IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 1 minute runtime, rated 5.0 by 128 cinematizens.
Genre: mystery
Verdict: Oh hum.
A series of robberies on the Midnight Limited train from New York City’s Grand Central Station have plod mystified. It is so dire that the Railroad is in danger of having to offer compensation to the victims. Rather than admit liability the company sends in the comatose John ‘Dusty’ King who reads his lines off cue cards without inflection.
Dusty checks to see if he has a pulse. Nope.
Marjorie Reynolds is one of the victims, and she lights up the screen, casting Dusty into the shade. Gratuitous racial stereotypes recur. Dusty lays a trap. By means unfathomable it works. The end.
There are some nice touches. The method by which the villain gets on and off the train is neat though I have seen it done better in Terror by Night (1946). I. Stanford Jolley is, as always, a greasy villain.
He had 370+ credits on the IMDb, the last in 1974.
Reynolds never quite made the A list but she stole the show in Ministry of Fear (1944) directed by Fritz Lang. She also had the female lead in Holiday Inn (1942), her only other A film lead. Tant pis.
IMDb mea-data is 1 hour and 4 minutes, rated 4.6 by 135 cinematizens.
Genre: Mystery
Verdict: Droll
It starts with a bang! A shot rings out and a woman with a gat flees the nocturnal scene, accosting a passing motorist who is so flustered to have a pistol poking in his neck that he drives into a wall and wakes up suspected of murder. Yikes!
Note. Keep back door locked when driving through movie sets. We always do.
To clear himself he has to find the frail, which he does right where she picked him up, and they join…forces to clear each other. There is much banter on the way to the inevitable.
Mustachioed plod is so low key that he becomes a chorus merely content to observe and comment, but at least he is not a flat-footed oaf as police are usually portrayed in these B films despite the injunction in the Hayes Code that required respect for law and order. In 1944 movie I was somewhat surprised to see that mo’ at a time when the clean-shaved army look was the patriotic norm.
‘What about the seven doors?’ asked the fraternity brothers when they regained consciousness. The murder occurred in a small shopping mall with seven shops each with a door around a sunny courtyard. That makes seven doors. Got it?
The frail sells hats, there is a silversmith, an art dealer, a furrier, a photograph, an antiquarian, and a forgotten. While the mall is well lit, airy, and open, there is a basement which is dark, dank, and creepy where much of the action occurs. Well, it may have occurred there but the print I watched on You Tube was so poor all the basement scenes were either inky or murky, and in either case muddy.
The specialism of each merchant figures in the story. Ditto what they might have in the basement. Nice and neat.
Chick Chandler stars, an accomplished second banana, and this is one of a few leading roles in his 185 IMDb credits. As with the other players, this unknown film is one of the three he is ‘Best Known For.’
It opened on 16 August as the Canadian First Army broke through the Falaise Gap in Normandy while in the Pacific the Seventh US Army Air Force, including my dad, set up in Guam, despite the continued combat with Japanese left on the island, for long range missions over Japan.
IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 14 minutes, rated 6.8/10.0 by 148 cinematizens.
Genre: Mystery, Sy Fy
Verdict: Easy viewing.
The set-up: Everyman Richard Carlson stops for gasoline on a rainy night and when he gets back in the car, there is a drenched, bug-eyed Martin Kosleck (on whom more below) cowering in the back seat. Carlson is persuaded to give Bug-eyes a lift and a room at the first hotel they find in the storm.
The plot thickens when Bug-eyes is murdered in the room while Carlson is doing his nails or something. The plods arrive on cue and clamp him in irons, well they try to, but he escapes and takes the redoubtable Nancy Kelly hostage, sort of. It is all Stockholm Syndrome thereafter.
To clear himself with the law Carlson must crack the case by tracing the path of Bug-eyes back to the asylum from which he escaped. The nuthouse is full of nuts to be sure, and there are some Keystone Kops involved. Bug-eyes passed the word to Carlson before he croaked: ‘G 47!’ It is open sesame when he says that…. but the door slams shut behind him!
There is one very nice stunt when Carlson leaps from a speeding car onto an auto transporter and then later rolls a vehicle off the back of it at highway speed. Not sure I have seen that before, and certainly not in a film made in late 1941 without any CGI. Most of all there is Nancy the hostage who dominates the screen with her sass and feisty temper. Yet somehow they become unintentionally married! ‘Go girl,’ yelled the fraternity brothers!
He went that way!
The reference to patriotic panties got the attention of the bros, ever so briefly. A sales lady spruiks them with a V for Victory embroidered on the article and she refers to ‘fine silk for Uncle Sam.’ Stop! The silk would have been Japanese, and by 1939 many manufacturers had substituted rayon for Japanese silk because customers were boycotting Japanese products, and the rayon was cheaper and more readily available.
There is a nice plot twist at the end, which surprised this jaded viewer. That is what gets the Sy Fy tick above. The 19 January release implies production in November of 1941, leading to the conclusion that the nefarious Nazis were a late add to the script after Hitler declared war on the United States on 9 December 1941. (Why did he do that? I have always wondered. Send five box tops with the answer.)
Martin Kosleck (a Polish Jew refugee) made a Hollywood career playing Nazis, Göbbels alone five times.
Marty at work.
Nancy Kelly (1921-1995) appeared on camera for the first time 1926 and for the last time in 1977. She was one of the few cute child actors to make the transition to maturity, albeit with a ten-year hiatus in the early 1930s. She gets top billing here in the credits, and rightly so. In addition to film, she also acted on radio and Broadway. Her good sense is evidenced in that she quit in 1977.
Siodmak directed, in this case not Kurt or Curt or Curtis, but Robert Siodmak, no relation to Kurt or Curt or Curtis.
Robert Siodmak
Though how they co-existed in Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950s is a puzzle. I am sure the one was often confused for the other, but their biographies on IMDb make no reference to the other. Despite the name and the techniques of German Expressionism this Siodmak was from Memphis Tennessee, born and bred, albeit in German Town (been there). He did specialise in Noir and visited Germany to learn techniques in the 1930s. The highpoint of his career might have been the mysterious The Killers (1946).
IMDb meta-data is 1 hour 9 minutes runtime, rated 5.8 by 378 cinematizens.
Genre: ODH ( = Old Dark House)
Verdict: Curve balls two.
A playwright and his producer with a comic irritant assistant are driving through a storm when they come to downed tree blocking the road while behind them flood waters are rising. They seek shelter in a conveniently located nearby Old Dark House.
The owner reluctantly bids them enter and offers a meagre hospitality to these strangers. They join a tuxedoed party of five or six, the fraternity brothers were in charge of counting. The travellers change out of their wet clothes into tuxedoes, what else.
One of the resident ladies appears walking in a trance, and there is talk of a ghost. Doors open and close by themselves. Furniture moves. Creaks and bumps are heard. Producer and assistant get shivery.
Then Madame Trance turns up dead. Dead!
Spoiler One.
It turns out all the ODH residents are actors hired by motoring playwright to put on this show to convince the accompanying producer to fund a new play. He arranged for the tree to be down (tough cookies for other drivers) while the storm was a lucky coincidence.
However, the death of Madame Trance was NOT in the script! The charade is revealed.
The tables now turn themselves. Producer and Assistant, once tricked, now stubbornly persistent in supposing the death is faked as part of the play, while the players and writer are alarmed at this ad libbing.
Get it? If not go back over the previous two paragraphs with your finger and read it again word-by-word to yourself.
Then after much loud knocking a uniformed guard from the inconveniently located nearby booby-hatch appears to announce that a homicidal maniac has been returned to the care of the community. He proceeds to search the house. Meanwhile, alert observers have noticed the eyes of painting above the fireplace moving and fingers on door handles. Get it? If not, repeat as above.
More members of the house party fall down dead, and in the ensuing consternation their cadavers disappear. The body count of missing bodies increases. Needless to say the telephone line was cut. The automobiles disabled.
Ten little indians gathered and counted off. Two gone already.
Spoiler Two.
More pounding at the front door yields two more booby-hatch guards who say that the escaped maniac dressed as a guard. Gulp! Get it?
First Guard (FG) is the nut job and he has been roaming around the house for hours, during which he found the hidden chambers, sliding panels, concealed passageways, torture chamber, and cobwebs. Behind the eyes on the painting they find secret passages and rooms. At last!
We cut away to FG with an audience of the disappeared all trussed up. None were killed but drugged to simulate death to the others upstairs. Now FG proclaims his genius and prepares to operate on the host with his many knives, scalpels, and wire cutters that he carried off from the loony bin. Sure.
In the nick (get it?) of time the other two guards with playwright et al. arrive and dis-knife him.
The End.
I liked the double twist but I wanted more spooky ODH stuff. It lacks atmosphere and tension. Some of the dialogue is sharp but these quips do not propel the story. Madame Trance was convincing in her limited screen time but the insipid female lead was…. Just about absent.
IMDb metadata is runtime of 1 hour and 7 minutes, rated 5.1/10.0 by 49 cinematizens
Genre: mystery
Verdict: Oh hum
Stanley Banks before he retired and became the Father of the Bride heads the code breakers in DC whose main interest seems to be lunch. Everyone has military ranks apart from the secretary whom Stanley aims to make Mother of the Bride just as soon as this case is over. (Psst! Though a Mrs Ames is already on the scene.) Wait, what case is that? The Coors Silver Bullets? No, then the fraternity brothers lost intent in right there.
Some Asians are up to no good. Before the code can be broken it has to be translated from the Kanji characters into Indiana English. Every time the code breakers get a break the Asians get a fast-break ahead again. How do the devils do it?
Spoiler. No red blooded, white skinned code breaker can read those chicken scratches so they hire off the street a translator named Arlie. He comes and goes as he pleases in their top secret super hush-hush headquarters guarded by a watchman who cannot see over his open mouth on the rare occasions when he is awake. It turns out Arlie is one of the code makers and he doctors his translations to throw off the code breakers! He disguises himself by wearing glasses. What a devil!
It takes the top notch code breakers an hour and several deaths to figure out that someone — who could it be? — is reading their mail even before they do: They of unmatched wisdom.
What is interesting is the romance between Arlie and fellow conspirator Lia (who is played by the aforementioned Mrs Ames). The scenes between these two are genuinely touching and played superbly in this otherwise bland production from the brothers Warner. I wanted to know more about Arlie and Lia, where they came from, how they met, what motivated them, what they hoped to achieve, where would they go in the future, what cellphone plan did they have? So many questions. Gerald Mohr also does a nice turn as the traitorous Republican pilot.
No such interest was sparked by Stanley and his crew. There are, by the way, no scenes in Panama. In contrast see Charlie Chan in Panama (1942).
Some of the simis on the IMDb suppose the villains are Chinese. Oh hum. Japan had invaded China in 1937 and many Chinese got help and encouragement from Americans. Much more likely the intention was to make the audience, if such there was, think they were Japanese, but nothing explicit was noticed by this auditor during occasional periods of attention.
IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 4 minutes, rated 4.3/10.0 by 907 cinematizens
Genre: Confusion.
Verdict: Monogram quality. (Say no more.)
The set-up: a room full of portly American men with svelte molls congratulate themselves as the war rages. Strangely they are celebrating, strikes, slowdowns, sabotage, arson, and destruction of their factories, rolling stock, warehouses, and ships. Though they look like the usual cast of B-movie extras they are no patriots! Are they Republicans? They are traitors!
Into their midst intrudes Bela Lugosi to whom no one ever says no. With the help of an ever handy hypodermic, he manipulates the host. Thereafter the industrialists play ten little Indians as one after another is found dead on the doorstep of the Japanese embassy in Washington DC. How they died and got delivered C.O.D. is left off stage. Perhaps Lugosi has a bulk contract with USPS for corpse deliveries. After the second or third, foul play is suspected.
You are in my needle’s power!
As always Lugosi appears and disappears by script magic. He sneaks up behind each victim and….
As the pile of corpses on the Japanese embassy doormat mounts the Lone Ranger, constantly flipping open his wallet looking for his mask, appears to investigate – the host’s niece. Nice.
SPOILER. In the last few minutes we discover that the industrialists had all been replaced by doppelgängers made to order by plastic surgery, the miserable scriptwriters crutch. The substitutes are nefarious Japanese who talk just like Ohio but are members of the dreaded Black Dragon Society. Where all those molls who were likewise celebrating American setbacks came from is left to the viewer’s imagination.
The surgeon who altered the men was …. [Go on, guess] the dedicated Nazi doctor Lugosi. Ah ha. To show their gratitude the Black Dragons threw Lugosi into a prison cell, so that he would not blow the cover of the agents he had created. Sounds like McKinsey management at its best: Save on the surgeon’s fees.
Black Dragons may be mean but smart they are not. Of all the prison cells in all the worlds, they put him in one with an exact look-alike due to be released. With a flick of his cape, Lugosi swaps with the look-alike and goes free to seek his revenge by travelling as a Nazi from Japan to the USA during the war. Sure. Why not. Book that berth and sail away across the Pacific, Manila, Guam, Wake, Honolulu all the way.
Moreover, this dedicated Nazi’s revenge helps the American war effort. Sure that adds up.
The substitution explains why a saboteur can have a nice niece. It does not explain why she does not notice any difference in her favourite uncle. (The script gives her some outs but they are lame, to say the least.) Still less does it explain why anyone would care.
It was released on 6 March 1942. The opening credits feature a rising sun flag in the frame.
Notice the Rising Sun flag at the top left.
The film would have been made in a fortnight in early February just after the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, when the threat of other attacks or even an invasion was in the air.
Insightful observations follow. Buckle up. Everyone smokes. Everyone. That surprised me because I thought smoking became general after World War II, because the mass production of cigarettes for the Army spread the habit and made it cheap. But in the opening scene at the dinner party the air is thick with smoke and every actor has a cigarette, pipe, or cigar. Now, perhaps in that scene the smokes are being used to indicate how rich and decadent they are, but that seems far too subtle for anything from a Monogram production, though the smoking is less distracting thereafter.
GoodReads meta-data is pages, rated 4.04 by 2028 litizens.
Genre: krimi
Verdict: Slow and sure.
It is October 1939 and the war is on. Handsome young London doctor Ben Bones has been assigned to Midsomer in anticipation of casualties from bombing nearby Plymouth. Off he goes with his gorgeous wife Penny who is angry about this move, and blames him for it. It seems she grew up in these environs and has no wish to return. Having escaped Midsomer alive, who would want to return? No one. Indeed she blames him for almost everything including the war and they are talking about separation and divorce through gritted teeth, when they speak, which is seldom.
As these Bickersons arrive at the village of Midsomer Birdswing darkness has fallen and the blackout combine to make it inky. Mindful, too, of petrol rationing they park the car and walk to find their accommodation.
Wham!
‘Wham’ is all Dr BB remembers when he regains consciousness again. A truck ran them down and disappeared into the gloaming. Exeunt stage right feet first bad Penny very dead. BB has two broken legs and assorted bruises. One break is compound and he is at a low ebb, bunking upstairs at a pub. There were no witnesses and his memory is little.
Penny, so conspicuous at the start, disappears. How and where she is buried passes in silence. If she had surviving family, this reader missed it. Yet her history at Birdswing influences much of what follows.
The more so when BB begins to suspect (thanks to anonymous note – where would writers be without anonymous notes?) the rundown was murder, not accident. This suspicion is far beyond the imagination of the local part-time plod who is officious, pompous, and incompetent. (Definitely professorial material.)
As BB slowly recovers he is integrated into the village, its ways, its gossip, its history, its hostility to Penny, its local gentry, and its characters. He is swept up by the uncompromising amazon Lady Juliet who brooks no excuses and drives him to doctoring, first in a wheel chair, and then on crutches. His London training and quick thinking saves a school girl from a deadly spider bite and puts him in good with the locals.
The horsey Lady Juliet and the crippled Doctor Bones begin to investigate the death of Bad Penny, though with no great vigour. Bones is distracted by the wiles of the school teacher who flatters no end. However his attention is brought back to the death … by an apparition.
Emma Jameson
This title is the first in a series and I will certainly read more. Lady Juliet’s inner doubts combined with her bold as brass exterior is most engaging, while Dr Bones grits his teeth exercising his mending bones.
There are some nits that need picking. Did a 1939 English village (Pop. 200) have a traffic light? This one does. For details about village life I thought of Margery Allingham’s Oaken Heart (1941), discussed elsewhere on this blog. Get clicking.
Was John Wayne a cultural token in rural England by October 1939, considering that his first major role in Stagecoach premiered in Los Angeles in March of that year, and screened in a few theatre in London in June 1939? He is cited as such in these pages, but it strikes a dissonant cord with this reader.
GoodReads meta-data is 416 pages, rated 4.04 by 2318 litizens.
Genre: krimi
Verdict: [Sigh]
The fog that is Chief Inspector Jean-Basptiste Adamsberg returns. This time in pursuit of shy spiders. José Garcia brought Adamsberg to life in a film years ago, and I still picture Garcia when I read these titles.
A number of elderly men die from the bite of the so-called reclusive spider. Oh hum. Yet Adamsberg cannot stop thinking about it. An arachnidologist he consults assures him the bite of this spider is not fatal, yet there are the three deaths associated with bites from just such spiders. Others are content to conclude that their age led to death triggered by the spider bite. Now if Adamsberg had reacted against this ageism we might have had an interesting story, because throughout the ages of the victims is used to dampen, dismiss, or deter interest in the case(s), but no Adamsberg just has one of his ineffable hunches. Tant pis.
Of course, if his boss had been versed in McKinsey management KPIs Adamsberg would never have been permitted to pursue this obvious dead-end. ‘Stick to the cases that can be cleared to make us look good,’ that would have been the direction.
There is much to’ing and fro’ing here and there, and — as usual —there are ructions in the squad. Situation normal. There are the Cartesian positivists who follow Adrien Danglard, the nominal number two in the unit versus the metaphysicians who follow Adamsberg. The computer nerd Froissy is there, along with the Amazon Violette Retancourt, sleepy Mordent, Mercadet, Voisenet, Noël with the short fuse, and Veyrenc with the strange head of hair, Estalère who worships Adamsberg, Justin who does not, Kernorkian, and Lamarre. Let’s not forget Snowball on top of the photocopier.
Fred Vargas
While I have enjoyed previous titles in this series I cannot be enthusiastic about this entry, which seems padded with pointless and repetitive dialogue and more repetitive and pointless dialogue while very little happens. The evocation of place which was a highlight in earlier entries is absent here. Nîmes is just a five-letter word here, not a place. Nor are there any surprising characters like the stableman or the sailor who figured in earlier novels. Still less do the victims have any character. Again unlike some earlier entries when the character of the victim was crucial.
That the villain could fire that weapon with such deadly accuracy in all the circumstances is an assumption too far for even this indulgent reader.
GoodReads meta-data is 320 pages, rated 3.90 by 1801 litizens.
Genre: krimi
Verdict: superb (again).
Aurelio Zen is on the job again, returning to his home town, Venice, to do a lucrative favour for an old friend. He conceals his true purpose in a several tissues of lies.
The favour is to investigate the disappearance of a wealthy American several months earlier. Zen’s cover is that he has been sent from distant Rome to investigate the Contessa’s complaints about intruders in her decaying mansion. He calls in some favours to assure himself that there is nothing to find about the American. He simply left. Now all he has to do is go through some motions and then collect his fee. Contessa is an honourary title for an elderly widow who complains of nocturnal visitations, which the local police put down to her dementia.
Knowing well the slipshod ways of the Questura, Zen has no trouble with his masquerade. His task is made easier by a national political crisis upsetting the usual ways of (not) doing things. In this context, other officers mind their own business, and leave him alone with the orders he forged for himself. As usual he trusts no one and uses the fax machine of a family friend rather the one at the Questura.
The atmosphere of Venice in February is cold and wet. The fog obscures reality while it penetrates stone and flesh. In this world, nothing is as it seems. And even when Zen peels aways the last layer the mystery remains. Nothing ever changes.
This title is fourth in the series and it is compelling. The more so since I read it while in Venice, though the weather was much better at the time. I recognised many of the streetscapes through which Zen walked, many of floating vaporetto stages (San Marco) on which he waited, some of the Venetian cuisine (nero pasta) he ate, and some of the museums (Accadamia) he passed. I first read this title and all the others in the series many years ago, after returning from a semester in Firenze.
Michael Dibdin
Each title in the series is set in a different region of Italy, and each offers something of a travelogue in the rich details of the setting which combine to explain some of what happens. However, the picture it presents of Italy is tainted to say the least. Incompetence, corruption, and indifference are the hallmarks. Senior police officers are mainly interested in tailoring. Politicians are uniformly corrupt. Citizens learned long ago to use the blind eye. The cynicism is pervasive. Yet Zen is a Sisyphus who does the best he can in this distorted world.
Although we liked the 2011 three-part television series, it makes Zen a much younger man, than he is on the page. Zen does not contact Inspector Brunetti when in Venice. Too bad.
GoodReads meta-data is 330 pages, rated 3.72 by 486 litizens.
Genre: Mystery.
Verdict: All trip and no arrival.
The opening invokes Chaucer’s Fourteenth Century world of the Canterbury Tales with the young prelate, Fairfax, riding through rain to a distant valley where the local priest has died. The job is to bury the priest in a Christian fashion, reassure the locales, and return within two days. Ah huh. The weather is miserable and gets worse. The rain leads to landslides and he has difficulty in finding the valley and getting into it. I felt wet just reading it.
The language and mōres are archaic. The Christian Church is almighty and Fairfax is one of its lowliest servants. But even so he is set apart from the primitive villagers, none of whom can read or write, and if cleanliness is next to godliness, they are a long way off. Work and prayer are their only pass times. A wheeled wagon is the most advanced technology they have and there are few of those.
In order to deliver a eulogy for the dead parson, Fairfax tries to learn about him by inquiring of the locals, and examining his belongings. It is in the latter that the plot thickened for he finds strange objects, and many forbidden books on the ancients. Among these relics are plastic items and a small sheet of metal with that most dreaded of symbols on it, an apple with a bit taken out of it! [Gasp!]
In further investigation Fairfax learns that the parson made no secret of his fascination with The Time Before and collected relics while rambling through the valley. Yet the mere possession of a plastic straw would lead to his excommunication or worse – he could be made to watch Pox News. Did he rely on the isolation of the valley to shield him from the long arm of the Church in ferreting out heretics.
Yes, an apple minus a bite. Get it yet? Ask Bill Gates. I had to read the first reference to plastic twice for the light to go on.
From this point on the text becomes more explicit about the cataclysm God visited on humanity because of too much or too little science centuries ago. The Church rejects all science and technology, teaching, nay, enforcing quietism and acquiescence in God’s mysterious ways – infant mortality, women dying in child birth, cuts leading the fatal infections, and the like. All very Fifteenth Century, post apocalypse.
While Fairfax recoils from the parson’s heretical pursuits, the suspicion grows that the parson was murdered. That seems farfetched until Fairfax finds the local Church registers have disappeared, four massive volumes recording the births, marriages, and deaths in the valley for a millennium. This mystery and the consequences of the weather lead him to stay in the valley longer than planned.
While some of the locals try to urge him on his way, none too subtlety, others seem to want him to stay. For the latter is it because they want a priest, or is it because they want something from him. He cannot tell.
Thereafter it is all trip and no arrival. There is much rain and mud as Fairfax and company try to dig up the past, though quite why is lost on this reader. It is Ypres without the context.
E. M. Forester used this premise in a short story, ‘The Machine Stops’ as did Isaac Asimov in Foundation and Empire without the mud. In this case The Cloud failed and everything was lost. There is no substitute for saving to the local drive, and backing up on hard disks galore! Though that is easier said than done.
