THE NANNY. Seven Arts/Hammer Films, 1965. Bette Davis, Wendy Craig, Jill Bennett, James Villiers, William Dix, Pamela Franklin. Screenwriter: Jimmy Sangster, based on the novel by Evelyn Piper. Director: Seth Holt.

   Most of the reviews that I’ve glanced at so far have been fairly consistent about one thing, and that’s their telling their readers exactly what the movie’s about, in as much detail as you could ask, if you’d like to know what’s happening and what’s going to happen every step along the way.

   I’ll do my best not to duplicate their efforts, but I have to admit that with… Well, I’m not going to say what I was just going to say.

   When the movie begins, Bill and Virgie Fane (James Villiers & Wendy Craig) are about to welcome home their ten-year-old son Joey (William Dix) from where he’s been for the past two years — a children’s psychiatric institution, from all appearances — a suspicion that quickly proves to be correct.

   Even though Joey is about to be released, the head of the facility has his doubts. The boy is still very much prone to playing with nooses and pretending to hang himself in his room, but home he goes. Outwardly he appears to be normal, but he will have nothing to do with the family’s nanny (Bette Davis), for example, no matter how cheerful and understanding she tries to be.

   It is Joey’s mother who needs the nanny, however, a longtime fixture in her family, not Joey. We (the viewer) gradually learn that there had been a tragedy in the family, one that involved Joey’s younger sister, who’s no longer alive.

   What happened? And who was responsible? Those are the questions that have to be answered, and answered they are, but if you play the game (and don’t listen to people who want nothing more than to tell you the answer) you’ll be guessing for most of the movie.

   For the most part, this movie is little more than a battle of wits between Joey and Nanny, the only person siding with Joey being Bobbie Medman, the precocious and rather world-wise 14-year-old girl who lives in the apartment upstairs, played by 15-year-old Pamela Franklin. (Precocious in the sense that she has a boy friend and smokes cigarettes on the sly.)

   While all of the acting is of high caliber, I was most impressed by the performances turned in by William Dix and Pamela Franklin. Without them in their respective roles, this movie could have been dull, duller and dullest. Dix also had a part in Doctor Dolittle (1967), but essentially nothing more. Pamela Franklin had a much lengthier career, mostly on TV, but earlier on made some horror movies and had, for example, a significant role in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969).

   The Nanny, made in black and white, and correctly so, I believe, is a psychological thriller, and not the horror movie you might think it is, produced by Hammer Films as it was, and from the general tone of its advertising campaign. It’s not difficult to find on DVD, and in my opinion, well worth your time in watching. I enjoyed it, in any case, if you were still wondering.

STELLA. 20th Century-Fox, 1950. Ann Sheridan, Victor Mature, Leif Erickson, David Wayne, Randy Stuart, Marion Marshall, Frank Fontaine, Evelyn Varden. Based on the novel Family Skeleton (Doubleday Crime Club, 1949) by Doris Miles Disney. Screenwriter & director: Claude Binyon.

   If there is a noir film that’s also an out-and-out comedy, not a black comedy, this one might be it. Or at least it would if it had more than the 20% noirish elements to it than I’d gauge that this one has.

   Stella, as played by Ann Sheridan, is the center of the film, and if my 20% figure is right, she accounts for 95% of it. She’s Stella Bevans, in this one, the hard-working secretary of a real estate and insurance agent in an unnamed seashore community. By default, or so it seems, she’s also the “all but” fiancée of her boss, a rather uninspired if not inept fellow by the name of Fred Anderson Jr. (Leif Erickson).

   Stella is also the main means of support for the rest of her family, her mother, two sisters, and the respective husbands of the latter (David Wayne and Frank Fontaine), two gentlemen who work only during the summer season, then spend the other nine months on unemployment insurance.

   So Stella’s world-weary and disillusioned, and prone to fighting off her boss as he chases her around her desk after hours. Literally. Entering at precisely that moment is Jeff DeMarco (Victor Mature), an investigator from the home office, who’s been assigned to check up on Fred.

   The new man in town is attracted, she’s not and she makes no bones about resisting his advances. All of which has nothing to do with the story, which really is about Uncle Joe, Stella’s mother’s no-good brother-in-law, who was killed in an accident, but fearing they wouldn’t be believed, Stella’s family, unbeknownst to her, buries him and claims he’s off on another of his binges.

   And no matter how she turns, Stella finds herself getting deeper and deeper into supporting their story, the passing of time making it more and more difficult to tell the truth.

   Where does the humor come in? As more and more dead bodies are found, Stella’s two brothers-in-law keep claiming them to be Uncle Joe, who as it also turns out, had a $10,000 life insurance policy, with double indemnity kicking in in case of accidental death.

   I laughed out loud at least a couple of times, alone in a room by myself, and that almost never happens.

   But stuck with Fred, unable to act on her growing attraction to Jeff, and fed up with the antics of her family, Stella finds nothing to smile about, a heroine in a tidal wave that’s slowly taking her further and further out to sea.

   David Wayne’s knack for comedy I had not realized before, what with his wild schemes to collect the money (actually due them), he later to become Inspector Queen to Jim Hutton’s TV EQ. The other brother-in-law (Frank Fontaine) is the dopier one, but thankfully not as dopey later on as Crazy Guggenheim on The Jackie Gleason Show.

   But it is the charmingly disillusioned-with-life Stella, played by the richly deep-voiced Ann Sheridan who’s the star here. Victor Mature is her co-star, but even he diminishes in star power whenever he’s in the same room with her.

NINE GIRLS. Columbia, 1944. Ann Harding, Evelyn Keyes, Jinx Falkenburg, Anita Louise, Leslie Brooks, Lynn Merrick, Jeff Donnell, Nina Foch, Shirley Mills, Marcia Mae Jones, Willard Robertson, William Demarest. Based on the play by Wilfred H. Pettitt. Director: Leigh Jason.

   Supposing that you knew that tomboyish Jeff Donnell was sometimes billed as “Miss Jeff Donnell,” or that she played George Gobel’s wife ‘spooky old’ Alice on The George Gobel Show in the mid-1950s, I wouldn’t blame you if you counted up the number of female stars in this movie and found that there were ten. (Alice, by the way, was neither spooky nor old.)

   There is an easy explanation, of course. The nine girls of the title are sorority sisters (including two soon to be pledged), while Ann Harding plays Miss Thornton, their favorite teacher and sorority mother. Anita Louise (playing Paula) has the shortest role in the movie. She’s one of those ultra-cultured creatures who manages to make herself intensely disliked if not hated by each of the other eight girls, and hardly above a little non-sisterly blackmail to get her way.

   Willard Robertson is the State Police officer who investigates Paula’s murder (if you ever see the movie, you will know how infinitely inevitable that event is), while William Demarest plays his dim-witted (and leering) assistant. There is quite a bit to leer at in the movie, too, as all of the girls have quite a variety of clothes to wear, including swim suits. I can’t tell you that this movie, made on a small B-movie budget, was a smash hit at the box office, but with nine girls in it, if it was, I can tell you who the attractions were.

   What I can’t tell you is which girl played what part. Some, those who had larger roles, I can, if you’re interested, but Evelyn Keyes (of Johnny O’Clock fame, among others) had a large portion of the dialogue, and so did tall statuesque Jinx Falkenburg, who probably had the shortest movie career of any of them.

   Lynn Merrick, whom I didn’t know before now, does a smash-up imitation of Katharine Hepburn, but only when there’s a man in the vicinity.

   Nina Foch (also later in Johnny O’Clock) did not have a high billing this early in her career, but she was perhaps the most noticeable of the eight girls, all suspects, cooped up together in a vacation lodge while the police do their thing. (She’s the mousy girl with glasses who was forced by the dead girl to write papers for her.)

   Personally, from the mystery end of things, I think the killer’s identity was revealed 10 or 15 minutes too early, but on the other hand, detection in an isolated manor house is or was not the primary reason this movie was made. View it as a light-hearted high spirited comedy instead, with lots of spooky moments during the night and silly antics and corny jokes all of the rest of time.

   If you enjoy silly antics and corny jokes, you’ll like this movie as much as I did.

THE CROOKED WEB. Columbia Pictures, 1955. Frank Lovejoy, Mari Blanchard, Richard Denning. Screenwriter: Lou Breslow. Director: Nathan Juran.

   If you take my advice, and I hope you do, don’t read any reviews of this movie anywhere you might see one. (Except this one of course.) Every last one of them that I’ve read gives the whole story away, or at least the part of it that counts. I’ll tell you more in a minute, but not – I guarantee you – anything you should not know ahead of time.

   Frank Lovejoy, the nominal star of this movie, has one of the most male distinctive voices I know, except for perhaps someone like Andy Devine, whom I’d have to concede can be recognized on an airport runway with 15 jet planes taking off or landing all at the same time.

   No, I mean in an everyday sense, a fellow with a voice of an everyday guy, talking in everyday tones – and I can still tell it’s Frank Lovejoy, no matter what movie, or more importantly, what radio show he may be in, and he was in quite a few.

   He plays the owner of a curbside hamburger joint in The Crooked Web, and Mari Blanchard is the carhop he’s engaged to. It’s established early on that Stan (he’s the man) is willing to take a gamble or two, so when Joanie’s brother (Richard Denning) comes through town with a secret deal in the works, he (Stan) is more than willing to cut himself in.

   Of course, as is always the case in low budget crime films like this one, things do not go exactly as Stan has planned, and here is where my warning comes in, and let me repeat: Do not read another review of this film. You might not even want to read the writing on the poster.

   Most reviewers of this film do not rate it very highly, and I agree. The last two-thirds of the movie is (are?) fairly ordinary indeed. Things do not go smoothly, though, and even though this is not a noir film, it has all of the trappings of one, so it is, as always, enjoyable seeing the protagonists work their way of their mishaps and other assorted screw-ups.

   Any leading roles that co-star Mari Blanchard ever had were, I believe, only in low-budget movies like this one, but she’s certainly easy enough on the eyes, speaking on behalf of the male half of the population. I found two posters for the movies, so you can see for yourself, although I’m not convinced that either pose she’s in is actually in the movie.

NEVER TRUST A GAMBLER. Columbia, 1951. Dane Clark, Cathy O’Donnell, Tom Drake, Jeff Corey, Myrna Dell, Rhys Williams. Story and screenplay: Jerome Odlum. Director: Ralph Murphy.

   It wasn’t planned this way — it happened only by chance — but here immediately on the heels of another Dane Clark film, The Toughest Man Alive, reviewed here, is another one, this one coming out four years earlier. (In between but not reported on here was a TV show I watched, the first episode of Vega$, vintage 1978, in which Clark played a no-good talent agent up to his ears in debt.)

   Clark’s career lasted until 1989, when he was 77 and an appearance on an episode of Murder, She Wrote. I don’t know how feisty he was then, but in 1951 he was definitely a small keg of dynamite about to go off, and go off he does.

   To back up just a little, in Gambler he plays a key witness who goes on the lam during a murder trial in San Francisco and heads for Los Angeles where his ex-wife (beautifully petite Cathy O’Donnell) lives. It seems she divorced him because of his addiction for gambling.

   Swearing that he’s turned over the new leaf and that he’s a new man, he asks her to hide him out for a while. If he were to testify, he says, it would put his best friend in the death house, a friend who’s innocent.

   If he doesn’t testify, the friend goes free. It’s a long set-up, and forgive me for telling it all to you, but it’s only the beginning. When a lecherous off-duty cop makes a play for his ex-wife, Clark’s character explodes, and while it’s an accident, the cop ends up dead.

   Convincing the ex-Mrs. Steve Garry to go along with him — and at this point she doesn’t know how much of his story to believe or not — Garry goes for the cover-up. Big mistake, as things begin to unravel quickly from there, as cover-ups always do.

   I’m sure that the story line sounds completely over the top, and perhaps it is, but both the screenwriter and the director had me hooked from the first scene on. Disregarding all of the coincidences that clutter up small B-movies like this one, the film is a small and all-but-unknown gem, tautly plotted with lots of small scenes each of which add little to the story but (in total) plenty in verisimilitude. (Though personally I could have done without the long, drawn-out escape scene at the end — who’s trying to escape, and from whom, I will not tell you).

THE MAN WHO CHEATED HIMSELF. 20th Century-Fox, 1950. Lee J. Cobb, Jane Wyatt, John Dall, Lisa Howard. Co-screenwriters: Seton I. Miller & Philip MacDonald. Director: Felix E. Feist.

   Not all of ladies in film noir movies were sultry sirens who manipulated men around their fingers with their come-hither eyes. As Lois Frazer in this small gem of a movie, Jane Wyatt is as petite and innocent-looking as they come, even as much, say, as Margaret Anderson in the long-running TV series Father Knows Best, except for one thing.

   Well, make that several things. Margaret Anderson never smoked, or at least I don’t think she did. Nor did Margaret Anderson have a lover on the side – I’m sure she never did that!

   Nor did she ever kill a man – in this case, her husband – before he had the chance to kill her.

   Lee J. Cobb may be slightly miscast as Lois Frazer’s man on the side – for one thing, he’s several sizes larger – but he’s absolutely the right man to play a grizzled homicide detective who puts his career on the line to save his wealthy lover’s reputation, if not some time in the Big House, by dumping the body at the airport and covering up the crime.

   Pure noir, all the way. He has an itch for her that just can’t be scratched. And do things go well? Two guesses, or on second thought, make it one. It’s always the cover-up that goes badly, and there’s no exception here.

   Complicating matters is that Lt. Cullen’s partner is his brother Andy, a rookie cop just assigned to him, and brother Andy is nothing but persistent in following up leads and fretting over details and small things that just don’t fit.

   There are, of course, coincidences galore, as there always are in movies like these, and stupid mistakes that are made that make the viewer simply cringe inside. If I were going to pull off a scam like this, I’d sure make a better job of it – wouldn’t I?

   You may be wondering how it all comes out, and obviously for that you will have to watch the movie. I will tell you this, though. The final scene is about as perfect as they come, bar none.

[LATER.]   I have now gone to read the comments left by viewers of this movie on IMBD, and more than usual, I am amazed.

   Reaction to seeing Jane Wyatt in a noir movie was decidedly mixed, about half and half, I’d say, and I guess that’s understandable, but I thought she was perfect in the part.

   A large number of people also did not understand many of the twists and turns of the plot, and at least one wanted the ending to be explained to him. My goodness.

THE PHANTOM OF CRESTWOOD. RKO Radio Pictures, 1932. Ricardo Cortez, Karen Morley, Anita Louise, Pauline Frederick, H. B. Warner. Director: J. Walter Ruben.

   At one time The Phantom of Crestwood, a 1932 film, was hard to see. One of its infrequent appearances was in 1985 at Manhattan’s The New School, as part of one of William K. Everson’s film programs.

   Now, due to the magic of cable television, one must virtually ignore American Movie Classics to miss it. It is worth seeing, especially because it is representative of an era in which Hollywood made many detective movies in which audiences were encouraged to try to guess the murderer, whose identity was withheld until the end.

   There were clues, which is more than I can say for many novels nowadays. The film even starts with the famous radio announcer Graham MacNamee encouraging viewers to guess thc villain as part of a joint radio-movie promotion contest.

   The stars are Karen Morley, one of the lovelier actresses of the 1930s, and Ricardo Cortez (né Jake Kranz), whose Brooklyn accent somehow never made him too believable, especially since, even after the advent of sound, he was still cast as a “Latin lover.”

   He was the Tony Curtis of his day. In this case he plays a typically brash role, walking a tightrope between hero and criminal in a house cut off by a storm. The villain is not difficult to guess, and the sliding panels must have been corny even then.

   Still, the element of audience participation works after almost sixty years, and the seventy minutes of The Phantom of Crestwood pass quickly.

MARTIN PORLOCK – X v. Rex . Collins Crime Club, UK, hardcover, 1933. US title: Mystery of the Dead Police, as by Philip MacDonald. Doubleday Crime Club, hc, 1933. Reprinted many times in both hardcover and paperback, including Mayflower Dell, UK, 1965, and under the US title by Pocket #70, pb, 1940; Dell D247, pb, 1958 (Great Mystery Library #19); Macfadden, pb, 1965.

   Films:

       ● The Mystery of Mr. X.   MGM, 1934. Robert Montgomery, Elizabeth Allan, Lewis Stone, Henry Stephenson. Screenplay by Philip MacDonald. Director: Edgar Selwyn.

       ● The Hour of 13.   MGM, 1952. Peter Lawford, Dawn Addams, Roland Culver. Director: Harold French.

   Philip MacDonald was one of the great farceurs of the Twenties classic detective novel whose crimes were often cleverer than the solutions of his sleuth Anthony Gethryn. But as the thirties came along MacDonald added a new element to his books, along with the clever crimes he added a strong line of suspense that makes his books from this period among the most readable of their kind.

    X v. Rex is the story of a serial killer (before the term serial killer was in use) — one who is targeting the police themselves (Rex referring to the Crown), his targets constables on their beat, his method disguise and brilliant innovation (for instance he uses a sandwich board to hide the gun with which he kills one unsuspecting victim).

   Scotland Yard is up in arms, and the streets have become places of fear. With all this activity, it is practically impossible for a criminal to sneeze without being arrested.

   Still X strikes with impunity, and as the police tighten their cordons and expand their hunt London is becoming as unsafe for the average crook as for the unlucky constables X hunts and kills.

   Nicholas Revel is no ordinary crook, but he’s feeling the pinch. Revel is a gentleman cracksman in the Raffles mold, suave, careful, and recently finding it difficult if not impossible to pursue his career.

   Clearly the only way to remedy this situation is to stop the deadly X, and if the police can’t do it, perhaps Nicholas Revel with his unique perspective can.

   But in order to find X, Revel needs access to information only the police know, so he romances the daughter of a high ranking police official and casually makes a few “suggestions” based on things he has learned from his underworld connections.

   The police aren’t entirely sure they trust young Mr. Revel, but his contacts do get him closer so that he can begin his own hunt for X. The suspense builds as Revel must put his own life on the line in the garb of a London bobby to spring the final trap for X, even as the police close in on the madman.

   X remains little more than a mysterious madman. Little or no effort is made to explain why he is pursuing his deadly war on the police, and why the most vulnerable and common of all British policemen, the bobby. That isn’t MacDonald’s interest. Instead he gives us the tensions of the hunt, the almost inhuman cleverness of X, and Revel’s clever schemes to get into the good graces of the police and their suspicions about his insights into the mystery of X.

    X vs Rex is one of the sprightlier examples of its type from the Golden Age of the Classical Detective novel. MacDonald would later combine the lessons learned here in two of his best Anthony Gethryn novels, The Nursemaid Who Disappeared (aka Warrant for X) and The List of Adrian Messenger.

   Both of the latter two books have been filmed, Nursemaid twice, the second time as Henry Hathaway’s 23 Paces to Baker Street), but X v. Rex may be his happiest confluence of Classic Detective novel and Suspense Thriller other than his earlier 1931 novel Murder Gone Mad.

   X v. Rex was filmed twice, the first time excellently with a screenplay by MacDonald himself (who went on to have a long and successful career as a screenwriter working on everything from Charlie Chan and Mr. Moto to Alfred Hitchcock’s film of Rebecca).

   Robert Montgomery was perfectly cast as Revel, Elizabeth Allan the lady in question (she became Mrs. Montgomery in real life and their daughter the actress Elizabeth Montgomery), and Lewis Stone and Henry Stephenson as suspicious policemen. The film is atmospherically done with a rousing finale.

   It was remade as The Hour of 13, which is inferior, but nonetheless the film has a solid performance by Peter Lawford as Revel and moves the setting from the contemporary London of the novel and first film to the late Victorian earlier Edwardian era to some effect. It’s by no means a bad film, just not equal to the original.

   X v. Rex is dated and readers used to the more psychological emphasis of this sort of novel may find it shallow in comparison, but it is a highly entertaining read by a master of the form with a well done portrait of a city under siege by a mad killer and the almost military precision of the hunt for the killer.

   Nicholas Revel is a charming rogue presented as a surprisingly believable gentleman criminal, and if the finale is a bit of a let down (the one in the films is not) it is only because MacDonald has pulled out all the stops in his clever manhunt.

   This one is a keeper, as enjoyable the second or third time around as the first.

TOP O’ THE MORNING. Paramount Pictures, 1949. Bing Crosby, Ann Blyth, Barry Fitzgerald, Hume Cronyn, John McIntyre. Screenplay: Edmond Beloin & Richard L. Breen; director: David Miller.

   Trivia experts likely know that William Levinson and Richard Link created the character of Lt. Columbo for Bing Crosby, but they may not realize Bing had played a detective before, and in fact a private detective in this 1949 musical comedy with a touch of noir.

   Music and murder had mixed before — Charlie Chan at the Opera, Murder at the Vanities, The Princess Comes Across, and Lady of Burlesque come to mind, but those were backstage mysteries, and the singing was confined to the stage. This may be the only full blown musical comedy murder mystery ever filmed.

   It begins with a murder and a shocking theft — the Blarney Stone — which bequeaths the gift of gab on anyone who kisses it — has been stolen. The stone is part of ancient Irish lore and it’s theft could well visit disaster on the entire nation. Finding the stolen stone and restoring it and the killer is of vital importance.

   Enter top American insurance investigator Joe Mulqueen (Bing Crosby), a laid back pipe-smoking crooning detective, sent by Inspector Fallon (John McIntyre) to Ireland find the ancient rock and save the company from having to pay off on the priceless relic.

   But that pits Joe against Sergeant Briany MacNaughton of the Irish Garda Civil, and his fiery daughter Conn (Ann Blyth), and further complications ensue because Joe’s arrival seems to fit all too well a prophecy about who the lovely Conn will marry.

   Top o’ the Morning is by its nature schizophrenic. When Bing isn’t crooning familiar tunes or those written for the film by Burke and Van Heusen, romancing the lovely Blyth, doing the usual Irish shtick with Fitzgerald and most of the cast, and exploring the legend of the Blarney Stone, he’s playing detective investigating a brutal murder.

   Toward the end of the film the mood turns dark and even noirish, and the screenplay acknowledges a nod toward G. K. Chesterton and one of Father Brown’s most famous cases, “The Invisible Man,” as Joe and Sgt. MacNaughton close in on the killer.

   Indeed these scenes almost make you wish the film had been played as a straight detective story, and they have a quiet power as well as a dark noirish look, thanks to Miller’s direction.

   Top o’ the Morning is more of a curiosity than a success. You can’t fault the cast or even the screenplay; the two forms just don’t really work that well together.

   Bing does get to show a little steel beneath the crooning in a few scenes, and he’s always worth watching playing off Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald, who played almost as many cops and professional Irishmen, gets to exercise both his specialties here, and Blyth is both lovely and convincing. A special nod to Hume Cronyn as Biddy O’Devlin, who gets to shine briefly in an offbeat film.

   Still Top o’ the Morning is well worth catching, and noir fans will recognize some excellent work toward the end of the film. It’s one of those films that you may find you like far more than it really merits.

K — THE UNKNOWN.   Universal, 1924. Virginia Valli, Percy Marmont, Margarita Fisher, John Roche, Maurice Ryan, Francis Feeny. Screenplay by Louis D. Lighton and Hope Loring, from the novel “K” by Mary Roberts Rinehart. Director: Harry A. Pollard. Shown at Cinecon 40, Hollywood CA, September 2004.

   The credit for Mary Roberts Rinehart took fellow attendee John Apostolou and me by surprise, since neither of us had ever heard of the source novel. The St. James reference guide includes the 1915 publication not with Rinehart’s crime novels, but with her “Other Publications,” although if the screen version is at all faithful to the original novel it is, like much of Rinehart’s work, a romantic suspense drama.

   It draws on Rinehart’s early career as a nurse and her skill at dealing with small-town settings (with no use of “rube” humor as claimed in tile program notes) into which she injects a generous dollop of melodrama that centers around a mysterious stranger (Marmont) who is in love with Sidney (Valli), his landlady’s niece, also the object of affection of two adolescents and a famous doctor, the pride of the local hospital.

   Both the stranger and the doctor have secrets, as does the doctor’s chief assistant (Margarita Fisher), and at least one of them is capable of murder.

   This entertaining film succeeds thanks to its good cast and intelligent direction, and some fine photography that the American Film Index credits attribute to Charles Stumar.

   Stumar would remain at Universal into the 1930s when he would be principal photographer on The Werewolf of London, The Mummy, and The Raven (1935 version).

   Both John and I thought this was a genuine “sleeper.”

Editorial Comment: For what it’s worth, the novel “K” is not included in the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, not even with a dash. Is this an error? I shall ask and find out.