IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 4 minutes, rated 6.2 by 72 cinematizens.
Genre: Mystery
Verdict: A lost picture found.
The set-up: Captain Hugh Drummond, called Bulldog for no reason whatever, embarks on his twentieth film, played in this instance by that irresistible sot, Tom Conway who has his brief way with women, one after another. The fraternity brothers lost count at two. Situation normal.
Bulldog tracks down a set of stolen lead soldiers to find a long lost Anglo-Saxon treasure trove stashed just before the Battle of Hastings. It is a tried and true formula used by Arthur Conan Doyle and many others. Bulldog borrows some gear from Lara Croft and sallies forth with a cast of flunkies and leading ladies in his wake.
This is one of the many studio B quickies done in five days of shooting and subsequently lost to the ravages of indifference, until 2001 when a much deteriorated 16mm print turned up on Ebay from which the You Tube offering derives. It is nearly impossible to watch. The images are stretched, the surface flyblown, and the dialogue out of sync. All too much like a keg party at the House. Think of it as a Salvador Dali version of a film. It is available on DVD now in a cleaned up copy but I am not motivated that far.
IMDb meta-data is run time of 1 hour and 12 minutes, rated 6.4 by 1192 cinematizens. (I do worry about some cinematizens when I see ratings like this.)
Genre: noir
Verdict: Oh hum.
In his first feature film a rake-thin Dr Leonard McCoy has a bad dream and tells the world about it, repeatedly. His Georgia origins are pronounced. (Get it?) He was born Jackson DeForest Kelley. Can you believe any parents would do that?
The dream opens proceedings and it is very well done, with spinning and shadows. In it there is a femme fatale, to be sure, and man bent over a safe in conservatory with four mirrored doors.
A robotic, and so perfectly cast, McCoy emerges from behind one door while the couple are intent on the safe behind another door, and he stabs the man to death while the femme scoots.
He then wakes upon a sweat, and begins to blab, while striving not to blab, he blabs to his brother-in-law of the chiselled chin (Paul Kelly) who laughs it off, slaps him around to straighten him out, and finally begins to think something might have happened. Chin is a copper and he has his ways of finding out things, namely, a slap on the chops. After the pair of them with their wife and girlfriend, respectively, just happen to go on a picnic on the grounds the very mansion possessed of a conservatory with four mirrored doors. Small world.
Sidebar: By now the fraternity brothers had passed out from boredom and beer in equal measure.
Thereafter Kelley and Kelly are on the case. McCoy cries, faints, trembles, and is useless, while Chisel-chin does all the running, thumping, and shooting. As we Noiristas realised from the second act, the harmless little man next door was an evil genius who had hypnotised weak-minded McCoy into hiding in the conservatory closet to surprise the safe cracker and moll.
The moll was Harmless’s wife who was going to run off with the cracksman after he cleaned out Harmless’s safe. Not nice to be sure.
Turns out robot McCoy had no responsibility because the yegg attacked him when he appeared out of nowhere ergo he acted in self defence. Sure, tell that to the judge, which he did. The end.
The dream sequence at the beginning derives from ‘Spellbound’ (1945) and anticipated later imitations. In this outing it lacks the gravitas imparted by Alfred Hitchcock who added doses of Salvador Dali hyper-reality to it in ‘Vertigo’ (1958). Strangely ‘Fear in the Dark’ is not included on the IMDb list of more than a thousand films with a dream sequence, but it does index many Donald Duck cartoons. Did A.I. compile that list?
One of the reviews attached to the IMDb entry – Film Noir of the Week – goes on and on for about 3000 words interpreting the film as a homosexual love story between Chisel-chin and trembling McCoy. Believe it, Ripley! I watched a different movie.
McCoy had just come out of the army and was branching out from his pre-war career as a radio singer. (!) His acting peaked in this outing, though he had a career as a villain in westerns on television before The United Federation of Planets was desperate enough to draft him. He remained robotic.
IMDb meta-data 44 minutes, rated 5.3 by 74 cinematizens.
Genre: mystery, comedy
Verdict: Padded even at 44 minutes.
It opens with the characters introducing themselves to the fourth wall. Never seen that before or since.
PI Tom leaves his Squeeze in charge of the office while he does mens business. A client appears and Squeeze accepts an assignment to take a picture of a woman in a divorce case. What can go wrong?
Well, to avoid being seen with a camera it is hidden in the titular hat box. Got it?
Well get this, Squeeze does not look into the hat box but takes the client’s word for it. This client is wearing a stick-on goatee, a greasy wig, and looks like he missed the clown car. Dutifully Squeeze stakes out the target and when she appears, Squeeze deploys the hat box and discovers that within is a gun not a camera, and she really did shoot the woman. Bang! Dumb!
Tom returns to sort this out. No one noticed until the last five minutes that the gun in the hat box was Tom’s very own gat which Goatee had snitched from Squeeze’s desk while she was licking the tip of a pencil to write a receipt. Nor did anyone realise until the last five minutes that the murder bullet did — Spoiler alert! — not come from the gun in the hat box.
It gets sillier as it goes on. Yet it went on … to a sequel, ‘The Case of the Baby Sitter’ (1947).
There is an in-joke. The ubiquitous Allen Jenkins is Tom’s gofer and he is nicknamed ‘Harvard’ because he did not go to Yale. Get it? No, me neither. See below for the explanation.
Tom Neal stars as Tom. He was a privileged scion with a Harvard law degree who was better known in Hollywood for fistfights, adultery, allegations of rape, drunk-driving, and finally a murder trial. It seems someone shot his wife in the head. He served six years for manslaughter. Justice is certainly blind. However he was finally blacklisted and he disappeared from the silver screen.
When the credits start with Robert Lippert’s name, we all know it is a Filene’s Basement production.
IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 3 minutes, rated 6.8 by 1529 cinematizens.
Genre: droll and catatonic.
Verdict: Nice and easy reprise.
In the town of Dog River — population few, location distant — on the Canadian Prairies nothing ever changes because nothing ever happens. Then it does. The Global Financial Crisis ate the town’s budget in a single gulp. Electricity, water, police, trash collection, and schools stop. No more nanny state for these survivalists.
Tim Horton’s proposes to buy all the real property in the town and pay all outstanding debts to build an All-Canadian donut factory that will supply the entire country with bad donuts to go with the legendary bad coffee. ‘It may be bad but it’s ours,’ cry the Ca-nationalists!
Residents react by blaming each other, drinking, and gambling. That part was social realism. Then they rally together to save the town. That part was Disney.
There is a series of sit-com vignettes to stretch it out to feature length. Some are amusing, others are funny, and most are neither. At the start and finish are nice shots of the landscape with fields of mustard seed, wheat, and sorghum. I wanted more of that at sunrise and sunset on the vastness of the flat lands.
It was, of course, a reprise of the eponymous television series that ran for six years and one hundred and seven episodes of thirty minutes each on CTV. Watched them all, more than once.
What I learned: pregnant women should not watch film noir because of all the smoking. Horsepower can take several forms. There are no Canadiens in Canada West. It was all so low key that the fraternity brothers passed out before the first word of dialogue.
N.B. In the end credits the entire population of Saskatchewan including expatriate is listed.
IMDb meta-data is one hour and twelve minutes, rated 6.5 by 73 cinematizens
Genre: Mystery.
Verdict: A misfire.
Affable but cynical Dennis persuades the sponsors of his failing radio mystery program to offer a reward for a notorious cracksman name of Jimmy Valentine. The search narrows his location down by means of the script to Smallville, where everyone suspects everyone else of being Jimmy. Or do they?
Meanwhile, Dennis finds a squeeze, gets to like the town, and, oh incidentally, finds Jimmy but does not. Huh? Yeah, that is what the fraternity brothers said.
It turns out Jimmy has company. The first half is farce and the second half is more serious and there is a nice denouement if the viewer can last that long.
Though radio precipitates the action no further use is made of it. Too bad.
The original story came from that master of irony, O’Henry in ‘Retrieved Reformation.’ Director Bernard Vorhaus handled it well. His HUAC blighted career is described elsewhere on this blog. This film was cut to fit a fifty minute television spot as ‘Unforgotten Crime’ which made it memorably incomprehensible.
Contextual note: In April 1942 the Bataan Death March began when 80,000 exhausted and starving Filipino and American prisoners of war were marched 100 kilometres with neither food nor water. As many as a third died en route. The subsequent surrender of the bastion on Corregidor yielded another 15,000 prisoners. Filipino officers were singled out for torture, abuse, and murder. The defence at Bataan and on Corregidor threw off the Japanese timetable by three months which significantly slowed and impaired the descent on New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. While news of the defeat figured in the newsreels in theatres before movies like this were shown, the story of the death march was suppressed until late in 1944.
IMDb meta-data is runtime of one hour an eleven minutes, rated 5.9 by 86 cinematizens.
Genre: Mystery
Verdict: Oh hum.
The irrepressible Wallace Ford returns from a media assignment in the sticks with a naive bride and sets up house in glamorous New York City. She is agog. The wives of other journalists visit her to tell her the bad new about being married to a hack. Her head spins.
Meanwhile Ford is rushing back and forth. After all it is not everyday that a well known public figure falls out of high window to his death — splat — in front of his very eyes. Off he goes in pursuit of this scent and that leaf like a dog in the park.
The date is important. The faller was the chair of an America First Committee. Was his death an accident or murder? If the later did it have to do with his seedy private life, or the Committee? Ford tangles all these questions up, observed by some stereotypes.
The stereotypes try to mislead Ford but without success so a more direct approach is taken. It seems the faller had disrupted some criminal plans and Ford, being the first upon the body, may have taken an important piece of paper from the dead man.
These villains erred in bringing Sheriff Micah into their scheme and he turns coat and joins forces with Ford. Meanwhile the naive wife makes dinner and watches it go cold. Night after night.
The villains are Nasties bent of disrupting rubber supplies to the US Army, and the faller had sniffed them out. Ford never does seem to know what is happening. Typical journalist, a lot of noise and little substance.
The ingredients are there for a good story and the players could do it. But the story is incomplete and while the directing is lethargic, the elastic is stretched too thin.
IMDB meta-data is runtime 1 hour and 5 minutes, over rated 4.9 by 130 cinematizens.
Genre: Allegedly mystery.
Verdict: Clank goes the Tin Man.
Here is the set-up. Take notes or take a walk.
Tin Man is the chess reporter for a rag in California. A nephew of the rag owner, he observes the state chess championship which ends in a riot that he does not notice. He is as literal-minded, inept and imperceptive as a dean numbed by McKinsey management training seminars and bayoneted with KPIs.
In frustration the managing editor sends him to Grape City or Center, or what is the difference. To get there he takes the product placement Greyhound bus where we met the cast.
Tin Man tries to play chess on a large lap set, jostled by his seat-mate. The lap set attracts the attention of other travellers. On board is an antique shop sales clerk that Tin Man has, against the odds, noticed. Also present is the dynamite called Veda Ann Borg. Riding along is a whiz kid and minder, who provide the chorus.
The bus stops at a motel in Grape Center or City and the malarky begins in earnest. Tin Man’s seat-mate stopped jostling him, because…. someone stabbed him in the back. Whoa. The bus passengers are held in the motel, owned by an identical twin actor. These twins are each chess nuts who never speak to each other. In the basement are swinging wall panels, concealed doors, and spooky shadows. The ingredients are there but it fizzles.
Meanwhile, a notorious murderer has escaped from the slammer with his gang and he making for….? Yep, the motel because..… There is a valuable chess set that Kubla Khan gave to Marco Polo somewhere, and antique girl has some of the pieces, and someone else, others, have the remainder. I never did sort that part out. Neither did Tin Man. It did not seem to matter.
There is much to’ing and fro’ing in the interstices of the motel, while Tin Man mugs. Think about that, a Tin Man trying mug. Very trying, indeed.
The menacing Barton MacLane is limited to a line or two, and wasted. The director must have confiscated Veda’s detonator because she just mopes around. The annoying whiz kid is annoying.
But mostly all the actors stand around waiting for the Tin Man to mug. Is the director Frank McDonald responsible for the lifeless result? We will never know. It has also been released under the title ‘Treasure of Fear.’ Be warned.
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.
