Walt at Random

The She-Beast (orig. La sorella di Satana), 1966, b&w. Michael Reeves (dir.), Barbara Steele, Kohn Karlsen, Ian Ogilvy, Mel Welles. 1:19.

We start with a drunken guy lurching down a tunnel, picking up an odd semi-book and reading about the death of a witch in 1766—not an innocent this time, but an evil woman who killed children. The townsfolk, led by the priest, grab her, tie her to a dunking chair, pound a stake through her and then repeatedly dunk her in a lake as she curses the entire town—although you’d think the stake would have done the job. The townsfolk seem to be doing some early version of The Wave or some odd form of aerobic dance while this is happening. Meanwhile, a little person and a regal sort watch this from a nearby hillside.

Back to the present, where a handsome young couple of Brits find themselves lost in Transylvania (where the flashback was also set), getting out of their Beetle to check maps. A loutish cop happens by on a bicycle and points them to the nearby town with “lots of hotels,” only one of which is open. They go to this dump of a hotel, where they find the drunken guy (now sober and regal in bearing) swinging on an adult-size swing set and a loutish hotel owner. Since it’s 40 miles to the next town and it’s getting dark, they decide to stay the night—on what turns out to be their honeymoon. Well, the hotel owner is also a voyeur (and, we later find, would-be rapist), and things start getting strange…and somehow, the next morning as they drive off, the car won’t steer properly and they end up in the lake. She’s drowned (presumably), he’s not—and the trucker who saw the accident takes both of them back to the hotel, saying not to call the police because they’ll just cause trouble.

That’s just the beginning. The witch has taken on the spirit of the wife; the regal guy—who turns out to be Count Von Helsing, the Von Helsings having stayed around since offing the vampires so as to deal with other demonic issues—brings her (now in witch form) back to life as part of some convoluted exorcism scheme (she wasn’t properly exorcised the first time around), and she escapes and starts killing descendants of the original villagers. Von Helsing drives a bright yellow Model T (or some other crank-started car), for what that’s worth.

So far, a straightforward horror film…but then it descends into a strange combination of farce, presumed commentary on the incompetence of Communist officials (since this was set in Romania), car chases (with scooters somehow involved), Keystone Kop antics and more. Eventually, things work out, but it’s a truly odd third-rate flick that seems to have started out as horror, run out of plot ideas (or money?) and turned into some strange mélange. In case you’re a Barbara Steele fan: She’s barely even in this movie, only there for perhaps ten minutes total. The print’s not very good, the acting’s no better, and I honestly can’t give this mess more than $0.75.

Manfish, 1956, b&w (this print). W. Lee Wilder (dir.), John Bromfield, Lon Chaney, Jr.=, Victor Jory, Barbara Nichols, Tessa Prendergast. 1:28.

Airplane (propeller-driven) lands at Montego Bay airport. Guy gets off, goes to constabulary, says he’s from Scotland Yard there to pick up a prisoner. The local cop says he can’t have the prisoner and tells a story…which is the picture (although people getting on the airplane show up over the closing credits).

The story: Four guys on a turtle boat (that is, people who grab and sell giant turtles, presumably still legal in 1956), with it becoming clear that the captain is sort of a jackass—gambler, doesn’t pay his crew, about to lose the boat over debt. The name of the boat? Manfish, thus the name of the movie. The two divers discover a skeleton in the water, panic, return to boat. The captain finds the skeleton, takes a bottle and message out of the bony hand. The message is half of a treasure map written in French.

All else evolves from that, and includes an aged Brit living on an out island with his local woman, who turns out to have the other half of the map. The two (plus the boat’s skipper, regularly derided as stupid and ignorant by the captain but clearly the best man of the lot) go hunting for the treasure—and find it, the old guy only staying alive because he’s memorized the map and burnt both halves, and says there’s more (and much bigger) treasure elsewhere.

A big portion of the film has to do with a murder, the long time required to hide the body, and a leaking scuba tank that gives us a Tell Tale Heart scenario (yes, the movie credits say it was based on that and another Poe story, The Gold Bug). Murder eventually does out, and the only character I found at all sympathetic—the skipper—ends up doing the best of anybody.

Here’s the thing: This is a slow-moving, almost languid film, but with lots of scuba diving in coral reefs, climbing over scenic rivers and waterfalls and other scenery. (Never mind the director’s bizarre method of cutting—rapid sweeps from one scene to another.) I thought: “This would be a much better film in color”—still seriously flawed, but at least a decent flick. Then we get to the very last credit: Color by Deluxe. Not in this print it ain’t, and the print’s badly damaged at points as well. Too bad; color scenery (in a really good print) would have helped a lot. As it is, the best thing this has going for it may be Lon Chaney—appearing with that name, although it’s apparently Lon Chaney, Jr.

The Devil Bat, 1940, b&w. Jean Yarbrough (dir.), Bela Lugosi, Suzanne Kaaren, Dave O’Brien, Guy Usher, Yolande Donlan, Donald Kerr. 1:08.

Bela Lugosi as a mad scientist—mad in both the “really upset about something” sense and the slightly-deranged sense: Check. Absurd method of taking revenge on one’s enemies—in this case, by getting them to test a new and fairly pungent after-shave lotion (or perfume), then releasing a humongous bat (made larger by electrical stimulation in a classic mad scientist’s lair) that hates the scent and kills the victims: Check. Generally implausible plot and second-rate acting: Check.

And yet, this one’s not so awful. OK, it’s thoroughly implausible—Lugosi is portrayed as the Beloved Family Doctor who’s also the Brilliant Chemist whose concoctions form the basis for the town’s primary employer, a cosmetics company whose founders paid him $10,000 for the formulas because he didn’t want to be part of the company. (But he frequently speaks as though he’s part of the company, and is still concocting formulas for them.) He feels cheated, so he’s out to slay the two founding families. Enter an out-of-town reporter and his photographer sidekick (nicknamed “One-Shot” and I think he only manages one good shot in the entire movie). Oh, did I mention a beautiful young woman who’s part of a founding family, and who has a nice-looking maid? Do I need to go much further? (The less said about the quality of the special-effects bat, the better.)

Somehow, it works better than most of Lugosi’s mad-scientist, low-budget horrors. I’ll give it $1.25.

The Devil’s Messenger, 1961, b&w. Herbert L. Strock (dir.), Lon Chaney Jr., Karen Kadler, Michael Hinn, Ralph Brown, John Crawford. 1:12.

A curious little trilogy of temptation, framed by the gateway to Hell, with Lon Chaney Jr. as the friendly old gatekeeper (or Satan, maybe) who greets people, looks them up in his big Rolodex, comments on what got them there and sends them through the open door to the fiery pits. Lots of people waiting in line coming down some rocky stairs…

And there’s a young woman, Satanya, who took her own life. The gatekeeper offers her a deal: Make a delivery Back Up Above (which turns out to be three deliveries) and The Tribunal will consider her case—after all, suicide doesn’t hurt a bunch of other people. So she does, and each delivery leads to murder and death. First, there’s a photographer who, when he meets a beautiful woman at a snowy farmhouse where his agent has ordered him to vacation, somehow finds it necessary to kill her…and deals with the ghostly outcomes badly. Second, there’s a frozen woman found in a glacier by Swedish miners and one scientist’s obsession with her. Finally, Satanya goes back to deal with the former lover whose rejection caused her suicide, in a tale that involves crystal balls (always the tool of the devil, don’cha know). Apparently, this is a feature version of three episodes from a Swedish TV series; it’s assembled into a not-too-bad combination (although Chaney doesn’t really do much of anything). The tacked-on ending is, well, a waste of footage.

Unfortunately, the sound’s frequently distorted and the print badly digitized. That makes what might otherwise be a nice little trio of horror tales difficult to watch, and reduces its score to $0.75.

Two discs this time—because three of the four movies on Disc 5 are Alfred Hitchcock movies and not rereviewed here.

Disc 5

The Man Who Knew Too Much.

Previously reviewed. $1.75.

The Lodger.

Previously reviewed. $0.75.

The Farmer’s Wife.

Previously reviewed. $1.50.

Legacy of Blood (orig. Blood Legacy), 1971, color. Carl Monson (dir.), Rodolfo Acosta, Merry Anders, Norman Bartold, Ivy Bethune, John Carradine, Richard Davalos, Faith Domergue, Buck Kartalian, Brooke Mills, Jeff Morrow, John Russell. 1:30 [1:22]

The setup is familiar: Hated wealthy father dies, children (four, two of them with spouses) and servants (three) gather to hear the will…and find that they must all live in the mansion for one week in order to inherit anything. Oh, and if any of the children die, the others will split the remainder—and if they all die, the servants (otherwise rewarded a peculiar annuity) get it all. (The peculiar annuity: Each servant gets $1 million in the form of $500 a month as long as they keep maintaining the house—but at that rate, and with no interest at all, the payments would last 166 years, which seems absurd. As it happens, $500 a month in 1971 is roughly equal to $2,600 now—not a fortune, but since they also get room and board, not terrible. Still, exchanging that for the $136 million to be split among the offspring does provide one solid motive for multiple murders.)

They’re quite a collection. One servant, Igor, is nutty as a loon and a masochist to boot (or whip); the cook is a sober woman who served as a substitute mother; the third, a handsome chauffeur, has a lamp made from a Nazi who stuck him with a bayonet and a large collection of Nazi memorabilia. As for the children…well, there’s a strong hint of incest in one case, leaving one attractive (and married) woman who’s a basket case and a young man who’s loonier than the butler.

I won’t bother with the plot. You can guess how it works out (or doesn’t), and to the extent you’re wrong it doesn’t much matter. The few gory scenes are shown multiple times to emphasize the gore. Otherwise, this is a remarkably slow-moving and dull story (and I like slow and dislike gore).

The print varies between mediocre and bad, but it’s decidedly better than the script, acting and direction. A reasonably strong cast is wholly wasted in this nonsense. Fortunately, this version is missing eight minutes—which means it was only an hour and 22 minutes that I’ll never get back or use for some better purpose like, say, Gilligan’s Island. Even fans of John Carradine will be disappointed: His dismal little role only take a few minutes. I’m being charitable to give this awful, incompetent picture $0.50.

Disc 6

The Werewolf vs. Vampire Woman (orig. La noche de Walpurgis), 1971, color. Leon Klimovsky (dir.), Paul Naschy, Gaby Fuchs, Barbara Capell, Andres Resino, Yelena Samarina, Patty Shepard. 1:35 [1:21]

Right off the bat, this film shows a rare level of intelligence among its characters. A medical examiner and friend go into this creepy place, at night, against the wishes of the friend, to do an autopsy on a body that’s been shot with two silver bullets because the townspeople believe it to be a werewolf. So the medical examiner, instead of conducting a usual autopsy, immediately digs out the two bullets to demonstrate how ridiculous the whole werewolf notion is, then turns away to have a cigarette…as the now-revived man turns wolf, kills the two, then goes off on a howl.

That’s right, it’s another cheapo horror flick where people demonstrate that they’re too dumb to live…and, with rare exceptions, don’t. Two young women (one, charmingly, named Elvira) working on their dissertation go off to the wilds of northern France looking for the grave of a centuries-old vampire/witch, get lost, wind up at a remote house with no electricity where a handsome “writer” is working on a manuscript. Before you know it (well, there’s some nonsense involving the writer’s deranged sister, but never mind), they’ve combined forces to locate the probable gravesite—at a crossroads, where all good witchgraves are located. The cover says clearly that the grave should not be disturbed until judgment day, so…of course…they remove the cover. Since this disturbs one of the women, she goes off (alone) to explore the abandoned church as the other two open the coffin…and, since they know that the only thing keeping the vampire dead is the silver cross piercing her body, the other woman pulls out the cross.

The rest of the picture’s pretty much consistent with this “we know that the worst possible thing to do is X, therefore we’d better do X right away!” approach. It features vampires sort of drifting across the ground, dream sequences, a touch of cheesecake and what passes for a happy ending in this nonsense. Badly filmed, poorly directed, badly scripted, generally poorly acted, and the lead does a nice job of ducking out of camera range for transitions from human to werewolf. The full version might be more coherent, but seems unlikely to be much better. (Based on IMDB reviews, I’m guessing the full version mostly has a lot of nudity, where the version here has perhaps half a second of partial nudity.) Charitably, $0.50.

The Phantom Creeps, 1939, b&w. Ford Beebe and Saul A. Goodkind (dir.), Bela Lugosi, Robert Kent, Dorothy Arnold, Edwin Stanley, Regis Toomey, Jack C. Smith. 1:18.

This review, written before looking anything up on IMDB, is valid only if this flick—certainly not a horror flick—is an edited-down version of a serial. In that case, the absurd jumps in logic and knowledge and general frenetic atmosphere make sense. Otherwise…well, let’s not go there.

Lugosi is Dr. Zorka, a mad scientist who has discovered an element (from a meteorite) with apparently unlimited and wildly varied powers, and intends to Rule The World with it, with the help of his henchman (who he rescued from prison and clearly regards as a tool). Let’s see: He has a very strange tall robot with the world’s worst face and the ability to very slowly claw somebody into brief submission; he has a device that can do painless surgery; he has a semi-invisibility device (it turns him into a big shadow), he has a bizarre combination of little discs and spiders that can set off little explosions that turn people or plants “dead” but not really (or, rather, comatose until brought out of it), he has a two-part combo of invisible gas and Z-ray gun that kills people, er, knocks them out, er… but can also destroy the lock on a safe. Oh, and there’s a neometer, which cops and spies both immediately know is a device to track the location of the secret element they’ve never heard of. It’s that kind of movie.

That’s right: Zorka has a big box of Unobtainium, and he’s out to either rule the world or destroy it! All else in this helter-skelter plot flows from that, with a climax in which he’s cackling like a proper Mad Scientist and tossing little capsules out of a plane that destroy a Zeppelin (!), explode a warehouse or two, and send a couple of ships to their doom.

Lugosi’s acting seems well-suited to this kind of live-action cartoon. There’s nothing in any sense coherent or sophisticated here, but it’s good cheap fun. And, yep, IMDB confirms that this was a serial, originally running 4:25 in 12 episodes. I suspect it would be a lot more fun spread out over three months. On that basis, maybe, $1.25.

A Scream in the Night, 1935, b&w. Fred C. Newmeyer (dir.), Lon Chaney Jr., Sheila Terry, Zarah Tazil, Philip Ahn, John Ince, Manuel Lopez, Richard Cramer. 0:58.

Not in any way a horror film, this is a mystery of sorts with Lon Chaney Jr. as a master of disguise. In this case, he plays two roles: The hunched-over, one-eyed (the other having been knifed), swarthy, not too bright owner of a grog shop in a lesser area of an Asian port town and a police detective—who then disguises himself as the bar owner. It’s all in service of catching an international thief who grabs his victims with nooses—and who’s now stolen the Tear of Buddha, a very special ruby, and kidnapped the girl who was trying to put the ruby in the bank.

Unfortunately, the movie is an incoherent mess, possibly because of missing pieces (although IMDB shows the same running time as what I saw), possibly because it’s really badly made. The rest of the police act in slow motion, resulting in a long action seen that shouldn’t have happened (and, of course, somehow has armed villains never using their weapons); the soundtrack’s a mess, and the movie’s sometimes barely visible. The plot can barely sustain a 15-minute featurette; at 58 minutes, the movie’s actually too long.The title seems random. At best, I’d give this $0.50.

The Crimes of Stephen Hawke, 1936, b&w. George King (dir.), Tod Slaughter, Marjorie Taylor, D.J. Williams, Eric Portman. 1:09.

Another Tod Slaughter melodrama, with Slaughter as an over-the-top villain (this time “The Spinebreaker,” who’s also a lovable old moneylender) busily chewing the scenery and laughing his evil laugh at the most inappropriate times—but this time with a twist.

To wit, the whole melodrama is cast as a recollection during a radio show—a radio show that begins with a very strange “singing the news” pair, Flotsam & Jetsam, and continues with an interview with a “pet butcher” who’s provided horsemeat—obtained one way or another—for cats for the last half century. Then the announcer welcomes Tod Slaughter, known for slaying hundreds and being executed hundreds of times in his many melodramas. Then…the show begins. And (not to give away the ending, but it’s not the real ending anyway) at the end, we cut back to the studio…where the announcer’s fallen into a deep slumber, leaving Slaughter to walk off by himself.

This “we know this is all tiresome and silly” frame somewhat inoculates the movie from what I might say otherwise—that is, Slaughter’s so over-the-top that it’s hard to deal with the movie. This one’s also an unusually good b&w print, and the story is certainly no sillier than usual. I’ll give it $1.

Half a Sinner, 1940, b&w. Al Christie (dir.), Heather Angel, John King, Constance Collier, Walter Catlett, Tom Dugan, Robert Elliott, Clem Bevans, Emma Dun, Henry Brandon. 0:59.

What a charmer! Sure, it’s a mystery of sorts—but it’s also a romantic comedy, nearly a screwball comedy and a caper movie. The plot’s really very simple: A 25-year-old schoolteacher, tired of wearing sensible clothes, glasses and “flats” (really modest heels), buys a nice well-fitting dress and hat and shocks her Granny by noting that she’s going to go wild—she’s going to have tea downtown!

One thing leads to another, and the next we know, she’s stolen a limo (that was already stolen), been flagged down by a handsome young man whose car has apparently broken down, discovered that there’s a corpse in the back seat, encountered (and escaped) the law and the crooks…and, well, it’s a fast-moving, satisfying plot. I don’t know any of the actors, but they all seem to be having a ball with this funny, fluffy flick. Notably, it’s based on a Dalton Trumbo story, before Trumbo was forced underground by HUAC. The print is excellent, and I give it the highest I’d give for an under-one-hour item: $1.25.

Guest in the House, 1944, b&w. John Brahm (dir.), Anne Baxter, Ralph Bellamy, Aline MacMahon, Ruth Warwick, Scott McKay. 2:01 [1:40]

No summary review because after 20 minutes I decided I wasn’t willing to watch this—life is too short. The title character was so absurdly strange, in a thoroughly unpleasant way, and the other characters so…well, unengaging, that I just couldn’t see watching the whole thing. (Sound problems and a strange, presumably-intentional, bit of having waves of light sweep through the interiors periodically, didn’t help.)

Looking at IMDB reviews, “nourish melodrama” may be the right label. I just found it uninteresting and simultaneously unpleasant. (Sorry, but I watch movies to be entertained; if a movie is neither entertaining nor engaging nor educational, I’ve got better uses for my time.) Your mileage may vary.

Ten Minutes to Live, 1932, b&w. Oscar Micheaux (dir., story, screenplay), Lawrence Chenault, A.B. DeComatheire, Laura Bowman, Willor Lee Guilford, Tressie Mitchell. 0:58.

This one’s a true curiosity—and it might have been better included in the Musicals set, since a substantial portion of the movie is the stage show at an upscale Harlem cabaret, with a troupe of eight frenetic dancers (apparently from the real Cotton Club), some singer-dancers, a hot band and a very odd set of comedians. There is a mystery of sorts—but, possibly due to technical problems, it’s difficult to make much of it. (I’ll never quite understand why Harlem nightclubs had black comics performing in blackface, but I assume that was authentic.)

What we have here is a black film from the early 1930s (that is, with an all African-American cast), one that appears to have been filmed mostly as a silent picture (except for the musical numbers), with some dialogue added later. Specifically, in one long sequence, the only dialogue comes from off-camera performers, who appear to be reading from a script they’ve never seen before. What we also have is a badly-framed picture that loses enough on all four sides to make important pieces of text illegible and with sound occasionally so bad that dialogue becomes nearly unintelligible. Oh, and once in a while the picture jumps out of synch, so there’s a black line midpicture with the lower half of a frame above and the upper half below.

I suspect this is a rarity (since most of these films never made it into mainstream theaters and were probably not preserved very well), and the musical sequences are certainly interesting. The acting…well, as I say, it’s an odd blend of sound and silent picture, and probably done with no real budget. Worth seeing as a historic curiosity and for the vintage musical numbers, but I couldn’t give it more than $0.75.

Fear in the Night, 1947, b&w. Maxwell Shane (dir.), Paul Kelly, DeForest Kelley, Ann Doran, Kay Scott, Charles Victor, Robert Emmett Keane. 1:12.

Two mysteries for the price of one!

The first is the noir mystery within the film. A young man (played by a 27-year-old DeForest Kelley), a bank cashier who lives in a hotel and whose sister and brother-in-law live nearby, finds himself in a strange and deadly dream…then wakes up to find items suggesting that it wasn’t just a dream, which would mean he’s murdered someone (in self defense). He seeks out his brother-in-law, a police detective, who tells him to shake it off.

Later, he (and his brother in law, and his sister, and his girlfriend) finds himself in a big house he shouldn’t know about—and there’s the room in his dreams, with a blood-stained wall where he thought he’d left a corpse. Suddenly his brother-in-law assumes he’s a cold-blooded killer and the whole “dream” thing was a ruse.

That’s as much of the plot as I’ll provide. It’s well-acted and keeps moving, even though you’ll have figured out half of the twist (and maybe all of it) well before it’s revealed. A good film. Kelley’s second film role and first starring role, and he does a fine job. (Apparently remade in the 50s as Nightmare, with Edward G. Robinson.)

The other mystery? The sleeve description—which makes this out to be a The Shadow/Lamont Cranston film about “the murder of a wealthy gentleman who was about to change his will.” There was no Lamont Cranston involved and, while there is a wealthy gentleman, he’s not a murder victim. (Usually in these cases, the sleeve describes another flick with the same title but, according to IMDB, there’s no Lamont Cranston movie with a title anything like “Fear in the Night.”) I’ve seen this before (the wrong flick being described on the sleeve), but usually they’d also get the star wrong—which they don’t. But that’s trivial. Pretty good film noir: $1.50.

A recent post–indeed, the most recent post–considered circumstances in which I’ll give up on an old movie.

Last Saturday, we started watching our Netflix movie of the week (the one we’d had longest) and, after ten minutes or so, took it off, packaged it to send back, and watched the other one instead. The other one got much worse reviews than the first one–for example. Rotten Tomatoes rates the one we didn’t watch at 71%, the one we did watch at only 43%.

I find myself silently screaming at the local TV critic sometimes, perhaps less now than over the past few years, when he was beating us over the head with The Great Show We Must Watch (sometimes “shows’), the show that was Serious Television. The name doesn’t matter; it changes from time to time. Pretty consistently, it’s a show I wouldn’t watch if you paid me–well, not unless you paid me pretty well. (Yes, in most cases, it’s a show I’ve seen at least one episode of, although in a couple cases I was unwilling to endure one episode.)

And I’m well aware that Proper Literary Folks would sniff at a lot of the stuff I check out from the library, certainly including the Bernie Rhodenbaar mysteries and maybe even including the Discworld books. (Maybe not: Pratchett seems to get a Bye from the Upholders of Serious Literature.)

The common thread

We watch our Saturday movies to be entertained or, occasionally, enlightened. Neither of us find lots’o'crashes terribly entertaining, or mean-spirited language, or casual violence, or… And, yes, we do find light romantic comedies entertaining if they’re at all well done. The first movie, a Gritty Con Drama, may have been better movie-making than the second–a quirky Romantic Comedy with a superb cast–but, for us, the first was offputting and not entertaining; the second was entertaining.

Note that “for us.” While I might raise broader questions about fans of certain kinds of horror movies (oh, you know the ones) and “snuff movies” of any sort, in general I no more question your taste than I allow you to dictate my taste.

We watch TV shows that we find entertaining and enjoyable (with, sometimes, digressions into Enlightening Programs on public TV). That almost always means cast members we find at least mildly sympathetic. It doesn’t hurt for the show to be reasonably well-crafted and lacking a howlingly overdone laughtrack; there’s a reason we watch very few half-hour sitcoms (How I Met Your Mother distinctly excepted).  It certainly means that we’re not sitting in front of the tube (it still is a tube, at least for another week or two) to Engage in Serious Drama; we’re there to be entertained. (“Reality” shows? Not so much…for us, that is.)

I read to be entertained and, more frequently than with visual media, enlightened or challenged–but I feel no obligation to read something because It’s Good For Me (or to avoid something because It’s Trash). (With newspapers and magazines, I read more for information, enlightenment and intellectual challenge–but a little entertainment along the way surely doesn’t hurt. And I will tell you that one high-minded monthly, which I decided to try as an airline-miles freebie, will definitely not be renewed: I don’t really need to be told, over and over, that everything I do is wrong and that I’m guilty of every crime against nature and humanity. That just gets old…and, I believe, self-defeating.)

Your mileage may vary

I sometimes think that TV critics feel the need to be Critics rather than Reviewers by stressing (over, and over, and over again) the Serious Shows in preference to even well-done fluff. I know that critics can show lots of hindsight–I will swear that there are dozens of critics (I believe including the local one) who never gave Buffy the Vampire Slayer a second glance until it was almost over and had been established as a Significant Show instead of Trashy Teenage Junk. (We watched it from the start. We’re starting the third pass…)

Reading video/home theater/etc. magazines, it’s become clear that most reviewers assume that real home theater is about spectacle–with “sound that keeps you on the edge of your seat.” Thus advice that you should spend more on speakers than on the TV, because Big Impressive Sound is at least half of the game. Not for us–because most of what we watch doesn’t involve Big Impressive Sound Effects. Again, that’s us–I have no reason to believe or desire that you’ll have the same tastes.

Rereading Crime and Punishment and seeking out more documentaries on the plight of whatever? More power to you. Maybe I’m a philistine. Maybe life is too short to worry much about that.

I know this: If I’m watching or reading or listening to a supposed Classic or Important Work and I don’t find anything that engages me on any level within the first (50-60 pages, 15-20 minutes/video, 2-3 minutes/audio), well, I’m gone.

Now there’s a portentous title!

The post, however, is more suitable for a hot, lazy holiday weekend. (I would say “3-day weekend,” but since I’m semi-retired, that’s sort of silly. Let’s just say “three days on which we try to stay away from highways and do without mail on Monday.”)

This little post is about a small decision, relating to the little essays I do about old movies in Mill Creek Entertainment packs (usually 50 movies, once 250 movies, sometimes smaller sets)–most of them either public domain or TV movies, but not necessarily all.

Here’s the decision:

Once in a while, I’m giving up

I know: Who cares? Fortunately, I also know that a few people enjoy the compilations in Cites & Insights (normally six discs or, for sets with fewer than six discs, the entire set), and maybe a few enjoy the single-disc summaries here as well.

And I usually enjoy watching the flicks and writing them up, even if they’re not all that good. Of course, sometimes the worst flicks (Apache Blood, to name an extreme case) are interesting to watch in an odd train-wreck-fascination way. The B “programmers,” roughly hour-long flicks, usually go by fast enough that watching them is no problem, and they’re fun to write up.

But…

I started watching Guest in the House yesterday–a 1944 full-length picture (2 hours and one minute in theaters, one hour and 40 minutes on the disc and in TV rerelease) with Anne Baxter, Ralph Bellamy and a fairly strong cast. And after 15-20 minutes, I stopped.

There’s precedent: Back in 2004, watching a bunch of movies that came free with a magazine/DVD subscription, I decided not to finish Bucket of Blood and Brain That Wouldn’t Die. Those were just too horrific (and bad) for my taste, and that may be true for some of the ones on the “Legends of Horror” 50-pack (although not so far).

This time, though, it wasn’t blood and gore. It was just plain annoying, uninteresting, and unentertaining–for me. I just couldn’t see slogging through another hour and twenty minutes of this “noirish melodrama” (as one IMDB reviewer put it). That was time I could spend listening to music, reading a book, taking a nap, staring out the window–or working on some project, for that matter. In short, “life is too short” for some movies, even though (to my wife’s dismay–but I do use headphones!) I sit through some movies that might be considered relatively worthless. (OK, so I think the whole “mining the public domain” thing Mill Creek does is interesting and worthwhile…)

So I’ll include a dummy listing, with the title, date, director, stars, timing, and–instead of a writeup and dollar rating–a note on why I didn’t watch it.

How often will this happen? Who knows?

That’s it. Portentous title. Trivial post. Enjoy your weekend…

The Mandarin Mystery, 1936, b&w. Ralph Staub (dir.), Eddie Quinlan, Charlotte Henry, Rita la Roy, Wade Boteler, Franklin Pangborn, George Irving, Kay Hughes. 1:06 [0:53]

This one’s a charmer—a relatively short, fast-paced Ellery Queen mystery (loosely) based on The Chinese Orange Mystery. A young woman arrives in New York with a uniquely rare stamp she’s agreed to sell to a doctor—who is investing his niece’s trust fund in rare stamps. As she’s arriving, she runs into Ellery Queen (Quinlan), a charming young PR man who was hoping to meet another woman but who will gladly chase after whoever’s available.

The stamp’s stolen before she can take it to the doctor; then she believe she’s retrieved it—from a dead thief (murdered in a locked room). Inspector Queen (Ellery’s father) arrives and the two of them, in very different ways, investigate a growing web of crimes including a second murder and stamp forgery, with enough suspects to make your head spin. Snappy dialogue, fast-moving, pretty decent acting (with Franklin Pangborn a hoot as the nervous hotel manager), in all a good time. It’s clearly a second feature/B movie, but a fun one—even with 13 minutes missing. $1.25.

High Voltage, 1929, b&w. Howard Higgin (dir.), William Boyd, Carole Lombard, Owen Moore, Phillips Smalley, Billy Bevan, Diane Ellis. 1:03.

Already reviewed as part of the 50 Movie Pack Hollywood Legends. Here’s what I said in Cites & Insights 9:1 (January 2009):

An odd title for an odd short flick with a fine cast. The setup requires a fair amount of disbelief: A coach or bus apparently going from Sacramento to Reno during a huge snowstorm. When it stops for gas, the station attendant says they’ll never make it through and should stop there, but the blowhard driver says he can make it. Passengers include one banker, one young woman on the way to meet her fiancée and a cop taking a woman (Carole Lombard) back East to serve out a prison sentence. The last two passengers are on their way to catch a train, as is (I believe) the young woman. The film is set in a time when there are not only buses but airplanes—but, apparently, either no train running from Sacramento east or the train’s so unreliable that it makes more sense to ride a bus out into a huge snowstorm. I suppose there was such a period, but it’s a little implausible.

Naturally, the bus gets stuck. Somehow, it’s 40 miles to the nearest city or town—but there’s a church close enough so the stranded group can see it and make their way there. Where they find a hobo (William Boyd), who (it turns out) is on the lam. (You may know William Boyd by the character he played in about 70 movies and 40 TV shows starting in 1935: Hopalong Cassidy. He’s a lot darker here!)

That’s the setup. The hobo has food but probably not enough for the ten days he estimates they’ll be trapped (based on nothing obvious). There’s jockeying for position, shoving around, threats…and mostly lots of talk and very little of anything else, although the hobo (who pretty much takes command) does manage to push them all out to get some fresh air, leading to two of them falling through ice (and being rescued). The hobo starts to go off in the night with the woman on her way back to prison (he knows of a ranger station ten miles away)—but when a plane starts circling overhead, he can’t go through with abandoning the others, and they agree to serve their time and move on from there. (Sorry for the plot spoilers, but there’s not much plot here to spoil.)

So I guess it’s a drama of tension among half a dozen stranded types. I suppose, but hardly enough tension to justify the title. Reasonably well acted. Some film damage. One real oddity: The opening credits refer to the characters as archetypes—The Boy, The Girl, The Detective, and so on—even though they all have names in the movie. Knowing the date does make a difference: This is a very early talkie. I’ll give it $1.

The Man Who Had Influence, 1950, b&w. Franklin J. Schaffner (dir.), Stanley Ridges, Robert Sterling, King Calder, Anne Bancroft. 0:59.

Not really a movie at all, and the sleeve’s clear about this: It’s a 1950 episode of Studio One, an early (live?) dramatic TV series—presented here including the three Westinghouse commercials within the story. It’s presumably a kinescope, that is, a film made from the TV broadcast, which helps explain the generally poor video quality (and sometimes poor audio quality).

The plot: We have an Influential Wealthy Lawyer—who’s backing a Senate candidate instead of running himself because he’s more powerful behind the scenes—and his absurdly overprivileged son, who’s always gotten away with everything because of his father and who just flunked out of college. He’s a drunkard but somehow has a fiancée who really should know better (she’s the daughter of the senatorial candidate).

After he comes home, he goes out with his fiancée, drinks too much, makes a play for the cute cigarette girl (notably, his fiancée is used to his leaving with somebody else!)…and the next thing we know, it’s the next morning, the car’s not at home, he is but doesn’t know what’s happened. What’s happened is a car crash and a dead cigarette girl, who he abandoned at the scene.

That’s the setup. The rest has to do with just how much influence the father has and how he gets it. It involves conversations with a copy who seems to spend his time in the jail cell with the son, playing cards and eventually bemoaning the fact that he shoulda been police chief but couldn’t be bought by the father…and a sort of redemption. Sort of.

I guess it’s golden age drama. Other than the achievement of doing this live, I can’t say that it’s all that wonderful—hammy, simplistic, and almost hard to watch. (There’s also something new on this and the next movie: A Mill Creek Entertainment logo in the bottom right of the picture for a few seconds every 20 minutes or so. I hope that was a temporary madness.) I’ll give it $0.75.

The Strange Woman, 1946, b&w. Edgar G. Ulmer (dir.), Hedy Lamarr, George Sanders, Louis Hayward, Gene Lockhart, Hillary Brooke. 1:40.

Bangor, Maine, 1824, a mostly-lawless logging town where the town drunk’s daughter is a handful—including an early scene where she nearly drowns a boy, then makes it look as though she saved him from drowning. She grows into a beauty, determined to marry a wealthy man—and manages, in the person of a much older man (the father of the boy, now away at college).

In the course of events, she seduces the son and makes it clear that she considers the father (her husband) a nuisance—and, when the son comes back alone from a trip to the logging camp, rejects him out of hand. She has eyes for the fiancée of her friend—and what Jenny wants, Jenny gets. The son turns drunkard, and eventually hangs himself—after telling the person who’s now her husband (and heads up the logging-and-shipping operation she inherited) what happened.

There’s more—specifically, a revivalist in buckskins from Ohio, whose third service is “The Strange Woman” and who seems to be speaking directly to her. Things do not lead to a happy ending—and, given Jenny’s sociopathic nature, it’s hard to see how they could wind up well. Hedy Lamarr gives a fine performance as a mostly-affectless beautiful woman plowing a path through all around her. George Sanders is upstanding and noble as her eventual husband, who stands by her to the end. The movie’s slow moving and there are a few glitches. Not great, not bad; I’ll give it $1.50.

Available now: Cites & Insights 10:8, July 2010.

This 40-page issue (PDF as usual, with most but not all the sections available as HTML separates) has a variety of features to keep you entertained or informed on your long flights to & from ALA–and it’s well worth reading even if you’re not attending (or live near the District of Columbia).

What’s here:

The CD-ROM Project…pp. 1-4

The start of a “digital medium archaeology project”–taking a few dozen of the best title CD-ROMs (that is, CD-ROMs that are extended books and multimedia carriers, not just software) from 1994-2000 and seeing whether they’ll work on a contemporary Windows 7 system, whether they still have much to offer, whether they’re still available (as is or updated) and, if not, what we’ve lost–and what’s readily available on the web that appears roughly equivalent. For starters, we have two astronomical CDs and two art-related CDs…

The Zeitgeist: One Facebook to Rule Them All?…pp. 4-22

A range of commentaries on the December 2009 and April 2010 Facebook privacy changes, including some pre-December items and a few notes on the current situation. Commentaries include some by librarians and a wide range by others–including a group of first-rate commentaries by danah boyd and a ReadWriteWeb piece that gets my coveted middle-finger salute for asininity in the service of (almost certainly false) gengen.

Interesting & Peculiar Products…pp. 22-29

Ten products (or product commentaries) and five group reviews–but some of the product notes are more essay than description, including a non-elegy for OQO and “Catching up with the OLPC XO.”

Offtopic Perspective: Mystery Collection Part 2…pp. 29-35

The second of ten segments of this massive 250-movie set, including three great flicks, three near-classics and another dozen worthwhile films. You get cheating wives, crooked electronics geniuses, a blind detective, a sexy ghost…and that’s just in the first two of six discs.

My Back Pages…pp. 35-40

As always, this chunk’o'snark is a bonus for “print readers”–those who download the whole PDF. Ten items, only half of them audio-related.

This is the final issue sponsored by the Library Society of the World. Now the uncertainty begins…

Two discs only because the second consists entirely of flicks I’ve already reviewed (in the Alfred Hitchcock set).

Disc 3

End of the World, 1977, color. John Hayes (dir.), Christopher Lee, Sue Lyon, Kirk Scott, Dean Jagger, Lew Ayres, Macdonald Carey. 1:28 [1:26]

More low-budget scifi (not science fiction) than horror, but I suppose Christopher Lee in a dual role gets it into this category. The story, such as it is: A professor (Scott) studying mysterious transmissions from outer space (and occasionally in contact with a government man working along the same lines) also finds mysterious transmissions to outer space—and suddenly begins decoding the outer-space transmissions, which appear to be notes of natural disasters, repeated three times. Accurate notes of disasters shortly before they happen…

Ah, but his boss doesn’t want him wasting time on this nonsense, he wants him on a lecture tour extolling the thrills of space science, so more people will earn appropriate degrees—and his beautiful wife likes the idea as well. There’s some odd sex play in the movie (he postpones going to an award banquet to Get Down, and his wife (Lyon) says something about “why didn’t this happen ten years ago?”), although no actual sex or nudity.

Anyway…he goes off with his wife, on their own, to check out the two locations where transmissions to outer space occurred. One is a seemingly harmless convent visited in broad daylight; the other, 40 miles away, is a fenced facility…and somehow it’s now the middle of the night. This allows for them creeping around mostly in the dark, the two getting separated, and the wife doing some choice screaming when she thinks she’s trapped. Oh, and a mild surprise as to where they actually are…

We wind up with the two back at the convent, which Is Not What It Seems, and a slow-moving plot (very slow-moving plot) involving stranded aliens (whose motivation keeps changing and who combine total peacefulness with remarkable viciousness), the odd coincidence that this professor is probably the only person who can bring the aliens just what they need, some remarkably stupid scifi gobbledygook about what they’re doing (a time-velocity transfer, or something like that)…and an ending that I won’t give away, because it’s really not what you’d expect from a low-budget (but good cast) affair like this. Too bad Scott doesn’t seem to have any acting chops at all and Christopher Lee is phoning it in; some life in the acting might bring this up from $1.00.

The Fury of the Wolf Man (orig. La furia del Hombre Lobo), 1972, color. Jose Maria Zabalsa (dir.), Paul Naschy (who wrote it), Perla Cristal, Veronica Lujan, Miguel de la Riva, Jose Marco. 1:30 [1:23]

Ignore the sleeve description, which is a pretty standard “man gets bitten by werewolf, becomes werewolf, attempts to save himself” plot. This flick is a little different—a professor returns from a Tibetan expedition, in which everybody else died and he was attacked by a Yeti, with a wound on his chest. If the wound turns into a perfect pentagon, he’s to open a box to find a remedy—and the wound does indeed turn into a pentagon while he’s in bed with his wife.

As things progress, we have a woman doctor who spouts all sorts of nonsense about mind control from electrical waves and “chemotrodes” and her assistant, the beautiful and innocent girlfriend of an ace reporter; we have, as you’d expect, the professor turning all hairy at the full moon, presenting an odd mixture of attacking savagely, walking nonchalantly, and jumping about like a rabid gorilla; we have his wife being faithless—and her lover (both of them apparently under the doctor’s influence) cutting the professor’s brake line; we have bodies dug up from graves and returned from the semi-dead. And oh, so much more, including a whole denizen of experimental subjects who are either in a bacchanal, chained up, or sometimes both. Much of it is incoherent; the rest is mostly confusing.

Very badly dubbed, with frequently very bad dialogue. The acting’s mixed—now that I see that the hero (professor) also wrote the screenplay, maybe his mediocrity makes more sense. I assumed this was a German production (there’s a German paper in one scene), but apparently it’s a Spanish production set in Germany. Certainly a horror film, but mediocre at best. Adequate person-to-wolf special effects. Charitably, I’ll give it $1.25.

The Ticket of Leave Man, 1937, b&w. George King (dir.), Tod Slaughter, John Warwick, Marjorie Taylor, Frank Cochran, Robert Adair. 1:11.

That first credit, for Tod Slaughter, may tell you most of what you need to know—this is a Melodrama, with substantial quantities of ham provided by the ever-overacting villain himself, leer, evil laugh and all. But there’s more: Hawkshaw The Detective, which really should be rendered in Old English script…and, unfortunately, Melter Moss, a stereotypical money-lending, stolen-property-fencing but, mostly forging Jew, replete with chin-rubbing, big nose and Yiddish sayings, who doesn’t mind The Tiger’s murders as long as he makes money.

The story? Slaughter is The Tiger, the most villainous murderer and thief in all of London, given to garroting people either for gain or because he dislikes them. He desires a young singer—and manages to frame her fiancée in a forgery charge, sending him off to prison. When he returns, The Tiger has become head of a charity devoted to Ticket of Leave Men—that is, parolees, who of course are shunned by all honest folk. One thing leads to another and…well, there’s an ending. I’d give it $1 as a period piece, but the viciously anti-semitic role of Melter Moss pulls it down to $0.50—it debases an otherwise minor overacted melodrama.

Shadow of Chinatown, 1936, b&w. Robert F. Hill (dir.), Bela Lugosi, Bruce Bennett, Joan Barclay, Luana Walters, Mairuce Liu, Charles King, William Buchanan, Forrest Taylor. 1:11.

This one’s strange—and surprising. Chinese-American characters don’t—generally—show up as simple stereotypes, and the villains are Eurasian, most specifically the mad scientist who wants to wipe out Europeans and Asians and start his own new race. He also seems to have one of those magic television systems that can see anything anywhere, although in this case he needs to have hidden an oddly-named device in each room he wants to view (which, of course, is most everywhere). The mad scientist can also hypnotize almost anybody just by looking at them. Three guesses as to who plays the mad scientist…

The other primary character is a beautiful Eurasian woman who doubles as an agent for San Francisco Chinatown merchants—and a double agent for other merchants determined to put them out of business. She’s involved with the mad scientist until she realizes just how utterly evil he is…

Lots more plot, with a daring young reporter who wants to break out of the society pages and her irritable writer pseudoboyfriend. Oh, and an interesting plot point, late in the picture, when he informs her that he’s had her fired from the paper because, after all, his wife shouldn’t have a job. Really? In 1936? I also question the notion that you’d use a cruise ship to get from San Francisco to Los Angeles in 1936, but it does allow for some of that great shipboard action.

Hard to judge this one. The print’s a little choppy at times, the plot makes about as much sense as you’d expect, there’s a little more stereotyping than seems necessary and Lugosi’s henchfolks are ludicrous. Looking at IMDB, I see what’s actually happening: This was a serial, originally running 5 hours total (15 chapters, 20 minutes each), boiled down to a 71-minute flick. Serials rarely make sense when viewed all at once. For Lugosi fans, maybe $0.75.

Disc 4

This disc consists entirely of Alfred Hitchcock films reviewed elsewhere. I did not revisit any of them.

Sabotage.

Previously reviewed. $1.50.

The Ring.

Previously reviewed. $1.00.

Blackmail.

Previously reviewed. $1.25.

Young and Innocent.

Previously reviewed. $1.00

Midnight Manhunt, 1945, b&w. William C. Thomas (dir.), William Gargan, Ann Savage, Leo Gorcey, George Zucco, Pauil Hurst, Don Beddoe, Charles Halton, George E. Stone. 1:04 [1:02].

Let’s see…villain (Zucco) enters victim’s hotel room, shoots victim (Stone) (who’s recognized him), removes wallet full of diamonds. Victim, not quite dead yet, staggers to door of room. Next, we’re in the Last Gangster Wax Museum (really!), which somehow has a cop manning a desk in the office—and a tired, would-be retired, proprietor who’s taken in $20 after standing all day. His worker is the ever-annoying Leo Gorcey, replete with malapropisms and an unlightable cigar. There’s also a somewhat disgraced female reporter who lives upstairs from the pathetic museum and her ex-boyfriend, another reporter who also shoots craps with loaded dice.

The plot? Joe Wells, assumed dead for several years, is dead but not for five years—he’s the victim, and he expires on the stairwell to the reporter’s apartment. From there, he keeps appearing and disappearing—on exhibit and in one or another car as villain, reporters, police all wander around looking for him and making wisecracks. None of it seems to make much sense or matter much. This is an odd trifle—I guess it’s a comic mystery, but there’s no mystery and precious little comedy—that seemed overlong at an hour. For fans of Leo Gorcey or Ann Savage, it might be worth $0.75.

Murder by Television, 1935, b&w. Clifford Sanforth (dir.), Bela Lugosi, June Collyer, Huntley Gordon, George Meeker, Henry Mowbray, Charles Hill Mailes, Hattie McDaniel, Allen Jung. 0:53 [IMDB and actual runtime, but sleeve says 1:00]

Experimental subjects are forced to watch “reality” TV until they rip their own heads off in despair. Well, no…but the real plot’s even stranger. During the experimental years of TV, one experimenter has designs years ahead of everybody else—and not only won’t he sell out for several million dollars, he hasn’t even patented the stuff. He arranges The Big Demonstration, at his laboratory in a house full of guests (all in formal dress). It’s impressive: He can cover the whole U.S. from a single broadcast station, the enormous piece of equipment—seemingly a single camera—cuts to different angles as though it was a three-camera setup. Oh, and there’s another twist: He can dial in views from anywhere on earth—apparently, this TV doesn’t really require a camera.

But he also keels over midway through this phenomenal (and, dare I say, wholly implausible) demonstration. Thus starts the mystery—which is an odd mix of slow and fast, with vignette scenes, a police inspector who seems to accept that a “brain scan” unit absolutely identifies whether somebody has a criminal mind or not (and, if not, of course they must be innocent), some clown who keeps trying to get in the house on important business (comic relief, I suppose) and some star turns by Hattie McDaniels of Gone with the Wind fame (but that was four years later). Oh, and Bela Lugosi…well, to explain his role would involve plot spoilers.

But between the print—with just enough missing spots to obscure some important dialogue—and the bizarre staging, it really doesn’t hang together very well. The acting is…well, there really isn’t any to speak of. As generous as I might want to be, I can’t give it more than $0.75.

The Moonstone, 1934, b&w. Reginald Barker (dir.), David Manners, Phyllis Barry, Gustav von Seyffertitz, James Thomas, Herbert Bunston, Charles Irwin, Elspeth Dudgeon, John Davidson. 1:02 [0:46]

Clearly, I need to read the Wilkie Collins book itself—since what there is to this movie doesn’t amount to much. We open with Inspector Cuff called in by his superior at Scotland Yard and told to go to a remote mansion because the Moonstone (a fabulous yellow diamond with, possibly, a curse on it) is going to be delivered there and it will be a target for thieves.

Then we cut to the mansion, where we have a doctor who seems to be mostly a befuddled scientist incapable of paying his bills, another doctor who isn’t who he seems, a daughter who’s extremely willful, a friend of the daughter who wants to have her for his own (but her fiancée is about to arrive—he’s the one bringing the Moonstone along with a Hindu servant who speaks flawless, unaccented English), a smart-talking housekeeper, a maid who’s also not who she seems to be…and a money-lender who’s about to foreclose on the mansion.

Moonstone arrives, in the midst of a terrible storm that forces the money-lender to stay overnight. Lights go out, Moonstone disappears, Moonstone reappears, people go to bed, Moonstone disappears, Cuff asks lots of questions…and eventually The Mystery is Solved.

Well, except that the sleeve copy says “the thief resorts to murder and assault to cover their tracks”—which might have happened in the full B flick, but not on this substantially shorter version, one almost totally free of violence. I don’t really know what to make of this: Some dialogue is missing, the acting is peculiar, it’s remarkably slow-moving for something no longer than a TV episode and it doesn’t seem to amount to much. $0.50.

Great Guy, 1936, b&w. John G. Blystone (dir.), James Cagney, Mae Clarke, James Burke, Edward Brophy, Henry Koller, Bernadene Hayes, Edward McNamara, Robert Gleckler, Joe Sawyer. 1:15 [1:06]

The chief of the Department of Weights and Measures winds up in the hospital because of an “accident”—and appoints former boxer Johnny Cave (Cagney) as his chief deputy inspector, in charge while he’s hospitalized. Cave, tough as nails and twice as honest, won’t touch the ready bribes—and is convinced his girlfriend’s boss is a crook. One thing leads to another; with the help of apparently-honest and incorruptible police, the good guy wins.

The best thing this flick has going for it is Cagney. Even with a few minutes missing and some clipped dialogue, he does a fine job, making a fairly ordinary picture entirely watchable. It’s flawed, but it’s good. On balance, I’ll give it $1.25.

Three items not really worth full posts–two book-related, one DVD-related:

La misma luna

Last Saturday, our weekly movie night, we watched La misma luna or “Under the Same Moon.” Unless you’re familiar with Mexican cinema, the only actor you’re likely to recognize is America Ferrera, and she’s only in it for about five minutes.

The plot, basically: A young mother is working in LA to send money to her son…in Mexico, staying with his grandmother…to make his life better. She’s undocumented. They talk once a week, when she calls him, always from the same pay phone to the same pay phone (she describes the corner at which the pay phone stands)–and they’re both “under the same moon” even though they’re in different countries.

Grandmother dies, son can’t stand being apart from mother, takes action to fix it. He’s nine years old.

I won’t say more than that. It’s excellent–well made, well acted. It’s also subtitled (not unreasonably), including the “making of” featurette (except when Ferrera is speaking). The only language option is Spanish. That’s only reasonable. We enjoyed it very much. No, I didn’t regard it as political propaganda, but then I don’t view the world as being entirely political statements.

Reservation Blues

On my long-term semi-random walk through the fiction available at Livermore Public Library (each time I go, I get three books: One nonfiction but with a narrative arc; one genre fiction, alternating between mystery and science fiction, and one fiction that’s not in a genre section and looks interesting), I picked up Reservation Blues by Sherman Alexie–who I’d heard of but never read.

I can’t say I read it in a single sitting. I can say that, if the rest of life had allowed, I might have done so–and I did read it in two days, which is highly unusual.

Don’t know whether I’d recommend it to others, but I was pleasantly surprised. (OK, so the rest of you, being more up on important literature than I am, have already read this–after all, it’s been out for fifteen years, it won an American Book Award, etc., etc.. What can I say? I’m a couple of decades behind on most book reading.)

Anyway, on the off chance that you haven’t read it…you might enjoy it.

Open Access and Libraries

Going from the sublime to the…well, anyway, I just received my own copy of Open Access and Libraries: Essays from Cites & Insights, 2001-2009. (USPS for the win, as usual: Three days for MediaMail from North Carolina to Livermore.)

I gotta say, the cover is even brighter in real life than on the screen (go down a few posts to see the screen version, or click on the link above for that matter). It is, of course, my tribute to the two primary flavors of open access and some of the many shades of those flavors.

It’s also a thick book (191,000 words in 519 pages): the thickest I’ve done via Lulu, although not actually either the thickest book I’ve published or the one with the most pages. (Desktop Publishing for Librarians, published in 1990 by G.K. Hall, is about 0.05″ thicker as a page block–that is, exclusive of hardcover–even though it’s only 420 pages; The Online Catalog Book: Essays and Examples, published in 1992 by G.K. Hall, is 560 pages and 8.5×11 rather than 6×9, but it’s a little thinner, printed on lighter-weight paper. Hmm. As with this book, I did the typography for both of those.)

Is it a “good” book or a “worthwhile” book? I can’t say. I know the price is right if you want PDF: $0.

Cites & Insights 10:7 (June 2010) is now available.

The 34-page issue is, as usual, PDF; each essay is also available as an HTML separate

(just click on the links, or use the highly sophisticated notational scheme, http://citesandinsights.info/vNiMx.htm, where N is the volume (10), M is the issue (7), and x is a lower-case letter indicating the article, starting with a, then b, then c…)

What’s Here

Bibs & Blather…pp. 1-3

Announcing the new book Open Access and Libraries: Essays from Cites & Insights, 2001-2009, a 519-page 6×9 book combining all OA-related essays from C&I–free as a PDF, minimally priced ($17.50) as a trade paperback. Also a note on ALA and my rehearsals for [semi-?]retirement.

The Zeitgeist: There is No Future…pp. 3-19

You could think of this as a Making it Work Perspective on library futures, if you prefer–focusing on exclusionary vs. inclusionary thinking (OR vs. AND), The Future vs. many futures…and more.

Feedback and Following Up…pp. 19-20

Finally (and probably having missed some feedback), a little feedback–three items in all.

Copyright Currents: Catching Up with the RIAA…pp. 20-27

Yes, the RIAA says they’ve wound down their vastly offensive campaign of suing 30,000+ file-sharers for a few thousand bucks each–and, during that process, exactly two cases have gone to jury trial. Guess what? So far, the RIAA’s batting 1000 in those cases. This piece brings us up to date on the longest-running case (Jammie Thomas, now Jammie Thomas-Rassset)–and ads notes on the other one, Joel Tenenbaum, where a defense lawyer’s novel interpretation of fair use was so convincing that the judge ordered a directed verdict…in favor of the plaintiff.

Offtopic Perspective: Spaghetti Westerns…pp. 27-34

That’s the name of the five-disc set containing 20 movies covered in this set of offhand impressions (although in 2.5 cases I refer back to an earlier impression). For a few of you on FriendFeed, inclusion of this piece also means I don’t plan to do a special “summer silliness” issue–and will integrate my odd digital media archaeology project, if and when, into regular issues of C&I.

Sponsorship and Support

This is the penultimate issue sponsored by the Library Society of the World. Chances are, the final such issue (July 2010) will appear before the 2010 ALA Annual Conference (although that’s not guaranteed).

After that, I’m in need of sponsorship or, failing that, direct support. If you regard C&I as worthwhile, one way to show that is to provide some support: The PayPal link is right on the C&I home page.

The natives seem restless about offtopic posts such as one about grapefruit, so let’s get back to posts that are squarely on topic…such as this one.

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The Ghost (orig. Lo spetto), 1963, color. Riccardo Freda (dir.), Barbara Steele, Peter Baldwin, Elio Jotta (as Leonard G. Elliott), Harriet Medin. 1:37 [1:35].

Set in Scotland in 1910, where a doctor who’s now paralyzed is both having odd séances and, with the help of a younger doctor, experimenting with using poisons and antidotes to try to cure the paralysis. The younger doctor is carrying on with the paralyzed doctor’s younger wife—who eventually convinces him to kill the older doctor by failing to provide the antidote. Meantime, there’s a housekeeper who’s sneaking around (and channeling dead people from time to time).

Various forms of haunting start almost immediately. There’s more, because the key to the safe has gone missing—but the housekeeper says it might be in the coat the old doctor was buried in. It is, but the safe’s empty. Or is it? The young doctor was opening the safe just as the faithless widow was called away… Anyway, there’s lots more plot, leading to an ending that not only involves some twists but winds up with all the key characters either dead or paralyzed.

It’s an unpleasant film, and may be typical of why I don’t much care for horror (although there’s only one really bloody scene). I guess there’s some psychological tension, but I mostly found the acting either overdone (Barbara Steele) or uninteresting (most everybody else). The print’s a bit choppy at the beginning. I see this was made in Italy (and, sigh, there are several other Barbara Steele flicks in the set: are these Spaghetti Horrors—or, apparently Italian Gothic horrors?) If you love horror flicks you might like this better; I’ll give it $1.00.

Crimes at the Dark House, 1940, b&w. George King (dir.), Tod Slaughter, Sylvia Marriott, Hilary Eaves, Geoffrey Wardwell, Hay Petrie, Margaret Yarde. 1:09.

The horror! The horror! Looking at the box for this 50-movie set, I see four more movies starring Tod Slaughter—six in all. I’d think my TV itself might show toothmarks given the amount of scenery-chewing going on. This time, Slaughter is an unnamed villain who, in the Australian gold fields of 1850, slays a gold prospector in his tent (in a particularly nasty way), takes his gold, discovers a letter indicating that the prospector is now a peer thanks to his father’s death—and, of course, assumes the man’s identity.

Murder follows murder as this nasty large man finds that the estate is mortgaged to the hilt, that “he” got someone pregnant (and married her) before going to Australia, that he’s now gotten another someone (a maid) pregnant—and that his only chance for financial redemption involves marrying a woman who clearly does not love him. An evil doctor who runs an insane asylum is also involved. What more to say of the plot? All over-acted (including a spectacularly absurd uncle of the young woman), all melodramatic, all very silly. Supposedly based on Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White. One IMDB calls this “probably the best Tod Slaughter movie,” which really is a horrifying thought. Charitably, $0.75.

The Long Hair of Death (orig. I lunghi capelli della morte), 1964, b&w. Antonio Marheriti (dir.), Barbara Steele, George Ardisson, Halina Zalewska, Umberto Raho (as “Robert Rains”), Laura Nucci (as “Laureen Nuyen”), Giuliano Raffaelli (as “Jean Rafferty”), Nello Pazzafini (as “John Carey”). 1:40 [1:34]

When I started these mini-reviews of old movies, I did the reviews for all of a disc after finishing all the movies. It’s fortunate that I don’t do it that way anymore—if only because some movies, such as Crimes at the Dark House, leave so little impression that I’d have nothing to say other than “not a very good movie.” This one’s not like that and it’s also not like the earlier Barbara Steele movie, other than being dubbed and a Spaghetti Horror. This one actually is a horror film, and a pretty good one—and, fortunately, the type that gentle souls like me can watch without flinching. (No gore, lots of suspense.)

It’s set in the time of the plague—the first few scenes in 1482, the remainder in 1499, with the plague breaking in a town toward the end of the film. A woman’s being “tried” as a witch (accused of killing a nobleman), where the trial consists of pushing her into a loose structure of hay and setting fire to the structure. You know the drill, as with water trials: If she survives (which would require divine intervention), she’s not a witch; only the guilty are killed horribly.

Ah, but her oldest daughter (Steele) goes to Count Humboldt (Raffaelli) insisting that she’s innocent—the daughter knows who the real murderer is but needs time to gather evidence. The lecherous old Count says he needs to “discuss” this with her and they won’t conclude the trial without him. As he’s Having His Way With Her, the trial goes on and her mother is burned alive—hurling an imprecation at the Count and his sons as she dies. The daughter’s upset about the Count’s betrayal; he pushes her off a cliff into a waterfall to shut her up. End of problem. And end of the 1481 segment. Oh, the non-witch’s younger daughter Elizabeth (Zalewska) becomes a ward of the court, brought up in the castle (which actually seems ruled by the priest Von Klage, perhaps the only upright male among the featured cast).

We get to 1499. Elizabeth’s all grown up and has attracted the fancy of the Count’s slimy handsome son Kurt (Ardisson)—who, as we learn a bit later, is the actual murderer, killing for political reasons. He takes Elizabeth against her will and marries her. In a storm, the dead older daughter is regenerated and shows up as a beautiful stranger, Mary. About that time, the Count dies.

One thing leads to another. The murderous handsome rapist, oh, sorry, new Count wants Mary and always gets what he wants. She half-assents, half-objects to his plan to murder Elizabeth and helps him (apparently) carry out a bizarre poisoning, burial in a crypt, removal from the crypt and return to her bed—presumably suffocated. Oone thing leads to another in a fast and furious final half hour, with the end result being…that would be a spoiler, but it’s very satisfactory all around.

I’ve talked about the plot too much, and I suppose there are spoilers there—but what it comes down to is a well-plotted, ghost-based story of revenge that works very well. The atmospherics are sound, the setting properly medieval, the acting appropriate for what it is, Steele (in two parts very good here, and the film slow-moving but in a good way. The only real flaws are some mediocre digitization and background noise on parts of the soundtrack. It’s not great, but it’s not bad: $1.25.

The Incredible Petrified World, 1957, b&w. Jerry Warren (dir.), John Carradine, Robert Clarke, Phyllis Coates, Allen Windsor, Sheila Noonan, George Skaff, Maurice Bernard. 1:10 [1:06]

I reviewed this as part of the 50 Sci-Fi Classics set in late 2005. Fast-forwarding through the whole thing, this appears to be the same print quality, although it’s a few minutes longer—and it’s a stretch to call it a horror film. Here’s what I said in the earlier review:

I suppose the diving bell (how could man ever hope to penetrate the depths of the ocean?) might count as scifi. Diving bell on its first deep-sea dive breaks loose, four inhabitants presumed crushed at the bottom of the sea (or something), but they see light, and swim up to…caverns, which have plenty of food and fresh water and air. Eventually, they meet a crazy old man who’s been trapped there—under a volcano—for 14 years. After spending most of the movie walking up and down sections of Colossal Caverns in Tucson, where this was filmed, they manage to get rescued by a rival diving bell. Losing [a few] minutes probably helps, but the flick is still awfully slow moving. The mediocre print does the film justice. $1 as a curiosity.

The motto for this disc appears to be All Noir, All The Time—or at least most of it. Unfortunately, it combines two very strong movies with two movies where the chief redeeming value is that they’re barely over an hour each.

Detour, 1945, b&w. Edward G. Ulmer (dir.), Tom Neal, Ann Savage, Claudia Drake, Edmund MacDonald. 1:07.

What a strange little film. Mostly told as heavily-narrated flashbacks from a down-on-his-luck guy in a little Nevada roadside café. He begins as an incredibly talented pianist (with very long fingers) reduced to playing in a dive nightclub from 8 p.m. to 4 a.m.—but in love with the singer, and engaged as well. Except that she wises up and takes off for Hollywood. After a day or two (?), he decides to follow—hitchhiking across country. He gets picked up by a snappy dresser in a fancy convertible, who turns out to be trouble—and who turns up dead, in the rain, as the hitchhiker’s driving and stops to try to put the top up. (As he’s hitching, half of the drivers are on the right side of the car and in the left lane…but never mind.)

Things go downhill from there, as the hitchhiker decides he has to impersonate the dead guy…and manages to pick up a no-good dame who’d earlier been hitching with the guy. The rest of the story, such as it is, involves these two and it’s neither pretty nor very interesting.

All in all, this seems like an attempt at noir, but not a very good one—mostly just depressing. The print’s generally OK except for a minute or so of damage. IMDB says it was shot in six days; I believe it. After reading a few of the rave reviews at IMDB, I’ll just accept that different people view low-budget, overacted, downbeat, depressing flicks differently. Charitably, I’ll give it $0.75.

Too Late for Tears, 1949, b&w. Byron Haskin (dir.), Lizabeth Scott, Don DeFore, Dan Duryea, Arthur Kennedy, Kristine Miller. 1:39 [1:33]

Now this is noir—and a good, complex mystery. It begins with a couple (Scott and Kennedy) on their way to a party—but the wife wants to turn around because she doesn’t like the hostess. This wife always gets her way—in this case, by nearly crashing the car. As they turn around, though, another car comes alongside and the driver throws a valise into their car (a convertible, conveniently). They stop—and find that the valise is full of cash.

The straight-arrow husband wants to turn it in to the cops. The wife wants to keep it. That’s the start of a plot that eventually involves the blackmailer who was supposed to get the money (Duryea), the husband’s beautiful sister who lives across the hall (Miller), several murders along the way…and a mystery man (DeFore) who claims to be, but is not, someone who fought WWII in the same outfit as the husband. Who he really is…well, you’ll have to see the movie. Scott plays a classically amoral money-hungry cold-hearted bitch, on her second husband and not yet into the money. Duryea isn’t quite enough of a villain, which makes him more interesting. DeFore and Miller are both interesting characters (Kennedy, not so much).

Well-acted, very well plotted (Roy Huggins wrote the screenplay, based on his own serial), reasonably well filmed. Unfortunately, the print’s missing a few minutes and is a bit choppy at times. That brings it down to $1.50.

Mystery Liner, 1934, b&w. William Nigh (dir.), Noah Beery, Lila Kane, Major Pope, Gustav von Seyffertitz, Ralph Lewis, Cornelius Keefe, Zeffie Tilbury, Boothe Howard, Howard Hickman. 1:02.

The basic plot is straightforward—but also ludicrous: Running ships by remote control, over radio linkages, from land—and testing the concept on an ocean liner, passengers and all. (Would you like a lesson on why remote-controlled oceangoing passenger vessels make no sense at all?) Oh, and one specific tube is the key to all this working. But the captain seems to have gone crazy (and is supposedly removed from the ship), although that’s not enough to keep the test from going forward. (The equipment could have been in Baron von Frankenstein’s lab—it’s that level of sparks, tubes, switches and other nonsense.) The means of communication between the ship and the remote control center, weirdly, is through panels that flash on and off and then show handwritten messages from the other source—since, you know, radio voice would be too advanced, but scanning from a panel is straightforward.

The real problem here is that the movie seems to be excerpted from a longer version—lots of scenes disappear partway in, there’s no sense of overall flow, some of the characters make no sense whatsoever. It’s an odd combination of slow-moving “action” and pieces-missing plot. It was also clearly shot on the cheap. The most I can give this unfortunate little flick is $0.75.

Scarlet Street, 1945, b&w. Fritz Lang (dir.), Edward G. Robinson, Joan Bennett, Dan Duryea, Margaret Lindsay, Rosalind Ivan. 1:43 [1:41]

Edward G. Robinson’s always interesting when he’s playing something other than The Tough Guy. Here, he’s a bank cashier with 25 years on the job and five years in a loveless marriage to a harridan. His only pleasure is weekend painting—and he doesn’t understand perspective, but does interesting work. He meets a lovely young woman (Bennett) and is attracted to her; she, with the goading of her abusive boyfriend (Duryea) who appears to be several steps below ordinary sleaze, starts taking him for money that he really doesn’t have. Ah, but she and her boyfriend believe he’s an Important Artist, not a low-level bank employee, so of course he’s rolling in it…

One thing leads to another, including the boyfriend’s bizarre decision to try to make money from the unsigned paintings (which the cashier’s moved to the apartment he rented for the girl, largely because his wife threatens to throw out the paintings), which leads to the girl being identified as the artist. I won’t describe the rest of the plot; even by noir standards, it’s complex and downbeat…including the execution of someone where, well, he didn’t commit the murder, but it’s hard to be as outraged as we should be.

The print’s damaged at points (with a line running down it and two minutes missing) and once in a while the sound’s not great. But it’s well directed (by Fritz Lang), well photographed, well acted and the bleak outlook is appropriate. It’s a solid noir—I found it discouraging but definitely well done. $1.50.

This may be an odd voyage, because I’m not much of a horror-movie fan, and probably won’t even watch movies with contemporary gore or torture approaches. I would not have purchased this set, but Mill Creek sent it to me for free—and my loyal readers voted that I should watch it before the other (purchased) sets. Since the 50 movies include all 20 from the Alfred Hitchcock set (most of them not horror movies by any plausible definition), that means watching no more than 30 others—so we’ll see how it goes.

Jamaica Inn.

[Previously reviewed: $1.50]

The Demon, 1979, color. Percival Rubens (dir.), Jennifer Holmes, Cameron Mitchell, Craig Gardner, Zoli Marki. 1:34.

The sleeve description is almost entirely wrong. The deranged killer doesn’t kill a family and abduct the daughter: He does such a sloppy job of killing the mother that the father is able to free her unharmed. The town may be terrified, but in fact we see nothing of town attitudes. The psychic (a former Marine) is the parents’ only hope; the town isn’t involved. This is, I guess, set in South Africa—it was filmed there.

Maybe the blurb-writer got confused because this flick is an incoherent mess. There are essentially two slightly-overlapping plots, both featuring “the demon”—a brutally strong guy who never talks, wears a face mask and gloves with claws when out on the prowl, and who seems to favor killing people by suffocating them with plastic bags (except that, in his first attempt here, he doesn’t bother to tighten the rope at the base of the bag around the mother’s neck) and carrying off young women, who wind up dead. The first plot features a guy (Cameron Mitchell) with the “gift of ESP,” who chews the scenery fiercely, hands out random clues and mostly gets the father killed—and himself, when he comes back to apologize to the mother and she shoots him on the spot. That does include the one good bit of dialogue in the entire movie.

The second plot involves two young women, sisters or cousins, who both work in a preschool and seem to spend a lot of time nude from the waist up (and, for one of them, entirely nude—for reasons that might have moved the plot forward but not in any way I could discern). The “demon” is stalking one of them and winds up killing the other one and her newfound lover…and gets killed in a climax that’s even stupider than the rest of the flick. (I’d describe it, but you’d think the film was a comedy, which it isn’t.)

What did I conclude? South African front doors have great locks but no peepholes, and the inhabitants gladly open the door for any knocks. Oh, and once the doors are locked, they can’t be opened from the inside. Apparently a bunch of shots of a shore with waves breaking over rocks are supposed to mean something, but I could never figure out what. Apparently young South African women of the era (they’re white, and one is apparently a visiting American) do their hair and makeup while half-dressed (and, if attempting to climb out the roof through those readily-removable tiles to escape, drop their robes as a matter of course—I dunno, maybe being mostly nude saves weight?). Otherwise…well, the print and digitization are lousy, with soft focus and night scenes that turn into vast arrays of gray. I’m being very generous in giving this one $0.50.

Murder in the Red Barn (orig. Maria Marten, or The Murder in the Red Barn), 1935, b&w. Milton Rosmer (dir.), Tod Salughter, Sophie Stewart, D.J. Williams, Eric Portman, Clare Greet. 1:10 [0:58]

After the lead characters are introduced as part of a stage play, we get a melodrama of sorts. Handsome Gypsy Carlos is in love with farmer’s daughter Maria—but she plays up to the wealthy Squire Corder. When she sneaks out of the house to see him, he Has His Way With Her, leading—well, where does this always lead? Meanwhile, Corder has gambled away large sums that he does not have, but knows of a way to get through marriage to a spinster.

When Maria’s father discovers her condition, he does what you’d expect in a melodrama (never darken my door again!), she goes to Corder for help…and we get the title of the flick. Although Corder does his best to frame Carlos, things unravel.

Overacted, to be sure (Tod Slaughter as Corder chews the scenery with gusto), and primitive—but not bad in its own way. Based on a true story, supposedly. Still, as presented here, it’s barely a B picture. I’ll give it $0.75.

The Ape Man, 1943, b&w. William Beaudine (dir.), Bela Lugosi, Louise Currie, Wallace Ford, Henry Hall, Minerva Urecal. 1:04.

Bela Lugosi stars as Dr. Brewster, reported missing but actually turned into a half-gorilla through his own experiments. He concludes that the only way to reverse the process is with human spinal fluid—but that can only be obtained by killing people. Oh, and he has an ape or gorilla sidekick who’s helping him kill people when Brewster isn’t beating up on the animal. That’s the horror part of it. Otherwise, it’s an odd combination of bad comedy (there’s a strange little guy that keeps pushing people toward the story—and I won’t give away the one sad little surprise in this movie by saying what his deal is), reporter byplay and—well, it’s just not a very good picture. Badly acted, done on the cheap, just plain poor.

Add to that frequently-distorted soundtrack making dialogue difficult to understand and just enough missing frames to be annoying, and it’s hard to give this more than $0.75.

Murder with Pictures, 1936, b&w. Charles Barton (dir.), Lew Ayres, Gail Patrick, Paul Kelly, Benny Baker, Errest Cossart, Onslow Stevens, Joyce Compton, Anthony Nace. 1:09.

The movie opens with a bad guy about to be acquitted for a murder—as long as That Person Doesn’t Show Up (but, as his pricey attorney notes, it doesn’t matter—once it’s gone to the jury, no new evidence can be admitted). He’s acquitted, goes back to his apartment (surrounded by his gang), and finds A Mysterious Woman along the way (while also being ambushed for a photo by a crack newspaper photographer).

That’s just the start of a plot-heavy picture, part comedy, part mystery, that includes two or three more murders, a ditzy fiancée, showering fully clothed, some heated arguments and, of course, a frenetic happy ending. I couldn’t begin to summarize the plot, but it heavily involves reporters and photographers.

Slight, but fun. I’ll give it $1.25.

The Stranger, 1946, b&w. Orson Welles (dir.), Edward G. Robinson, Loretta Young, Orson Welles, Philip Merivale, Richard Long, Konstantin Shayne. 1:35.

Neither fun but slight, this one’s a true classic—maybe a masterpiece. It begins at the Allied War Crimes Commission, as Mr. Wilson (Edward G. Robinson) insists that they make it possible for a secondary Nazi, Konrad Meinike, to escape—so he can lead them to a primary target who’s erased all clues to his whereabouts: Franz Kindler (Orson Welles).

Meinike winds up in Connecticut, where Welles is a professor at a local college, now named Charles Rankin and about to marry the daughter (Loretta Young) of a Supreme Court justice. Meinike also winds up dead, to be sure—and the rest of the movie is about the process of getting Kindler to reveal himself. It involves lots of psychodrama and a fair amount of tension. Oh, and some checker games with the slightly shifty proprietor of the local drug store. And a lot about clockworks.

Beautifully directed and well acted (Robinson is particularly fine, but they all do good work). Good print, marred very slightly by noise on the soundtrack. I can’t possibly give this one less than $2.00.

Murder at Midnight, 1931, b&w. Frank R. Strayer (dir.), Aileen Pringle, Alice White, Hale Hamilton, Robert Elliott, Clara Bandick. 1:09 [1:06].

At 66 minutes, this film seems padded—as though a 20-minute short might have worked better. It begins with a, well, implausible idea (three people carrying out an extensive sketch involving shooting, in order to convey a charades clue to a couple of dozen guests—and since when can you speak doing charades?). The key: the “blanks” in the gun turn out to be real bullets. The rest of the film? A series of slow-moving killings and surprises, supposed humor that isn’t funny, and very little suspense. I could barely keep from nodding off…

Also not a very good print. Other than being dull, slow, tiresome and acted as though it was a stage play done by amateurs, it was so-so. Charitably, $0.50.

Kansas City Confidential, 1952, b&w. Phil Karlson (dir.), John Payne, Coleen Gray, Preston Foster, Neville Brand, Lee Van Cleef, Jack Elam, Dona Drake. 1:39.

A big guy sets up a bank robbery (actually an armored car robbery) with great precision, making it nearly a perfect crime involving three ex-cons (all in current trouble), all wearing masks (as does the big guy) so they can’t identify or rat on each other—and in the process framing a flower delivery man (Payne) who also did a little hard time.

The delivery man escapes the frame but, thanks to cops publicizing his arrest, can’t find work. He finds out the name and destination of one of the three chumps (each sent to hide in a different country), tracks him down in Tijuana and makes sure he’ll be along when the guy goes to get his share of the loot. But on the way, the chump gets shot and the delivery man assumes his identity.

That sets things up for a tense plot in a Mexican resort with a fair amount of attempted double-crossing, a beautiful young law student whose father is an ex-cop (and, clearly, the big guy)…and, well, it all works out in a fairly elaborate finale. Quite a cast, including young (at the time) Lee Van Cleef, Jack Elam and Neville Brand as the three cons that did the robbery. Well acted, well filmed, classic noir style, worth $1.75.