Reviews

A lifeboat is stationed at the tiny port of Mousehole in Wales, about two and a half miles south of the better known Penzance -- at least if you're a fan of Gilbert & Sullivan.

You've probably never heard of the town, unless you're fan of director Harry Watt; he made a film in 1936 about Frank Blewitt, a fisherman and a member of the lifeboat crew -- as he is here. In the 13th century, the improbably named Mousehole was a major port, judging by the revenue from licensing of fishing boats, more than that from nearby Penzance, Newlyn, or other towns. It gradually fell in importance, and in the 20th century was amalgamated with Penzance.

Dennis O'Keefe can't stomach defending men he knows to be guilty, so he joins D. A. Adolphe Menjou's office. His boss is pleased with his work until he loses a case. Menjou thinks his mind isn't on his business, so he investigates and discovers O'Keefe is in live with Marguerite Chapman. She was tried for murder in Kansas City, but beat the rap. Menjou thinks she did it, and sends O'Keefe to Italy to get a witness. While he's gone, Miss Chapman marries her boss and the local mob's, George Coulouris. O'Keefe returns, finds out what happened, and quits.

It all runs back to Phillips Lord's radio series of the same name, and with an involved and noirish plot, this runs along pretty well. A good part of that can be attributed to the cast, which includes Michael O'Shea, Jeff Donnell, Steve Geray, and Ralph Morgan. Although as a mystery it's no great shakes, the fast pace keeps things interesting.

Retired mine owner C. Henry Gordon has isolated himself in his home, with his daughter, his sister, and his son. When a black doll turns up, he calls in his former partners and they discuss a dead man. Then Gordon is killed, and sheriff Edgar Kennedy shows up to bumble his way through the investigation. Thankfully, there's private detective and chef Donald Wood on hand, to woo Gordon's daughter, Nan Grey, and point out the obvious mistakes in observation that Kennedy makes.... except when he's standing on Kennedy's foot.

It's the second of Universal's CRIME CLUB movies, and it has a good if wordy script from William Edward Hayes' mystery novel. Director Otis Garrett is by no means the best director in the world for his first time holding the megaphone, but he had been a skilled editor and knows how to push the movie along at a good pace, leaving his actors to say the words well. With Doris Lloyd, John Wray, Addison Richards, Holmes Herbert, and William Lundigan.

Boris Karloff is executed by the state, then lawyer Ricardo Corrtez proves he didn't do it. So scientist Edmund Gwenn brings him back from the dead, which causes the big shots on both sides of the law to worry he will try to kill them.

Warner Brothers didn't produce many horror movies. When they did in the 1930s, they usually handed te assignment to Michael Curtiz. He usually turned out something visually interesting. Here, however, the limits of visual inventiveness are limited to using stuff from Universal's Frankenstein movies, especially around the resurrection scene. In story terms, there is an attempt to get from Karloff what happened while he was dead, but he's understandably reticent under the Hays Code.

Dolly Lupone gets off the bus and asks people for directions. Lewin Fitzhamon offers to take her where she wants to go, but instead enslaves her, whips her, and forces her to beg for him.

It's clearly a rather abbreviated and bowdlerized tale of the abduction of women e White Slave Trade, with a handsome man rescuing Miss Lupone at the end. It's very primitive, and a bit backwards by the standards of the day, but there's something charming about its absurdity. Fitzhamon would direct more than five hundred movies for Cecil Hepworth by the time he quit in 1914, among them the enormously popular RESCUED BY ROVER. He died in 1961 at the age of 92.

The John Gilman, a trawler out of Aberdeen, sets out on Friday. It's an unlucky day, but out they go, and run into a storm that nearly sinks them. In fact, they have to tell Wick Radio that they don't need salvage; that would mean they lose all their cargo.

The other IMDb commenter seems uncertain if Wick Radio was run by the British Post Office, which would make it a proper subject for the GPO's film unit. Perhaps the copy he looked at lacked the ending, which makes it clear that the PostOffice does run these stations, allowing the ships on the sea to keep in touch.

It's produced by Cavalcanti, and directed by Harry Watt, director of the classic documentary NIGHT MAIL. I see the roots of the sort of movie that Watt and others in his group would make during the War, showing Britons just doing their work under desperate situations.

London can take it, we are informed by Humphrey Jennings, but Dover is quite all right. The camera may stare at the German-occupied cliffs of Calais twenty miles off. The people in Dover have other things to do, like go roller-skating or take in a movie. Meanwhile, under a barrage of German aircraft conducting the Battle of Britain, the people of Dover man the anti-aircraft batteries and have second jobs. The shopgirl runs the ambulance, and so forth.

That's the message the GPO Crown Unit sent out to movie theaters: deal with the situation, and we'll sort it out later. All those stockpiled posters reading "Keep Calm And Carry On" never had to be used.

American detective Edmund Lowe is traveling in Europe. He falls in with love interest Constance Cummings, and the two get tangled up in a mystery involving some train wrecks, a dead man, and a peace organization.

I was struck by the numerous plot elements and situations that Hitchcock had and would use. A comparison and listing of them would be the sort of thing that some one might undertake in search of, if not a thesis, then a good grade on a paper in a film course. Many of these similarities, I believe, can be attributed to the writers of this movie: Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder have the primary screenplay credits.

There's also a great train crash sequence lifted from the out-takes of 1929's The Wrecker. Over all it's a fine movie, even if it lacks the visual flair and mordant humor that Hitchcock would have given it.

Warren William sells hair tonic and such at medicine shows, with the aid of Allen Jenkins and Clarence Muse. After seeing a mind reader in a carnival, he decides to get into that racket, and soon has a great crystal-ball scam, with "private readings" on the side. Unfortunately for this racket, he falls in love with Constance Cummings. She insists he give up the phony business, so he does. They get married. He's a bust as a Fuller Brush man, so it's back to the swami racket.

It's hard to believe that anything this cynical came from the man who wrote the lushly romantic ONE WAY PASSAGE, but Wilson Mizner did both. Considering he was hiding out in Hollywood, on the run from people he had sold Florida swamp land to, I figure this is what went on in his mind while he told the pretty stories to the suckers. It has the usual sparkling Warner Brothers cast, and even Robert Greig gets a role that isn't a butler!

Neil McCallum breaks his brother, Aldo Ray, and three others out of prison. Ray wants a retrial, and talks about getting the public on his side, while the others just want away, but go along, with grumbling. But the boat they are on wrecks its piston, and they put up at Fort Denison in Sidney Harbor, aka, Pinchgut Island. They take the keeper, his wife and daughter hostage, and plan to get away the following evening, after the tourists have left. But that goes wrong, too, and they come up with a third plan: there are shells inside the disused fort, and a working gun, and a ship in the harbor with 15,000 tons of explosives. A shell in that ship will destroy miles and miles of Sidney. The authorities are paralyzed. They could destroy everyone in the fort, but then what would public opinion say about the keeper and his family? The only man who can order a retrial for Ray is out of town and refuses to act.

The last movie produced by Ealing Studios under Michael Balcon is in no wise a comedy, although there are some funny bits as the harbor area is evacuated. Instead, it's about the men under pressure, the authorities who refuse to budge because of red tape and conviction, and the increasingly frenzied behavior of Ray, as his brother expresses doubts.

Director Harry Watt had become a director in the GPO unit under Humphrey Jennings. He directed the fine NIGHT MAIL, and did uncredited direction on LONDON CAN TAKE IT. During the War he moved to Ealing. After the War he directed their overseas movies. After this, he went to TV and eventually back into documentary work. He died in 1987 at the age of 80.

Gordon Harker gets out of prison from his latest turn, having heard about a fabulous piece of emerald jewelry that was stolen and is still around. He goes to the home of Lord Gerald Barry, hoping to find it. He is mistaken for an investigator, bribed by everyone in the house to cover up their indiscretions, and serves the cause of love, justice, and his own pocketbook in the process.

For a Julius Hagen production, it's rather lush, from a play by Edgar Wallace, with Betty Stockfield, Jane Carr, Geraldine Fitzgerald (in her third film appearance), and Sebastian Shaw, young and slim enough to play the juvenile -- I'm used to him in the late 1950s, where 'portly' is the kindest way to describe him. Harker has a lot of fun in the lead in a variation of registers, wandering about, accepting large sums of money, biffing a couple of lags who also want the loot, and falling into luck with barely concealed astonishment. Perhaps it had been pre-sold to Universal under the Kinematograph Act, and Hagen decided to spend the money to begin his upgrading of product. In any case, it's the best print of any talkie directed by Henry Edwards I've seen, and definitely worth your time.

Popeye and Olive Oyl go into a sporting goods store, where he tries to teach her self defense with a pair of boxing gloves. While Olive is losing to the stationary equipment, the well-built lady sales clerk vamps Popeye with a Mae West voice until the women get into a fight.

This is one of my favorite Popeye cartoons, for its real message, Jack Mercer's singing the song that seemed to show up in all the Popeye cartoons in Popeye's voice, and the large number of gags as Olive loses to the equipment and to her romantic competition. Plus it's always good to see one of the cartoons in which a fight between Popeye and Bluto is the point.

Marlene Dietrich scams a very valuable pearl necklace out of a Parisian jeweler. She drives to Spain, continually encountering vacationing American engineer Gary Cooper, spattering mud on him, requiring him to fix her auto horn, getting the pearls over the border by slipping them into his coat pocket, and finally stealing his car. Before she can recover the pearls,, he vanishes, and she has to explain to her confederate, John Halliday, that she doesn't have the pearls. Fortunately, Cooper shows up in search of payment for his car.

It starts off grandly with as wonderful a confidence trick as I've ever seen, sags a bit, and then picks up again, with Halliday giving a marvelous performance as Cooper and Miss Dietrich inevitably fall in love. Despite Frank Borzage being the director, it shows the hand of its producer, Ernst Lubtisch, with a couple of his typical "Lubitsch touches" that delight the observant viewer with their brisk, visual way of reducing a thousand words to a single picture.

Miss Dietrich needed a success, now that her partnership with Von Sternberg had broken up. Alas, despite efforts Paramount took, her popularity continued to slide, and in May of 1938, she would be labeled "box office poison".... and a year later would rebound with a comic variation on her screen persona in DESTRY RIDES AGAIN. It had very little to do with the quality of her vehicles. This one is a delight almost 90 years later.

Beautiful, wealthy Joan Collins is shipwrecked on a desert island with pompous professor Robertson Hare, Irish stoker Kenneth More, and journalist George Cole. All three men go gaga for Miss Collins and fight among themselves.

It's a purely mechanical comedy with all three men offering various stereotypes, and Miss Collins somehow never dirtying or damaging her one dress. I quickly grew tired of their bickering, and even of Peter Sellers, who is present if not in the flesh, at least in the voice as the voice of the parrot -- actually a cockatoo.

It's written and directed by Noel Langley from a novel by Norman Lindsay. Langley is best remembered as one of the writers of 1939's The Wizard of Oz. He died in 1980 at the age of 68.

Kay Francis works for Traveler's Aid in San Francisco, helping people get to where they are going to, whether they're mail-order brides from overseas, or girls who think they can't go home with the baby from the dead husband her family disapproved of. George Brent is in charge of building the Golden Gate Bridge. Naturally they fall in love, and he wants her to quit her silly job, which she won't, so bye! Meanwhile protection racketeer Barton MacLane wants $5,000 a month, which Brent says no to. So Maclane gets some of his workers drunk, falling off the construction site to become splatters far below, and blaming Brent.

It's got a provenance that includes Frank Wead. That explains the muscular side of things, with men riveting red-hot rivets, and using an oxy-acetylene torch to light their cigarettes. All very phallic. But most of the time it seems like a Public Service Announcement for Traveler's Aid, which is doing good work even as Brent scoffs, and is still doing good work as I do this. Most of the mysticism is missing from this Frank Borzage movie, but what remains is a well-paced movie, with funny and sad vignettes, and a lynching at the end. Too bad the prowl cars pull up as it begins.

Pippa Scott and Majel Barrett are newly graduated teachers. Given their youth, they have a hard time landing jobs, but finally get one at a school in the countryside, where they'll be teaching classes filled with the children of migratory workers; it's a rough element, but rewarding. On the way there, their car breaks down. They are rescued by Robert Harland. There are sparks between him and Miss Scott. Imagine her state of mind when she discovers he's one of her students. Despite her determination to do the right thing, Harland pursues her, causing a lot of gossip.

For a release from Paramount, this was shocking for the era in a way that, had the teacher been a man and the student a girl, it wouldn't have been. Even with the crumbling Production Code, this was a tough subject for 1958. The years have passed, though, and we've seen headlines like this, including cases in which the married teacher carried on an affair with the high-school student. Given the fact that nothing really happens, the impact has died down over the decades. As a result, it's more the portrait of an era than of two people.

In this episode of Robert L. Ripley's newspaper feature transferred to film, we are confronted with the usual hodge-podge of facts odd and unbelievable. They include a dog cemetery, a Georgia golf course that incorporates trenches from the Civil War, a violin made entirely of match sticks, and a house on the ocean.

For the second time, Ripley is present in a pith helmet to announce that he's on a journey around the world in search of more odd facts, and that Leo Donnelly will drone the narration to us. If true, this indicates that the oddities were collected when Riley was unavailable, and that other people could do his work just as well as he.

In this MGM cartoon written by Homer Brightman and directed by Michael Lah, Droopy and Butch are a pair of gold miners. They have never struck paydirt, until today. Now, instead of the share-and-share-alike bonhomie they showed under hardship, Butch wants all the gold, and tries to kill Droopy in various ways. All of which fail, of course.

I'm not sure how Homer Brightman came to write this; his home turf was Walter Lantz' cartoon factory. However, the gags average pretty poor, although there is one excellent one. Nether does the cheap design and execution of the visuals please me.

It was, of course, not really the fault of the cartoon makers; budgets had plummeted so much that they couldn't do good work. But that doesn't make this cartoon any better.

Warren William stars as Michael Lanyard, the Lone Wolf. Long retired from his safecracking days, he is asked by Ralph Morgan to open a safe for $10,000. When he refuses, he is let go.... and framed as the man who broke into it and stole some War Department secret plans. When he is not trying to clear his name, he is being stalked by senator's daughter Ida Lupino, pursued by Rita Hayworth, and dealing with daughter Virginia Weidler. Who's the mother> That's never very clear, although her absence now is.

It's a semi-remake of 1929's THE LONE WOLF'S DAUGHTER. Without having looked at that, I imagine it had a certain *ahem* pre-code looseness to it that was no longer possible, In the meantime, we are confronted with a fine cast, including uncredited turns by Vernon Dent, Bud Jamison, and Jack Norton. Therefore I am mildly embarrassed to be unable to explain why I don't like it. There's not a thing in it that doesn't work -- although extreme undercranking to make William a man who will fight three others barehanded and almost win seems wrong. Maybe it's Brandon Tynan as a senator who wants to go hunting the bad guys. Whatever it is, despite the competence in every department, I don't like it.

Jean-François Calvé receives an amphora from a young girl while vacationing in Sardinia. A few years later, he learns that there was an almost legendary shipwreck with Phoenician amphorae filled with gold coins a couple of thousand years ago. He takes the amphora to the lecturer, who confirms it is a Phoenician one. Calvé decides that there are other amphorae down there, with hundreds of millions of francs worth of gold. He raises enough money to hire cigarette smuggler Howard Vernon and his boat for half the loot. When they arrive at Sardinia, he discovers that the girl has grown up to be Brigitte Bardot in her second movie. Eventually he will find out who he can trust.

Willy Rozier wrote and directed this as a straight adventure story, with Calvé exceedingly naive, and Mlle Bardot extremely fetching in her itsy-bitsy bikini. Cinematographer Michel Rocca shoots Miss Bardot and the ancient-looking rocks of Sardinia with equal verve, which should keep the audience distracted from the lack of novelty in the story, even though they'll have to wait for more than half the movie before seeing La Bardot.

What would you do if you had a handheld time machine that would let you go back ten minutes? In Sean Astin's case, he uses it to perfect his pickup of the cute bank cashier he's been obsessing on for months. What he doesn't know is that FBI agents Ivana Milicevic and Kevin Otto have been trailing him as a potential security risk --justified, it seems, because he has removed the time-travel device from a national laboratory. And what none of them know is that Vinnie Jones and his all-British crew are going to rob the bank, gun blazing.

It's a very pleasant little story that would have rated high in the rankings in a mid-1940s pulp SF magazine of the better sort. Astin looks bewildered. Jones snarls. The others try to look effective, and it all sorts out satisfactorily in the end.

When I deal with sf, I try to look for the little things, and I was astonished at how much things have changed in the two decades since this was made. There are lines at the bank! The time machine is referred to as a 'PDA' (for those of you too young to remember, that was short for "Personal Digital Assistant")!

Arno Frisch is an ordinary-looking teenager. He lives with his parents in an apartment decorated in similar shades of grey. He is a member of the school's chorus. He gets in trouble for punching his friend. One day he brings a girl home and kills her with a bolt gun. When his parents find out, they decide to cover it up; it would be a disgrace.

Michael Haneke's movie makes me want to blurt out technical terms like sociopathy, anomie, and so forth to explain what happens. I think Haneke wanted to elicit those terms to toss them aside for simpler, clearer motivations: boredom, evil, lack of conscience. In many ways he takes apart Werner Herzog's views of evil in glorious shots and reduces it to something small, grey, and blankly unaware: people living in a society where nothing is expected of them except to not make a fuss, and not get caught. Herzog's evils, carried through successfully, will yield huge rewards. Haneke's evils have no reward, people just do them because they're evil. There's no sense of consequentialism, no defense that the ends justify the means.

Charles Prince is an inept butler, so he is fired. He goes and gets a job at a restaurant, where he discovers his former employer in a tryst with a young woman who's clearly prepared to be no better than she is, and snatches a love letter from the boss to the girl. He uses this to reinsert himself into his former home, where he drinks the master's wine, smokes the master's cigars, and insults the master's cook.

It must have been delicious for the lower classes attending this to watch Prince revenge himself on their behalf, and he carries off the role with such rude behavior that no sympathy for him is tenable. It goes on for a trifle longer than I cared for, but over all, it's a fine one-reel comedy.

A man is sleeping in his bed. A monkey -- actually, a man in a monkey costume -- enters, wakes him up and attacks the man.

Which raises a multitude of questions mostly involving in why the monkey is doing this, or if that is, indeed, supposed to be a monkey, and not a man in a monkey costume, as it so clearly is. Is it part of some longer story, like the early Sherlock Holmes novels, filled with sinister lascars, snakes hiding in bed pulls, and a missing fortune in gems?

Unfortunately, there seems to be no way of telling what, if any of that is actually the case. I suspect it was simply meant to be an imitation of one of Melies' early "Haunted Inn" shorts. And blurry, too.

James Olson was the first man to land on Mars. When the corporation shifted from exploration to tourism, he quit and now runs a salvage operation that is going bust. However, Ori Levy wants him to crash an asteroid into the moon's surface, which is illegal, but a slight nudge will make it look happenstance. Then Levy can scoop up the six thousand tons of sapphires it contains. But there are other people interested.

It's a decent enough story and even notes some of its absurdities, like what that amount of sapphires would do to the market. Hammer spent good money on things like excellent miniatures, and the costumes by Carl Toms clearly inspired Emma Porteus' work for Gerry Anderson -- or perhaps vice versa. Roy Ward Baker did his usual highly competent job of direction, and even if Olson isn't particularly good as the misanthropic pilot, you have Catherine Schell to look at.