SLEEPING CAR TO TRIESTE. General Film Distributors, UK, 1948. Eagle Lion Films, US, 1949. Jean Kent, Albert Lieven, Derrick De Marney, Paul Dupuis, Rona Anderson. Screenplay: Allan MacKinnon . Director: John Paddy Carstairs. Currently available on YouTube.

   I’ve always loved films set on vintage trains. It’s the best place to generate suspense: strangers trapped together with no safe way to escape. The Lady Vanishes (1938), of course, is the gold standard, though Night Train to Munich (1940), The Narrow Margin (1952) are other notables. This effort from prolific British director John Paddy Carstairs is a remake of 1932’s Rome Express, which I’ve seen, and follows it fairly faithfully.

   That film centred on a Van Dyke painting stolen by a gang of thieves who subsequently fail to regroup. Poole, one of the gang, tries to flee on the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits train the Rome Express, travelling between Paris and Rome, but his accomplice Zurta, gets on board himself in pursuit.

   Also on board are an adulterous couple, an English golf-bore, a wealthy but tight-fisted businessman and his brow-beaten secretary/valet, a French police officer and an American film star with her manager/publicist.

   The 1948 version went out under the title Sleeping Car to Trieste. The train is now the Orient Express, though the story’s biggest difference is probably the MacGuffin: instead of a painting, it’s now a diary. The film star has also disappeared, the businessman is now a celebrated writer and the golf-bore (who had been played rather wonderfully by Gordon Harker) is now a hooray henry, while other characters have been added.

   As in the original, when Poole (Alan Wheatley – who I only saw the other day in a Tara King-era Avengers episode) boards a train in an attempt to flee his accomplices, one of them, Zurta (Albert Lieven), gets on board and tries to catch him. The tension comes from watching how close he gets. Of course, Poole tries to lay low in his compartment (the sleeping car of the title) until he gets to the West, where he can sell the diary without sharing the proceeds with his accomplices.

   Unfortunately, he is interrupted by another passenger who insists on sharing his accomplice. The diary is hastily hidden in the en-suite bathroom and Poole tries to arrange another compartment for himself without raising too much attention. Before long, he is roaming the train alone and trying to find cover while avoiding bumping into Zurta.

   Elsewhere on the train, there is an adulterous couple (Derek De Marney and Rona Anderson) an Italian-American GI from New York (Bonar Colleano); a famous writer and his put-upon valet Finlay Currie and Hugh Burden); an ornithologist (Michael Ward); a French police inspector (Paul Dupuis) and an imbecilic stockbroker (David Tomlinson).

   The tone is much lighter than the more sinister Rome Express. There is a French chef who is forced to take lessons on English food from a cheerfully xenophobic passenger (“…And that’s called roly poly pudding!”) while the American GI, bored senseless by the chattering ornithologist sharing his compartment, has his romantic advances spurned by a couple of young French sisters (“We don’t want to be liberated anymore!”).

   Tomlinson’s character – younger than his Rome Express counterpart – is perhaps the most overtly humorous, as he bumps into the couple and realises he knows the man, George Grant, and insists on spending time with him. Grant, therefore, must keep away from his mistress, Joan, to avoid their affair becoming known.

   There’s a neat bit of satire here, perhaps even pathos, as Joan is more in love with him than he is with her. In fact, Grant is clearly using Joan as a bit of sexual distraction during his business trip, and deserves all the trouble he gets. Similar sympathy is wrought by author Alastair MacBain’s poor valet Mills who – in one of the film’s most engaging scenes – briefly turns the tables on his tyrannical employer.

   Although such scenes are diverting, they do distract from the main plot, particularly as these side-characters never become properly involved in it. I expected the diary to go from passenger to passenger but, although it does get discovered, this doesn’t quite happen.

   There is still tension, however, not least when Poole is cajoled into a card game involving Zurta and tries to avoid being left alone with him, and there’s a murder in the last couple of reels, followed by a confrontational climax.

   The film is neatly updated to the late 1940s political situation in Europe, though this is only ever obliquely referred to. Aside from the first five minutes, the whole thing is set on the train, so railfans and retro-romantics will enjoy seeing the compartments and corridors. Like the first version, it lacks a central protagonist, and there’s no larger conspiracy to unravel, but on its own terms, it is worth a watch.
   

Rating: ***

FINGER OF GUILT. RKO Radio Pictures, 1956.  Initially released in the UK as The Intimate Stranger (Anglo-Amalgamated Films, 1956). Richard Basehart, Mary Murphy, Constance, Roger Livesey, Faith Brook, Mervyn Johns. Screenplay was written by Howard Koch as by Peter Howard. Directed by Joseph Losey, under the pseudonym Alec C. Snowden. Currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video.

   To me, Richard Basehart is one of those actors who always turned in a picture perfect performance, but who never became a huge box office motion picture star. Finger of Guilt is just another picture in which he totally absorbs himself into the part he’s playing. (I think that Tension, 1949, in which he plays a meek pharmacist who gets heavily into woman trouble, is one of his best.)

   In Finger of Guilt, another noirish film of some note, he plays an American producer who because of his past has been forced to movie to England to ply his trade, a job he loves. (He is said to have fled after being caught in a dalliance with his boss’s wife.) In the UK he’s married the daughter of the head of the studio he’s working for. Pure love, he says.

   Trouble arises with a series of letters from a girl who claims the two of them had an affair together while he had a brief sojourn between Hollywood and London. Problem is, he doesn’t remember the girl, and since blackmail doesn’t seem to be her goal, he has no idea what she wants from him. Convinced that she she is pulling some kind of fraud on him, he even confides in both his wife and father-in-law.

   So convinced, he even takes his wife up country to meet her. His next problem is that the girl (Mary Murphy) is totally convincing: names, dates, even a signed photo of him. Could he be leading a double life without knowing about it? If he has doubts, even more so does his wife.

   I leave to you to watch this to see how (or if) he works himself out of this dilemma.

   I began this review talking about Richard Basehart, who’s in the movie from beginning to end. Mary Murphy, best known for her role as the girl who redeems Marlon Brando in The Wild One (1953), was the one who caught my eye the most, even though she has far less screen time than Basehart does. Her sprightly and somehow innocent acting performance here (both without and within the film) will catch yours too. I guarantee it.

   Only a cliché-ridden shootout at the end spoils this one a bit. Before then, it’s a prime example of a film noir that shows you that you don’t need murders and dead bodies to make a film noir.

THE BLACK RAVEN. PRC, 1943. George Zucco, Wanda McKay, Noel Madison, Robert Livingston, Byron Foulger, Charles Middleton, I. Stanford Jolley, and Glenn Strange. Written by Frank Myton. Directed by Sam Newfield.

   If the B-movies from Universal were Subversive and (as some have suggested) those from Warner Brothers were Proletarian, then the political orientation of PRC was Anarchy. The plots of PRC movies don’t so much develop as simply happen; events seem to start and stop almost at random, giving these poverty-row quickies an eerie, life-like quality that always eluded the better-written films of the big studios.

   Take the case of The Black Raven, which was advertised as a Horror movie, starts out as a Gangster film, turns into Grand Hotel, then somehow metamorphoses into a whodunit that meanders about aimlessly until the mystery is abruptly solved by the Villain of the Piece.

   The above is as coherent a summary of the plot as I can manage, and really more than the thing deserves. The story of nine characters thrown together on a stormy night, where two are killed, two set free, one arrested and one simply disappears (I think the writer forgot about him) is at one and the same time too complex and too simplistic for further explication.

   What impressed me about the tale was the obvious contrivance of putting so many bozos together (six of them have a motive for murdering the seventh) followed by the complete aimlessness of all their subsequent actions, as if it took all of writer Frank Myton’s energy just to set the thing up, and he pretty much left the actors on their own after that.

   Fortunately for the sake of High Art, the thespians in The Black Raven are an all-star lot for a B-Movie, including George Zucco, who usually managed to rise above his material (which usually wasn’t saying much), Byron Foulger, Noel Madison, I. Stanford Jolly, Charles (Ming the Merciless) Middleton — here billed as “Charlie” Middleton, playing a hick sheriff — and Glenn Strange, providing what was apparently meant to be comedy relief.

   All of them can be seen working their little hearts out, trying to lift their parts into the realm of the not-laughable. And if they don’t quite succeed, well, it’s still fun watching them try.

   They are hindered more than a little, these thespians by the apparently complete incompetence of the craftsmen around them. Myton seems to have been unable to avoid (or write around) minor details, and hence we suffer through interminable perfunctory scenes of characters deciding which rooms to take, George Zucco deciding how to dress, various criminals trying to decide who stole what, and “Charlie” Middleton trying to decide whom to arrest next. And Director Newfield, who should have known better, went ahead and milked each of these leaden scenes for its maximum deadweight.

   Thus, we are treated to three separate scenes of handyman Glenn Strange parking the guests’ cars: In fact, this being a cheapo PRC flick, one of the prop cars is slow to start, and we get to watch its headlights flicker as Strange turns the starter on and off and on and off and on and….

   So why watch this, much less write about it? Well, for one thing, it’s enjoyable having George Zucco playing a Good Guy for a change, gathering clues, dispensing advice to troubled young lovers, and even wrestling baddies and engaging in a shoot-out. Zucco himself seemed to be having fun with all this, and in several scenes he is seen smiling for no apparent reason. True, it’s rather incongruous to hear his cultured, well-modulated voice uttering lines like, “With your imagination, you could probably see the Statue of Liberty dance the Conga!” but the overall effect is charming.

   Then too, once you’ve seen it, it’s hard to forget Glenn (Frankenstein’s Monster and Sam, the Bartender on Gunsmoke) Strange doing outrageous double takes and falling up and down stairways — for such is the level of comedy here.

   In all, it’s not a movie I’d recommend, but if you’re in the right frame of mind and care at all about B-movie actors, The Black Raven can be a lot of fun.

MAN AT LARGE. 20th Century Fox, 941.  Marjorie Weaver, George Reeves, Richard Derr, Steve Geray, Milton Parsons, Elisha Cook Jr., Richard Lane, George Cleveland, Kurt Katch. Screenplay: John Larkin. Directed by Eugene Forde.

   Who are the Twelve Whistling Men?

   That’s the question in this spy comedy released just before America’s entrance into the Second World War as wanna be newspaper photographer Dallas Dayle (Marjorie Weaver) gets her shot at a real job on a New York newspaper when she’s assigned by editor Richard Lane to cover the story of a German Ace who escaped from a Canadian internment camp and is expected to cross over into the United States on his way to Canada.

   Complicating things is rival reporter Bob Grayson (George Reeves) who she thinks murdered German fifth columnist Hans Brinker (Kurt Katch) in the newspaper reception room. We know he was killed by a sinister man with a silenced gun (Milton Parsons), but when Grayson shows up at the same motel on the border as Dallas and the killer, then meets with the escaped German flyer (Richard Derr), it starts to look more than a little suspicious, especially when another German agent at the motel (Spenser Charters) who meets with the killer is murdered like Brinker. Grayson and Dallas are arrested for it by Sheriff George Cleveland while Grayson tries to steal the camera Dallas snapped a photo of the German flyer with.

   Just what are the Twelve Whistling Men the dying Brinker whispered about, and what do they have to do with the passage from “Peter and the Wolf” everyone seems to be whistling, and a pulp story that is uncannily close to exactly how the German flyer escaped in the first place and seems to be popping up everywhere? And what does that have to do with convoys carrying supplies to England being sunk?

   Following the style, and a bit more (Grayson and Dallas get handcuffed together at one point) of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Thirty-Nine Steps, Man at Large doesn’t move, it positively gallops hardly giving the viewer a chance to breathe from the opening escape in the dark to the final clench.

   Little surprise that. Screenwriter John Larkin was one of the brightest lights of the B film of the period, penning and directing Quiet Please, Murder! an early film noir about a stolen Shakespeare Folio, murder, Nazi art collectors, and a masochistic thief. With the capable Eugene Forde directing this little gem fires brightly from Weaver’s screwball Dallas, Reeves fast talking mystery man, and a fine assortment of German agents.

   Back in New York Dallas tracks down the pulp author who proves to be wealthy Karl Botany (Steve Geray), a suave blind man whose recently hired secretary is none other than one Mr. Sartoris (Milton Parsons).

   Up to this point things haven’t been moving slowly, but now the kick into overdrive with Grayson and the German flyer tying Dallas up as they go to meet a contact, Dallas escaping with help from hotel clerk Elisha Cook Jr., the real Nazis revealed, much more confusion on Dallas part, more dead bodies, Grayson and Dallas doing a mind reading act in a run down girly show theater, and no one, including the viewer, quite sure who anyone is until the final confrontation.

   The plot, almost more than this B film can bear, manages to hold up well enough to keep you entertained without asking too many questions, and most of the ones you might ask are covered by the various reveals without bothering to explain them to the viewer.

   No one takes a long enough breather for that. Anything not covered by the breathless plot really doesn’t seem worth worrying about anyway.

   I’ve been looking for this one for years and only recently found it. Happily it is no disappointment. It’s fast, fun, attractively acted, and the polish of the B department of Fox in the period shows despite its lowly origins.

   This might have fared well as an A with a better known cast, it’s that good.

   The print I saw is flawed, and I really have no idea if a better one exists, but this is a small delight. Just buckle in and enjoy.

GORILLA AT LARGE. Panoramic Productions/Fox, 1954. Cameron Mitchell, Anne Bancroft, Lee J. Cobb, Raymond Burr, Lee Marvin, Charlotte Austin, Peter Whitney, Warren Stevens, John Kellogg, Billy Curtis, and John Tannen. Written by Leonard Praskins and Barney Slater. Directed by Harmon Jones.

   If you only see one movie in your entire life, it should be Gorilla at Large. Where else in the known universe will you get a chance to hear tough cop Lee J Cobb snarl, “We’ve got two gorillas around here, and one of them’s a murderer.” Where, I ask you?

   Cobb is only one feature of a surprisingly able cast for what is essentially an inflated B-movie. Raymond Burr radiates menace very nicely as the boss of an elaborate carnival, playing effectively off Anne Bancroft as his wife, who does a trapeze act above the cage of Goliath “the world’s largest Gorilla” who manages to narrowly miss grabbing her at each performance.

   Cameron Mitchell and Charlotte Austin walk through their bland parts as leading man and heroine, and Lee Marvin is wasted as a comic relief dumb cop, but Perter Whitney as a blackmailing carny and John Tannen as a publicity flack with his eye on the main chance ooze a very fitting sleaziness into their under-written roles.

   Come to that, maybe it’s the writing that puts Gorilla at Large. so firmly into B-movie class. The dialogue is flat and obvious when it isn’t memorably bad, the plot is predictable when it’s not implausible, and…

   Oh yeah, the Plot: Burr decides to put Cameron Mitchell in an ape suit to double for Goliath, but someone steals the hirsute suite and goes around killing blackmailing carnies and blaming it on Goliath. Yeah, who’s gonna notice an ape running around the lot? And the concept is not helped at all by the fact that the real ape and the phony are both played by guys in gorilla suits.

   Fortunately, all this arrant nonsense is handled with pace and precision by Harmon Jones, a director who had his moments, and in his sure hands, it’s all really quite enjoyable. And really, if you’re only going to see one movie in your whole life, well, whathehell, it might as well be Gorilla at Large.

WHIPSAW. MGM, 1935. Myrna Loy, Spencer Tracy. Director: Sam Wood.

   There are other members of the cast, but the only other name I recognized was John Qualen, and he was so far down in the list, I decided to mention only the two leading stars. They’re all that’s needed, though, to make this the best movie I’ve seen in quite some time. If it ever comes on in your area, don’t miss this one.

   She’s a lady crook, working for a gang of jewel thieves, He’s a cop, pretending to be a tough hoodlum to gain her confidence. He doesn’t know she’s onto him, but she needs him to help shake the members of a rival gang who are on her trail.

   It’s a pleasure to watch a movie written with some intelligence behind it. The people in it are thinking, and none of the usual ploys in your usual run-of-the-mill crime caper seem to work as well here as they do in every other film you sit down to see. What’s more, it may be corny, but it’s also a pleasure to watch a picture in which even the crooks (well, some of them) have moral standards.

   And it’s not enough that Myrna Loy can act cool and disinterested and obviously be falling deeply in love at the same time; she’s also beautiful and charming, and she simply fills the screen with her presence every minute she’s on it, Spencer Tracy tries hard, with an intensely casual portrayal of a policeman caught between his job and a woman he begins to care for more and more, but I think this is the lady’s picture, all the way.

ONE SHOE MAKES IT MURDER. CBS, 06 November 1982. Robert Mitchum as Harold Shillman, Angie Dickinson as Fay Reid, Mel Ferrer as Carl Charnock, José Pérez, John Harkins, Howard Hesseman, Cathie Shirriff. Teleplay by Felix Culver, based on the novel So Little Cause for Caroline, by Eric Bercovici. Director: William Hale.

   Truth be told, Harold Shillman (possibly Schillman; sources vary) is not a PI. He’s an ex-cop from LA, who’s hired to do the kind of job that PI’s do in all of the books I’ve read with PI’s in them. Which is to say, he’s hired by a suspended casino owner in Lake Tahoe to find his wife, who’s gone missing.

   That’s the story he’s told, anyway. If you’ve read as many books with PI’s in them – and yes, I know: you’ve probably read more than I have – you know right away that there’s more to the story. The surprising thing is that right after he’s found her, he sees her falling from one of the top floor windows in the hotel where she was staying.

   Finding her was easy. Maybe too easy. But what the police suspect is that her death was not a suicide, which is what they were supposed to believe, but murder. How do they know? She landed with only one shoe on. The other is still in her room, several feet from the terrace where she supposedly jumped. What woman would walk across a room with only one high-heeled shoe in order to jump out on her own.

   Tagging along with Shillman, played by a world-weary Robert Mitchum at his aging world-weariest, is Angie Dickinson as Fay Reid, who as a twice-married call girl who, as it turns out, is one of the perks of the job. Both she and Shillman have issues behind them, but more than that, it somehow also happens that she knew the dead woman in their mutual past.

   There is a bit of romance involved as well, as well as a light easy tone to the tale that makes the whole affair go down very easily. And who can resist Robert Mitchum playing yet another PI, even though the detective part of the tale is not the primary reason I’m going to ahead and say that if you like PI movies but haven’t seen this one yet, you should.

   No, the real reason you should watch this is Robert Mitchum. No surprise there, I’d say.
   

OUT OF TIME. MGM, 2003. Denzel Washington, Eva Mendes, Sanaa Lathan, Dean Cain, John Billingsley. Director: Carl Franklin.

   Of all the movies that Denzel Washington has appeared in up to now, at least one of them must have been a time travel story, or so you’d think. In any case, though, based on the title, you might also think that this is one of them. But if you did, as I did when I came across this one just as it was leaving Showtime, you’d have been wrong.

   What it is instead is a solidly constructed crime film, with Denzel Washington as Matt Whitlock,the chief of police in a small town in Florida, a town so small that almost nothing happens for him to do, a situation which he is quite willing to take advantage of, until, of course, it does. Something does most definitely happen, that is, in a way that is almost more amusing than it should be, given the scrape he finds himself in.

   His marriage to Eva Mendez, playing the county’s chief homicide detective, is  heading for to the divorce courts, Matt has been sleeping with a long time lady friend who unfortunately has a jealous husband. Not the brightest of maneuvers, but hey, things like that happen. This particular potential pitfall is combined with nearly a half million dollars of drug money stored in an evidence locker in his office, and when the match goes off, the bodies of Matt’s erstwhile girl friend and her husband are discovered in their home, destroyed in flames.

   And who might the number one suspect be? You guessed it. Without having the advantage of his position as the chief of police and thus advance notices of the turns his wife’s investigation into the murders take, he’d be locked up in jail in thirty minutes flat. Watching him scoot just ahead of the tide coming in is what makes this fast-moving movie all the more enjoyable to follow along with, just to see what happens next.
   

THE SNORKEL. Hammer Films, 1958. Peter Van Eyck, Betta St.John, Mandy Miller, Gregoire Aslan, William Franklyn. Directed by Guy Green.

   Several years ago, Candace ‘Candy’ Brown (Mandy Miller) saw her father drown and has always believed that Paul Decker (Peter van Eyck) was responsible. Now Candy is a teenager, Decker is her stepfather, and her mother has apparently gassed herself to death in their Italian villa.

   Candy is convinced that Decker killed her too. For one thing, there was no suicide note. Both the local police inspector (Grégoire Aslan) and British Consulate Mr Wilson (William Franklyn) believe the death was self-inflicted as the door was locked and the windows were sealed. Even her friend and nanny Jean Edwards (Betta St. John) thinks Candy is delusional.

   Unbeknownst to them, Decker is indeed the murderer and let in the gas himself before escaping through a trap door and hiding beneath the floorboards, where he donned a snorkel to prevent his own death from asphyxiation.

   Candy openly accuses him of murder, but Decker presents his passport as proof that he was across the border in France and was therefore not in the country at the time of her mother’s death.

   Undeterred, Candy investigates and soon figures out that a snorkel was somehow involved. Decker, meanwhile, becomes romantically interested in Jean and slyly suggests they have Candy committed to an American asylum while they start a new life together. However, as she moves closer to the truth, Decker decides more drastic action is necessary. He has the means, after all…

   The Snorkel is a thriller from Hammer, one of several they made which now cower in the tall, distinctive shadows of Frankenstein and Dracula. These play like Hitchcock on a lower budget and several came from the pen of Jimmy Sangster, who wrote many of their most iconic films and as such remains at least partly responsible for the company’s iconic cult status across the decades.

   The story for this one was dreamed up by actor Anthony Dawson (remembered for his superb performances in Dial M for Murder, Midnight Lace, Dr No, and an episode of The Saint), and though the murder method may lack the ingenuity of other locked room mysteries, it looks less unlikely when offered up first. An explanation at the end of the film may have seemed like a slight cheat.

   While Sangster’s later Taste of Fear would imperil a paraplegic, he focuses The Snorkel on another vulnerable female in teenager Candy, played by the slightly too old child actor Mandy Miller. This gives the film a faint Nancy Drew feel, though Candy has few deductions and no clues, while most of the developments are due to coincidence and an unshakeable conviction that Decker is the murderer.

   The detective work is limited to a furtive search of a hotel room before being dropped altogether and replaced with brassy confrontations and sullen assertions, while an inspection of the villa at night is simply there to generate some spooky atmosphere and slyly set up the finale.

   German actor Peter van Eyck (best known to English-language audiences for his appearance in Richard Burton-starring The Spy Who Came in from the Cold) acquits himself well as Decker, suave and serenely disappointed at one moment and blank-eyed and sinister in the next. He looks like a cross between Derren Nesbit and Jack Cassidy, which is fitting as this is basically an episode of Columbo (in the first few minutes, as he commits the murder, you expect to see the thick, yellow credits of that ’70s classic).

   The Snorkel doesn’t, however, offer a slyly formidable opponent, and wastes William Franklyn, potentially a perfect fit, in a negligible role. Really, though, it’s not that type of thriller in the first place, and Decker isn’t caught through any mistake of his own. This is an atmospheric, psychological thriller of the ‘damsel in distress’ variety, not a detective story.

   Though low-key, it features some excellent location work on the Italian Riviera, a tense climax that also teases something ruthlessly cold-hearted, all sewn up in a brisk, undemanding 74 minutes.

Rating: ***

THE MIGHTY QUINN. MGM, 1989. Denzel Washington (Xavier Quinn), James Fox, Mimi Rogers, M. Emmet Walsh, Sheryl Lee Ralph, Esther Rolle, Robert Townsend (Maubee). Based on the book Finding Maubee by A. H. Z. Carr. The title of the film is derived from the song “Quinn the Eskimo” by Bob Dylan. Director: Carl Schenkel.

   Xavier Quinn has his hands full in this one. Having graduated from the FBI Academy at Quanico in the US, he’s come home to become the chief of police on a small island in the Caribbean, when he’s asked to close up a case of homicide as quickly as possible. Problem: the most obvious suspect is Maubee, a friend of his from childhood. He’s also forced to deal with his estranged wife Lola and he barely has time to see his son.

   Over the years Maubee has become a puckish ne’er-do-well who has a knack of just staying one step of the authorities – that is to say, Quinn, and he leads the latter a very merry chase throughout the movie. The governor of the island and the others powers that be are not amused.

   There is a detective story behind this rather amusing overlay, but it takes second place behind the general atmosphere of singing, dancing and the beautifully photographed colors of the people, the local shop, the beaches and blue sky. It may seem a little forced at first, but once the story gets underway, it all blends together in very fine fashion.