the weekend to play golf.  Hmmm.  What does that remind me of? 

Ah, at last, an Old Dark House, hoped the fraternity brothers.  

For reasons unknown to the scriptwriter the Shadow is there, too, and for reasons unknown to the scriptwriter Second Dick knows that the Shadow is there, and rushes — ever so slowly — to warn Sir Name, when….!  Second Dick is shot to death on the winding five-mile driveway of the country estate.  Maybe a poacher shot him by accident, but is that likely? Well, yes in Midsomer, but the end result is: Two dead dicks!  

Well, never mind, there are more dicks where those two came from and another middle aged, overweight, dolt is called to the country estate who confirms that Dick Two is dead.  Enter the  Third Dick.  

In the Old Dark House are gathered the usual suspects: a butler, a scrumptious daughter, her unsuitable suitor, a toff of no apparent value who blunders about looking for the other two stooges, a maiden aunt who still hopes for the best, along with a sneak thief who passes himself off as a gentleman with an Eton tie, his girlfriend, and someone else whom I have overlooked.  They do not add up to ten and soon subtraction begins.  

There is also a ringer who passes briefly through the halls before being killed. This latter is the butler’s son escaped from a conveniently located nearby looney bin. (See any version of Hound of the Baskervilles for the prototype of this plot device.)   Ringer makes the mistake of getting in the way of the Shadow and clonk he goes back to central casting.

The Third Dick with a body guard assistant muddies the waters.  Much this and much that follows on the Dali watch.  Frail swoons. Toff toffs.  Plod plods.  Name names.  Butler butlers.  Got it?  Care?  

Spoiler ahead!

Then Third Dick reveals all by means of reading the script off camera.  In standard operating procedure screenwriting the least likely did it.  No, wait, not the maiden aunt, but rather….[pause] the garrulous Toff.  He transform from tiresome bore to tiresome villain.  Now Richard Dix could have made this transformation worth watching but in this case one Henry Kendall could not and did not.  We were all just glad to see The End. 

There is one scene with some acting in it when Name comforts the Butler about the death of his psycho son, but that two minutes is not worth the rest.  It has nothing to do with the plot.  

There is also an oddity on the IMDb entry, where there are 184 photographs linked to this title.  That is an extraordinary number for any film, let along one of this era, and from Great Britain.  The Shadow Laughs (1933) has two photographs and that is a typical number, and this is the real Shadow, too!