Category: Film Review

IMDb meta-data is runtime of 57 minutes, rated 6.1 by 255 cinematizens
Genre: Who dunnit?

Verdict: Whoosh!
Smug PI with feet on desk, telephones to a newspaper a want-ad describing the secretary he wants to hire as she walks in the door and hangs up the telephone. He is flabbergasted.
This Dream Girl takes over.
After the opening credits we saw a veiled woman in black looking up this very same PI under the esses for Smug in the telephone book as she carefully stepped around the dead man on the floor of a man cave. Oh, oh. Now that telephone books are no more, what does Tom Cruise sit on now? So asked the fraternity brothers.
In a whirl Dream Girl books PI for a secret meeting with a veiled mystery woman all in black with a Hollywood accent. Could this be a set-up? Could it be anything else?
The Woman in Black takes him to the man cave. Turns out the victim was Rush Limbaugh, a hatred radio shock jock and part-time blackmailer. She asks PI to dispose of the body in return for favours many….. The fraternity brothers perked up at the thought.
PI may be a sleaze but he demurs and she clonks him with a handy clonker. All of this is observed by the nosy gardener peering in the window. Fred Mertz, ever reliable, appears and arrests PI for being dumb. It is an open-and-shut case. Thereafter it gets complicated.
It seems Dream Girl set-up PI so that he would be arrested. She would then be a witness and spring him. Somehow this would shield her sister, whom Dream Girl thought had dusted the stiff. Seems though Sis had not done the deed. It was all wasted effort.
Fortunately the blackmailer kept carbon copies of all his illegal demands. Whoa! What is carbon copies asks the fraternity brothers. Plural, singular it is all one to them.
By now the focus shifts to finding the killer who miraculously appears and when implicated pulls a gat to provide the evidence. The denouement is done as a live radio broadcast re-enactment. Nice gimmick that, and free advertising for PI.
Now that the murder is cleared up, Fred arrests PI and Dream Girl for obstruction of justice. The end.
It is fast and furious. Loved the reference to the ‘wolf tie.’ No idea what the title means.

IMDb runtime of one hour and four minutes, rated 6.1 by 209 cinematizens
Genre: Old Dark House

Verdict: Shiver!
On a speeding train Spectacles is typing away on a barely portable typewriter. He has pages and pages of a manuscript. Just as the train slows for his two-minute stop at Asquewan Junction the lights go out in his first class compartment and….. the manuscript disappears. He shrugs off the loss of hours of work and disembarks. (!)

‘He shoulda saved to the Cloud,’ chorused the fraternity brothers.
Unlike Spectacles, viewers saw a dainty female hand turn off the light switch before the manuscript went poof.

At the Asquewan Junction depot a blizzard rages. As Spectacles prepares to walk ten miles to the Baldpate Inn, Blondie appears and warns him not to go because ‘It’s dangerous.’ She then takes refuge in the ladies’ room.
To abridge, Spectacles is a well published writer of ‘mysteries of the intellectual sort’ who had complained of distractions throwing him off schedule. Encouraged by Ellery Queen, he bets his publisher $5,000 he can finish a novel in a single night of uninterrupted work. The publisher called this bluff by offering him the only key to the empty Baldpate Inn. The inference is that the publisher wants the book finished, but he does not want to lose the $5000 bet, so he sent along Blondie to gum up the works.

Far from being vacant Spectacles finds a sinister European-accent in residence at Baldpate Inn claiming to be the caretaker. To make matters ever more menacing, European-accent wears an ascot! This is serious.
Blonde fetches up at the Inn, too, in need of shelter from the blizzard, she says, but she soon blows her cover and Spectacles starts to work when he realises the trick. Nothing will stop him from the work!

As more and more stereotypes show up, the tough moll, the hoodlum, the fence, the whiner, and the brain it seems there are a lot of keys to the Baldpate Inn out there. But Spectacles thinks all of these people have been hired to disrupt him. With that ego he should go into politics.

With about eight people in the empty Inn the villainous stereotypes start murdering each other. It seems there is a stash of jewels and a huge payoff going. They met there on the assumption the place would be empty. Now there is no room at the Inn.

There are satisfying numbers of creaks and moans in the Old Dark House, sliding panels, hidden doors, and the other accoutrements of mystery homemaking. As Spectacles begins to realise there is more at stake than his ego, he confronts situations such as he has written in his books, only to find that the responses he imagined on paper don’t cut it in reality. That is a nice running gag. I took it to be a jocular reference to his alter ego Ellery Queen.
Another running gag is his repeated attempts to start his next novel by typing a title page which starts as ‘One Key to Baldpate’ and by the end is ‘Seven Keys to Baldpate’ and counting.

Loose ends, there are a few, the missing manuscript pages from the train are never again mentioned! Gasp. While the name ‘Baldpate’ would seem to be a joke, nothing is made of it in the story.

This is a remake of a version done in 1937 which is also on You_Tube along with an earlier 1929 version. There were silent versions still earlier. Evidently a tried and true story for which the fees had been paid. I tried the 1937 version but found the audio out of sync and lost interest.

The original story was by Charles Chan’s creator Earl Derr Biggers.
Lew Landers directed in the house style of RKO, i.e., fast and furious. Landers has a 150 directing credits on the IMDb with six or more B movies a year. Philip Terry played Spectacles to a T. There is some goss on him in the discussion of ‘Double Exposure’ (1944) elsewhere on the blog. The assorted character actors were fine until they got bumped off. Harry Harvey as the local police chief is a delight as he applies common sense to the denouement.

IMDb meta-data is runtime of one hour and three minutes, rated 6.4 by 121 cinematizens
Genre: Mystery, comedy

Verdict: A mile a minute
The set-up: Boston Blackie poses as the editor of a photo-news magazine called ‘Flick,’ a hybrid of People and National Inquirer. The owner is a health fanatic who hands out carrots as incentives. What McKinsey seminar did he attend?
Circulation is not what is should be. Even though their sensational photographs are faked, they are not very good fakes. They need new blood. They scan newspapers for sensational photographs and land on one. The decisive carrot sends a telegram to the Iowa snapper, a Pat Kelly, with an offer too good to refuse. Who can say no to a carrot a day?
Pat leaps on the train, leaving her Iowa boyfriend, Spectacles, behind even though he has helped her fake her photographs, including the one that caught the eye of the Big Carrot .
With it so far? It is all fake.
She arrives at the New York offices. Consternation follows. She is a she. Blackie quickly recovers and begins to see opportunities here. Yep. Leachery follows. Pat may be country but she is no bumpkin. She fends him off with references to her big Iowa brother who is staying with her in the Big Berg. Blackie is five foot nothing and takes the hint.
The plot thickens when Spectacles does show up and Pat, with difficulty, convinces him to play the brother role she had already cast.
Pat gets to work and with brass, wit, and a disarming honesty gets some nifty pixes. The real thing. Blackie is impressed. He never thought of that. Real events. In the excitment Carrot changes to handing out turnips.
See, I said it was fast-moving.
Then, finally, a stiff shows up. It’s complicated. Pat staged a mystery shoot for a ‘Flick’ promotional piece, which was then copied in a real murder. The cops pounce.
Blackie sees more opportunities here. It had to be spelled out for the fraternity brothers. First, by leaving Pat in the slammer for a while they get material for an exposé of police incompetence, terrible conditions in jail, the poor hygiene of other prisoners, or the poor Wi Fi in New York City jails. Second, when he springs her then her gratitude will exceed the Hayes Code. Perfect. What can go wrong?
Well when Blackie and Carrot tell Plod about the promotional stunt figuring it will be Open Sesame, the cops play (as usual) dumb. Oh, oh. Pat is still it in The Big House.
Much desperate this and that follows and Blackie fakes another photograph to flush out the real killer. Whew!
Meanwhile Specactles has gone and got married to another woman so that all can live happily ever after, the end.
Nancy Kelly as Pat carries the show and Phillip Terry is marvellous as Spectacles. The ever reliable Richard Gaines as the Big Carrot is brisk and efficient. Charles Arnt is a charming rouge and Claire Rochelle runs ‘Flick’ so subtly none of the men realise it. Director William Berke keeps it moving full tilt. He worked in television in the 1950s after about eighty B-movies in the 1940s. He also produced and wrote.
Kelly was a baby model at age one, and as a child appeared opposite Gloria Swanson. She was the Bad Seed in the ‘Bad Seed’ (1956) and Walter Kerr said it was an astounding performance. She did it first on Broadway and then in film. Seeing the film made me glad I did not have a sister. Kelly also did much television
Terry was the lead in ‘Seven Keys to Baldplate’ (1947) discussed elsewhere on this blog. He was one of those B movie actors who went into television. Innuendo has it that it was as a toy boy for Joan Crawford that he started his film career. Even so his film career was blah and he turned to real estate with great financial success.
Richard Gaines flew to Mars in ‘Flight to Mars’ (1951) discussed elsewhere on this blog.
The film was released on 18 December 1944 while the Battle of the Bulge had just began in Western Europe with a series of German victories and advances. At the same time MacArthur’s return to the Phillipines was being fought out on Mindoro. The siege of Bastogne had begun as the film travelled to theatres across the country. More German victories followed. The newsreel on the bill with this film would have covered all of this. Yellow telegrams arrived from both the Pacific and European Wars. Diversion would have been most welcome.

IMDB meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 27 minutes, rated 6.2 by 197 cinematizens.
Genre: Mystery, Comedy

Verdict: ‘Sunset Boulevard’ Lite.
A streamer trunk arrives at the estate of a glamorous Hollywood peroxide star who swans around in a diaphanous wardrobe. The delivery man demands payment, Cash On Delivery. Irritating that, since the trunk contains fabrics for costumes to be used in an upcoming production, but she writes a cheque. (Look it up under either ‘cheque’ or ‘check.’)
Then her factotum prises the case open to reveal, among the bolts of cloth, a corpse! Screaming and gasping follow on cue.
Worse the deadman is the very unpleasant costume designer with whom Peroxide had an argument about wardrobe the day before. Factotum reaches for the telephone but…’No,’ she says and called a newspaper reporter Boyfriend (he wishes) and who takes over control.
After insuring a scoop for his byline he calls the law in the person of Detective Baritone who goes all Dragnet.
Even as Boyfriend investigates he trips over a newshound rival, played by the one and only Joan Blondell. The pratfalls are predictable, as are the fisticuffs, and the red herrings but it is all done with so much joie de vive to make it seem fresh.
There are in-jokes as the two journalists compete for information around the studio lot. The running gang of the convict escape scene did finally end with the man who came to sing! Nice.
Marvin Miller is a superb villain, before he went to work for Mr Tipton giving away moolah. Though the major villain is….. Well, the fraternity brothers figured it out before the denouement because it was telegraphed nearly from the start.
Peroxide is a wall flower when in the same scene with the firecracker Blondell. Even dim Boyfriend figures that out.
The picture starts like a publicity film for Hollywood with references to the dominate gossip and newspaper columnists of the time, like Luella Parsons and Hedda Hopper and then arrives at the estate mentioned above. There is no further reference to the figures reviewed in that five minute overture, which, by the way, included the screenwriter of this piece. If there is a backstory to explain this introduction it did not reveal itself to me.
The anonymous New York Times review of 17 August 1947 is as exhausted and disdainful as most of the reviews carried by that organ. It adds nothing.

1 hour and 6 minutes, rated 6.4 by 301 cinematizens.
Genre: Krimi

Verdict: Redemption.
An amnesia victim is rescued up by Lieutenant Tragg posing as a kindly, country doctor. Tragg tries all the plays in the script to rekindle Amnesia’s memory. No go. Time passes.
Victim gets depressed and is snapped out of it by a love interest, and Tragg challenges him to make something of himself. ‘Few men have a second chance and he should take it.’ This dramatic tension is well played.
Victim transforms himself into….[drum roll], the Crime Doctor, a combination of physician and psychologist. Ten years passes while he transforms.
Then in no time he has reformed innumerable criminals. All the while a mysterious stranger is lurking about who tells Crime Doctor that he knows he a faking amnesia. He is not, but he worries about what Lurker knows that he doesn’t.
Turns our Victim (aka Crime Doctor) was a criminal mastermind who made off with a fortune, when prosperity was just around the corner, and then he lost his memory and with it the loot. Lurker with two associates want a cut, even these ten years later.
Whew! Is this plot thick, or what? There are lumps in this gravy alright.
Victim recovers his memory, singlehandedly captures Lurker and gang, finds the dosh, and surrenders himself to the authorities.
He is put on trial as a split personality. Think Clockwork Orange. He is tried for what Victim/Villain did but the man on trial is pillar of virtue Crime Doctor. Get it? What the fraternity brothers got was a headache.
He admits Victim/Villain’s guilt while claiming Crime Doctor’s innocence. Both inhabit the same body! What to do? There is some nice satire about the journalists covering the trial. On Fox News Hillary is blamed.
Find him guilty and let him go, that’s what.
It is all nicely done, though disbelief has to be suspended with Victim, the 55-year old Warner Baxter, who is ostensibly 30 at the start. Whoa. Not only does he look 55, he also looks ill. He did eight of these programers.
Crime Doctor was a multimedia hit at the time. It ran in newspapers, over the airwaves of radio, and in this and the subsequent series of films.

1 hour and 9 minutes, rated 5.7 by 94 cinematizens.
Genre: Krimi

Verdict: Diverting
We open in China with a professional ventriloquist who is entrusted with a fortune in jewels to take from China to New York to raise money for Chinese war relief. But complications ensue.
The two dummies arrive in New York and the warm blooded one goes missing. Foul play is suspected by viewers. Inscrutable Anna May Wong arouses suspicion, but proclaims her innocence.
The local agent for the sale seeks the advice of Ellery Queen’s typist who brings EQ into it. There is some nice by-play between EQ and the typist who would like to be an assistant, and even a detective. EQ insists that he is writer and not a detective, and I agreed. This insistence riled the contemporary New York Times reviewer who was condescending and disdainful without a by-line. That august organ seems to specialise in reviewers who do not like movies.
Ralph Bellamy played EQ in this outing, and he does it pretty well, though the screenplay is repetitive.

IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 6 minutes, rated 5.3 by 286 cinematizens.
Genre: Krimi

Verdict: Snappy
Hidden in the title is Ellery Queen played to a ’T’ by Eddie Quillan. A rare Chinese Mandarin stamp is stolen and the body count starts. The courier delivering the stamp from China is robbed in her hotel room, and the Inspector Queen comes to investigate with Ellery in his wake.
Her intention was to sell the stamps to a private collector. When a rival collector offers twice as much the courier, strangely, declines. Meanwhile the offspring of the first collector oppose the purchase of another useless stamp which they see as squandering their inheritance.
There are locked rooms, posed cadavers, shadows lurking outside windows, and bumbling coppers. The dialogue is brisk; the direction is crisp; the players are engaging.
There is much coming and going, and more than one set of villains are on the prowl to confuse things, and me.
EQ comes to the rescue with smart alec remarks, and a keen eye for detail.
Spoiler: Turns out Collector One found that forgery paid better. His plan was to buy the Chinese stamp and them make forgeries and sell each on the black market for the purchase price. I think.
Franklin Pangborn, as ever, superbly plays the flighty hotel manager.

Ellery Queen stories were multi-media at the time, in print, over the radio, and on the silver screen.

IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 21 minutes, rated an astonishing 6.2 by 42 cast members.
Genre: Sy Fy, incredulity

Verdict: [Gasp!] ‘Corner Gas’ it is not.
A skilled veteran is recruited for one last mission. Heard that one before, Rambo? This Rambino is overweight, with combo mullet-mohawk hair, slurs, slovenly, and waddles. He is the man for the job!
He blasts off from planet somewhere that looks just like Ontario to Earth in a CGI-take to capture the science experiment gone wrong which is wandering around the Pre-Cambrian Shield (look it up) looking for a pizza place. Instead he finds idiots.
It is hard to go on because the fraternity brothers interrupted my study of this celluloid with their demands for the remoter to change channels. I had to hold them off with one hand and that limited the note-taking.
The back story is that presiding genius Erica Benedikty made a six-minute project called ‘Phobe’ in a media studies course (which has much to answer for). She parlayed that into a feature-length script and found a backer to invest, sit down, $500,000 dollars of some sort, American, Canadian, Hong Kong, Liberian, Namibian, New Zealand, Singaporean, Taiwan, who knows. Full marks for initiative.
Erica became producer as well as writer and set to work. With a hangover the putative investor woke up and pulled out, but she went ahead, adding director to her list of credits, on the Niagara Peninsula at St Catherines and transformed it into a community project. Everything was done by amateurs. Again full marks, this time for persistence.
The result is several steps below the worst of Roger Corman. Who would have thought that possible?
The lines are delivered flat. The scenes are in private homes, an empty high school hallway, public sidewalks, and — the most interesting — a steel mill.
The femme fatale that Rambino has to rescue from Phobe (on whom more in a moment) is Chubby, slow-witted, and out waddles him. Phobe wears platform shoes inside boots to elevate him, three layers of hunter’s camouflage over a parka to give him bulk, and an arc welder’s face mask to make him, well, look like a hockey goalie.
In the end after a mano-à-mano struggle at the steel mill where miraculously Chubby knows how to operate all the heavy equipment, ah huh, Rambino and Phobe bond. Together they turn on the evil scientists who Xenoed Phobe and zero them.
The list of credits is torn straight from the St. Catherine’s telephone book and just about as long. After this the Ontario Provincial Police impounded Erica’s director’s chair for her own safety.

IMDb meta-data is run time 1 hair and 21 minutes, rated 6.4 by 190 cinematizens.
Genre: Mystery.

Verdict: Predictable but diverting.
As the bodies fall in the Big House, Plod comes to investigate. The formidable chatelaine is uncooperative whereas her musical Lord son is is ever so friendly. Ever so.
Chatelaine wants to get him married off to her secretary, the Frightened Lady of the title, who hears strange sounds and sees creepy shadows that remind her of — shiver! — President Tiny. She and Lord are pals; nothing more. Two lurking footman who seem to have no duties are much present and just a shade short of insolent.
Then the chauffeur is murdered. Well, ‘So what?’ says lawyer Rudy for the Chatelaine? The lower orders will do that.
Plod is not so sure and insists on reading the script. He interrogates the suits of armour in the hall, and generally is never there when he is needed. He concludes the family doctor did it. Inconveniently, then the doctor is murdered and that blows Plod’s KPI clear-up rate.
There are more shadows and sounds. The lies are piled up with the abandon of Faux News. Lord Musician tittles and tattles. The eponymous lady screams, faints, and trips per the stereotypes of the day.
Spoiler alert.
The pace is slow enough for a viewer to realise only one person could be the culprit, and he is. The footman are so dumb they could not possibly have done ‘em in. All the Chatelaine’s scheming slows the pace and draws attention to her motivation. She is a good schemer to be sure but it becomes obvious that she is protecting….
Marius Goring gives a great performance as Lord of the Music. The comic relief plod is irritating. The supercilious doctor gets his comeuppance. The Frightened Lady gets the architect. The haughty chatelaine gets nothing.

IMDb meta-data is runtime 1 hour and 16 minutes, rated 6.2 by 112 opinionators.
Genre: Krimi komedy

Verdict: Snappy
Boston Blackie (avant le nom) locates a missing heiress and marries her in Reno. Since he is already there, his boss gives him another missing person to find in Reno. He does this by locking his new bride in the bathroom, in the hotel room, and in a car. How anyone can be locked in any of these is beside the point. The sexism is surpassing. He locks her up to keep her out of trouble, he says.
She is feisty enough to get loose, to make him regret it but not enough to stop him from doing it again, and finally to save his bacon though it is too little, too late.
The missing man remains missing, and there is a secondary plot about mistaken identity that was lost on me.
There are many familiar faces from the time and genre: the feisty bride is Jean Parker, Rod Cameron towering over all, Grant Withers scowling, Keye Luke faking bad English, Dick Purcell for once acting, the glacial Astrid Allwyn being glacial, Doc Adams before med school, and those eyebrows on Oscar!
The title comes from a clock on a mortuary across the street from the hotel which has a large pendulum for seconds but no hands for the time. Symbolic? Yes. Of what? Dunno.
By 7 December I suppose audiences had other thing to think about, like the 2,000 widows created on Oahu in just under two hours.