MANHANDLED. Paramount Pictures, 1949. Dorothy Lamour, Sterling Hayden, Dan Duryea, Irene Hervey, Phillip Reed, Harold Vermilyea, Alan Napier, Art Smith, Irving Bacon. Screenplay by Lewis R. Foster & Whitman Chambers, based on the story “The Man Who Stole a Dream,” by L. S. Goldsmith. Director: Lewis R. Foster.

   There are some positive aspects to this film, including an absolutely bravura performance by Dan Duryea, but sad to say, there aren’t enough of them for me to give you more than a very tepid recommendation that you see it, if you haven’t done so already. And that’s especially true if, attracted by either the title or the names of those in the cast, you’re expecting a solidly built film noir.

   And a solidly built film noir is not what this is. Maybe the first ten minutes, in which we see a husband, obviously impatiently waiting for his wife to come home with her current boy friend or so he assumes, followed by an argument which culminated with in crashing a perfume bottle down on her head, killing her instantly.

   It’s a chilling scene that’s beautifully photographed. It’s too bad, then, that it was all a dream, as the husband is next seen telling his psychiatrist all about it. The dream, that is. The doctor tries o alleviate the husband’s fears, but he also seems inordinately interested the wife’s jewelry, which are said to be worth something $100,000.

   Which is a lot of money, then or now, and when the wife is subsequently found murdered, in identical fashion to the husband’s dream, of course the jewelry is missing. At which point the film shifts into its real reason for existing: a fairly ordinary murder mystery. Did the husband really do it, or if not, who else knew about the dream and jewelry? The doctor, of course, or perhaps the PI (Dan Duryea) who lives in the apartment immediately below the doctor’s secretary (Dorothy Lamour).

   I have not yet mentioned Sterling Hayden, who plays the insurance investigator assigned to the case, and whose eye is quick to notice that the secretary is an extremely attractive woman. You’d also think he’d be more involved with solving the case as well, but in spite of many opportunity to do so, the story goes off in another direction altogether.

   No, it’s Dan Duryea’s performance that carries the story, no doubt about it. He always played smooth but ultimately sleazy operators to the hilt, but in Manhandled he turns his trademarked unctuousness up a notch, or maybe three. A greater cad in all regards, you cannot imagine.

   The movie does get a little rougher — especially in the final fifteen minutes — but after the one additional twist I thought was coming never materialized, I was so non-interested as not to care. This one could have been a lot better than it actually turned out.

PS. The orecurring attempts to add some humor, especially the police car with no brakes, were truly lame, indeed.

NO MAN’S WOMAN. Republic Pictures, 1955. Marie Windsor, John Archer, Patric Knowles, Nancy Gate, Jil Jarmyn, Richard Crane, Fern Hall, Louis Jean Heydt, Percy Helton. Screenplay by John K. Butler, based on a story by Don Martin. Director: Franklin Adreon.

   Marie Windsor’s movie-making career was perhaps never destined to climb into the A-film category, but to me and many people I know, she was the Queen of the B’s, no doubt about it. She has top billing in this one, and she deserved it, even though she’s the kind of witch (“no matter how you spell it”) who’s destined to be killed off buy someone she’s crossed, and badly, soon after the halfway point.

   As Carolyn Grant, she’s the wife, for example, of a man (Suspect #1) who’s no longer in love with her, and in fact they live apart, and who would like to have a divorce to marry someone else (Suspect #2). He can’t meet her demands, however: alimony plus a six-figure additional payout. The husband’s father (Suspect #3) offers to meet her demands, but husband refuses to use his money that way.

   Carolyn meanwhile has her eye on the fiancé (Suspect #4) of the girl (Suspect #5) who works for her in her art shop. After insinuating her way into breaking up the engagement, add two more people would would be happy to see her dead.

   And that’s not all. Her lover of sorts is a local art critic/newspaper columnist [Suspect #6] who’s been plugging her art shop, to their mutual advantage, until he’s found out and fired. At which point Carolyn summarily boots him out of her life, laughing happily as she does so.

   All of which makes the first half of the movie a lot of fun to watch and await the inevitable. On the other hand, after Carolyn’s death, all of the built up tension is gone, and the movie turns into a straightforward murder mystery. It’s not a bad one as far as murder mystery movies go, and in fat it’s actually a very good one. The problem is, without Marie Windsor’s memorably brassy man-stealing performance to continue watching, anything that follows would have to have been, in comparison, a ten-story letdown.

INTRUDER IN THE DUST . MGM, 1949. David Brian, Claude Jarman Jr, Juano Hernandez,. Porter Hall, Charles Kemper, Will Geer, and Elizabeth Patterson. Screenplay by Ben Maddow, from the novel by William Faulkner. Directed by Clarence Brown.

   As much a mystery/suspense movie as a social-problem film, and excellent on both counts.

   Intruder opens with Lucas Beauchamp (Juano Hernandez) arrested for the murder of Vinson Gowrie — he was found standing over Gowrie’s body with a recently-fired pistol in his pocket—and the locals, egged on by Gowrie’s brother Crawford (Charles Kemper) feel it their civic duty to skip the formality of a trial, stalled only by the absence of Gowrie’s father (Porter Hall.)

   Enter Chick Mallison (Claude Jarman Jr) a spectator in the crowd who knows something of the aloof “uppity” Beauchamp, believes him innocent, and enlists his older-and-wiser attorney uncle (David Brian) to defend him in Court. If he ever gets there.

   Sounds like To Kill a Mockingbird before its time, but the characters surprised me: Juano Hernandez’ Beauchamp is remote and uncooperative. Porter Hall , who at various times in his career murdered The Thin Man, shot Will Bill Hickok, locked up Kris Kringle, and marooned Tab Hunter, is quite sympathetic here, while David Brian’s wise-looking lawyer is only slightly less benighted than the noose-swinging locals — he doesn’t wait to hear Beauchamp’s story, just wants to plead him Guilty, and has no intention of getting in the way of any lynch mob.

   BUT THEN….There’s a marvelous moment in Brian’s office, where Jarman interrupts his conference with a meek little old lady (Elizabeth Patterson, being sued for running over a chicken) and Brian rails about the impossibility of Beauchamp’s case. “Why did he have to murder a Gowrie? And if he did, why did he have to shoot him in the back?” Whereupon Patterson pipes up softly but firmly “Maybe he didn’t.”

   At which point the whole tone of the piece shifts. Patterson (who was also in The Story of Temple Drake) takes over the investigation, blockades the Jail and… and other stuff I won’t spoil for you. Suffice it to way she’s a tough and smart in her own way as Margaret Rutherford’s Miss Marple.

   I think this character was deliberately brought on quietly and allowed to grow, as do some others, making this a film that reminded me of Chandler’s dictum: The crime itself is less important than its effect on the characters. Or in this case, the effect of the characters upon the crime.

   Make no mistake. This is a Mystery Movie, albeit a fairly obvious one. Bodies get buried, moved, and dug up again, clues get gathered, and toward the end, Will Geer’s canny sheriff has a tense stand-off with a hidden killer.

   We also get some quietly pungent displays of passive racism, as when Jarman’s dad shrugs off a lynching with, “These things happen. And people like us do not get involved.” but scenarist Ben Maddow (The Asphalt Jungle, God’s Little Acre, etc) keeps the lesson implicit, and never preaches what he can show.

   So we get a good mystery here, and a thoughtful one. Mostly though we get to see human beings acting like people we know. And this is what makes Intruder in the Dust a film to treasure.

SHERLOCK HOLMES FACES DEATH. Universal, 1943. Basil Rathbone, Nigel Bruce, Dennis Hoey, Hillary Brooke, Milburn Stone and Vernon Downing. Screenplay by Bertram Millhauser, based on the story “The Musgrave Ritual” by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Directed by Roy William Neill.

   A turning point in Universal’s Sherlock Holmes series, as Director Roy William Neill took the Producer’s reins, weaned the stories away from Wartime propaganda, and told Basil Rathbone to go comb his hair.

   Fans know this as the one set in creepy Musgrave Manor, with the scene where the characters move about the checkered floor of the great hall like chess pieces, then descend into a crypt set left over from Dracula. It’s also the one where Neill began consolidating his stock company: cementing Dennis Hoey firmly in place as Lestrade (a cop thick enough to make Nigel Bruce’s charmingly comic Dr. Watson look brilliant by comparison) and bringing back Gavin Muir, Gerald Hamer, Olaf Hytten, and other capable bit-players, including Mary Gordon as Mrs. Hudson.

   So we get the usual cast of sidelong-glancing suspects, beleaguered heroine, and the wrongly-accused nice-guy. There’s something else, though: the cast of suspects poking and sneaking about the gloomy corridors and secret passages includes some recuperating soldiers, obviously mentally disturbed by some trauma in combat, trying to keep a grip on sanity. Just how they were expected to recover in The Haunted Mansion is never made clear, (“Every house has a personality,” Holmes intones, “This one is positively ghoulish.”) but the film portrays these souls with surprising insight and compassion.

   And as such, this “B” picture may have been the first to address, however tangentially, the psychological problems of returning heroes — this at a time when most “A” war films were glossing over any unpleasantness.

   Or maybe not. Whatever the case, I shall remember a brief moment with a soldier afraid to open a pack of cigarettes in Sherlock Holmes Faces Death when I have forgotten much more “important” films and not missed them a bit.

THE LADY IN THE MORGUE. Universal Pictures: A Crime Club Production, 1938. Preston Foster (Bill Crane), Patricia Ellis, Frank Jenks, Thomas Jackson, Gordon (Bill) Elliott), Roland Drew, Barbara Pepper. Based on the book by Jonathan Latimer. Director: Otis Garrett.

   I’ve never read the Crime Club novel by Jonathan Latimer on which this is based, but — according to the program notes — the film is less true to the novel than was the film version of Latimer’s The Westland Case.

   This sips along with zany ease [beginning with the disappearance of a girl’s body from the city morgue], and is notable for some inventive camera work by Stanley Cortez, who also filmed The Magnificent Ambersons and Night of the Hunter. It’s the kind of camera work that calls attention to itself (some of the visual scene transitions are as wild as the plot), but it seems perfectly matched to the narrative.

   Foster and Jenks are first-rate, and maybe the organizers will turn up the third Crime Club Bill Crane film (The Last Warning) for next year’s program. If The Last Warning is everywhere near as good as the first two, this would make a sensational laser disc set.

THERE’S THAT WOMAN AGAIN. Columbia, 1939. Melvyn Douglas, Virginia Bruce, Margaret Lindsay, Stanley Ridges. Director: Alexander Hall. Shown at Cinevent 27, Columbus OH, 1995.

   A followup to last year’s showing of There’s Always a Woman [reviewed by Steve here ], with Virginia Bruce replacing Joan Blondell as Sally Reardon, wife and would-be colleague of her husband Bill (melvyn Douglas) in his detective agency.

   Bruce, as far as I’m concerned, almost makes this unwatchable. She plays a ditzy blonde, with no compensating charm or cuteness. The mystery [concerning a series of robberies from a local jewelry store] is marginally interesting, but Bruce killed off any pleasure I might have taken in it.

TOMORROW AT SEVEN. RKO Radio Pictures, 1933. Chester Morris, Vivienne Osborne, Frank McHugh, Allen Jenkins, Henry Stephenson, Grant Mitchell. Director: Ray Enright.

   This one comes straight from the pulp magazines. I should know. I’ve read enough of them. Looking for some background for his next book, a mystery writer named Neil Broderick (Chester Morris) inveigles his way into the household of Thornton Drake (Henry Stephenson), a wealthy man who is said to know a lot about a mysterious killer nicknamed “The Black Ace.”

   The latter’s modus operandi is to send a warning the day before the victim is to die, in the form of course of a black ace of spades. Broderick manages to meet Drake by means of his secretary (Vivienne Osborne), but when Drake gets the black ace warning himself, off they all go to his manor house on a Louisiana plantation. And when I say “all” I mean Drake’s butler and two dimwitted Chicago cops who have maybe a half a brain between them.

   If you picked Frank McHugh and Allen Jenkins as the two cops just from the cast listing, you’d be right, and I’ll bet you’re not the only one. It is Drake’s butler who was murdered on the plane coming in, though, not Drake himself, and with only a limited number of suspects to choose from, it’s also not very difficult to figure out who the killer has to be.

   That’s not the point, though. This is half comedy and half a spooky old mansion mystery, not really a detective mystery, and depending on your tolerance for lowbrow comedy, the combination makes this an enjoyable if not very demanding film to watch. (If McHugh and Jenkins are the best that the Chicago Homicide Squad are able to offer, however, we really are in an alternate universe here.)

THE LIMEHOUSE GOLEM. Lionsgate, UK, 2016. Bill Nighy, Olivia Cooke, Douglas Booth, Sam Reid, Maria Valverde, Daniel Mays, Eddie Marsan Screenplay by Jane Goldman based on the novel Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem by Peter Ackroyd Directed by Juan Carlos Medina.

   I haven’t read the novel by Peter Ackroyd this film was based on, but based on Mr. Ackroyd’s previous work (Hawksmoor) I have to assume something went terribly wrong in the translation from book to screen. The year is 1880, and the Limehouse section of London has been rocked by a series of bizarre unrelated murders by a killer who designates himself as the Limehouse Golem, after murdering a rabbi who was studying the Golem of legend when he was struck down.

   Inspector Kildare of Scotland Yard is assigned to the case with Constable Flood (Daniel Mays) and a quote by the Golem from Thomas de Quincey’s book Murder as a Fine Art leads them to the British Library, where the book is found defaced by the Golem with his own notes leading to four suspects who had access to the reading room before the murder — Dan Leno (Douglas Booth), a musical comic and social commentator who performs in drag; John Cree {Sam Reid), a journalist and failed playwright who was recently poisoned and whose wife, former music hall star Lizzie (Olivia Cooke) Leno’s protegee, is on trial for his murder; Karl Marx; and, Victorian novelist George Gissing, the latter two providing brief and pointless cameos and filler as each suspect gets a scene as the supposed killer (I suspect Ackroyd used them to show the political and social unrest and injustice of the era in the novel since that was what both men were known for, but here they serve only as unconvincing red herrings and in Gissing’s case a visit to a Limehouse Opium den).

   Kildare soon becomes convinced that Cree is the killer, and that he can save Cree’s wife from the gallows if he can obtain a handwriting sample from the dead man and win sympathy for her as the wife who poisoned the Golem, but Cree destroyed all his own papers before his death and Lizzie Is curiously unwilling to be helped. A sample of Cree’s handwriting is the McGuffin the plot turns on, and source of one of the plots major twists (which is spelled out so obviously that I cannot imagine they expected anyone not to notice).

   Before going any further I should mention most of the cast is outstanding, especially Olivia Cooke and Douglas Booth in the most demanding and theatrical roles. I wish I could say the same of Bill Nighy, an actor whose work I have greatly enjoyed elsewhere, but to call this performance one note would assume he ever achieves an actual tonal quality as Kildare. Even rushing to prevent an execution he can’t muster much.

   Poor man obviously read the screenplay.

   Some effort is made at providing a fair play solution, with red herrings presented, misdirection staged, and only a few plot contrivances to string the viewer along (with handwriting samples vital to their case the investigators drag their heels collecting the easiest of those needed because it would eliminate an attractive suspect thus making it all the easier for the viewer to figure out who did it — as if anyone didn’t early on).

   And there lies one of the film’s problems. While scrupulously providing red herrings and misdirection the script has also been showing us the killer’s motive, nature, and personality so clearly that when the big twist comes it is no twist at all — you will have figured it out long before the detectives do, and killed the big reveal that is supposed to be the major plot element. Frankly I am having trouble even writing the review without giving the game away.

   I’ll grant that the big twist might have fooled audiences even twenty years ago, and certainly in the Victorian period the story is set in, but in 2019 most of us have matured enough to think the once unthinkable, and once you even entertain the idea of the killer’s real identity everything that has gone before makes sense. Worse, if, like me, you caught on fairly early, then everything that happens simply convinces you more to the point you want to yell at Nighy’s character because it is so obvious.

   Not really where you want to be in a mystery.

   There are a few other minor problems from a historical standpoint. The Golem murders are headline grabbing news, yet handed to Kildare who has never investigated a homicide. We know enough about the Yard to know that passing difficult cases off on incompetents wasn’t how things worked. There was great social unrest in London in this period, riots, crime, and terrorism, and the Yard would have moved swiftly as they did eight years later with the Ripper to reassure the city. Abberline, who investigated the Ripper may have been a drunk, but he was a drunk with a reputation for solving crimes.

   Novelist or no, there is a point you have to nod to reality. In addition both Kildare and Flood are gay, and fairly openly so. I am not arguing there were no gay inspectors or constables, but this was a period when the Yard was raiding male brothels (at one point embarrassing the Royal family and government by capturing an heir to the crown in one) and persecuting gays and I would have to see some historical evidence that gay men were openly tolerated in the Metropolitan Police in this period. The idea of the barely closeted Kildare and the fairly open Flood (at least they are in the film) being tolerated in that environment much less assigned a sensitive case is unlikely, and if the book makes a believable argument for why or how, the film doesn’t bother. And there lies another problem, since I suspect a lot of dotted i’s and crossed t’s in Ackroyd’s book got left on the cutting room floor in lieu of sensationalism and melodrama.

   Many of my problems with the film are likely dealt with in the novel in light of Ackroyd’s known literary skills.

   It’s just one of several things in the film that work against the important suspension of disbelief needed in any film and especially in one with a historical setting. I’m far from a stickler about these things, but when they interfere with story logic they do bother me, and I know Ackroyd, an expert on this era and a fine novelist and biographer, knows better leading me to suspect the screenwriter and director just didn’t bother.

   The film is handsomely produced, and there is a certain underlying intelligence and literacy. There is brief nudity and quite a bit of gore as well as some disturbing scenes but nothing too gratuitous. The glimpse of musical hall life in Victorian London and the few bits of performances and plays are the best of the film, and you share young Lizzie’s euphoria on stage with her, so much so I wish they had dumped the murder mystery and made a film about the Victorian music halls instead.

   I suspect if you see it, you will feel the same.

DANCING WITH CRIME. Coronet Films Ltd./Paramount, UK, 1947. Richard Attenborough, Barry K. Barnes, Sheila Sim, Garry Marsh, John Warwick, Judy Kelly, Barry Jones. Director: John Paddy Carstairs.

   Richard Attenborough, he of Jurassic Park fame, was very young when he made this film, only 24, but if you’re fond of crime movies taking place against a backdrop of a postwar British dance palace, he’s not the only reason to watch this film.

   To tell you the truth, I’m not sure how man other movies there were taking place against a backdrop of a postwar British dance palace, crime film or not, but it only adds to the semi-noirish aspect of the movie. When a war buddy tries to persuade a young taxi driver named Ted Peters (Attenborough) that there’s easy money to be made in some obviously criminal activity he’s part of, Peters turns him down, only to later find his friend dead in the back of his cab.

   The aforementioned dance palace seems to be the headquarters of the gang, and while Peters goes straight to the police, he decides to do some investigating on his own. Not only that, but his girl friend agrees to go undercover as a hostess at the club. Kind of a lark on both their parts, as neither of them seems to be all that broken up at the death of the friend.

   But lark or not, it’s still very much an engaging sort of story, in which Attenborough gets to show off his athletic prowess as well as his acting ability. At least twice he gets away from hoodlums holding guns directly on him. It’s also good to see a movie in which the villains are entirely bad. Not a streak of goodness in any of them.

CHARLIE CHAN AT THE OPERA. Fox, 1936. Warner Oland, Boris Karloff, Keye Luke, William Demarest, Charlotte Henry, Thomas Beck, Margaret Irving, Gregory Gaye, Nedda Harrigan, Frank Conroy and Guy Usher. Written by Scott Darling, Charles Belden and Bess Meredyth, based on the character created by Earl Derr Biggers. Directed by H. Bruce Humberstone. Libretto by Oscar Levant.

   Above the title, the screen reads, “WARNER OLAND vs BORIS KARLOFFF” which is not exactly true of the ensuing film, but I remember it did pump considerable excitement into the monster-movie fan I was at 14, watching Charlie Chan at the Opera after school.

   In the wisdom of my advancing years I can appreciate CCatO for the anomaly it is. Or was. In 1936 Horror movies were banned in Britain and began to disappear from American screens, not to return till Son of Frankenstein in 1939. In the interim, Karloff made only a handful of films, and in 1938 would find himself feebly competing with Oland in Monogram’s “Mr. Wong” series – “Warner Oland vs Boris Karloff” indeed!

   But let’s get back to Charlie Chan at the Opera. It’s basically a Chan film trimmed out with some Horror Movie clichés — it even opens on a dark & stormy night!—and as such it shows off the strengths and weaknesses of Fox’s durable Chan series: strong production values and a capable supporting cast vs Oland’s tedious delivery, cardboard characters, and improbable story-line.

   Karloff opens the film in bravura style as an escaped maniac on some sort of vendetta that leads him back to the Opera where he once starred, with murders ensuing. But since this is a Chan film, he can’t actually be the killer — a bitter disappointment to a young horror fan of my acquaintance.

   Instead, we get the usual suspects: Margaret Irving, Geregory Gaye and Nedda Harrigan are rather good as the Nasty Diva, Philandering Baritone, and his Jealous Wife, but Charlotte Henry and Thomas Beck merely take up space as the perfunctory young lovers — there’s a momentary eyebrow-raiser when a bit of careless writing pegs Ms Henry’s age as about 11, but this isn’t that kind of movie; it’s the kind of movie where William Demarest plays the obligatory Dumb Cop on a single shrill note that gets tiresome very quickly.

   Against this mediocrity, Karloff and his back story (Years ago his “widow,” now the Nasty Diva, locked him in his dressing room during a theater fire.) emerge with a full-blooded theatricality I still find highly enjoyable. When Karloff comes on as Mephisto, glowering and demonic, belting out his ersatz villainy at the top of his lungs, CCatO achieves an intensity that seems fittingly poetic. And it’s fun to watch, too.

   I should add that this may be due in large measure to Oscar Levant’s mini-opera, with Karloff’s big scene reprised to haunting effect as he is lured back out onstage in an empty theater by the orchestra playing his big number. Levant was obviously having fun with this (I could swear I heard Karloff singing “Coloratura! ColoraTURRRAHHH!”) but it makes a perfect showcase for the actor, the character, and a scene that, like many old horror films, is strikingly operatic.