DARK ALIBI. Monogram Pictures, 1946. Also released as Charlie Chan in Alcatraz, Fatal Fingerprints and Fatal Fingertips. Sidney Toler as Charlie Chan, Benson Fong as Tommy Chan, Mantan Moreland as Birmingham Brown, Ben Carter as Benjamin Brown, Teala Loring, George Holmes, Joyce Compton, John Eldredge. Based on the character created by Earl Derr Biggers. Director: Phil Karlson. Currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
Charlie Chan is hired in this film by a public defender whose client has been convicted of a murder which happened during a bank robbery. He is scheduled to be executed in ten days, which doesn’t give Charlie, his son Tommy, and his chauffeur Birmingham Brown much time to save him. The damning evidence is the man’s fingerprints at the scene of the crime, even though he swears he was never there.
The actual detective work takes up maybe 30 minutes of the just over an hour of running time. The rest is all comedy, with Tommy and Birmingham clowning it up together or long portions featuring the latter alone. The suspects all live together in the same rooming house, which makes questioning them very easy. The other major setting is that of a large warehouse filled with what looks like old leftover sets and other spooky material, especially in the dark.
It is clear from the beginning that the crux of the case is finding out how the criminals were able to leave false fingerprints. I don’t know how, but I fingered the key villain immediately. Maybe he/she was obvious, but I still call it a Good One for me.
But I can’t end this review here before telling you that Mantan Moreland and Ben Carter do what’s called their “indefinite†routine (*) twice, wherein both men carry on a lengthy conversation with neither one ever quite completing any of their sentences. What’s more they do it again a third time at the end with Charlie himself taking part, leaving son Tommy simply scratching his head.
(*) Changed from “infinite” routine, which is incorrect. See comment 6.
This low budget private eye mystery has a surprisingly decent plot going for it, though it never quite amounts to much, despite a good cast.
Far from Film Noir it’s more in a minor Peter Cheyney key as a designer fashion house in London is robbed of the jewels used by their models, jewels on loan from vaguely foreign Mr. Mercedes (Eric Pohlman, the voice of Blofield in the early Bonds and a noted character actor), whose personal investigator arrives at the same time as Inspector McLeod of the Yard (bespectacled Richard Wattis as an unlikely Scotland Yard Inspector).
That private detective is former FBI agent Tom Conway (and yes, Tom Conway plays Tom Conway in this one, no doubt in an attempt to connect in British viewers minds with his role as Tom Falcon in the Falcon series).
At the shop the morning after the robbery is a middle aged peeress who claims when she was there the day before she saw two of her own jewels among the stones in Mercedes collection, and shortly after that Mercedes decides he doesn’t want Conway wasting time investigating the theft.
Conway, being American, and a private eye, doesn’t listen and is there the night of the upcoming show when one of the models plunges to her death wearing a blood orange gown designed by Helen Pascall from a defective railing Conway saved Simpson from earlier in the day.
When the woman who claimed to have seen her stolen jewels is murdered, also in a blood orange gown, after a visit by Conway it starts to look bad for him since bodies keep showing up at his feet, and when he finds a third model murdered again in a blood orange gown his relationship with reserved McLeod deteriorates further.
The police are suspicious of Mr. Mercedes (Pohlman is subdued, but not bad in the closest thing to a colorful performance in the film save for the killer who I won’t give away), and Conway is getting too close to something so his own boss ends up kidnapping him only for a police raid to throw Mercedes off. Mercedes fakes having a bomb and escapes, and Conway ends up in custody suspected of being in with Mercedes who it turns out was an international crook with a record across the world using his business interest in the fashion house to launder money and re-cut stolen jewels.
Then Mercedes is murdered, no doubt by an unsuspected partner, and Conway has to set a dangerous trap for a killer who has killed four people and who is willing to kill again.
And in fairness, it is a pretty good trap, replete with a twist that I admit I did not see coming, and which made complete sense. In fact that is why I bothered to review this one at all.
Jealous lovers, criminal conspiracy, and a ruthless killer are the key ingredients here.
Admittedly Conway is tired by this point in his career (and drinking heavily), and while he still wears a trench coat well, he is not at his best. While there are some good scenes, especially between Conway and Naomi Chance as the sophisticated model Gina, there is nothing here that really clicks though the plot is more than serviceable for the short running time.
A tighter script, and less tired leading man, and a few touches of directorial flare would have boosted this immensely. As it is it kills an hour not unpleasantly even if it is instantly forgettable.
Probably the most interesting thing about this film is the studio where it was made, legendary Hammer, well before its horror days, and the director, Terence Fisher, who would helm many of the horror films that put Hammer on the map. Beyond that it is little more than a B programmer with a better than usual cast and some decent sets.
Frankly, while still a pro, Conway often looks as if he would prefer to sit down and have a drink, giving his brother George Sanders a run for bored and indifferent.
COLONEL MARCH INVESTIGATES. Criterion Films, UK, 1953. Starring Boris Karloff as Colonel March. Screenplay by Leo Davis, based on three stories written by John Dickson Carr. Director: Cyril Enfield.
The master of the locked room mystery was, inarguably, John Dickson Carr, one of the most popular crime writers of the Golden Age. His masterpiece, The Hollow Man (1935), retains an almost legendary status among crime fiction fans, but he is now sadly forgotten by the wider public. The books have long been out of print in the UK, and I’m always hoping that some publisher will bring them back.
Perhaps they are so obscure because Carr’s most famous sleuths, Dr Gideon Fell and Sir Henry Merrivale, never made it to the screen. One of his lesser characters managed it, however, in the early 1950s, with the television series Colonel March of Scotland Yard.
Carr had used the character only in his 1940 short story collection The Department of Queer Complaints, in which there is a subdivision of Scotland Yard that specialises in crimes of a curious or apparently impossible nature. The series was financed by the Americans and starred international film star Boris Karloff – famous for playing the Chinese-American detective Mr Wong and, of course, even more so, Frankenstein’s Monster.
At this point in his long career, Karloff was a frequent guest on American radio series and even had his own show for children in which he read stories and told riddles. In 1952, he returned to England and made three episodes for ITV which acted as pilots for a longer series. Eventually, twenty six were produced, all of which were a brisk 25 minutes long.
The first three made were stitched together for release to cinemas in 1953. This was not uncommon for a TV show at the time and the practice would continue into the next decade, particularly with The Saint.
Colonel March Investigates is a taut 70 minute anthology of three slight, though entertaining, mysteries with the twinkly-eyed Karloff. He gives the character an eye-patch, which he didn’t have in the stories, but it adds something to the character, as we can imagine he may have lost it in the First World War. This, perhaps, is someone who has witnessed untold horrors and has come to terms with the world by engaging with its more whimsical wonders.
Unsurprisingly, there is a framing device which helps tie the three tales together, in which March stands in his office and inspects a cupboard stocked with souvenirs of his cases before leading the audience into the corresponding story.
The first of these, aired as “Hot Money,” revolves around a bank robbery in which a clerk is incriminated. He follows the criminal to an office, where the money is seemingly stored. However, when the place is searched, the money has apparently disappeared. Despite the clerk being framed in the silliest of ways, the resolution is pretty decent, but nothing too special. Joan Sims appears here in an early role, and March reveals a John Steed-like umbrella sword!
The second story was aired as “Death in the Dressing Room,” which is probably the weakest of the three. Set in a nightclub, it features an exotic dance routine which acts as a clue, while the always reliable Richard Wattis plays the manager. The running time to these is so short that there is virtually no time to set up a number of suspects, so the culprit tends to be the person who has been in it the most.
No matter, as it’s all about how March gets his man, which he does here in a tense confrontation. As usual, March’s sparring partner is the Scottish Inspector Ames (Ewan Roberts), though you wonder why he’s there as March seems to be a famous genius.
The third story, intriguingly titled “The New Invisible Man,” features a peeping tom who has apparently witnessed a pair of animated gloves committing murder, and a scene of a crime with no evidence of a crime. It’s the best one, I think, though there are a couple of problems. We get the opportunity to see the gloves in action ourselves, but it doesn’t look much like the way it’s shown to us in the reveal.
The trick is good, nonetheless, and it certainly had me baffled. The reason behind it all is pretty shaky, however, and involves stolen paintings and, eventually, a kidnapped March. It’s all good fun, though, which is what I’d call the film as a whole. And an interesting peek, as ever, into bygone England. Eight episodes of the series itself are available on DVD. It’s just a pity the complete series isn’t available.
GOODBYE PARADISE. Australia, 1982. Ray Barrett, Robyn Nevin, Guy Doleman, Lex Marinos, Paul Chubb, Janet Scrivener, and Carole Skinner. Written by Bob Ellis and Denny Lawrence. Directed by Carl Schultz. Released on DVD in Australia (Region 0.)
Okay, drop what you’re doing, put down your book, stop watching whatever’s on TV and go out and find this. Watch it. Then watch it again. It’s that good.
What follows is a gaudy Technicolor echo of THE BIG SLEEP, THE GLASS KEY, FAREWELL MY LOVELY and DOUBLE INDEMNITY, with touches of BILLION DOLLAR BRAIN tossed in. And it works. Beautifully. Schultz’s graceful camera work is backed up by Ellis’ and Lawrence’s Chandleresque voice-over narration, read by Barrett with a wry shrug in his voice:
Even better is the sense of feeling Schultz and his actors evoke. When Barrett meets up with an old friend or an ex-lover (as he does about every ten minutes) one gets the impression that they really care for each other, and the effect is to draw us even closer to the character and his goofball style.
Schultz & co even extend this to the bad guys. Barrett finds an old buddy getting rich as a Hefner-style guru, bullshitting teenagers for a living, and the look he gives his old friend speaks a mega-series. Third-billed Guy Doleman turns up about two-thirds of the way through as a punctilious military type, and when his ramrod spine bends for a moment in reminiscence, the character achieves dimensions that make his later misdeeds somehow even more depraved.
Throw in an icy doctor-for-hire, a few greedy politicians and brutal cops, some young space-cadets and a tour-guide pornographer and you have a cast as diverse and exotic as a Russian novel.
And let me spoil one big surprise here. No, I’m not going to throw in a (SPOILER ALERT!) because this is too good not to share. There’s a moment here where a helpful suspect tells Barrett to come back tomorrow for a vital piece of evidence. And when Barrett does come back tomorrow, the helpful suspect is STILL ALIVE!
TWO O’CLOCK COURAGE. RKO Radio Pictures, 1945. Tom Conway, Ann Rutherford, Richard Lane, Lester Matthews, Roland Drew, Emory Parnell, Bettejane Greer, Jean Brooks. Based on the novel of the same title by Gelett Burgess. Previously filmed as Two in the Dark (1936). Director: Anthony Mann. Available on DVD and streaming here on the Internet Archive.
There are three good movies all wrapped up in this one and struggling to get out. Unfortunately with only just over 60 minutes of running time, not one of them manages to prevail. The result is a totally entertaining but still disappointing film that could have been so much better if the people behind this one had chosen one of the three and stuck to it.
(A) Noir. A man staggers out into a foggy street and a cab manages to stop from hitting him only in the nick of time. The driver of the cab, female, lends a sympathetic ear when she discovers that he is bleeding from a wound on his head, and cannot remember who he is or why he’s there on the street. I was reminded immediately of Cornell Woolrich and many of his stories at this point.
(B) Screwball comedy. Trying to discover who he is, the pair run across a murder, a dopey cop, a wise aleck reporter and a butler who didn’t do it. They also find themselves rubbing elbows with the high class elite of the city, all dressed up in night club finery, including the cab driver (Ann Rutherford, who never looked finer).
(C) A serious detective mystery, centered around the manuscript of a successful play, but the name on the manuscript is not the same as the person who’s taking credit for it. As far as I was concerned, here’s where I decided to sit back and simply enjoy the movie, since none of this made any sense.
Quite a mishmash indeed, is what I’m trying to say. Tom Conway, as the amnesiac, which I see I have neglected to mention before, is perfect in his role: suitably bewildered but still obviously a gentleman of some refinement. I do see I have mentioned Ann Rutherford already. She is worth mentioning twice. And did you see Jane Greer in the credits? A small part, I grant you, but she’s just another reason for watching this one. An indubitable bonus, if you will.
BLIND ADVENTURE (RKO, 1933) Robert Armstrong, Helen Mack, Roland Young, Ralph Bellamy, John Miljan, Tyrill Davis, and Phyllis Barry. Written by Ruth Rose. Directed by Ernest B. Schoedsack.
This one gets off to a slow start, especially for a movie only an hour long, but stick with it.
Blind Adventure was cobbled together while stars Armstrong and Mack were lolling around on RKO’s dime, awaiting completion of the stop-motion effects in Son of Kong. And it has a charmingly thrown-together look, courtesy of Ruth Rose’s one-damn-thing-after-another story, and Ernest B Schoedsack’s rough-and ready direction.
Things get moving when Robert Armstrong, an American at loose ends in London, gets lost in a foggy night, wanders into a stately town house to get directions, and finds it deserted — except for a dead body (Ralph Bellamy.) He catches a glimpse of someone running out of the house, loses him in the fog, and returns to find the house filled with staid, respectable Englishmen, no dead body in evidence, and everyone assuring him there’s no need to bother the Police.
Enter delightful Helen Mack as a niece visiting staid, respectable relatives she’s never seen. She and Armstrong overhear the others arguing about what to do with them and start to sneak out… only to discover Ralph Bellamy, who it turns out was merely stunned by a bullet grazing his head.
Bellamy explains that the house is full of spies, he’s with the Secret Service, and they must deliver a cigarette case to his boss — the fate of the Free World depends on it.
Fortunately, the story that ensues is not nearly so simple-minded. Twist follows turn, complications compound, and mysteries mount with every scene.
Chief among said complications is a cockney burglar, played to the hilt and then some by Roland Young, usually typed as pusillanimous businessmen, looking delighted with the change. The three principals forge their way through a plot as dense as the London fog that fills the screen, courtesy of Henry W. Gerrard’s evocative photography.
But the real star of this thing is Ruth Rose’s story and her director-husband’s gift for telling it with verve and a certain amount of affection. The critical world will little note nor long remember Blind Adventure, but it offers a pleasant hour of adventure that I shall cherish.
THE LADY IN THE MORGUE. Universal Pictures, 1938. Preston Foster (PI Bill Crane), Patricia Ellis, Frank Jenks (Doc Williams), Bill Elliott (as Gordon Elliott), Barbara Pepper. Screenwriters: Eric Taylor, Robertson White, based on the novel by Jonathan Latimer. Director: Otis Garrett.
When an unidentified young woman’s body is found in a hotel room bathroom, it is easy to assume that she hung herself. The police, always willing to wrap up a case as quickly as possible, certainly do. PI Bill Crane gets involved only when a representative of a missing girl’s family wants his agency to see if the dead woman is her.
Also interested in knowing the who the dead girl is are a couple of gangsters who have been rivals for a missing woman’s hand. But when all parties show up at the morgue at the same time, they find her body missing and the morgue attendant knocked on the head and lying dead on the floor.
Thus begins one of the screwier detective murder mysteries I’ve had the occasion to see in quite a while. What follows is just over sixty minutes of fast-paced clues and action, mixed with cops, hoodlums and a sizable number of attractive dance hall hostesses, debutantes and more.
You’ll have to pay close attention to the clues that Crane comes across, though. I think there are enough there to make the conclusion hold water, but the emphasis in this sentence is the world “think.†When the movie had ended, and Crane had revealed what was going on in terms who was doing what to whom and where, my head was still spinning. I’m really not sure.
And to be perfectly sure, I’d have to watch the whole movie again, a possibility I wouldn’t mind in the least. The first time through I was too busy enjoying myself. Madcap detective movies such as this one don’t come along often enough, not nearly so, not for me.
EXILE EXPRESS. Grand National, 1939. Anna Sten, Alan Marshal, Jerome Cowan, Walter Catlett, Leonid Kinskey, Irving Pichel, Harry Davenport, Feodor Chaliapin, Byron Foulger, Vince Barnett, and George Chandler. Written by Ethel La Blanche and Edwin Justus Mayer. Directed by Otis Garrett. Currently available on YouTube here.
A star on her way down, a studio on its way out, a movie that ain’t bad.
Anna Sten was imported to this country by Sam Goldwyn, who saw her as another Garbo. Problem was, we already had one, and after three flops, Ms Sten was cast loose in the film industry, where she continued to work at fitful intervals into the 1960s. Exile Express was her first film in three years and a far cry from the lush work of Goldwyn.
Grand National was a scrappy little “B†outfit with an eye out for novelty. They snagged James Cagney at the height of his popularity (and in the middle of a contract spat with Warners) for two films, but lost him when they passed up Angels with Dirty Faces for a limp musical that was nothing to sing about. Undaunted, Grand National went for the ready-made publicity of Heavyweight Champ Joe Louis (Spirit of Youth) Lamont Cranston (The Shadow, with silent star Rod LaRocque) and Doctor Robert E Cornish’s home-movie footage showing him supposedly restoring a dead dog to life (Life Returns) which left the lovely Anna Sten literally following a dog act on the bill.
Withall, nevertheless, and notwithstanding, Exile Express is pretty good: mostly light and inconsequential, but a few moments stick in the critical conscience like venial sins. Ms Sten plays a refugee, and when she speaks of her plans to become a US citizen, she conveys real feeling. Then, of course, the plot rears its banal head; she’s working for a scientist engaged in top-secret research, and when he’s killed and his notes stolen, she falls under suspicion. Acquitted of any crime, he is ordered deported on general principles and put aboard a train from San Francisco to Ellis Island — hence the title Exile Express.
The rest is mostly sub-Hitchcock, with the train hurtling across the Land of the Free while Enemy Agents try to sneak her off — it seems they need her to fill in the gaps in those stolen notes — and a handsome young reporter takes a bemused interest in the whole thing. We get the usual complement of colorful characters and comic interludes, well-played by reliables with faces you never forget and names you never remember, but there’s also a quiet moment on the train when a gangster being kicked out of the country brags about how big he’ll be back in the Old Country, then falls sadly silent as he looks out the window and sees America passing by.
I should also put in a word for George Chandler as a gawky near-bridegroom replaced at the last minute by the handsome hero. Chandler had a pivotal part in what is undoubtedly and beyond debate the greatest film ever made (The Fatal Glass of Beer) and he uses his typecast sincerity to here to excellent comic effect.
This was the last film from Grand National, and if it didn’t go out with a bang, it was at least more swan song than whimper.
HOLD THAT WOMAN! PRC, 1940. James Dunn (skiptracer Jimmy Parker), Frances Gifford, George Douglas, Rita La Roy. Director: Sam Newfield. Currently available on YouTube.
Yes, I know that skiptracers (guys who track down people who have not kept up payments on their purchases) are not exactly private investigators, but it does take a certain amount of detective work on their part combined with enough finesse to get the unpaid for goods out of the non-payers’ hands without causing a major incident.
This is exactly where Jimmy Parker slips up. Trying to repossess a radio set from a woman’s apartment, she defies him and calls in the cops, who (straining credulity) take her side of it. It turns out, though, that she has a very good reason for wanting to hold onto the radio, and it has to do with a small cache of jewels stolen from a famous movie star.
Or in other words, the two cases are connected. The movie is only just over an hour long, and not a minute of it is wasted. It’s non-stop action mixed with a strong swallop of comedy from beginning to end, as you’d probably guess from the presence of James Dunn, his usual jovial unruffled self, as the aforementioned skiptracer. He was married at the time to Frances Gifford, who is both beautiful and exceptionally efficient as his fiancee and (eventually) his wife, that latter event totally against the wishes of her father, a crusty old cop who sees Jimmy as a good-for-nothing lightweight.
If you’ve read this review all the way down to here, lots of fun awaits you with this one.
THE CARIBBEAN MYSTERY. 20th Century Fox, 1945. James Dunn, Sheila Ryan, Linda Lane, Reed Hadley, Roy Roberts, Edward Ryan. Screenplay by Jack Andrews, Leonard Praskin, W. Scott Darling & Nicholas Ray (dialogue; not credited), based on Murder in Trinidad by John W. Vandercook. Directed by Robert Webb. Currently available on YouTube here.
This was the third film adaptation (*) of famed newscaster John W. Vandercook’s first novel featuring his Cockney sleuth Bertram Lynch who previously appeared in Murder in Trinidad with Nigel Bruce in the role, as a Mr. Moto entry, Mr. Moto on Danger Island, and finally here with James Dunn (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn) as Brooklyn born ex-cop turned private eye Mr. Smith.
Vandercook, who penned four adventures of Lynch between 1934 and 1959, had a solid formula mixing classic detection, adventure, exotic locales, and his unprepossessing Cockney detective Lynch, who seemed neither too bright or particularly tough, but who was in fact all of those things and more. It didn’t hurt Vandrcook had a lively writing style and a way with a plot.
The plot is simple enough. Two scientists have disappeared in the jungle on a Caribbean island and the police are no where near finding them or why they disappeared. Enter Smith, a private detective who seems like nothing more than a Flatbush Flatfoot, but who is smart, tough, and hard to kill.
The local police are not impressed, and indeed suspect, especially the head of the police whose daughter, Linda Lane, is enamored of young Edward Ryan.
When Sheila Ryan’s character is murdered at the hotel where Smith is staying after suggesting she has something to tell him, it becomes obvious that whatever happened to the missing men is tied to someone in the city too, so Smith has to play his cards close to his vest, only taking Edward Ryan into his confidence when Lane and her father disappear into the jungle as well.
Moving into the swamp’s inland, Smith uncovers a slave camp run by Roy Roberts where the girl and her father are held hostage and the two dead scientists are buried. After Roberts plans the same fate for Smith and his helper Smith manages to escape, turn the tables on Roberts, and take him prisoner.
But Roberts is shot before he can reveal who the man back in the city is behind the whole business — did the girl’s father really have to shoot him or was he silencing him? — and Smith’s only chance is to lay a trap for the killer.
As low budget mysteries go, the stronger than usual story-line and a decent cast help this one, though it has nothing on the first version (rightfully praised in William K. Everson’s The Detective in Film) or the Peter Lorre Mr. Moto outing.
Dunn’s mugging is less annoying than in some films (at his best he was a fine character actor, but he did rely on the Irishness a bit heavily in some parts), and his Smith is a decent take on Lynch. Given a decent cast, better than average script and story, and decent mystery this one deserves a look.
It’s worth a look, but if you have to make the call, stick with the Nigel Bruce or Peter Lorre version.
(*) I wouldn’t be the least surprised to discover there had been another adaptation of this on television or elsewhere, IMDb doesn’t seem to recognize there were two previous versions of the same book though, so there is not easy way to tell.
