OUTLAWS OF THE ORIENT. Columbia, 1937. Jack Holt, Mae Clarke, Harold Huber, Ray Walker, James Bush, Joseph Crehan, Harry Worth, Bernice (Beatrice) Roberts). Director: Ernest B. Schoedsack. Shown at Cinecon 44, Hollywood CA, Aug-Sept 2008.

   The program annotator was surprised to find Schoedsack directing this post-Kong quickie (only 61 minutes long). However, whatever its length and place in the hierarchy of Columbia’s releases in 1937, it proved to be an entertaining action film with engineer Holt, reluctantly returning to China to oversee drilling operations for oil, dealing with his problem-ridden brother (ostensibly in charge of the project) and attacks by a desert Warlord (Harold Huber), in the pay of a rival company.

   When I was a wee lad, nobody was better than Jack Holt at projecting iron-jawed determination and bringing off what appears to be an impossible job. The movie zings along, anchored by his solid performance, a screening well-worth staying up for past my usual bedtime.

   The notes claim that the film never made it to television syndication, so this was thought to be its first screening in some 71 years. Lucky Cinecon attendees.

THE MOLLYCODDLE. Fairbanks-United Artists, 1920. Douglas Fairbanks, Ruth Renick, Wallace Beery. Director: Victor Fleming. Shown at Cinecon 44, Hollywood CA, Aug-Sept 2008.

   The films that Fairbanks made before the success of Robin Hood propelled him into the big-budget historical epics for which he is now remembered may not be as visually sumptuous as his later work, but they are every bit as entertaining.

   In this, his third United Artists release, Fairbanks plays Richard Marshall V, the descendant of a line of risk-takers and adventurers, who is the “Mollycoddle” of the title, a term coined by Theodore Roosevelt to characterize a spoiled, frivolous young man.

   Attracted to a young woman in Monte Carlo, he insinuates himself into her group, a party formed by villainous diamond smuggler Henry Van Holkar (Wallace Beery) that is shortly to set off as a cover for an Arizona tour where Van Holkar will pick up another supply of diamonds for delivery to Amsterdam.

   The Arizona excursion proves to be the making of Richard, who performs spectacular stunts that prefigure the Fairbanks roles shortly to follow. The most spectacular stunt, in which Marshall leaps from a cliff to a tree, was filmed with a double because of injuries Fairbanks sustained in an earlier stunt.

   The doubling is seamlessly shot, with the dastardly villain foiled and the intrepid hero and fair maiden reunited. All of the early Fairbanks films are wonderfully entertaining; ten of them, including The Moddycoddle, I am delighted to say, are included in a reecnt DVD set from Flicker Alley.

Editorial Note: In that set referred to by Walter are: His Picture in the Papers / The Mystery of the Leaping Fish / Flirting With Fate / The Matrimaniac / Wild and Woolly / Reaching for the Moon / When the Clouds Roll By / The Mollycoddle / The Mark of Zorro / The Nut.

SKY PATROL. Monogram Pictures, 1939. John Trent (Tailspin Tommy Tomkins), Marjorie Reynolds (Betty Lou Barnes), Milburn Stone (Skeeter Milligan), Jackie Coogan, Jason Robards Sr., Bryant Washburn, Boyd Irwin, Dickie Jones. Based on the comic strip characters created by Hal Forrest. Director: Howard Bretherton.

   Following the two serials based on the character: Tailspin Tommy (1934) and Tailspin Tommy in the Great Air Mystery (1935), Monogram produced four hour-long Tommy movies with John Trent in the leading role, all coming out in 1939. Sky Patrol is the third of the four. (As many many critics have said, long before I came along, 1939 was a very good year for the motion picture industry.)

   I’m not sure how Tailspin got his name, but I am going to out on a limb and say it was for his knack of getting out of tailspins, rather than getting into them.

   Along for the ride in all four of these later films are John Trent as Tailspin Tommy, the ace pilot, Milburn Stone as Skeeter Milligan, his long time buddy, and Marjorie Reynolds as Betty Barnes, his girl friend.

   They make a pretty good team, and believe it or not, in spite of being a budget movie all the way, Sky Patrol is a pretty good film.

   In this one Tommy and Skeeter have been loaned out to an official government agency to train pilots to guard the US border against smugglers and treasonous agents.

   Against the young lad’s own wishes, the son of the commanding officer is one of the pilots they’re training, and it’s only through Tommy’s heroics that he passes the final acceptance tests.

   When he later gets captured by a gang of smugglers, it’s up to Tommy and Skeeter to save him and bring the wrongdoers to justice, which they do gladly, with dispatch and zeal.

   This movie is a great deal of fun to watch. In spite of a sparsity of overall production values, the story makes sense, and you also get the sense that the players were not on the set against their will. It is, I suppose, a movie made for twelve year olds, and in fact, it is also a movie in which a twelve year old aviation enthusiast (Dickie Jones) helps Tommy locate the hideout of the gang he’s after.   [FOOTNOTE]

   I also suppose that you have to be a twelve year old at heart to watch and enjoy this, but then again, you know me by now, don’t you?

FOOTNOTE:   At the end of the movie there is a plug for the next movie in the series, Scouts of The Air!, in which the audience was told that a soon-to-be organized cadre of 12 -year-old lads would have an even greater role to play. Unfortunately that particular film was never made.

SEVEN THIEVES. 20th Century Fox, 1960. Edward G. Robinson, Rod Steiger, Joan Collins, Eli Wallach, Alexander Scourby, Michael Dante, Berry Kroeger, Sebastian Cabot. Based on the novel by Max Catto. Director: Henry Hathaway.

   Context first. To Catch a Thief was filmed in 1955, while Ocean’s Eleven premiered in August 1960. Seven Thieves beat the latter to the gate by a few months, its first showing being in March that same year.

   Of course you can’t really consider To Catch a Thief as a caper film, not in the strictest sense of the word, I don’t think, and there were a number of others that were that came in between, but since both it and Seven Thieves take place in Monte Carlo with the Casino a major part of the plot, it was of course the film I first thought of when I began to watch the latter.

   Only problem is, Thief was filmed in beautiful Technicolor, and Thieves is in “glorious” black and white. As befitting a “noir” film, one supposes, but then why was it filmed in Cinemascope? The noir aspects are minor. Why not have followed Hitchcock’s example and gone with color as well? Monaco is such a beautiful place. It deserved it.

   Thieves is also not nearly as good, plotwise, as Thief, but it is better than Eleven (filmed in color) but whose fame depends on the actors playing in it than the rather disposable details of stealing all that money from the Las Vegas casinos, all to no avail.

   Something always has to go wrong in caper and/or heist films. We’ve said that before on this blog, and Thieves in the long run is no different. But for a suspense film, it runs a leisurely course from nearly beginning to end. Even the twists in the plot are leisurely.

   I will not be the first to have pointed this out, I am sure, but what plot behind the caper in Thieves reminded me of most was those that appeared every week on the Mission Impossible television show. Meticulous detail, timed to the second, but while nothing ever seems to go exactly to plan, and a lot of sweat appears on everyone’s brows, there is little to fear that anything goes seriously wrong.

   But of course it does, and I will refrain from telling you just when it does, assuming that you will one day wish to watch this picture. And yet the ending, while perhaps persuaded in the direction it takes by a board of censors, goes down smoothly enough – save the very last scene, where sheer luck seems to be involved more than bad happenstance, if there is a difference, and I believe there is.

   I don’t believe that Edward G. Robinson ever gave a bad performance, and he’s in fine form in this one as the disgraced elderly Professor who puts the details of the theft together, with Rod Steiger coming on board to keep the other players in line. Steiger himself seems a bit out of place among the other members of the gang, a miscellaneous group to say the least, but he’s quite effective, and (surprisingly) quietly so.

   Joan Collins was also in fine form, and here I’m speaking physically as well as performing her role well. She is a dancer in a jazz nightspot in Thieves, brunette, beautiful, slim, lissome and slender, with her two sensuous dance numbers well choreographed by Candy Barr, one of the most well-known true strippers of the day.

   There is some interplay between the members of the gang, some more committed than others, but mostly between Robinson and Steiger, whose character needs a lot of convincing to come in on the job, then later on an attraction between Steiger and Joan Collins begins to bloom.

   The heist itself? While complicated, rather ordinary, I’d have to admit. But being no particular fan of the Rat Pack myself, I’d recommend this one over its more direct contemporary, even though it’s not nearly as well known, even before the remake of Ocean’s crew at work came along and made the earlier version even more famous.

●   THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS. United Artists, 1936. Randolph Scott, Binnie Barnes, Henry Wilcoxon, Bruce Cabot, Heather Angel, Phillip Reed, Robert Barrat, Hugh Buckler. Based on the novel by James Fenimore Cooper. Director: George B. Seitz.

●   THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS. Associated Producers, 1920. Silent. Wallace Beery, Barbara Bedford, Albert Roscoe, Lillian Hall, Henry Woodward, James Gordon. Based on the novel by James Fenimore Cooper. Directors: Clarence Brown & Maurice Tourneur.

   Since last time I’ve seen two versions of The Last of the Mohicans, neither of them the most recent one (1992).

   The 1936 version starred Randolph Scott as Hawkeye and Henry Wilcoxon as Major what’s-is-name. Wilcoxon is not much remembered anymore, but in his day, he was Charlton Heston. He starred in lavish DeMille Costume Epics like Cleopatra (1934) and The Crusades (1935), and toward the end of his career played the Frisian Chieftain in The War Lord (1965).

   In Mohicans he’s appropriately stuffy and heroic. As for Randolph Scott, well, he was just too young at this point to make much impression as Hawkeye, and Director George B. Seitz (best remembered for the Silent Perils of Pauline and the talky Andy Hardy series) hasn’t the virility to make him look tougher than he is, the way Henry Hathaway had a few years earlier in Paramount’s Zane Gray Series [e.g., The Last Round-Up, 1934].

   Bruce Cabot is quite nice as Magua, though.

   The other Mohicans was a silent version from 1920, directed by Maurice Tourneur (Jacque’s Dad) offering really fine visuals, a surprisingly gruesome massacre scene, a memorable performance from someone named Barbara Bedford as the heroine, and Wallace Beery an astonishingly sinister Magua. Without his sugary voice, Beery’s really quite convincing in this part.

   Interestingly, Hawkeye is reduced to little more than a walk-on in this film, with most of the time devoted to the growing love between Cora (Bedford) and Uncas, a subplot that is sluffed over in the serial and the ’36 film.

SOLDIER OF FORTUNE. 20th-Century Fox, 1955. Clark Gable, Susan Hayward, Michael Rennie, Gene Barry, Alexander D’Arcy, Tom Tully, Anna Sten, Russell Collins, Leo Gordon, Richard Loo, Jack Kruschen. Screenplay by Ernest K. Gann based on his novel. Director: Edward Dmytryk.

   Jane Hoyt (Susan Hayward) comes to Hong Kong at the height of the Cold War with only one hope, an expatriate American adventurer, pirate, smuggler, and businessman, Hank Lee (Clark Gable).

   Inspector Merryweather (Michael Rennie) of the Hong Kong police tries to warn her off, but she’s determined — her husband, photo journalist Louis Hoyt (Gene Barry), is being held by the Red Chinese on espionage charges, and neither the Americans or the British have any intention of rocking the boat to get him out.

   Her only hope is someone like Hank Lee.

   But Hank Lee sees through Jane Hoyt even as he is attracted to her. Guilt as much as love is what makes her so desperate to save her husband. Lee wants no part of her or her husband, but she’s determined and he’s attracted. (There are some obvious parallels to Hayward’s role in Henry Hathaway’s western The Garden of Evil.)

   There are no surprises from this well made film and the well written novel it was based on. It’s an old fashioned adventure served up by Ernest K. Gann, a writer who knew his way around suspense, adventure, and action in best selling novels like The High and the Mighty, Island in the Sky, Fiddler’s Green (The Raging Tide), and Twilight of the Gods — all of which were successful films too.

   Soldier of fortune, Lee may be, but he is also a family man with adopted Chinese children, and for all his criminal activities a man of honor. He and Merryweather have a grudging respect for each other — both men enjoy the game they are playing, though Merryweather will soon enough put him away if he catches him. Lee, for his part, is thinking of getting out of the criminal end of his enterprises before it costs him his comfortable life and family.

   Jane Hoyt has shown up at just the wrong time in his life.

   Or is it just the right time?

   Once Jane convinces him to rescue Hoyt, Lee enlists a small army of reprobates (D’Arcy, Gordon, Collins, and Tully) and sets plans to sail to the china coast in one of his fleet of Chinese junks and land, hitting the coastal facility where Chinese general Richard Loo is holding Hoyt.

   But Merryweather is closing in and Lee is falling for Jane Hoyt, and is only willing to rescue Hoyt because his shadow would be harder to fight than the man for Jane’s love.

   The film was shot in technicolor and on wide screen with gorgeous Hong Kong locations and plenty of local color. Gable may have been a bit old at this point, but he could still play these roles with ease, and in this one a strong supporting cast, script, and fiery Susan Hayward as the romantic interest all contribute to the fun.

   Rennie is very good as Merryweather and Barry scores well as Hoyt, a character who isn’t all that sympathetic, but who Barry at least makes believable and ultimately even a bit noble.

   The finale is a well done shoot out at sea with the Red Chinese in hot pursuit of Lee’s junk.

   No one wrote better about distant shores, the romance of flight, or the poetry of ships the sea, and the men who spent their lives in them than Gann, himself a pilot, sailor, and former newsreel photographer.

    His novels have a poetic almost lyrical quality to them that attracted Hollywood again and again — among those filmed, the ones named above plus The Aviator, Blaze of Noon, Fate is the Hunter (non-fiction), Band of Brothers, The Antagonists (as Masada), The Adventures of Sadie, and The Last Flight of Noah’s Ark (story).

   Soldier of Fortune is a slick big name Hollywood adventure film as handsome to look at and painless as the well written novel it is based on. Just how cinematic Gann’s prose was becomes obvious when you compare the two. Good book and good film, both deceptively simple and damn entertaining, with the movie made with professionals who might well have stepped out of the pages of one of Gann’s novels.

THE GAMBLER FROM NATCHEZ. 20th Century Fox, 1954. Dale Robertson, Debra Paget, Thomas Gomez, Kevin McCarthy, Lisa Douglas, Douglas Dick, Jay Novello, Woody Strode, John Wengraf, Donald Randolph, Henry Leontal, Parley Baer, Peter Mamakos. Screenplay by Gerald Drayson Adams & Irving Wallace, based on a story by the former. Director: Henry Levin.

   A Southern swashbuckler rather than a Western, this entertaining outing is a canny variation on The Count of Monte Cristo.

   Robertson is Captain Vance Colby, of the Louisiana Volunteers, returning in the early 1840’s to New Orleans after four years serving under Sam Houston in Texas. The son of a well known gambler, he returns to encounter social prejudice from dilettante Andre Rivage (Kevin McCarthy) after aiding Rivage’s beautiful sister Yvette (Lisa Douglas) with her carriage.

   As Colby rides to meet his father after leaving his cold reception at Rivage’s plantation Araby, he is wounded when ambushed by Rivage’s man Etienne (Peter Mamakos), but escapes to the river where he is rescued by Melanie Barbee (Debra Paget) and her riverboat captain father (Thomas Gomez) whom he met earlier, and their man Josh (Woody Strode).

   Recovering from his wound he returns to New Orleans to find his father murdered by Rivage, accused of cheating, with three witnesses; Claud St. Germaine (Douglas Dick), the weak fiancee of Yvette; Nicholas Cadiz (John Wengraf), the owner of the casino the Saint Cyr where his father was killed; and Jay Novello, the waiter serving that night.

   With the police (in the person of the Commissioner played by Henry Leontal) on the side of the city’s Creole elite and the wealthy Cadiz, Colby must discover why his father was set up and murdered and avenge himself on the three men who committed the crime after having lost their new riverboat to Colby’s father in a game of 21, but in such a way the police can’t touch him.

   The day he came home from Texas Colby pocketed a playing card, the three of spades, now he has written the names of his father’s murders on it and sets out to destroy them one by one.

   The film is handsomely shot, with fine sets and costumes, and Robertson makes a dashing hero — even doing his own blade work in the final sword fight with McCarthy and handling it quite well.

   The theme of the three of spades runs throughout the film, with the neat touch that in the final confrontation with McCarthy in a game of 21, it is the three of spades that puts McCarthy over 21 and loses the game for him, taking both the riverboat, and Araby, his family estate.

   A well handled plot well written by Adams and Wallace, capable direction, and a handsome cast all combine to insure this one delivers everything it promises and more. Robertson is steadfast and dashing, Paget gorgeous, Gomez up to his usual scene stealing, and McCarthy a fine villain, by turns arrogant, snide, scheming, cowardly, and ruthless.

   There are no surprises here, save perhaps for how well it all plays, and how good this little film really is. Dumas himself would have been proud to have inspired it.

MY NAME IS MODESTY. Miramax, 2004. Alexandra Staden. Raymond Cruz, Fred Pearson, Eugenia Yuan, Nicolaj Coster Waldau. Screenplay by Lee Batchler & Janet Scott Batchler, based on the characters created by Peter O’Donnell and “In the Beginning,” the Modesty Blaise comic strip by Peter O’Donnell & James Holdway. Directed by Scott Spiegel.

   The history of this one isn’t very promising — Quentin Tarantino had acquired the rights to film the character of Modesty Blaise from the comic strip and novels by Peter O’Donnell, and in order to keep them he needed to get something on film. As a result he produced this made for DVD release feature as a sort of prequel to a real film.

   The good news is that it is better than any previous Modesty Blaise film or television appearance, and better than it had to be.

   In fact, for now, it is the definitive Modesty Blaise on screen. The story takes place before Modesty meets Willie Garvin, and before she became the “Mam’zelle,” mistress of the criminal organization known as the Network. This is very much the story of how she came to hold such a position.

   The film is short and the story succinct. Modesty Blaise (Alexandra Staden) is in Tangier working at the casino owned by her criminal mentor, the head of the Network. As the film opens he is planning a major drug deal (despite Modesty’s disapproval) and as a result the vault at the casino is filled with money.

   Myklos, (Nicolaj Coster-Waldau), a charismatic young terrorist with a grudge against her boss, kills him and takes over the casino after closing time taking Modesty and a handful of employees hostage.

   To keep herself and the other hostages alive, Modesty convinces Myklos that they must wait for her bosses second in command (Raymond Cruz from TNT’s The Closer) to return to open the safe, and engages him at the roulette wheel and in a desperate ploy: for every game he wins she will tell another chapter of her life beginning with how she came to be named Modesty Blaise, and for every three in a row she wins he will let a hostage free.

   Thus Modesty reveals the story of her origins as an orphan in war-torn Bosnia (updated from the original post WW II era) and how she met Lodz, the old man who became her teacher and traveling companion. As the suspenseful cat and mouse game proceeds Modesty carefully plays Myklos and reveals her compelling story from how she wandered over Southern Europe and North Africa to how she became involved with the Network after the old man’s death when she was caught stealing in the bazaars of Tangiers by her mentor in crime.

   Done on a small budget and with mostly unknown actors, this shouldn’t work, but ironically those things become virtues, and while Staden is too slight to really capture the Modesty of the comic strip and books, she has the exotic look, Khirghiz eyes, and screen presence to suggest both the complexity and strength of the character, and when at the end she rips off her skirt in the true Modesty style to go into action, the well-choreographed fight could have been story boarded from the panels drawn by artist James Holdway.

   Modesty wins the day, and even offers an ironic thank you to the dead Myklos, who has inadvertently delivered the Network into her hands. She cancels the drug deal, and informs her now second in command that they will deal with the problems that causes when it comes. The film ends as the legend is born.

   There is a nice touch, too, as one of the hostages, the bartender, who has overheard her life story as she recounted it to Myklos to stall him, asks her just how much of what she told them was true.

   With a Giaconda smile she replies: My name is Modesty.

   After the awful Joseph Losey film with Monica Vitti and Terence Stamp as Modesty and Willie, and the misguided television pilot designed to move the characters to California with Ann Turkel miscast, it is nice to finally see a respectful and intelligent adaptation of O’Donnell’s popular cult favorite.

   My Name is Modesty is nothing more than an appetizer, but as such it does what a good appetizer is designed for and whets the appetite for the main course.

   Even if the main course never comes, this remains a faithful and heartfelt tribute to the real thing and the DVD includes a nice making of video, insightful audio commentary by the screenwriters, director, and producer, a video interview with the late Peter O’Donnell on the creation of Modesty, and an illustrated retrospective of all her comic strip adventures replete with detailed synopsis.

   All in all this is a class act all the way, like the lady it celebrates. It is the real Modesty Blaise, and that’s all any of her fans have ever asked for.

  JAMES HELVICK – Beat the Devil. J. B. Lippincott, hardcover, 1951. Penguin, UK paperback, 1971, under the author’s real name, Claud Cockburn. Film: United Artists, 1953. Screenplay: Truman Capote & John Huston; director: John Huston.

   I reviewed the film version of Beat the Devil earlier on this blog, but in a notable I’m-glad-I-read-it vein, there’s also the print version, an inexpensive copy of which I found thanks to the nice folks who hang out here. The Bogart film is a legendary mess, and I had fun seeing how the two of them compare.

   Truman Capote’s script for the movie stays remarkably faithful to the book, with the notable exception that the book offers a couple of action scenes, which are carefully leeched out of the movie, to be replaced with something they thought was funny.

   Thus an ambush on a lonely beach becomes a runaway jalopy, a tragedy at sea turns into a mere mishap, and one of the best bits in the book — a lengthy prison stay where the characters reveal some surprising facets of themselves — is replaced by a quick joke about Rita Hayworth.

   Helvick/Cockburn’s book offers some engaging, often surprising characters (replaced in the movie by competent character actors given nothing to do) and off-hand moments of casual chivalry when they find themselves rising to occasions of their own making — again, replaced in the film with limp humor.

   More important, as the book ended I saw what must have drawn director John Huston to film it: a moment when fate seems to smile at the characters and their little dreams, only to break out laughing at them the next moment. It’s a well-done resolution that recalls bitter wrap-ups in The Maltese Falcon and Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which I find even more surprising since Huston and Capote replaced it in the film with a cheap joke. Oh well.

   At least the film offers one interesting variation, when the two female leads (played by Jennifer Jones and Gina Lollobrigida in the film) find themselves in competition for each other’s husbands. In the book, they go skinny-dipping to check out each other’s bodies. In the film, Jones simply finds an excuse to wave her butt repeatedly in Gina’s face, a moment of cheerful vulgarity so engaging one wishes the rest of the film offered more of it.

  LAST TRAIN FROM BOMBAY. Columbia Pictures, 1952. Jon Hall, Christine Larsen, Lisa Ferraday, Douglas Kennedy, Michael Fox, Donna Martell, Matthew Boulton, James Fairfax. Director: Fred F. Sears.

   With civil war about to break out in India, the first assignment of American diplomat Martin Viking there is a doozey.

   Viking, as played by Jon Hall just before he became Ramar of the Jungle, is a naive fellow, you’re led to believe at first, who nonetheless turns out to be top notch when it comes to killers and thuggees of all sorts (but mostly inept), as he proves over and over again in hand-to-hand combat.

   Blamed for the murder of his wartime friend who gets him into trouble from the very beginning all the way through to the end of this 72-minute adventure, Viking encounters an unfriendly Captain Tamil of the Bombay police (Michael Fox) and two women who prove to be both friendly and unfriendly (or vice versa):

   Christine Larsen plays the daughter of a retired British officer as they take a trip by auto together to see the Taj Mahal in the moonlight, while Lisa Ferraday is a French woman once married to an American who now lays in wait for unsuspecting travelers in a tavern where Viking seeks refuge.

   And believe it or not, I almost forgot to mention the train.

   Viking is on it for no more than five minutes during the entire movie, but nonetheless it’s the entire crux of the plot, which consists of his being able to stop an unknown band of conspirators from blowing it up as it makes its way across the subcontinent of India, among the passengers being a very important Indian ruler and his entire entourage.

   Filmed like an action-packed Columbia Pictures afternoon serial, there is little time to spend on subtleties. And like action-packed Columbia Pictures afternoon serials, there is a continual feeling of being cheated, what with death-defying escapes coming all too easily at the end of one chapter and the beginning of the next – especially the last one, wherein Viking and his fellow female captive at the time simply walk out of the dungeon where they’re being held captive.

   No self-respecting villain would ever be this inept – ever!