Category: Film Review

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.

IMDb meta-data is runtime 1 hour and 43 minutes, rated 6.7 by 4497 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy

Verdict: Cavorite about! Be careful.
In 1968 when astronauts at last land on the moon, they find a Union Jack in a Victorian bottle. ‘Huh?’ is the scientific reaction. The political reaction is to slap D-Notices on the news.
H. G. Wells got there first with cavor! Ingenious. It is an anti-gravity paste whipped up in a motor and pestle. Belt up. Get set. Slather it on. Go!
Professor Cavor recruits his neighbour who wishes to escape debt collectors with his obliging girlfriend who wants a honeyMoon. She got it.
They bundle into his garden shed and off they go …’to the Moon, Alice!’
The green cheese is full of holes and they go into the moon, per the title: ‘In’ the moon.
In the cheese they find toiling beetles, not mice, who speak English and are not cooperative.
They escape to return, but keep it all secret for script reasons.
There is good humour, mannered turn-of-the-century charm, and a lot of special imagery from the masterful Ray Harryhausen. Lionel Jeffries as Cavor steals the show with his plucky determination and courageous conscience. Eye candy Martha Hyer is mostly locked away in the Victorian tradition, though she too is in the moon, despite that title. The screen play is from the golden typewriter of Nigel Kneale but….not his best work.
Well, I found it boring. Most of Wells’s social commentary was deleted. It seemed aimed at children which Wells’s story certainly was not. Nor was there any mystery in the flashbacks, perhaps because the pace is so slow.

IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 25 minutes, rated 5.6 by 542 insomniacs.
Genre: Sy Fy, Noir

Verdict: Broken-backed but diverting in both parts.
Carmine Orrico, his cheek bones have never looked sharper, lands in England and young women start disappearing. Meanwhile a cast of reliable British character actors study a glowing soccer ball, and when it goes missing they call in another set of reliable British character actors to track it down. The reliables include Maurice Denham, Patricia Haines, Alfred Burke, John Carson, Aubrey Morris, Warren Mitchell, Marianne Stone, and Barbara French. It is an ensemble piece and better for it.
The first half is Sy Fy as Denham and Carmine track an object from SPACE and find it on the pitch. Well, it is England and they are soccer mad there. But it is one strange soccer ball. Very. Denham decides to commune with it. Did his life insurance include death by soccer ball?
After killing Denham, the soccer ball grew legs, scarpered, stole a car, and set off for Vienna for the second half of the film which is Noir.
More than twenty young girls answering an ad for swimsuit models — at this point the slumbering fraternity brothers gained consciousness — have disappeared. Since they have disappeared, they are not on screen, and the bros lapsed into the usual state of unconsciousness. The police, oh hum, find these disappearances to be routine. Flighty young girls are always disappearing, it seems.
Carmine tries to convince the stodgy British moustaches that the soccer ball is a menace. He is dismissed as a flighty (wo)man. Then he connects the missing girls with a soccer magazine and the chase is on. It goes all zither and Third Man thereafter.
Squeeze tries to talk to the soccer ball, which is very polite, and assures her that the missing girls will come to no harm (but that they will never be seen again on Earth). She does not find that very reassuring, so soccer ball kills her, because she is too smart. That was a surprise. But at least Carmine is safe, as he is not that smart.
Turns out soccer ball is a man with a lobster claw on one arm — which makes lighting a cigarette a chore — and a lump of rubber on his profile but he has mellifluous voice when he is not a soccer ball.
Eventually, Carmine of and with the Yard corners soccer man, and he explains his world — of all places, Ganymede — has had a Republican apocalypse and needs new blood, i.e., breeding stock, in the hope shaking off the lobster claws. Apologia delivered, he blasts off with the hu(wo)man cargo.
Carmine seems to have forgotten that soccer man killed his mentor, Denham, and his squeeze Squeeze, and has alien-napped twenty-one girls against their wills, and that they will be sex slaves. Carmine seems to find that normal. Ahem. Maybe those rumours about his life style choices have a truth in them.
The pace is brisk though the soccer ball is loquacious for a shy alien.

IMDb meta-data is runtime 1 hour and 5 minutes, rated 7.0 by 290 cinematizens.
Genre: Mystery

Verdict: Art /deco steals the show.
Eight strangers are invited to a swish soiree in a splendid penthouse apartment. After wining and dining at a banquet buffet while waiting for the arrival of the mystery host, Siri on the radio informs them that the ninth guest is DEATH. Each will be murdered. These are Eight Little Indians off the Agatha Christie reservation.
In the penthouse doors are locked, gates carry an electric charge, stairwell doors have been welded shut, windows cannot be opened, the balcony is on the thirtieth floor – too high for shouting or jumping. The fraternity brothers suggested throwing furniture off the balcony to bring a reaction.
There is no escape. They must endure the McKinsey management training seminar that will lead to their deaths. I know the feeling.
The mystery is why they are there and who is the mastermind. There are connections among some but not all of them. None is innocent. They include an oily dean from a university, an egotistical assistant professor from the same university, a political fixer and his mistress, a shyster (aka lawyer), a self-appointed do-gooder, a hypocritical society hostess, a starlet trying to sleep her way to the top, and – shock – an unscrupulous journalist.
They all wear the most formal Tuxedo Park attire, and proclaim their ignorance and innocence. The former is credible but the latter is not.
What follows is a character study as each guest reacts to the doom the awaits. Some panic and in so doing hasten their own end. Others go all rational and try to figure it out. Some read spam email. Others close in on themselves, but no one turns to prayer. There is a butler for comic relief, and mercifully he is not a she or a black. For such a static story, the direction is crisp.
The art deco set and the 1930s hi-tech are marvellous. It makes it a variant of the Old Dark House with all its quirks, lurks, traps, sliding panels, disappearing objects, talking radio, and more.