BIG JIM McLAIN. Warner Brothers, 1952. John Wayne, Nancy Olson, James Arness, Alan Napier, Veda Ann Borg, Hans Conreid. Screenplay: James Edward Grant, Richard English, Eric Taylor, James Atlee Phillips (uncredited), William Wheeler (story); quotes from “The Devil and Daniel Webster” by Stephen Vincent Benet. Director: Edward Lustig.

   It’s 1952 and all that stands between us and ruin is Joe McCarthy, Big Jim McLain, and Mal Baxter …

   Things were never blacker — or is that redder?

   Sadly only two of those are fictional characters, though Tailgunner Joe was at least ninety percent a product of his own vivid alcohol mist of a mind. I suppose we should be grateful no actual communists were harmed in the making of this movie — come to think of no actual communists were harmed by Joe McCarthy either… It was a strange era.

   You can’t separate the Red-baiting hysterical witch-hunts of the era from this badly written, acted, directed, and intended film. The Duke would have been better served to get his buddy Mickey Spillane to write the script, at least that might be watchable. I warn you this one isn’t. Even location filming in Hawaii doesn’t help, since the scenes there are mostly interiors probably shot back in the states, and the few outdoor scenes in the tackiest parts of the island. It’s a half-assed attempt at the docu-noir style so popular then, and handled with no subtlety whatsoever.

   So, now to our plot — such as it is. Jim McLain (John Wayne) and Mal Baxter (James Arness, who was pretty much owned by Wayne at that point of time, acting-wise) are investigators for the House Committee on Un-American Activities — the beloved HUAC of every crackpot right-winger’s dreams (“Were you prematurely anti-fascist? Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party …”) sent to investigate the hold the party seems to have gained in our then territory. Apparently our vital supply of pineapple was under extra-ordinary threat by Communist labor organizers (those radicals who believed in revolutionary ideas like minimum wage).

   Have a sense of humor guys, I know Hawaii was a vital military and shipping asset, I remember Pearl Harbor, that and a trip to the island are why they chose it in the first place to associate communist with the sneak attack by the Japanese. Clever these occidentals.

   I’m sorry, but it is hard to take this clunker seriously, and it stands an insult to those who fought the actual cold war against the Soviets and not the headline war against drunken screenwriters, labor organizers, and actors. Red’s weren’t only in your community, they were in our entertainment — and — gasp — thanks to the garment union, our underwear.

   Meanwhile Jim and Mal are tracking down Mr. Big with stops along the way for a suspicious Nancy Olsen (Nancy Olsen femme fatale), Veda Ann Borg (she’s virtually a Wayne regular from this period on), and Hans Conreid (say it ain’t so Uncle Tunoose). Conried was also in John Wayne’s much more entertaining Red-baiting Jet Fighter — which thanks to producer Howard Hughes had sex appeal to spare from Janet Leigh as a Russian fighter pilot — a film that at least knows it is stupid and enjoys itself. I guess Conreid struck the Duke as more frightening than he did me. Maybe The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T scared him. In Jet Fighter he’s a Russian officer, here he’s only a traitor.

   Of course from scene one you know Arness isn’t leaving this one alive, and since he’s the only person in the film even pretending to try, you will miss him. So now it’s personal for Big Jim against those dastardly Reds. At least this promised to be good for a rousing Spillane style bloodbath finale, but if anyone could kill a good payoff it seems to have been director Edward Lustig, who seems to think he’s making a serious and important film and so develops no thrills and no surprises when Big Jim almost casually catches up with with Struac, the dirty Commie ring leader — played by Brit accented Alan Napier (Alfred to Adam West’s Batman), because to be a Commie you had to have an accent or a foreign sounding name. No red-blooded American with the right amount of vowels in in his name could ever be a Red. For instance no red blooded name like Hammett …

   I wish I was being unfair to this film in the name of a few laughs, but sad to say I’m not. This has all the drama and suspense of cottage cheese (less if you leave the latter out too long).

   Now before you start, I’m a huge John Wayne fan. The High and the Mighty, The Searchers, and The Quiet Man are among my all time favorite films, and I admit unashamedly I held back a few tears when he died in The Shootist. But that’s no excuse for this lunk-headed thud-ear piece of propaganda disguised as a movie. It doesn’t even flag-wave well, being so dull as to negate any patriotic fervor — the only fervor this movie generates is how fast you can reach the remote and cut it off. It needs much more than a few quotes from Stephen Vincent Benet’s “The Devil and Daniel Webster.” If you want to hear that masterpiece quoted watch the delightful film Anything For Money with Walter Huston’s Mr. Scratch and Edward Arnold’s Dan’l Webster.

   You might well emerge from this film thinking, that if that’s the best the Communists could do maybe they weren’t such bad guys after all — it is literally such a bad film it achieves the opposite of it’s intent. It diffuses the communist menace with its comic book plot — no. I take that back the anti-commie comics were better written.

   He’s a Go-Get-‘Em Guy for the U.S.A. on a Treason Trail that leads Half-a-World Away!

   That tagline is the most exciting thing about this snoozer.

   You can watch this full movie at Amazon. Do yourself a favor and don’t.

   Incidentally in this film both HUAC and the Duke don’t seem to know it wasn’t illegal to be a Communist in 1952, so Congress hasn’t changed all that much over the decades.

   If you would like to see this done right check out I Was a Communist for the F.B.I., My Son John, Woman on Pier 13, Walk East on Beacon Street, A Bullet for Joey, or Walk a Crooked Mile. They all surpass this film by miles, with genuine suspense and menace even when they are silly or over the top. Even The Whip Hand with rough tough all American Eliot Reed battling commie Raymond Burr is better, and that’s saying a lot.

   Wayne did a little better in contemporary dress in McQ and Brannigan, not a lot, but a little, and the latter has one of the funniest scenes ever filmed with the Duke doing that famous walk across the floor of a London disco replete with mirrored ball and strobe lights. Take that John Travolta.

   Alas Big Jim McLain has nothing going for it despite the screenwriters who have done much better, and the stars who were do doubt sincere. Truth be told a lot less sincerity and more melodrama would have helped. A better movie than this could have been made about the threat of tooth decay and gingivitis. Talk about a red menace …

THE POPPY IS ALSO A FLOWER (aka The Opium Connection). Made-for-TV movie, ABC, 22 April 1966. Expanded theatrical release, 1967 [?]. Yul Brynner, Stephen Boyd, Angie Dickinson, Rita Hayworth, Trevor Howard, E.G. Marshall, Omar Sharif, Eli Wallach, Jack Hawkins, Gilbert Roland, Hugh Griffith, Marcello Mastroianni, Trini Lopez, Senta Berger, Barry Sullivan, Nadja Tiller, Harold Sakata, Anthony Quayle, George Geret, Howard Vernon. Narrator: Grace Kelly. Screenplay by Jo Eisinger, based on a story by Ian Fleming. Directed by Terence Young.

   The amount of tripe written about this big budget made for television film done for the United Nations as an anti-drug project, and originally shown on ABC television in this country is amazing. For some reason it seems to drive some critics and viewers to extremes of near insanity far beyond any problems it has.

   In reality it is a fair action adventure film with a point that deals with the efforts of the UN and the then Iranian secret police to deal with the trade in illegal opium.

   I say any film that features Gilbert Roland as the villain, Rita Hayworth as a junkie, and E. G. Marshall in hand to hand combat with Harold (Oddjob) Sakata can’t be all bad. That’s not to mention wry Hugh Griffith as a opium selling bandit chief, Eli Wallach as a former Mafioso deported from the US, and Angie Dickinson as a mysterious woman getting ready for a shower with E. G. Marshall hiding under her bed is at least worth watching.

   Did I mention the two girls in bikinis wrestling in the nightclub?

   In 1966 that wasn’t something you saw often on television.

   Trini Lopez even sings “La Bamba” and “Lemon Tree.”

   Okay, that may not be entirely in its favor.

   When UN agent Benson (Stephen Boyd) buys up the opium crop before drug king Serge Marko’s (Gilbert Roland) people can he promptly gets killed but not before destroying the opium. Now Marko is under pressure to secure the next supply or be out $10 million dollars.

   Arriving in Iran to assist in the hunt for the opium connection is UN agent Sam Lincoln (Trevor Howard) and US Treasury Agent Coley Johns (E.G Marshall) No sooner have UN operative Omar Sharif and Iranian soldier Yul Brynner briefed them on their plan to irradiate the opium* so it can be tracked than Angie Dickinson shows up as Benson’s widow. But Benson wasn’t married.

   Marshall and Howard make a good team with a nice playful attitude and give and take:

   Considering everyone was working for nothing the performances are better than they had to be.

   It’s not Oscar material, but it is nothing like the nonsense written about it.

   The dubbing isn’t too good, but that’s hardly reason to have a hissy fit.

   Leonard Maltin rates it a BOMB.

   Leonard Maltin gives three stars to Roger Corman’s The Undead.

   I’m just saying …

   Sam distracts Angie while Coley searches her room which is how he ends up under her bed while she prepares to take a shower.

   Mrs. Benson eludes them but they move on to Yul Brynner’s plan to raid the opium supply held by bandit chief Hugh Griffith and irradiate it, leading to a colorful raid on horseback in the mountains. It’s well staged and exciting shot on location among some spectacular scenery.

   With the opium irradiated its now up to Lincoln and Johns to follow its trail back to the man behind the distribution, and the trail leads to Naples and deported gangster Happy Lucarno (Eli Wallach) who agrees to help to clear himself of suspicion.

   Senta Berger has a nice bit as a drug addicted nightclub performer, and Rita Hayworth one of her last roles as the addicted wife of Marko the drug kingpin. Anthony Quayle is a South African ship’s captain who is a key part of Marko’s smuggling operation.

   The plot builds to an exciting showdown with Johns and Mrs. Benson trapped by Marko on the Blue Train out of Marseilles to Lyon as they get the evidence from Mrs. Marko that will destroy him. There is a well staged battle between Marshall and Sakata in the baggage car and an exciting chase through the train yard with a final bitter triumphant line for Johns.

   The Poppy Is Also a Flower moves quickly, generates some suspense, features good location work, and unfolds logically to an exciting finale, pausing long enough to develop the characters of the two protagonists and well done vignettes by Brynner, Griffith, Quayle, Mastroianni. Berger, Wallach, and Hayworth. Considering it could have been preachy, stiff, and self important it is not only better than we might expect, but an exciting international chase.

   You’ve seen better, but you’ve certainly seen much worse.

   I’ve said it before. No film was ever worse for the presence of Gilbert Roland.

   But I would like to know what it is about this film that gives some people such an irrational dose of dyspepsia. It’s not dull, it’s not stupid, and it’s not badly written or directed. But it rubs some people the wrong way to a surprising degree.

   I can understand not liking it, but the reaction it provokes is all out of proportion to any of its failings.

   Maybe that irradiated opium is more dangerous than I realized.

   Or maybe the idea of E G. Marshall as James Bond causes some people to froth at the mouth.

   *  Perhaps the single silliest critique of this one are the countless reviews I’ve read worrying about what would have happened to the poor addicts if they got hold of the irradiated opium. Aside from being so ignorant as to not understand the nature of radiation or that opium is not sold in bulk , but cut and sold as cocaine, heroin, or morphine in doses so small as to make radiation poisoning impossible, the critics seem totally incapable of recognizing this is fiction.

   If a drug addict got hold of a kilo of uncut opium chances are he would have died of something else long before radiation poisoning.

   When did people get so politically correct they worry about non existent irradiated opium poisoning non existent drug addicts?

    No fictional drug addicts were harmed in the making of this picture.

GAMBLING SHIP. Paramount, 1933. Cary Grant, Benita Hume, Jack La Rue, Roscoe Karns, Glenda Farrell, Arthur Vinton, Marc Lawerence. Screenplay: Max Marcin, Seton I. Miller. Adaptation: Claude Binyon. Based on the serial “Fast One” appearing in Black Mask magazine by Paul Cain (Peter Ruric). Directors: Louis Gasnier and Max Marcin.

   That passage from the Paul Cain novel is as close as this movie gets to the hardboiled classic it was based on, Fast One, though more than a bit of the basic plot is used — just not to the same effect as in the book.

   How Fast One, a novel that was so terse and stacatto it made Hammett read like a Victorian triple decker, became this romantic dramedy with Cary Grant and Benita Hume is one of those mysteries only a Hollywood producer could explain — or justify — but that’s what happened on the classic Black Mask serial’s way to the big screen as Gambling Ship.

   Gone are Gerry Kells, the tough as nails gambler and gunman, and Grandquist (Kells looked at the woman. She was blonde — but darkly, warmly. Her mouth was very red without a great deal of rouge, and her eyes were shadowed and deep. She was a tall woman with very interesting curves. Fay said: “This is Miss Granquist.”), a femme fatale so fatal and tough she could give lessons to Hammett’s Diana Brand and Brigid O’Shaunessy as well as Chandler’s Velma, and in their place we have a tough but much smoother Cary Grant as Ace Corbin (replete with gray at the temples and a streak in his wavy dark hair), a New York gambler finding it hard to go straight and Benita Hume as the most lady like (if not entirely wholesome) moll you can imagine (well kept too, her apartment in Los Angeles has a bathroom the size of most bedrooms).

   Gambling Ship opens in New York where the newspaper boys are hawking the extra that gambler Ace Corbin has just been acquitted of a murder charge, a fact that seems to amuse police and public alike:

   Kells has similar problems in the book:

   That pretty much sums up this semi-tough film that might be a dress rehearsal for one of Cary Grant’s later iconic roles as gambler Mr. Lucky. Here Ace Corbin is sick of New York and the rackets, and having walked from a frame set up by hood Pete Manning (Jack La Rue), all Corbin wants is to head to the coast and take a vacation.

   Not so easy, as flunky Marc Lawerence points out when one of Ace’s men tosses Ace’s shoulder holster and gun in his bag: “Sometimes even a good man has to blast his way loose.”

   It’s hard to imagine Kells having to be persuaded to “blast his way loose”:

   On the train to the coast Ace meets beautiful society girl Eleanor Kiniston and a romance blossoms, Ace introducing himself as Bruce Grahame. Ace isn’t the only one with a secret. Eleanor is really Eleanor La Vere, girlfriend of Joe Burke (Arthur Vinton), a west coast gambler who runs an off shore casino.

   Burke’s in a bind for money, thanks to his chief competitor hijacking his customers for his own ship, Pete Manning’s Paradise. Once home Eleanor finds out what a bind Burke is in, and being to noble to walk out on him drops Bruce.

   Meanwhile Burke’s henchman Blooey (Roscoe Karns) is an old friend of Ace, and tries to convince Ace to go in with Burke, a chance to buy into a good deal and take revenge on Manning, but Ace is in love and wants none of it.

   But Manning won’t leave Ace alone so he agrees to go in with Burke. and starts by hijacking back all the players Manning hijacked in the first place.

   That does sound like Kells.

   Again, this hews close to the novel:

   His first night on the ship Eleanor shows up and finds out he’s Corbin, but he still thinks she’s a classy society woman, an illusion that will have to stay in place when Manning fire bombs the ship.

   The ending is well done and exciting, and being pre-Code, neither Ace nor Eleanor have to repent or suffer for the error of their ways. A clinch, a kiss, and Ace is ready to turn that vacation into a honeymoon, assuming he still has marriage on his mind after finding out who she is. This being the pre-Code era, happily ever after didn’t always need a license and a justice of the peace. It’s a very different ending than Fast One.

   Gambling Ship has a bad reputation among fans largely because it is based on Fast One, the legendary hardboiled extravagansa of flying bullets and McGuffey’s reader prose by screen writer Peter Ruric (The Black Cat, The Raven, Grand Central Murder …) writing as Paul Cain.

   Granted it would have been nice to see his novel get the pre-Code treatment with Grant as tough-as-nails lethal gambler gunman Kells (though reading the book I always have Alan Ladd in mind), but that aside this isn’t a bad little film and like any decent pre-Code film (or is that indecent?) it’s interesting to note the little touches like the teasing dialogue bordering on double entendre, the suggestion of nudity (Hume outlined fairly clearly in a pebbled glass shower), skimpy lingerie (and not a lot of it), and a cavalier attitude to sex, without moralizing or due punishment, that could only be hinted at in later films.

   To be fair, any movie that has both a journey on a train and a gambling ship can’t be all bad.

   It’s interesting to note as well just how much of the Grant persona and the familiar gestures and slow takes are already established even at this point. It’s not hard to see watching this how Leslie Charteris and Raymond Chandler both could envision the Saint and Philip Marlowe as played by Grant (who was also a pick to play James Bond). He dominates every scene without doing much of anything but being Cary Grant, and for an actor at this early stage in his film career that’s no mean feat.

   Gambling Ship is no masterpiece, but it is a swift moving well done film with crisp direction, a smart script filled with clever quips, a first class cast, and an exciting finale, as well as good camera work by Charles Lang.

   If you can manage to forget what it might have been considering its source you will likely enjoy it. And it’s not like Hollywood reserved this treatment for Ruric’s book, or have we forgotten Satan Met a Lady, the second version of The Maltese Falcon?

   That said, once or twice toward the end of the film you get a glimpse of how Grant might have played Kells, and you have to at least think about what might have been, Fast One is a very violent book that reads more like it was written with a tommy gun than a typewriter.

   Machine gun country is where Ruric’s book would feel at home, if not the film based on it.

Note: The novel Fast One has been reviewed by Bill Pronzini some time back on this blog. Check it out here. And both the novel and the author are discussed in depth by Walker Martin in his review of The Complete Slayers, by Paul Cain. It’s worth your reading again, or for the first time, if you haven’t already.

PRISON FARM. Paramount, 1938. Shirley Ross, Lloyd Nolan, John Howard, J. Carrol Naish, Porter Hall, Esther Dale, May Boley, Marjorie Main, John Hart. Director: Louis King.

THE MAGNIFICENT FRAUD. Paramount, 1939. Akim Tamiroff, Lloyd Nolan, Mary Boland, Patricia Morison, George Zucco. Director: Robert Florey.

DANGEROUS TO KNOW. Paramount, 1938. Anna May Wong, Akim Tamiroff, Gail Patrick, Lloyd Nolan, Harvey Stephens, Anthony Quinn, Roscoe Karns, Porter Hall. Co-screenwriter: Horace McCoy, based on the novel On the Spot by Edgar Wallace. Director: Robert Florey.

   Caught a few of those delightful little Paramount “B” movies from the late 30s last week, and enjoyed them quite a lot. The producers of these films were ready to try anything they thought they could get away with on any unused set handy, and as a result, they gave us studio-made ocean liners, city streets, plush B-movie penthouses, and in one movie, even a whole country, created on the Paramount back-lot. The result is some delightfully audacious and unpretentious entertainment.

    Prison Farm offers Lloyd Nolan cast unsympathetically for once as a brash no-good who makes off with the proceeds of a botched robbery, with his unknowing fiancee (Shirley Ross) in tow. When they run afoul of an off-duty backwoods prison guard (J. Carroll Naish) Nolan lets them get railroaded into a short sentence, rather than face some awkward questions about his background.

   The rest of the film cheerfully avoids the usual “Big House” cliches, with Nolan scheming against the mildly sadistic Naish while on the other side of the fann, Ross contends with crypto-lesbian matron Marjorie Main. When John Howard, Paramount’s utility leading man, shows up as a sympathetic prison doctor, attracted to Ross in a decent, manly way, everything’s set for an unsurprising but fast-paced finale.

   The next year, Lloyd Nolan was playing a gangster again, this time a bit more sympathetically, as the chum of a Latin-American dictator (Akim Tamiroff) marked for assassination in The Magnificent Fraud. The title refers to another Akim Tamiroff in the cast — this one a cabaret performer who does impressions — and quicker than you can say “Danny Kaye” the actor is substituted for the mortally wounded dictator so as to be on hand to clinch a badly-needed loan from an American banker.

   The wonder of this thing is that the plot spins out so much more believably than it has any right to, mainly because director Robert Florey pushes the story (centered on Nolan’s attempts to live up to his dead friend’s legacy and evade the machinations of local nasties in on the Big Switcheroo) along at breakneck speed, yet pauses meaningfully to flesh out the characters, producing an hour-long movie, in which no one is conveniently stereotyped.

   This is abetted also by a lot of nifty casting. Aside from Nolan and Tamiroff, who play off each other very nicely, George Zucco and Abrlcr Biberman milk their small parts, Mary Boland gets a surprisingly well-written role as a faded dowager. and lovely Patricia Morison stars as the sexy and Intelligent fiancee of the Banker who’s supposed to close the loan.

   Once again, you get producer, director and the Paramount “B” stock company putting their all into a solid sixty minutes entertainment.

    Which is also the case with Dangerous to Know, which offers Lloyd Nolan, all the way on the side of the Law this time as a tough police detective out to get Akim Tamiroff (again) as a powerful gang boss just starting to go soft over socialite Gail Patrick. with Anthony Quinn and Anna May Wong for partners.

   Unlike most of its fast-paced Paramount ilk, Dangerous to Know is something of a mood piece, with only a few (very effective) action scenes set off against Tamiroff’s growing obsession. Unlike some other arty crime Hicks, however (The Gangster comes to mind) Dangerous has an elegantly gritty look to it, and the producers and players seem to have some idea what it is a Gangster really does for a living.

   In fact, Dangerous to Know has some very impressive credentials indeed. Directed by Robert Florey, who did Murders in the Rue Morgue, written by Horace (Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye) McCoy from a stage play by Edgar Wallace. It’s a film that knows how to be thoughtful without bogging down in it.

THE RACKET. RKO Radio Pictures,1951. Robert Mitchum, Lizabeth Scot, Robert Ryan, William Talman, Ray Collins, Joyce Mackenzie, Robert Hutton, Virginia Huston, William Conrad, Walter Sande, Les Tremayne. Screenwriters: William Wister Haines & W. R. Burnett. Director: John Cromwell.

   It may be a cliché, but they don’t make pictures like The Racket any more. It was filmed in black and white and gives us characters portrayed in black and white. Robert Mitchum is a tough, incorruptible cop, and Robert Ryan gives one of his usual strong performances as a psychopath.

   The supporting cast is especially noteworthy, including William Talman and Ray Collins six years away from their success on the Perry Mason Series, though playing very different roles. This time Talman is the honest police officer; Collins is a sleazy district attorney. Also around, and underacting almost to the point of somnolence, is William Conrad, that great radio actor who would later be Cannon and Nero Wolfe on television.

   There are no great surprises in The Racket, but no disappointments either, as a tight script, co-written by W.R. Burnett, and John Cromwell’s clean direction provide a satisfying movie.

DR. BROADWAY. Paramount, 1942. Macdonald Carey, Jean Phillips, J. Carroll Naish, Richard Lane, Eduardo Ciannelli. Joan Woodbury, Gerald Mohr, Warren Hymer, Olin Howard, Frank Bruno, Sidney Melton, Mary Gordon, Jay Novello. Screenplay: Art Arthur, based on the short story “Dr. Broadway” by Borden Chase in Double Detective Magazine (June 1939). Directed by Anthony Mann.

   Dr. Broadway … Specialist in Heart Trouble … and Lead Poisoning

   The lights of old Broadway are flashing over Times Square, neon and traffic, crowds and honking horns, and a pretty girl on a ledge.

   So what’s new?

   Not much for Dr. Timothy Kane, Dr. Broadway (Macdonald Carey), a smooth taking GP who was raised and sent to college by the people of the Broadway streets when his much loved newspaper man father died. On this night there is a pretty blonde girl on a ledge (Jean Phillips — Ginger Rogers stand-in — and really nice legs I might add) and his old pal Detective Sergeant Pat Doyle (Richard Lane) bets him a ten spot he can’t talk her down.

   Of course she has no intention of jumping. It’s a publicity stunt — but she didn’t know it could send her to jail, so Kane has to keep her out of jail — which is how he ends up with a leggy blonde receptionist.

   Meanwhile Vic Telli (Eduardo Ciannelli) is fresh out of jail, a haunted gunman sent up by the Doc’s testimony. Everyone assumes Vic wants Doc dead — but what he really wants is a favor. Vic is dying: “I’m up to my neck in my own grave …” and wants Doc to see his innocent daughter gets the $100,000 dollars he has put back for her legally.

   How much trouble could that be?

   But jammed up he is. Telli is murdered in his office (fried by a heat lamp) and Doc promptly knocked out and framed. Someone wants Telli’s hundred grand for themselves.

   Pretty soon Doc is on the run from the cops and the crooks. And then his new receptionist gets kidnapped.

   All they want is the money. But Doc is in a cell and his only hope is to run a con on the kidnapers and rely on his army off the Broadway streets — grifters, hoods, news vendors, and the like.

   In the meantime Doc is, as crooked haberdasher J. Carroll Naish puts it, “… half way between the hot foot and the hot seat.”

   And you just know Doc and the girl are going to end up back on a ledge over the streets of New York before it’s over.

   This handsomely shot B-programmer was Anthony Mann’s debut film. It is mostly shot at night in the reflected shadow of flashing neon and with the constant chatter and blare of Times Square in the background. It is peopled with a colorful cast out of central casting by way of Damon Runyonville and moves at a rapid pace full of fast talking and faster thinking.

   Dr. Broadway is based on a series of stories written by Borden Chase for the pulps and was the pilot for a possible series that didn’t develop sadly. Chase may be more familiar to you for his books that became films (sometimes with his screenplays) like Red River and Lone Star.

   Macdonald Carey had a long career as a mid-level leading man, and was always reliable. He brings an earnest and easy going charm to the central character as Dr. Timothy Kane, and Jean Phillips is good as the slightly dizzy blonde receptionist/girl friend caught up in his world.

   Richard Lane could play good but frustrated cops in his sleep (he was most often the brunt of Boston Blackie’s adventures), while Ciannelli had at least one really good scene as the haunted gunman (reminding us how seldom he was used as effectively as he might have been) and J. Carroll Naish has some fun as the crooked haberdasher behind it all. Gerald Mohr appears briefly as a hood not long before he would be the voice of Philip Marlowe on radio.

   There is no real mystery here, mostly just a fast paced crime drama.

   Familiar faces like Warren Hymer, Sid(ney) Melton, Olin Howard, Mary Gordon, and Jay Novello round out the cast as various Broadway types.

   Now, before someone starts, this is a slick fast paced, exciting B-programmer, but despite the direction of Anthony Mann, it is not noir or even proto noir. There are a few touches that will eventually become noir, but they were nothing new to this kind of film in 1942, and good as it is, entertaining as it is, it’s not a precursor of film noir.

   You only have to look at a film like I Wake Up Screaming to see the difference. It’s far above average, but in many ways, it could have been made at any time from the start of the talkies as a slick mix of crime, humor, and characters. At most its a cousin of noir-like Mann’s Two O’Clock Courage.

   There is an almost indefinable quality that makes a film noir, and this one doesn’t have it, even though it touches on some of the themes and styles.

   On a personal note, it took me over twenty years to catch up with this one, ever since I read about in William Everson’s The Detective In Film. Usually when you wait that long it is a disappointment — this one is not. It is everything advertised, and the copy I have from the collector’s market is only a little soft, but otherwise extremely good.

   This is a superior B-programmer from a time when they were often the best thing on the bill. Heat up the popcorn and enjoy it. If you look real close you will even see some of the promise of Anthony Mann to come. But either way it is a rapidly paced sixty eight minutes making the most of its low budget and an army of New York types.

   You will probably enjoy it far more than its modest origins might suggest.

PEEPING TOM. Anglo-Amalgamated Films, UK, 1960. Carl Boehm, Moira Shearer, Anna Massey, Maxine Audley, Brenda Bruce. Director: Michael Powell.

   Tom is a young photographer (English, but played incongruously by German actor Carl Boehm) who photographs the death-scenes of young women who imagine that he is giving them screen-tests. Boehm’s flat performance is chilling, and I find this film as disquieting as Hitchcock’s Psycho.

   The camera eye seduces the victims and the audience, and there is an extended, bravura sequence in a film studio that portrays the protagonist’s heightened sexual excitement so graphically that many viewers may find it intensely disturbing.

   The film was a box-office failure when it was first released (at a time when audiences preferred the Hammer films’ tamer eroticism) and virtually put an end to Powell’s film career. The director of such distinguished films as Black Narcissus, The Red Shoes, and The Tales of Hoffman photographs this in bright, glossy color that make the scenes of violence all the more disturbing.

   You may find this film disgusting, but I don’t think you will be insensitive to its power.

A RAGE IN HARLEM. 1991. Robin Givens, Gregory Hines, Forest Whitaker, Danny Glover. Based on the novel For Love of Imabelle by Chester Himes. Original music: Elmer Bernstein. Director: Bill Duke.

   Not too many movies are based on paperback originals, but this is one, and it’s a Gold Medal paperback original to boot. Unfortunately, it’s not a book I’ve ever read, so I can’t tell you whether Himes’ series characters, a pair of ruthless Harlem cops named Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson, have as small a role in the novel as they do in the movie, but in the movie, if you weren’t listening for the names, you’d never even know they were in it.

   The main focus, not too surprisingly, is Robin Givens as Imabelle, a luscious gangster’s moll who flees Natchez, Mississippi, to Harlem with a trunk full of gold, circa 1956, with the gangster’s gang following close on her heels.

   Giving her shelter in his room overnight is a shy, pudgy undertaker’s assistant named Jackson (Forest Whitaker), and nature soon takes its course from there. Jackson’s half-brother Goldy, the black sheep of the family, flamboyantly played by Gregory Hines, is a Harlem-based grifter whose ears perk up when he senses there may be a fortune in gold in the neighborhood.

   A period piece, beautifully filmed. The cinematography may be even better than the plot, which itself is better than average. (Well, even if they changed things around from the way they appeared in the book, as is probably the case, consider the source.)

   There’s enough action – cars and guns – to satisfy the portion of the crowd for whom the plot is hardly essential, and an absolute highlight, besides watching Jackson and Imabelle and nature taking its course, is a knock-out performance at the Undertakers’ Ball of “I Put a Spell on You” by none other than Screamin’ Jay Hawkins (played to perfection by himself). Absolutely decadent.

BLUEBEARD. PRC, 1944. John Carradine, Jean Parker, Nils Asther, Ludwig Stössel, George Pembroke, Teala Loring, Sonia Sorel. Director: Edgar G. Ulmer.

   John Carradine plays a disturbed puppeteer dubbed “Bluebeard” by the Parisian tabloids in this stylish, low-budget film. In the twenties Ulmer worked as a production designer on films directed by F.W. Murnau and Fritz Lang,and the theatrical-looking studio sets (including what appears to be a cardboard cutout of Notre Dame) are appropriate to this study of a deranged artist.

   The most striking visual effect is a shot of the puppeteer’s eye peering out balefully at the audience in the park- and, coincidentally, at the theater audience. It reminds me of a shot in Lang’s You Only Live Once (1937) in which the blind covering the rear window of a menacing black automobile parts to reveal a pair of eyes, the face covered as if by a mask in an imaginative use of the melodramatic convention of the hooded villain.

   Carradine plays the role of the artist/murderer with great restraint, and his long face and mournful eyes, wedded to his rich but monochromatic voice, give to his performance the haunting — or haunted — look of a fallen angel.

SWORDFISH. Warner Brothers, 2001. John Travolta, Hugh Jackman, Halle Berry, Don Cheadle, Sam Shepard, Vinnie Jones, Camryn Grimes. Directed by Dominic Sena.

   As a recently released felon, famed computer hacker Stanley Jobson (Jackman) is recruited by the beautiful and alluring Ginger (Halle Berry) to work for the mysterious (and ruthless) Gabriel Shear (Travolta). Needing money to help regain custody of his young daughter (Camryn Grimes), Stanley accepts, and during the rest of the movie he learns to regret his decision, many times, over and over again.

   This is pretty much one of those movies where you are better off not asking questions and sitting back to enjoy the ride. If, that is, you are not bored with watching someone typing at a keyboard and pretending they are breaking into various money accounts scattered around the world. The less-meaningful (but eye spectacular) action that takes place is largely confined to a mini-prologue that works about as well as anything in the movie (a bank under siege with hostages wired to blow up) and in the last thirty minutes or so, when all of the safety latches are set free.

   Lots of large-scale explosives going off, in other words. Cars careening around busy city streets and smashing into each other, large guns being fired and causing all kinds of havoc, and tons of other vehicles of several makes and models veering out of control and smashing into tall buildings and on several different levels. That still leaves an hour to fill, which of course does not mean there are not plenty of bad guys willing to do all kinds of bad things in those remaining sixty minutes.

   Travolta and Jackman have the good parts, and both do well in them, with Travolta taking (in my opinion) top honors as a truly Machiavellian mastermind, over the top and subtly clever at the same time. Amazing. (Unfortunately, with the need for pyrotechnics to keep the action crowd happy, “over the top” seems to prevail, more often than not, over common sense.)

   Halle Berry appears too aware of herself to be truly sexy, but those commentators who have described her much-maligned topless scene as “gratuitous” should watch the movie again.

   Or if not, at least the ending. (Think subtle.)