PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

Reign Of Terror 1949

Reign Of Terror 1949  Story and screenplay by Philip Yordan and Æneas MacKenzie, directed by Anthony Mann. The film's working title was The Black Book but changed before release, later that same year the title was changed back to The Black Book. I first saw it under TBB on an old Alpha Video DVD a few years ago. This VCI DVD looks much better than that.

The movie was the work of cinematographer John Alton, he also shot the other movie on the Classic Noir Volume 3 disc, The Amazing Mr X. I've seen several of his films, most of them in the noir genre, He Walked By Night, Lady And The Monster, I, The Jury, Bury Me Dead and The Big Combo. John won an Oscar for the ballet scene in An American In Paris. Reign Of Terror was a really low budget film and mostly shot with lights on the floor. That produces a lot of shadows to play with and it's quicker to set up than over head lighting. John has a reputation of being able to quickly light a set and that speeds up production.

It's 1794 France and Robert Cummings plays Charles D'Aubigny, Richard Basehart plays Maximillen Robespierre and Arlene Dahl plays Madelon. It's the last days of Robespierre and his Reign of Terror. Charles kills and impersonates prosecutor Duval who's been summoned to Paris by Robespierre to recover his Black Book. It's got the names of those Robespierre wants to denounce and have executed. It's not something he wants to be made public.

There's plenty of intrigue and double crossing going on. There's plenty of punching and sword fighting, horse riding and yelling. Madelon helps the fake Duval escape and there's a bit of romance going on too.

It's an entertaining film that looks great despite the lack of a budget. Production designer William Cameron Menzies does a great job on the sets, many of which are simple one and two wall designs. They were also able to use some sets left over from the 1948 film Joan Of Arc. The DVD has an interesting and informative commentary by Alan Rode with clips from his interview with Arlene Dahl.

Night Monster 1942

Night Monster 1942 Written by Clarence Upson Young and directed by Ford Beebe. Ford has 125 writing credits on the IMDb, he's only got 105 director's credits. His first film was in 1921 and he made 31 silent shorts before graduating to features in 1931. He directed quite a number of serials, I've seen some of them, including Flash Gordon Conquers The Universe, Flash Gordon's Trip To Mars and Secret Agent X-9. 

It's the second film in the 4th volume of the Universal Horror Collection. I'd seen it couple of times before and enjoyed it. There's a commentary by Gary D Rhodes, it's fairly decent but way too slow. The Blu-ray has a nice looking picture, a trailer and stills.

A wheel chair bound rich man invites three doctors who were trying to cure him. He blames them for their failures and one by one the men are murdered in the house. The police suspect the rich man but he has no arms or legs.

That's the rich guy in the wheel chair, he's played by Ralph Morgan, I'd seen him in quite a few films from the thirties and forties. Bela Lugosi is the butler, the man next to him is Francis Pierlot, one of the soon to be murdered doctors. Don Porter is the guy in the light coat, he'd have a nice long career in TV that lasted until 1988. The guy sitting down is Nils Asther, he's playing a mystic, the short man next to him is Frank Reicher, he's another of the soon to be murdered doctors. The lady is Irene Hervey, her career lasted nearly 50 years but I can't say I've seen more than a few of her pictures, I've probably seen her more often on TV.

I enjoyed the movie, it's got a nice creepy vibe going on. It's only 73 mins and it moves along quickly. The cast is good and the characters suspicious. I'd certainly want to watch it again sometime.

Lady Of Burlesque 1943

Lady Of Burlesque 1943 Based on the novel The G-String Murders by Gypsy Rose Lee, screenplay by James Gunn, directed by William A Wellman. I read the book in the 80s and have dug it out to re-read soon. I had originally believed it was ghost written by Craig Rice but the current thought is Gypsy herself wrote a good portion of the novel with her editor and Craig's help. I wonder if I'll like it as much as I did in the 80s. In recent years revisiting old favorites hasn't been as successful as I might hope.

In the movie Barbara Stanwyck plays a singer and strip tease artist called Dixie Daisy. During a raid by the police someone tries strangling Dixie but she manages to escape. A few days later her friend Lolita isn't so lucky.

Dixie turns detective in this murder mystery set in her world of burlesque theater. There's a fair bit of the on stage show and plenty of backstage business with the cast and crew. There's a punch up, some singing and a bit of romance too. I liked the characters and the story. I've seen it several times since the 80s and still enjoy it. You can check it out on YouTube. I bought a DVD ages ago.

The Strange Case Of Doctor Rx 1942

The Strange Case Of Doctor Rx 1942 Written by Clarence Upson Young, directed by William Nigh. The third film in the 2nd volume of the Universal Horror Collection. The Blu-ray disc has a still gallery and a short featurette about Lionel Atwill. He had an interesting life although it had a bad patch when he got convicted of perjury in 1942. It was for his testimony in a 1941 grand jury investigation of an alleged sex orgy at his home. He got probation, he was blacklisted, parts were scarce and not every big. He died in 1946 from cancer and pneumonia, he was 61. He was in a lot of pictures I have liked and he's almost always top notch.

Patric Knowles is a detective who's come back to town after being away for a year. He quickly marries his old girlfriend Anne Gwynne, much to the surprise of his live in butler. Mantan Moreland. plays the butler, I'm such a Mantan fan, I feel he makes a movie better. There's more silly comedy in this than most of the movies in the Horror Collection.

He gets involved with the Rx murders and helps the police catch the baddie. Edmund MacDonald and Shemp Howard play the cops, Lionel Atwill plays Dr Fish, and Ray "Crash" Corrigan plays the gorilla. I think I'd want to watch this every once in a while.

Crack Up 1946

Crack Up 1946 Based on Madman's Holiday by Fredric Brown, screenplay by John Paxton, Ben Bengal and Ray Spencer, directed by Irving Reis and his assistant James Anderson.

Pat O'Brien is an outspoken art critic but when we meet him he's out of his mind. He smashes his way into the museum like a drunken man, a statue is bust, the police come and Pat concocts a wild story about someone calling about his dying mother and a train wreck. Trouble is there was no call about his dead mother and the train he took last night to go see her didn't have a wreck.

Pat swings into flashback mode and we see it start in the museum where he's giving a lecture to a small crowd. He's against the surrealists like Dali and for painters like Dürer's The Adoration of the Magi. It's a painting that had been on display at the museum, it's been crated and awaits shipment. Pat wants it uncrated, as well as a couple of his pals, so he can do a bit of a lecture about them and show off the technique of x-raying paintings to see what's underneath.

When the director of the museum voiced his reluctance to have the paintings uncrated I figured this was a art forgery story and that's what it is. Pat's crazy antics give the director even more of a reason to cancel Pat's lecture. Pat's one of those tenacious bulldog types, he really needs to find out what happened to him last night. He takes the train again and gets a clue to the mystery. The rest of the film is Pat vying against the villain. He takes some body blows but comes out of it OK in the end.

That's Pat with Clair Trevor and Herbert Marshall, Claire's Pat's girlfriend and Herbert is an art theft investigator from Scotland Yard. Ray Collins plays a member of the museum's board of directors, Wallace Ford is the local police lieutenant. I enjoyed the cast and the story idea was good enough to carry a movie. I thought it was a bit pokey, even for the time it was made, but I still enjoyed the film as a whole. You can give it a test drive by clicking the link in the title.

The Gorilla Man 1943

The Gorilla Man 1943 Screenplay by Anthony Coldeway, direction by D Ross Lederman. Anthony has a 153 credits on his IMDb page, he started in 1911 and the last one listed is in 1957. A couple of titles from the sound era are familiar. D Ross started a bit later, 1925, and he still has a respectable 150 plus credits on the IMDb. He directed features pretty much from the get go through 1950, the last 7 years of his career were in TV. I know I've seen Tarzan's Revenge, Adventure In Sahara, a couple of Lone Wolf movies and a Boston Blackie, and The Return Of The Whistler.

The guy in the middle is John Loder and he's Captain Killian, the man the newspapers have dubbed the Gorilla Man for his climbing ability. The other two are Paul Cavanagh as Dr Dorn and John Abbott as Dr Ferris. The two doctors are Nazi spies, they hear of the daring raid that Killian lead on a German instillation in France. Killian was hurt in a grenade blast during the raid and he's being brought to the UK in a ship that lands near where Dorn has a clinic overlooking the sea. Ferris is a wanted murderer and he likes to experiment on people, experiments that kill them if they're lucky.

Dorn arranges to have Killian taken to his sanitarium by having Ferris be on hand when the small rowboat carrying Killian lands on the beach near the sanitarium. Handy, huh. No matter, the doc's trick everyone into believing that Killian is a bit out of his mind to discredit the info Killian has on a German raid planned a couple of weeks later.

Killian is on to their tricks so the Nazi scum raise the stakes and have Killian framed for the murder of the wife of one of his men. He had been to the apartment to see her that evening, he delivered a letter to her from her dead hubby. The letter, Ferris lying about not seeing Killian leave the building and an open 2nd floor window are evidence the police detective can understand. Killian is arrested and charged but he escapes and the man hunt is on.

It's a nice tight little spy thriller, there's only 64 mins and they move along at a nice clip. There's more murders and plenty of running about. There's a bit of goofy romance near the end but nothing I can do about that. I enjoyed it and would watch it over again. Lucky for me, I bought the Warner Archives DVDr. I couldn't find the movie on YouTube, there's a bit of clip in the link above.

Ellery Queen's Penthouse Mystery 1941

Ellery Queen's Penthouse Mystery was the 4th of the Ellery Queen movies and the second from Republic Pictures. It came out in 1941 and it's based on the 1939 Ellery Queen play The Three Scratches. It's got a screenplay by Eric Taylor and the director is James P Hogan. Eric wrote around 50 movies in a career that started in 1936 and ended when he died in 1952. He was only 55 but before he croaked it he wrote several entertaining Universal horror films like The Black Cat, The Ghost Of Frankenstein, Phantom Of The Opera and Son Of Dracula. He wrote 6 more Ellery Queen movies, a couple of Dick Tracy movies and some starring The Crime Doctor. James started as a director in 1920 and he directed some of the Bulldog Drummond pictures and The Mad Ghoul. He died in 1943 at the age of 53.

Ralph Bellamy and Margaret Lindsay are back as Ellery and his secretary Nikki Porter. Anna May Wong is a woman with some jewels, she's to sell them and use the money for Chinese famine relief. Of course, crooks are after them. There's all the usual running about and yakking. The story moves along and the crooks get caught. Cast has a few of my old favorites: James Burke, Charles Lane, Russell Hicks and Mantan Moreland. I'd watch it again sometime.

Friday Night Movies 789

The First Of The Few is a 1942 British film that was called Spitfire in the US. I couldn't find any good poster images for the British title, I had to settle for the one on the left. The original story is by Henry C James and Katherine Strueby, the screenplay is by Miles Malleson and Anatole de Grunwald, the director is Leslie Howard. It was Leslie's last role as an actor, he died the following year, the plane he was in was shot down by the German Luftwaffe.

Leslie is RJ Mitchell, the man who designed the Spitfire fighter plane. He'd been designing planes since the early 20s and they won a lot of speed records. He was first guy to use one wing instead of the two that were popular at the time. The company he worked at didn't agree and he left them. They hired him back later and then they were bought out by a bigger company who wanted Mitchell as their head designer. The head of that company knew that the future needed men like Mitchell.

David Niven plays RJ's test pilot and Rosamund John plays RJ's wife. The trio visit Germany just after Hitler has taken control, the pro-war rhetoric convinces RJ he must build a war plane that's better than anything. He works too hard, gets sick and dies. It's all melodramatic in the movie, it's like he worked himself to death for the sake of the country.

In real life RJ got cancer in 1934, he slowed down some and totally stopped working in 1936, he died the following year. They don't even mention cancer in the film. Still, good work out of Leslie, David and the rest of the cast. I liked most of the film, a little too much melodrama mixed in with scientist working to solve a problem, but I was still glad to see it. I'd prefer a film like The Dam Busters to this.

Berlin Express is a 1948 American film that was partially shot in the ruins of Frankfort and Berlin in 1948. Curt Siodmak wrote the story, Harold Medford wrote the screenplay and Jacques Tourneur directed.

Robert Ryan is an American agricultural expert, Paul Lukas is a German peace activist Dr Bernhardt, Merle Oberon is a French woman who's Bernhardt's secretary, Charles Korvin is a Frenchman, Robert Coote is a British teacher and Roman Toporow is a Russian officer. They all meet on a train from Frankfort to Berlin. Bernhardt is blown up on the train but we find out it's really an agent who was killed, Bernhardt is in disguise. Bernhardt is only safe for a few minutes, he's kidnapped by the Nazi underground after the train arrives in Berlin.

Merle convinces Robert, Charles, Robert and Roman to help her find Bernhardt. They set out to find the guy. We know he's being held by a fanatical brew-master who wants the Reich to rise again. The investigation takes them around the city, there's an incredible amount of rubble and destruction, yet people continue on. A good few of them are still looking backward to the glorious Nazi past that's slipped out of their fingers. You can't be sure who to trust.

It's a bit pseudo-documentary style with a narrator filling us in on what we are seeing. The cast is great, the script is great, the rubble is great. Happy to add this to the small pile of Jacques Tourneur films I would want to watch again.

Michael Shayne - The Complete PRC Mystery Collection

Classic Flix from Lincoln California packed the 5 Michael Shayne films starring Hugh Beaumont in a one disc set called Michael Shayne - The Complete PRC Mystery Collection. They are all short, 60 to 68 minutes, and black and white, so they don't look that bad. I don't think Classic Flix spent a whole lot of restoring the films but they are all watchable.

There had been an earlier series of 7 Michael Shane movies, with Lloyd Nolan, for 20th Century-Fox. Four of them are available in a DVD set. I have that to watch sometime soon. I hope I can find the other three films. I need to look around on the internet I guess. After 20th dropped the series, Producers Releasing Corporation picked it up, they did 5 films with Hugh Beaumont. Brett Halliday wrote the novels, I've read 2 or 3 over the years but he wasn't a novelist I kept up with. The movies are loosely based on the novels or characters.

Murder Is My Business 1946 Screenplay Fred Myton, director Sam Newfield, producer Sigmund Neufeld. Sam and Sigmund were brothers. Sam is considered one of the most prolific directors in Hollywood. He started directing in 1926 and he has 277 credits on the IMDb, his career ended in 1964 when he passed away at age 64. His output is mostly low budget films, shot quickly for little money, but some are entertaining. A number of them turn up in those public domain multi film DVD packs. I've seen a bunch of his Westerns and can't complain, they're B pictures but totally watchable. Same with the Mike Shayne pictures.

Hugh plays Michael, Cheryl Walker plays his secretary and romantic interest Phyllis Hamilton, Lyle Talbot plays a brother, Ralph Dunn plays an annoyed cop and George Meeker plays a gigolo. Virginia Christine has a small part, she would later play Mrs Olson in the Folger's Coffee Ads.

Michael comes to the aid of a pal who's been accused of murdering a rich woman. Her family are pretty suspect and Mike works on them. Ralph Dunn is the annoyed police detective Pete Rafferty, he's sure he's going to pin something on that crooked PI someday.

Hugh's Shayne is a peanut eating laid back sort of guy who plays pretty loosely with the law. He's not ashamed to hold back some evidence or steal something from the scene of the murder. He gets the job done and in record time. It's a pretty casual film that was fun to watch. Onto the next.

Larceny in Her Heart 1946 Screenplay Raymond L Schrock, director Sam Newfield, producer Sigmund Neufeld. Sigmund produced 146 pictures and directed 12 shorts.

Mike gets hired by a man to find his missing daughter, he does, she's in an asylum. Mike goes undercover as a patient to find her. Cheryl Walker returns as Mike's secretary as does Ralph Dunn as Detective Rafferty. Paul Bryar joins Mike's gang as Tim Rourke, a reporter for the local paper. Nothing outstanding but still entertaining. It kept me interested and it's short so they don't waste any time.

Blonde for a Day 1946Screenplay Fred Myton, director Sam Newfield, producer Sigmund Neufeld.

Kathryn Adams plays Michael's secretary. In real life she was Hugh Beaumont's wife. They married in 1942 and she retired from acting. She returned for this one picture. They were married until 1974 when they divorced. Cy Kendall takes over the role of Detective Pet Rafferty, Paul Bryar returns as the news paper guy Tim Rourke.

Michael's moved to San Francisco for some unknown to us reason but he returns when reporter pal Tim is shot. He in the hospital, near death. A gambling syndicate is behind it all and Mike's got his hands full punching those guys. There's a fair bit of rough housing in the series and most of the fights are fair to good. Same with everything in the series really. Still they are watchable pot boilers that have a good sense of humor. That can stretch a budget pretty well, in the right hands. I enjoyed this one too.

Three on a Ticket 1947 Screenplay Fred Myton, director Sam Newfield, producer Sigmund Neufeld. Cheryl Walker is back as Hugh's secretary, same with Ralph Dunn and Paul Bryar.

A PI Hugh used to know drops dead in Hugh's office, Hugh skims 10 Gs and a small piece of cardboard off the dead guy. He beats it, leaving Cheryl to call the cops. A woman asks Hugh to bump off her husband. Crooks looking for that piece of cardboard come a knocking, they knock Hugh out. He's used to it and it doesn't stop him from solving the case. He's nice and he dumps the credit to his long suffering police pal Rafferty. Another one I enjoyed.

Too Many Winners 1947 Screenplay John Sutherland, director William Beaudine, producer John Sutherland. William has even more credits on the IMDb than Sam Newfield. William started directing in 1915 and he directed 147 shorts before moving to feature films in 1922. He made over 30 silent films, over 150 talkies, and over 200 episodes of TV. He's one of my heroes of film.

Hugh plays Michael for the last time, Trudy Marshall plays Hugh's secretary for the first and last time, Ralph Dunn plays Rafferty for the last time.

All Mike's trouble in failing to go on vacation stems from the local horse racing track. Some crook has figured out how to counterfeit the betting tickets and the track is paying out way too much money. They hire Mike to look into it. The crooks aren't happy and send someone over to talk to Mike. There's the usual punching and dead bodies but Mike manages to pull his fat out of the fire and solve the case before Rafferty. He still gives Rafferty the newspaper credit. It was about as much fun as the rest and in the end I was glad to have picked up a copy. I'll watch these over again.

Dead Of Night 1945 Commentary and Documentary

I watched Dead Of Night again, this time with the commentary by Tim Lucas. He has a lot to say and most of it is interesting. He comes well prepared and it sure is nice to hear. There's a nice 75 minute documentary and people interviewed all seem to be fans of the movie, at least to same degree. They all agree on the important of the film in establishing a model for anthology films to come. The people on the commentary are Matthew Sweet, Kim Newman, Danny Leigh, Jonathan Romney, Keith M. Johnson, Reece Shearsmith and John Landis. Glad to have watched them.