Walt at Random

It’s over, it’s over, this set is finished. What a relief. I know I didn’t actually start watching it until April, but it seems even longer than that, as some of the 1-hour films in this set felt like they’d taken whole days of my life. With the fervent hope that I never again encounter Tod Slaughter, and could actually do without ever seeing Bela Lugosi again either, here are the last two discs—one of them saving me loads of time because it’s entirely Hitchcock.

Disc 11

It’s Never Too Late (or It’s Never Too Late to Mend), 1937, b&w. David MacDonald (dir.), Tod Slaughter, Jack Livesey, Marjorie Taylor, Ian Colin, Laurence Hanray, D.J. Williams, Roy Russell. 1:10 [1:07].

This film is a horror, all right—another example of Tod “Snidely Whiplash” Slaughter’s astonishing range of acting, from V to Villainous to…V for Villainous. The excuse for this one is that it’s supposedly based on a book that exposed the horrors of 19^th-century British prisons and caused Queen Victoria to clean them up. Maybe, but prison scenes (as brutal as they are, with the “visiting justices” apparently competing to see how vicious they can be towards prisoners) aren’t all of the film.

The plot? A young woman loves a young man who’s having trouble making a farm pay off. The Squire, a typically villain-tending-toward-insanity Slaughter role, wants the young woman for his own. He fails in framing the young man for poaching (which leads to most of the prison scenes, since an innocent friend of the young man “confesses” to prevent the frame), but the young man must go off to Australia to win his fortune, without which the young woman’s father will forbid the union.

The Squire, also the local Justice of the Peace, suborns the postman to assure that no letters between the two ever reach their destination, cultivates the father, and variously twirls his mustache and otherwise sneers. Oh, in the end, he fails, of course…another hallmark of a Slaughter flick. (Another: Despite his continuous sneering, debasement of others, etc., he seems to be viewed favorably by most.)

The only reason I’d give this any rating at all is for Slaughter fans (which apparently include every IMDB reviewer of this piece of…well, never mind.) In that case, I guess it’s no worse than most. As a revelation of bad conditions in prisons, it’s apparently several decades too late and mostly consists of sneering. As a Slaughter film, after which I had to go wash my hands and mind…well, kindly, $0.75.

The Bowery at Midnight, 1942, b&w. Wallace Fox (dir.), Bela Lugosi, John Archer, Wanda McKay, Tom Neal, Vince Barnett, Anna Hope. 1:01.

It’s an hour long. It stars Bela Lugosi in a role with two names. It’s…an incoherent mess, and maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. The only plausible explanation I can see for the way this movie doesn’t work is that it’s a summary version of a really bad serial—but that seems not to be the case. It’s surely a really bad movie. This time Lugosi’s not a mad scientist; he’s a professor of psychology (at a campus that looks like UC Berkeley but is apparently near the Bowery) who, in the evenings, runs a soup kitchen up top and an incredibly evil gang down below—a gang that pointedly leaves one of its members as corpse at each robbery.

Or does it? The has-been doctor who’s a support person (I guess) for this gang (which, at the point of the film, has maybe two members at a time) seems to be doing things with their bodies. Near the end, a bunch of fatalities seem so be taking care of the evil mastermind. I’d say “oh good, zombies,” but the very end has one apparent fatality reunited with his girlfriend.

Awful, awful, awful. Also, portions of the print are so faded as to be nearly unwatchable, and some dialog is missing just enough syllables for unintelligibility—which, fortunately, doesn’t harm this picture all that much. (Reading some of the IMDB raves for this trash…I guess true fans are true fans.) For Bela Lugosi completists, maybe, charitably, $0.50.

Number Seventeen

Previously reviewed (September 2009), $1.75.

The Face at the Window, 1939, b&w. George King (dir.), Tod Slaughter…and what else do you need to know? 1:10 [1:04]

Mercy, I beg of you, mercy: Not another Slaughter melodrama! I tried. Honest, I did. And when the nobleman played by Slaughter attempted to woo the young woman half his age and began laughing His Laugh when informed she was in love with someone else…I snapped. No more, no more: Even 40 minutes more of Tod Slaughtering another role was too much.

The plot, from the sleeve: “The Wolf” is murdering people in Paris with no clues—and is, well, who else? I can predict the rest: The nobleman does his best to ruin the young man, does various evil deeds, and is eventually caught out, with good triumphing. Some of the same cast as The Ticket of Leave Man. Since I gave up part way through, I’ll just say that if I hope never to encounter endure another Slaughter melodrama. $0.

The Shadow of Silk Lennox, 1935, b&w. Ray Kirkwood & Jack Nelson (dir.), Lon Chaney Jr., Dean Benton, Marie Burton, Jack Mulhall, Eddie Gribbon, Theodore Lorch. 1:00.

Another one that involves a “Legend of Horror”—if Lon Chaney, Jr., really deserves that moniker. This one’s a gangster musical mystery of sorts, featuring Chaney as a nightclub owner that everybody assumes, correctly, is a gangster. The sleeve description seems entirely offbase: Everybody knows he’s a gangleader, and he doesn’t actually start killing off associates until one of them doublecrosses him.

The key, such as it is, is that he’s got locals in his pocket, making sure he’s bailed out and intimidating witnesses so nobody faults him (one sequence shows just how easy that is when anybody’s allowed into a lineup). But then the G-men arrive and things go wrong. There’s one plot line that appears to be a red herring and an undercover agent who’s accepted far too readily as being a safecracker who can also escape from jail. And there are musical numbers—quite a few of them for a one-hour flick. Unfortunately, the sound track’s extremely noisy through much of the film (the print’s also damaged at times).

Chaney Jr.’s not that impressive, and neither is the movie. I suppose it’s worth $0.75.

Disc 12

All previously-reviewed Hitchcock films: Champagne, $1.00; Juno and the Paycock, $0.75; The Manxman, $1; Alfred Hitchcock Presents: The Chaney Vase, $0.55; Alfred Hitchcock Presents: The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, $0.

Inner Sanctum, 1948, b&w. Lew Landers (dir.), Charles Russell, Mary Beth Hughes, Dale Belding, Billy House, Fritz Leiber. 1:02.

A story within a story—with a twist on the outer story that I won’t reveal. The inner story: Guy gets off a train, woman gets off after him, they argue, she winds up dead, he throws her on the rear platform of the departing train. Lots more stuff happens involving a kid, his mother, a boarding house, a semi-loose woman, a one-man newspaper and various small-town folk. Oh, and a flood that strands the guy in the little town.

It’s OK, but nothing particularly special—the only real mystery is whether he’ll get away with it and what will happen in the process. I guess it could be called noir; I found it mostly dispiriting. The print’s good. As a minor B picture, it’s worth maybe $0.75.

Gaslight, 1940, b&w (released in the U.S. as The Murder in Thornton Square). Thorold Dickinson (dir.), Anton Walbrook, Diana Wynyard, Frank Pettingell, Cathleen Cordell, Robert Newton. 1:24.

This is the original Gaslight, a British film—not the much better-known American version with Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman filmed in 1944. (Supposedly MGM attempted to suppress this version.) I haven’t seen the later film, but this is essentially the same plot and based on the same play: That is, a man is driving his wife insane (or at least to the point where he can have her committed)—in this case so he can continue searching for rubies that he killed his aunt for, years ago in the same house.

In this version the husband is a sneering Victorian tyrant, a true villain, and the wife is neurotic enough to make the overall plot believable. Well played and a good print. Not quite a masterpiece, but very good. I’ll give it $1.75.

The Last Mile, 1932, b&w. Samuel Bischoff (dir.), Preston Foster, Howard Phillips, George E. Stone, Neal Madison, Frank Sheridan. 1:15 [1:09]

Primarily a short death-row drama featuring eight prisoners, each in his own cell, and the guard watching over them all—although the surround is one person who’s innocent (and the only one who survives). Lots of talk (and one execution early on, with the interesting variation that the prisoner’s Jewish, so the prayers being spoken are different) followed by an attempted prison break and attendant action. Very much anti-death penalty, including a textual introduction from a prison warden.

Not great, not terrible. It’s a play on film, and feels that way. The print’s missing six minutes and is choppy in places. I’ll give it $1.00.

D.O.A., 1950, b&w. Rudolph Maté (dir.), Edmond O’Brien, Pamela Britton, Luther Adler, Beverly Garland, Lynn Baggett, William Ching, Henry Hart, Neville Brand. 1:23.

A classic, or at least a minor classic. Guy stumbles into the homicide division of a police station, asks to see the person in charge, gives his name…and they’re all ears. The rest of the story is flashbacks, and it’s a doozy. The guy’s an accountant from Banning, who’d gone to San Francisco for a little vacation (upsetting his girlfriend)…and who gets poisoned while he’s there, with a “luminous poison” for which there’s no cure but could leave him going for a day, two days, a week.

The rest of the story is his attempt to find out who murdered him. It’s a complicated story, but hangs together fairly well. To say any more might involve spoilers, and this movie’s good enough that I won’t do that. Well acted, well written, well directed. The print’s not great, but the movie is—about as good as film noir gets. $2.00.

This disc really points up why I probably shouldn’t be doing these reviews. I loathe gore flicks and what now seems to be standard slasher horrorshows, with their oodles of “blood” and crazed killers. I almost stopped watching the first flick 20 minutes in—and that might have been the right decision. So if you’re a fan of stupid bloody horror, just ignore these reviews. If you’re a true connoisseur of “holiday axe murderers” and the like…I really don’t want to know about it.

Silent Night, Bloody Night, 1974, color. Theodore Gershuny (dir.), Patrick O’Neal, James Patterson, Mary Woronov, Astrid Heeren, John Carradine, Walter Abel. 1:28 [1:21]

The idiocy starts right at the beginning, as a man whose coat is on fire runs from a house into a snow-covered field—and doesn’t drop-and-roll, even by accident. Nope. No matter how often he falls down, it’s always forward and he gets back up and keeps running as he’s burning to death.

But that’s a flashback. Today, we have a long-abandoned house about to be sold. The devil-may-care adulterous lawyer up with his hot French girlfriend to sell it for quick cash, by order of an owner he’s never met—and, of course, staying the night in the abandoned house, not in the motel the town council suggests. People always respond to mystery messages by going, one at a time, usually unarmed, to meet their fates. And, if you want to stretch things far enough, you could conclude that Only The Good Survived…

Awful, awful, awful. Badly filmed, poorly acted (John Carradine doesn’t help matters and Patrick O’Neal is a joke), crappy direction, poor production and a worthless screenplay. Maybe the one good thing it has going is the opening music—a minor-key arrangement of Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht that’s surprisingly unsettling. I’m being exceedingly generous by my own standards to give this piece of trash $0.25.

Horror Express (aka Panic in the Trans-Siberian Train), 1972, color. Eugenio Martin (dir.), Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Alberto de Mendoza, Julio Pena, Angel del Pozo, Telly Savalas. 1:28.

This is a cross between science fiction and horror, beginning with an expedition in China but with all the action taking place on the Trans-Siberian Express. A British anthropologist has discovered a “fossil”—some sort of caveman or missing link encased in a block of ice. Another scientist is returning with his assistant. The train also includes a count, countess, their crazed Russian priest, a beautiful spy, and a police chief—and an engineer who studied under Tsiolkovsky, the early Russian rocket theorist.

All of which comes into play as we get one corpse and another, in both cases with wholly white eyes. After one scientist (who’s also a medical doctor) notes that the eyes on a steamed fish at dinner are wholly white, he does an autopsy on the second victim—and finds that the brain is entirely smooth, which (he intuits) means that their memories have all been sucked out. Okay…well, things continue, and we learn much more along with quite a few deaths along the way, all with the same briefly-horrible eye-bleeding/eye-whitening scene, always in the dark or near-dark. I won’t give more of the plot away, such as it is, except to note that it ends with a deliberate train crash but also most potential victims saved. We get mind/being transfer and even blind zombies of a sort.

Telly Savalas as a scenery-chewing Cossack. A strong cast (Lee and Cushing are the two scientists), interesting script and decent acting. It’s entirely on a train ride (after the first few minutes)—always a good thing for enhancing mystery and suspense. The print is a little wonky at times and never all that good. All in all, $1.50.

The Nightmare Never Ends (orig. Cataclysm), 1979, color. Phillip Marshak (and others, dir.), Cameron Mitchell, Marc Lawrence, Faith Clift, Richard Moll, Maurice Grandmaison. 1:34 [1:28]

Life really is too short. I gave this half an hour, which is probably 15 minutes too long. Given the miserable quality of the print (soft, with bad colors—and it’s not clear whether the bad colors are deliberate), lousy production (from what I could see) and incoherent plot, direction, script and acting, I just couldn’t see going through the whole thing.

What I could get of the plot up to that point: There’s a famous (Nobel laureate!) professor who’s an atheist and has just published his most important work, God is Dead. (There’s a problem here: A proper atheist wouldn’t write such a book because a nonexistent being can’t die.) His beautiful wife is a doctor and a devout Catholic, who firmly believes in God and Satan. Let’s see. There’s a Las Vegas fake clairvoyance act, where the admittedly-phony clairvoyant dies (or is murdered) immediately after getting the wife to visualize her nightmare around a Nazi dinner party. There’s an old Jewish Nazi hunter who’s almost entirely incoherent, but who believes a young man is actually one of his targets from 35 years previous—and who gets his face ripped off as he’s being killed (and, of course, the corpse ends up with the doctor/wife).

I’m sure there’s lots more, but I found it unwatchable both because of the print and the movie itself. Cameron Mitchell’s cop isn’t terribly well played but stands out among the rest of this. Looking at IMDB, it appears that it isn’t just a bad print or digitization; it’s a lousy film with bad production values and terrible acting and plot. It gets a rare $0.

Count Dracula and His Vampire Bride (orig. The Satanic Rites of Dracula), 1973, color, widescreen. Alan Gibson (dir.), Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Michael Coles, William Franklyn, Freddie Jones, Joanna Lumley, Richard Vernon, Barbara Yu Ling. 1:27.

The final Hammer film with Christopher Lee as Count Dracula and Peter Cushing as Dr. Van Helsing, presented in wide screen (not anamorphic, but a zoom mode should work) and in a decent print (with damage at a few spots). Contemporary setting, with Dracula as an industrialist poised to unleash a much more deadly version of The Plague, developed by a scientist (who won the Nobel for “science and humanity,” one of the more obscure categories). Some nudity (mostly as part of a Satanic ritual), some violence, lots of female vampires, and evil in high places.

Pretty good as these things go—after all, with Lee and Cushing in a Hammer film, how far wrong can you go? Some of the plot is a little bizarre (why would Dracula want to destroy the entire world?) and the addition of hawthorne trees as deadly to vampires seems odd, but, well… As to the title: It involves Van Helsing’s beautiful granddaughter (Joanna Lumley) and is a little misleading, but there you go—the original title makes more sense. $1.50.

Love from a Stranger, 1937, b&w. Rowland V. Lee (dir.), Ann Harding, Basil Rathbone, Binnie Hale, Bruce Seton. 1:26.

A young woman whose fiancé is about to return from a three-year stretch of work in the Sudan wins the French lottery (for about 90,000£, or about $25 million in contemporary purchasing power) just as he’s returning, and wants to go see the world. Two things happen almost simultaneously: A suave man shows up in response to her ad to sublet the flat—and her fiancé returns, won’t give up his post on returning to England just to follow her around the continent, and gets in an argument with her, stalking off.

Next thing we know, the woman (and her friend and flatmate) is on the ship to Paris—as is the suave stranger, who of course makes a play for her. Then they’re in Paris, her ex shows up to apologize…and now she’s married to the stranger. Shortly thereafter, he borrows 5,000£ to buy a house in the country (a house which, his wife later discovers, was up for sale for half that amount—still, at around $700,000, a goodly sum)…and gets her to sign a form for the loan without reading it.

Then we get the husband acting very strangely and the suspicion that he might just be a serial wife-killer who gets his wives to sign (gasp) papers giving their husbands control over their money. There’s more to the plot than this, and the ending is…interesting. The whole thing seems wildly overwrought, but maybe that’s the intention. I’m torn on this one: Basil Rathbone seems to be chewing the scenery (as does Ann Harding) and the whole thing’s a bit implausible, but it has its merits. $1.25.

The Evil Mind (or The Clairvoyant), 1934, b&w. Maurice Elvey (dir.), Claude Rains, Jane Baxter, Athole Stewart. 1:21 [1:08].

Reviewed in the January 2009 Cites & Insights as part of 50 Movie Hollywood Legends. Here’s what I said at the time—and, once again, the “starring” line is for Fay Wray rather than the more deserving Claude Rains.

Maximus works as a stage clairvoyant, using his wife’s clues to say what she’s holding—until, in the presence of another woman, he suddenly makes a real and correct prediction. This happens a couple of times; he gets a big London stage engagement but the producer’s unhappy because he can’t do big predictions to order. Meanwhile, his wife’s becoming jealous of the young woman. This all leads up to his unwilling prediction of a tunneling catastrophe—one that, when it comes true, causes him to be put on trial on the basis that his prediction caused the catastrophe.

There’s little point in saying more about the plot. It’s not bad, actually, and there’s a nice twist involving why he only makes accurate predictions under certain circumstances. The print is jumpy at points, 13 minutes are missing and the soundtrack’s damaged at points as well, but not so much as to ruin the picture. It’s generally well-acted. While the sleeve lists Fay Wray (the wife) as the “legend,” I’d say Claude Rains’ faintly bizarre and very well played Maximus deserves more credit. The original title (“The Clairvoyant”) suits this better, as there’s nothing evil in Rains’ predictions. I’ll give it $1.00.

One Frightened Night, 1935, b&w. Christy Cabanne (dir.), Charles Grapewin, Lucien Littlefield, Mary Carlisle, Regis Toomey, Arthur Hohl, Fred Kelsey, Evalyn Knapp, Hedda Hopper. 1:06.

Another short mystery-comedy family-inheritance movie, and a good one. This time, instead of a dead Mean Old Man Who Nobody’s Sorry To See Go, we have a live MOMWNSTG, faced with a supposed midnight increase in inheritance taxes—so he’s about to distribute his funds, $5 million of them (call that $77 million in today’s dollars).

It all starts at dinner with his niece and her husband, a ne’er-do-well charming nephew, his female servant and his doctor—where, after baiting them generally for being what they are, he tells them, one by one, that each is about to receive $1 million. The fifth million? That goes to his attorney—but in all cases, it assumes that his long-lost granddaughter, who he hasn’t seen for 20 years, doesn’t show up (or she gets it all). Then, in comes the attorney…with his granddaughter.

Well now. As he’s talking to her upstairs, a young woman battles the storm (of course it’s a dark and stormy night) to get to the house, and announces herself as…his granddaughter. With her colleague in a vaudeville magic act showing up soon, once he gets the car parked. She just dropped by because her mother said she should. Unlike the first granddaughter (both with the same name), she doesn’t have corroborating letters…but also unlike the first one, within five minutes, she’s still alive.

That sets the scene. Add a police detective and sergeant, a couple of hidden passages, and a whole bunch of red herrings, and you have a thoroughly entertaining hour. (A note about the IMDB listing: A claimed “goof” is, to my eye, a deliberate plot point—the utility folks managed to repair a downed pole, restoring power to the house.) Unfortunately, the picture has problems during the last five minutes, but it’s still a lot of fun. $1.50

Prison Shadows, 1936, b&w. Robert F. Hill (dir.), Eddie Nugent, Lucille Lund, Joan Barclay, Forrest Taylor, Syd Saylor, Monte Blue. 1:06.

We open in a boxing ring with overhead shots and one guy winning in short order—and then cut to the reality: The boxing ring is in prison, and all the prisoners—including the fighters and their trainers—now head back to their cells. Ah, but as we soon find out (while the winner’s trainer is alternating between rubbing down the winner, his cellmate, and drinking the rubbing alcohol), the winner’s about to be paroled for his “crime”: Killing an opponent by hitting him with a late punch, with his lethal right hand (which he basically won’t use in fights).

The plot escalates from there—with a woman who clearly loves him but he regards as a friend, a woman who is playing him along, playing his promoter along (of course he goes back into the fight game as soon as he’s paroled) and either also playing a trainer/thug along or, maybe, actually involved with this one. Her bit is to win bets on the fights by killing off the opponents. She comes off as mean-spirited throughout, and it’s hard to see just what makes her so seductive. In any case, we have another two deaths (involving a methodology that’s basically—well, let’s just say improbable) and, eventually, a happy ending.

The plot’s not terrible, but I find the tone of the whole thing absurd. The guy who’s been in prison comes out and is relentlessly chipper (and hopelessly naïve), as though being an imprisoned felon was basically a vacation. Oh, except that he can’t get married during the seven years of parole (?). It just doesn’t work. That, and the generally lightweight acting (and missing frames here and there, just enough to be annoying) bring this down to a subpar $0.75.

Disc 8

Shock, 1946, b&w. Alfred L. Werker (dir.), Vincent Price, Lynn Bari, Anabel Shaw, Frank Latimore, Stephyen Dunne. 1:10.

Young lady arrives at a San Francisco hotel very excited because her husband, assumed dead for two years but really a POW, will be meeting her—but they’ve lost her reservation. The manager finds her a room (actually a suite) for one night only. As she’s waiting for her hubby, she goes out on the balcony and sees, inside a nearby room with the drapes open, an argument that ends with a husband clubbing his wife to death with a candlestick.

Does she call the desk? Notify the police? Nope—she goes into shock. When her husband arrives, much later (the plane was delayed), he finds her sitting on the sofa, wide-eyed but unresponsive. A doctor checks her over and says it’s mental—but what luck! There’s a great psychiatrist in the hotel. Who just happens to be the wife-killer. And who takes her to his asylum…where his nurse (and lover) would just as soon make sure she doesn’t get well.

That’s the plot. It also involves an odd crisis of conscience, in which one person murders another because of unwillingness to kill a third. Vincent Price is Vincent Price. The sound is occasionally distorted, but the print’s pretty good. All in all, a middling $1.00.

The Island Monster (orig. Il mostro dell’isola), 1954, b&w. Roberto Montero (dir.), Boris Karloff, Franca Marzi, Patrizia Remiddi, Carlo Duse. 1:27 [1:25].

The sleeve gets the plot wrong—but maybe that’s because the plot is incoherent, as is this mystery in general. (It’s not a horror film, but Boris Karloff is a Legend of Horror…) It involves Italian drug smuggling on Ischia, a seeming benefactor who’s really the villain (guess who?), a police undercover agent whose wife is so jealous that she insists on, essentially, blowing his cover and making his daughter a suitable kidnapping target, and ever so much more.

I won’t even attempt to summarize the plot or how it progresses. It’s badly dubbed (I could almost hear the English-speaking actors sitting around a table, cigarettes and drinks in hand, reading from the script as the footage flashed on a screen), badly acted, just plain bad. At least the dubbers found a mediocre Karloff voice impersonator. I see IMDB reviews average out to 2.2 points on a 10-point scale—and that may be generous. (Turns out it is: One crazed Karloff fan gave it 10 points, balancing out all the 0, 1 and 2 point scores). For anyone who likes either good movies or so-bad-they’re-good movies, this is one to avoid completely, but for Karloff completists only, I’ll give it $0.75.

The Lady Vanishes.

Previously reviewed. $2.50

Rich and Strange.

Previously reviewed. $0.75

Disc 9

All previously-reviewed Hitchcock films: Easy Virtue ($1.00), Secret Agent ($2), The Skin Game ($1.25), The 39 Steps ($2).

The Phantom Fiend, 1932, b&w. Maurice Elvey (dir.), Ivor Novello, Elizabeth Allan, A.W. Baskcomb, Barbara Everest, Jack Hawkins. 1:25 [1:02]

Women keep getting murdered in London at call boxes. A phone operator, who may have heard one of the murders, lives at home with her parents—who also rent a room, when they can. She has a sort-of sometimes boyfriend who’s a reporter. They manage to rent a room to a quiet foreign man who doesn’t like having women’s portraits hung in the room, plays a fine piano and also owns (but never seems to play) a violin.

He makes friends with the young woman—but in a mysterious way. Meanwhile, an agent claims to know who the fiend (“the avenger?”) is—and the father somehow concludes that it’s the roomer. Since the roomer is such an obvious suspect from the moment he appears in the picture, it should be obvious that Not All Is At It Seems, as is revealed in the final four minutes of a remarkably slow-moving flick. There’s a little domestic humor, but…

Atmospheric foggy-London photography, so-so picture, staticky sound, acceptable acting. (Note re picture and sound judgments: Now seeing the flicks on a much larger TV with upconversion to HDTV—which seems to make bad old prints more acceptable. Also listening with different and apparently better wireless headphones.) I wonder how much is missing in this considerably-abbreviated version of the original? I couldn’t get terribly excited, but I suppose it’s worth $1.00.

The Sleeping Tiger, 1954, b&w. Joseph Losey (dir.), Dirk Bogarde, Alexis Smith, Alexander Knox, Hugh Griffith, Patricia McCarron. 1:29 [1:27]

The setup: guy tries to rob a psychotherapist at gunpoint, but the shrink—a former army man—takes the gun away from him. And, instead of turning him in to the police, takes him home for a six-month experiment: “See whether we can turn things around, or go back to the cops and jail.” The housekeeper’s appalled and leaves (not without a little rough stuff from the guy, who doesn’t want her to leave). The wife, perhaps a trifle distant from her brilliant husband who’s always off lecturing (she’s American, he’s British, the film’s set in London), is hesitant at first but…well, goes riding with him, then starts falling for him.

Things end badly (particularly for her). Much of the movie is slow-moving, but it’s reasonably interesting and well-acted overall. An oddity: The sleeve gives the star as Alexis Smith (the wife), but I’d say Dirk Bogarde (the brooding young man—he was 34 at the time) is the real star here. Either it’s the new TV or this is an unusually good print, but the tonal qualities were very good. There are, sad to say, some missing pieces—whole lines of dialog, not just chops, although it only adds up to two minutes overall. Still, I think it’s worth $1.25.

Monsoon, 1943, b&w. Edgar G. Ulmer (dir.), John Carradine, Gale Sondergaard, Sidney Toler, Frank Fenton, Veda Ann Borg, Rita Quickley, Rick Vallin. Original title: Isle of Forgotten Sins. 1:22 [1:16]

I’d already seen this movie on another set, and didn’t rewatch the entire movie. The big difference, such as it is, is the sleeve: Originally, the sleeve described some entirely different movie with, apparently, the same title, where this time the sleeve description was reasonably accurate. Here’s what I said in 2008:

[This movie is about] greed, gold, diving and weather. It starts in a South Seas gambling hall/brothel and winds up in a similar establishment. In between? Better than you might expect, partly because there really are no heroes among this strong cast. $1.25.

Slightly Honorable, 1939, b&w. Tay Garnett (dir.), Pat O’Brien, Edward Arnold, Broderick Crawford, Ruth Terry, Alan Dinehart, Claire Dodd, Phyllis Brooks, Eve Arden. 1:25.

The opening credits and music underneath make it clear that this is a comedy—but it’s also a mystery, and a fairly involved one at that. We have an honest lawyer who’s out to dethrone a group of crooked politicians and businesspeople, and whose client and good friend is murdered—presumably by one of the bad guys. We have a couple more murders, a singer/dancer (who tends to go flat, but is a great dancer) who’s a little underage and given to malapropisms, incompetent cops, the inimitable Eve Arden as a secretary (and victim) and lots more.

Thoroughly enjoyable, with a remarkable cast. The print’s generally very good. I give this one $1.75.

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.

The Wrong Road, 1937, b&w. James Cruze (dir.), Richard Cromwell, Helen Mack, Lionel Atwill, Horace McMahon, Marjorie Main. 1:02 [0:53]

An odd little B movie, not without its charms. Open on a young couple dancing in a fancy nightclub and discussing their plans. She graduated from college and found that her father had squandered his fortune (consider the year!), and her only real plan was to become part of Moneyed Society. He graduated assuming he’d get a $10,000/year job (equivalent to more than $145,000 in 2009 dollars) but that disappeared, and now he’s making $25/week as a bank clerk—and is on his way out to make way for the boss’s relative. They’re both Too Good to Work, so they have a solution: He’s going to steal a bunch of the bank’s money, they’ll hide it, they won’t deny the crime, and when they get out of prison—Shazam!

They do this—basically, he just hands her $100,000 in a phony transaction (which, if it really was equal to $1.45 million, wouldn’t have them Set For Life but would be a nice starting point) and neither of them deny the crime. But the insurance investigator counsels them that this won’t work out well—the money’s traceable, so they’d have to sell it to a fence, leaving maybe $40,000, and, oh, by the way, they’re not likely to get two years, they’re likely to get ten. Is $2,000/year per person really worth it—even if he doesn’t capture the money when they get out? (Throughout, this hardnosed investigator—Lionel Atwill—is more of a wise old uncle than anything else.)

But they’re intent on it. And, two years later when they’re initially up for parole, he sees that they get the parole with some fairly stringent conditions (e.g., they can’t get married). Meanwhile, the guy’s cellmate has gotten out and wants some (or all) of the money…and the uncle they’d sent it to (sealed inside a music box) has died bankrupt, with his estate being auctioned off. Oh, and the insurance investigator is still on their trail and still counseling them to give it up.

You can probably guess how it ends; it’s an odd little morality tale. They keep saying “We earned that money,” but, well, the weed of crime bears bitter fruit. In some ways, it’s a pointless little movie, but I found it enjoyable as a trifle. Still, given the length and general lack of plausibility, I can’t give it more than $0.75.

The Naked Kiss, 1964, b&w. Samuel Fuller (dir., also screenplay and producer), Constance Towers, Anthony Eisley, Michael Dante, Virginia Grey, Patsy Kelly, Marie Devereux, Karen Conrad. 1:39.

Truly a strange duck. Before the titles, we get a hot sequence where a half-naked woman is thwacking a man with her purse, eventually flooring him (he’s obviously drunk), taking $800 out of his wallet, removing $75, tossing the rest back…and, after getting dressed, checking her makeup and, by the way, putting the wig back on her bald head (he’d ripped it off), leaving.

After the titles, she’s getting off the bus in a town where the police captain deals with thugs by sending them out of town—and spots her as a prostitute, availing himself of her services as a demonstration (then telling her to get out of town, cross the stateline and river to his friend’s bordello, and she’ll be fine). She decides to go straight and turns out to be a wonderful nurse’s assistant at the local pediatric hospital, where she can get the kids on crutches and in wheelchairs to perk up.

That’s just the start. She meets and gets involved with The Man—the scion of the town’s founding family—with only the noblest of motives. To say much more would give the plot away, and it’s a fairly involved one. I’m not sure you’d call the ending happy, but it could be worse. In between, we get a mix of fairly slow, “natural” timing and some slightly odd acting. Oh: It’s also widescreen. On balance, I’ll give it $1.00.

Affair in Monte Carlo, (orig. 24 Hours of a Woman’s Life), 1952, color (b&w on this disc). Victor Saville (dir.), Merle Oberon, Leo Genn, Richard Todd. 1:30 [1:04].

Previously seen in 50 Movie Hollywood Legends and reviewed in the January 2009 Cites & Insights. Clearly the same short, “it says Technicolor on the movie but it’s black-and-white on this print” version. Here’s my review:

Merle Oberon is excellent in this tale of sudden romance and gambling addiction, told mostly as a flashback—but there are two problems. The biggest one is that this seems like “scenes from an affair”—at 1:03, it’s much far too short for its story and has gaps in continuity. Given the fairly slow pacing of the movie, that’s particularly unfortunate. Noting IMDB after rating this, I see that’s what’s happened: The movie should be 90 minutes long, the U.S. version was trimmed to 75 minutes (why?), and this version—apart from losing its color—is down to a mere 64 minutes.

The other—well, the credits list a Technicolor colour consultant, but there’s no color in the movie as presented here. The scenery would be much nicer and the film more convincing in color. It doesn’t have the qualities of great b&w cinematography. (Actually, it looks like desaturated color, which is what it apparently is.) Nice little story, good scenery, some good acting, but ultimately I’m generous at $1.00.

Sinners in Paradise, 1938, b&w. James Whale (dir.), Madge Evans, John Boles, Bruce Cabot, Marion Martin, Gene Lockhart. 1:05 [1:03]

Eight people board a lavish four-propeller seaplane to cross the Pacific Ocean from California to China (with, presumably, a stop in Hawaii). We learn just a bit of their stories early in the flight—with people standing around the cabin (which consists of seats across tables) during takeoff, and no signs that there even are seatbelts—and a bit more as the flight continues.

The plane crashes near an almost-deserted tropical island, hundreds of miles from the mainland. “Almost”: there’s a handsome, perfectly-dressed man in a little (well, not so little—he can comfortably seat all the rest at breakfast) grass shack, with a Chinese companion/servant. He tells the rest they’ll need to make their own way—and although he has a boat, he’s not willing to take them anywhere, even for very large bribes.

That’s the basics. The eight are a quite odd lot: Two weapons dealers, two criminals (one man, one woman), a wealthy industrial heiress, a nurse planning to fly back to China for relief work against her soon-to-be-ex-husband’s wishes, an ex-state-senator, and a 50-year-old woman planning to surprise her son in China. After the resident relents and agrees to take five of them to the mainland (the boat can only hold six), the weapons dealers force the servant to take them instead (killing the “elderly” woman in the process). The rest of the movie, short as it is, deals with the changes wrought by three months of making things work. It’s not all that major, and there’s no real ending, but it’s not bad. $1.00.

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.

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.