NEVER TOO LATE. Reliable Pictures, 1935. Richard Talmadge, Thelma White, Robert Frazer, Mildred Harris, Vera Lewis, Robert Walker, George Chesebro. Director: Bernard B. Ray (as Franklin Shamray).

   This is not a movie I can recommend to you, and in fact, if I were to be perfectly honest, and why shouldn’t I be?, I’d advise you to stay away, even if ever you have an hour to spare and nothing else to spend it on.

   On the other hand, it is possible to find something interesting to see in it (and therefore to say about it). Leading man Richard Talmadge plays a police detective in this one, although that’s a fact that I don’t believe was made known right away. His task is helping a girl retrieve a set of pearls her sister, wife of the police commissioner, gave to an insidious (and pernicious) blackmailer.

   He knows the pearls are hidden in a shoe inside a trunk that for some reason is being sold at a police auction. To get there, he smacks up his car, gets into a police wagon heading for the auction, swings out the door in back up onto the roof and rides to the auction standing and swaying on top of the police wagon, then somersaulting to the ground when it stops.

   It turns out, not for the story’s sake, but in real life Richard Talmage was also a stunt man for much of his movie-making career, and as a result there are several scenes in which he is able to show off his prowess in that regard, somersaulting down stairs, jumping off second story balconies to the floor below, pivoting on tall pieces of lumber from the top of one building to another, and slugging it out with the bad guys, usually at odds of four or five to one against him.

   This is fun stuff, all right, but it really has nothing to do with the story, about which I’ve already said all I’m going to.