Diva (1981)

Diva, released in 1981, was the first feature film directed by Jean-Jacques Beineix and it also launched the cinéma du look movement in French film. One of the major criticisms of this movement is that it emphasised style over substance. We’ll get back to that.

Jules (Frédéric Andréi) is a young postman obsessed by opera singer Cynthia Hawkins

(Wilhelmenia Fernandez). He has made an illegal recording of one of her concerts. Since she has never made a legal recording this bootleg tape is potentially worth a lot of money although Jules is only interested in it for his own pleasure. There are people who want that tape and they have seen hoodlums after Jules in order to get it.

There’s another tape recording, made by a prostitute, which contains evidence that could bring down a criminal empire based on the smuggling of drugs and women. Just before the prostitute is killed she slips the tape into one of the panniers of Jules’ moped.

There’s another set of hoodlums pursuing poor Jules. They want that incriminating tape.

So there are two plots running in tandem. There are two sound recordings. Two sets of bad guys. Jules will become entangled with two women. Everything in this movie comes in pairs.

The two plots become fairly convoluted. Jules can’t really trust anybody. People are not necessarily what they seem to be. Jules is in over his head.

Gorodish (Richard Bohringer) may be on his side. Gorodish is an enigmatic figure. He seems to be passive but as the movie progresses he becomes more active and more important. There’s also Gorodish’s cute young roller-skating Vietnamese girlfriend Alba although whether she is actually his girlfriend isn’t quite clear. Things are not always as they seem to be in this movie.

Jules is more than a little obsessed by Cynthia Hawkins. He bluffs his way into her hotel room. He steals one of her dresses and gets a prostitute to wear the dress while he has sex with her. Then he gives the dress back to Cynthia. Yes, Jules is an odd young man.

Jules steadily becomes more obsessed by Cynthia.

There’s another murder. There are several cleverly staged chases. Jules has lots of narrow escapes. There’s gunplay. Things get blow up. The two plot strands never quite come together but that adds to the paranoia. Jules doesn’t know which set of bad guys will come after him next.

Apart from the obsession with doubles there’s a running theme of artificiality opposed to reality. Some things are real. Some things appear real. Cynthia will not record her voice because she believes that only a live performance is authentic.

This is certainly a visually stunning movie. The loft in which Jules lives is wonderful - lots of wrecked cars plus paintings of car accidents about to happen (appropriate since Jules’ life is an accident waiting to happen). Other sets and locations are equally impressive and mostly with a touch of the surreal or the hyper-real. There’s not much in this movie that we can confidently say corresponds to normal everyday reality. It’s not a case of dreams being confused with reality but perhaps more a case of art opposed to reality.

Beineix loved comic books and the movie does at time have a slight comic book look.

The Blu-Ray release includes a partial commentary track by Jean-Jacques Beineix. It’s interesting in revealing his thinking and mostly it’s interesting because it reveals just how trite his thinking was. Advertising has become all-pervasive. There’s a conflict between art and commercialism. Industrial design (such as car design) can be art. Wow, that’s all just so deep and profound. It’s what you’d expect from a first year film student.

Which gets us back to the style over substance argument. Personally I think you’ll appreciate this movie more if you see it as an exercise in pure style. Forget the substance. Who needs substance when when you can come up with style as impressive as this?

Diva is a must-see movie purely for its stylistic flourishes. While it came out right at the beginning of the decade Diva does have a very 80s look, but in a good way. And it is a lot of fun. Highly recommended.

Kino Lorber’s Blu-Ray looks great and includes lots of extras for those who are into that sort of thing (I’m not).

A Lady of Chance (1928)

A Lady of Chance is a 1928 MGM silent film starring Norma Shearer. It’s a lighthearted comic crime melodrama/romantic melodrama.

A Lady of Chance was shot as a silent film. By this time audiences were losing interest in silent films so MGM added some dialogue scenes. That soundtrack is apparently lost so the movie now survives only as a silent movie. What we get on the DVD is a modern score - I turned the volume down to zero as quickly as possible. I’ll watch a silent movie with no sound at all rather than endure a modern score.

Dolly Morgan, nicknamed Angel Face (Norma Shearer), is a con artist. She’s working the old badger game. It’s a racket she knows well.

She has a prime sucker lined up. His name is Hammond. Hammond knows that Dolly isn’t exactly a respectable girl. That’s OK, he doesn’t want a respectable girl. He wants a bit of fun. He knows that girls like Dolly don’t give away their favours without getting a few presents in return. Of course he doesn’t know just how much his fun is going to cost him this time. It’s going to cost him ten grand (an immense amount of money in 1928). He’ll have to pay up because if his wife finds out he’s in big trouble. She is not a very understanding woman.

Dolly is working this racket on her own, but unluckily for her she runs into two former partners-in-crime, Brad (Lowell Sherman) and Gwen (Gwen Lee). They want a piece of the action. Of course they intend to double-cross Dolly and she intends to double-cross them. When it comes to double crosses Dolly is an expert. She ends up holding the ten grand but she will have to make a hasty departure.

Dolly has a new sucker lined up, Steve Crandall (Johnny Mack Brown). This could be it, the big score that every girl in Dolly’s line of work hopes will come along. Steve is a cement tycoon which sounds promising enough but when he tells her about the plantation back home, in the South, she knows she’s hit the jackpot. Ten grand is chicken feed compared to a score like this.

And the best thing is that Steve is as dumb as a rock. He even offers to marry her. She can’t wait to see that plantation. When she arrives in Steve’s home town there will of course be some surprises in store for her.

Dolly has been thrown for a loop and now the last thing she needs is for Brad and Gwen to turn up. Which of course they do.

While it’s not a conventional formulaic romantic comedy this is a movie that combines comedy with romance. It is amusing, and it is very romantic.

The acting is pretty good. Johnny Mack Brown makes Steve suitably innocent and naïve but he’s so well-meaning we can’t despise him.

Lowell Sherman and Gwen Lee are fun as likeable rogues. Gwen Lee in fact is a delight. Lowell Sherman’s reputation hasn’t stood the test of time which is perhaps a little unfair.

Norma Shearer is fine and she manages to sell us on Dolly’s sudden change of heart. It’s a brittle amusing performance. These four main players really work extremely well together. Norma Shearer looks fabulous, which is easy for an actress to do when she has the great Adrian designing her gowns.

Robert Z. Leonard is not a director you’ll find on most people’s great directors lists and he’s not one of the darlings of auteurist critics but he made some extraordinarily good and interesting movies, include the superb 1949 noir The Bribe and the very underrated pre-code Susan Lenox (Her Fall and Rise).

This is a very lightweight movie but it doesn’t pretend to be anything else and it has a breezy charm. Highly recommended if you’re in the mood for something frothy.

The Warner Archive DVD presentation is very good.

I haven’t seen a huge number of Norma Shearer’s films. I want to see more but her movies are remarkably difficult to find. I do highly recommend one of her earlier silent pictures, Lady of the Night (1925), in which she plays dual roles.

Destry (1954)

Destry is 1954 Audie Murphy western based on a novel by Max Brand. There were two film adaptations in the 1930s including a fairly admired 1939 version (with the title Destry Rides Again) directed by George Marshall. In 1954 Marshall directed another version, simply called Destry, with Audie Murphy in the role played by James Stewart in the ’39 film. This is the film reviewed here.

I’ve seen the 1939 movie but it was so long ago that I was able to approach this 1954 remake with an open mind.

Restful is the name of the town but restful it ain’t. It’s run by a very shady businessman and gambler named Decker (Lyle Bettger). Decker has the crooked Mayor Sellers (Edgar Buchanan) is his pocket and a gang of gunmen.

Restful is without a sheriff after the previous holder of that office, Sheriff Joe Bailey, suffered a fatal heart attack. That’s what it says on the death certificate but the death certificate neglected to mention that by an amazing coincidence the heart attack happened at the exact same moment that the sheriff got a bullet in the back. This occurred shortly after a dispute over a poker game in which Decker cheated Henry Skinner (Walter Baldwin) out of his ranch. Decker cheated with some help from sexy saloon girl and chanteuse Brandy (Mari Blanchard).

To ensure that they have no problems with nosy sheriffs Decker and the major appoint hopeless drunk Rags Barnaby (Thomas Mitchell) as sheriff. Rags then has a brainwave. Years earlier, before he crawled inside a bottle, Rags had been the deputy of a legendary sheriff named Destry. Destry had a son, Tom. Rags hasn’t seen the son for years but he figures he’s bound to be a tough two-fisted fast-shooting lawman.

When Tom Destry (Audie Murphy) arrives in town all Rags’ hopes are dashed. Tom is a quiet inoffensive young man who looks like he would faint if he saw a gun. And Tom makes it clear that as deputy he has no intention of carrying a gun. Tom is a tenderfoot who will clearly be no use at all.

Appearances are of course deceptive. Tom Destry doesn’t carry a gun and he doesn’t believe in shooting people but underneath the gentle bookish exterior there is steel. Destry is tough and brave. He’s just not tough and brave in a way that involves shooting people. And he’s smart. Why try out-shooting criminals when you can out-think them?

Destry is determined to clean up Restful, and bring the murderer of Sheriff Bailey to justice.

This is the sort of thing Audie Murphy did particularly well, playing an unconventional hero. He plays this hero as a seriously nice guy but he convinces the viewer that Destry is actually quite formidable in his own way. And of course Audie Murphy had a very high likeability factor. I think Murphy’s performance works just fine.

Mari Blanchard has a tougher challenge, playing the role played by Marlene Dietrich in the ’39 film. She’s no Dietrich but she’s not pretty good. She gets several musical numbers which she handles well enough.

Thomas Mitchell as Rags and Edgar Buchanan as the sleazy mayor are of course huge amounts of fun. Wallace Ford as the town’s incompetent doctor and Alan Hale Jr as a hot-headed cattleman are also excellent. Lori Nelson gets saddled with the thankless good girl role but she’s OK.

As I said earlier I have only dim memories of the 1939 Destry Rides Again so I can’t compare the two movies. Judged on its own merits Destry is a pretty good western. Recommended.

Kino Lorber’s Blu-Ray (in their Audie Murphy Collection II boxed set) offers a nice transfer. Being a 1954 Universal International release the movie was shot in Technicolor and looks great.

I’ve seen and reviewed quite a few Audie Murphy westerns. Their quality is variable but Murphy’s performances are always good. Hell Bent for Leather (1960) and No Name on the Bullet (1959) are superb. Ride Clear of Diablo (1954) and the Don Siegel-directed The Duel at Silver Creek (1952) are reasonably OK.

Romancing the Stone (1984)

Romancing the Stone was part of the 80s mini-craze for lighthearted adventure movies in exotic settings, a craze kicked off by Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Diane Thomas wrote the screenplay and it was not just her first screenplay but apparently her first real attempt at writing. There’s not much chance of a first-time screenplay getting picked up by a major studio but somehow Michael Douglas got to read it and fell in love with it. At the time Douglas was concentrating on his career as a producer and he knew he just had to produce this movie.

Then came another stroke of good luck. He could not persuade any actor to take the lead role so he was forced to play the role himself. Of course he turned out to be perfect and this movie established him as a very major star.

Getting Kathleen Turner as his co-star was a definite bonus. Hiring Robert Zemeckis to direct proved to be a smart choice.

Joan Wilder (Kathleen Turner) is a romance novelist. It’s clear that she writes adventure romances in which the heroine always end up with a dashing, brave handsome hero.

Now she gets involved in an adventure of her own. Her sister is being held hostage in Colombia. The kidnappers don’t want money. They want a map that is in her possession. It is a treasure map. Joan will have to deliver the map to her sister’s captors.

She arrives in Colombia and everything goes wrong. It’s bad enough being up against ruthless kidnappers but she is also up against an evil secret police chief. Everybody wants the treasure (which turns out to be a gigantic priceless emerald).

Joan quickly finds herself in big big trouble and she is stranded in the jungle. Luckily a rescuer appears just in time. His name is Jack Colton (Michael Douglas).

He’s not quite the kind of hero you’d find in one of Joan’s books. He’s dashing and brave but he’s cynical and entirely untrustworthy. He is in fact a bit of a scoundrel. He doesn’t rescue damsels in distress unless they can pay cash for his services. Joan disapproves of him and doesn’t trust him but she has no choice.

All sorts of dangers and mayhem and narrow escapes follow. Joan and Jack get some help from a friendly cocaine dealer who happens to be a huge fan of Joan’s novels.

Joan and Jack get chased all over the countryside, they fall off cliffs, are swept away by waterfalls, they have to dodge hungry alligators and they get shot at. They get shot at a lot. The action doesn’t let up. I’m not a fan of Robert Zemeckis as a director but this is the sort of thing he could do well.

Michael Douglas seems to be relishing the opportunity to play a non-intense role as a loveable rogue. We believe Jack as a scoundrel but he has real charm and we can see why a girl like Joan would be swept off her feet by him. And Douglas does the hardbitten action hero stuff well. A fine performance.

Douglas’s old buddy Danny de Vito is great fun as one of the kidnappers.

Kathleen Turner is terrific. Joan starts out very demure and very mousey and very nervous. She gradually becomes more confident and glamorous, as you’d expect since she’s now met a handsome hero. Turner is charming and amusing and very very likeable.

The best thing about this movie is the overall concept. Joan writes adventure romances. Suddenly it’s as if she’s living one of her books, and at the end she does in fact turn her real-life adventure into a bestselling romance novel. This is most definitely not one of those movies in which we’re told at the end that it was all a dream. This adventure does happen to Joan. But of course this is a movie and movies are make believe. So it’s like we’re in an alternative reality which is just like an adventure romance novel. We don’t care that the story is far-fetched. That just adds to the fun and the romance.

No-one watching this movie will care in the least about the emerald. We care about the romance between Joan and Jack. We don’t care who gets the emerald as long as these two find love together.

There’s mayhem but no graphic violence. There’s one very very tame bedroom scene. This is a movie aimed squarely at family audiences and I have no problem with such movie as long as they’re as enjoyable as this one.

It’s a wildly romantic movie but it has enough action and adventure (and humour) to ensure that every viewer is satisfied.

This is just such a fun feelgood movie. Highly recommended.

The Kiss Before the Mirror (1933)

The Kiss Before the Mirror is a 1933 melodrama from Universal directed by James Whale.


Mirrors are the key to this story. A murder is committed because of something a man saw in a mirror. Mirrors can reveal truths that would otherwise remain hidden. The plot also mirrors itself in an interesting way.

Professor Bernsdorf (Paul Lukas ) shoots his wife when he discovers she is having an affair. He knew she was having an affair before he found her preparing to meet her lover. He knew because he saw her face in a mirror. That told him everything he needed to know.

Bernsdorf’s friend Paul Held (Frank Morgan) will be defending him. Held has started looking in mirrors with a great deal of interest. Perhaps a mirror will him something as well. Perhaps it will tell him something about his own wife.

Held starts to understand how Bernsdorf could have been driven to murder. He knows how he will conduct the defence. He must also make a decision about his own case.

There’s pretty much it as far as plot is concerned.

I have major issues with James Whale as a director. I find his movies stagey and annoyingly mannered. The only pre-code movie I have ever truly hated is a James Whale movie (his 1931 Waterloo Bridge). I didn’t like Bride of Frankenstein and found The Old Dark House to be an ordeal to sit through.

But in The Kiss Before the Mirror Whale has a story that is overheated, overwrought, contrived, absurdly melodramatic and theatrical. In other words a story that is a perfect fit for his very artificial directorial style. Whale dials the hysteria levels up to maximum and then dials them up a bit more. This is melodrama on steroids.

The acting is artificial and mannered. I suspect that these were exactly the performances Whale wanted. Frank Morgan as Held and Nancy Carroll as his wife Maria are at least entertaining.

There are lots of things wrong with this movie but it has its compensations. It’s visually quite impressive.

And it deals with touchy subject matter in a way that is both bold and complex, and provocative. It is made very clear that the two wives in question really are betraying their husbands, and really have deceived their husbands. It’s not a case of suspicious husbands jumping to conclusions. There is also no question of the wives being driven to infidelity by unsympathetic husbands. These are loving attentive husbands who do not mistreat their wives in any way. The wives are guilty of betrayal and have no excuses. But of course that is no justification for murder.

Early on Frank Held believes that it is a justification for murder. That does not mean that the movie takes this line. And Held increasingly has doubts. He understands Bernsdorf’s actions but is longer sure that he approves. In his own life Held has to choose between retribution and forgiveness.

There is no hint of a double standard. There is no suggestion whatever that there is any moral difference between a wife’s unfaithfulness and a husband’s.

This is a story of hidden truths and lies and suspicions. As you would expect there are a lot of mirror shots in this movie.

The mirror motif is used very cleverly. The mirrors are not metaphors for female vanity. The mirrors can reveal hidden truths, truths hidden in the eyes of a woman looking at herself in a mirror not knowing that her husband can see what she is revealing. But a mirror might show only part of the truth. Mirrors can reveal truths, but these truths may lead us astray. They do not necessarily tell us what we really need to know. The theme of the movie could be said to be that we need to look into our hearts instead.

I still have issues with Whale’s approach to film directing but this is quite an interesting movie. Recommended.

Kino Lorber’s Blu-Ray release looks fine. Kino Lorber have a knack for coming up with dreary ideologically driven audio commentaries that suck all the pleasure out of movie-watching and this is yet another another example.

Scorpio (1973)

When people talk of 1970s paranoia movies they often neglect to mention Michael Winner’s Scorpio but as well as being a spy thriller it has as much paranoia as the heart could desire.

At the beginning of Scorpio we are introduced to Jean Laurier (Alain Delon). He’s a hitman known as Scorpio. He’s a freelancer but he does a lot of jobs for a particularly sinister organisation. No, not the Mob. They at least have some ethics. He does jobs for a much more sinister outfit who have no ethics at all - the CIA. Scorpio often works with a CIA agent named Cross (Burt Lancaster).

Scorpio opens with the CIA assassinating a Middle East political leader. He’s an American ally but the US Government feels he would be a more useful asset dead. The assassin was Scorpio, working with Cross.

Scorpio had another mission which he failed to carry out. Now the CIA wants that job done. This begins a whole complicated series of events involving possible betrayals and possible double-crosses and lies and manipulations and conflicted loyalties.

Cross is now running. He’s been marked for death by the CIA but Cross is a very clever agent. Catching him and killing him will be immensely difficult and dangerous. You’d need someone as good as Cross. Scorpio is as good as Cross. Maybe.

But there are plenty of twists, and plenty of unanswered questions. Why does the CIA want Cross dead? What is the exact nature of the relationship between Cross and KGB agent Zharkov? They are friends, but strange friendships sometimes do exist between spies on opposite sides. It doesn’t mean Cross has sold out to the KGB, but it might mean that.

Another major unanswered question involves Scorpio’s motivations and intentions. Scorpio is not CIA. He’s a freelancer. Can the CIA trust Scorpio? Can Scorpio trust the CIA. None of the players in this game know if they can trust anyone, and the CIA don’t know if they can trust any of the players, even the guys who are supposedly working for them.

This is not a James Bond-style spy movie. It’s much closer in mood and spirit to the dark cynical pessimistic world of spy movies based on books by writers like John le Carré and Len Deighton - movies like The Spy Who Came In from the Cold and The Ipcress File. The main difference is that Scorpio does also include some great action set-pieces.

It’s interesting that Scorpio loves cats, which I assume is a nod to the first great movie about a hitman, This Gun For Hire (1942).

Casting Burt Lancaster and Alain Delon as the two spies was an interesting decision. Two actors with plenty of star power and charisma but sharply contrasting styles. Lancaster had a tendency to give flamboyant larger-than-life performances. Delon was always super-cool, giving very controlled subtle minimalist performances. Both actors were good at playing dangerous men but they did so in totally different ways. They complement each other perfectly.

Winner is a much reviled director. I suspect he’s mostly reviled because people disapprove so strongly of his monster 1974 hit Death Wish (and they invariably disapprove of Death Wish without actually understanding it). My impression is that a lot of people approach a Winner film in such a prejudiced state of mind that they decide it’s junk before they’ve even watched it.

Scorpio has some very definite affinities with Winner’s excellent 1972 The Mechanic (1972). In both movies there’s an older hitman acting as mentor to a younger assassin. In both cases the relationship is complex. Both movies deal with betrayal. In The Mechanic there’s a single level of betrayal whereas in Scorpio it’s like peeling an onion - you just keep finding new layers of duplicity and betrayal. There are double-crosses and triple-crosses and quadruple-crosses.

To try to pick holes in the plot is to miss the point. To criticise the movie on the grounds that the character’s motivations are insufficiently developed is also to miss the point.

As far as this movie is concerned the world of espionage is a world of meaningless futility.

It is all pointless. It’s just a game. There is no actual objective to the game. The only objective is to strengthen your own position by weakening someone else’s. It’s like a football match in which no player cares whether his team wins or loses.

The purpose of the CIA is to increase the power and influence of the CIA at the expense of other agencies such as the FBI (the CIA guys in this movie regard the FBI as a dangerous enemy.) The characters are all aiming to advance their own interests. The CIA chief McLeod (John Colicos) aims to maintain his position and perhaps move up another run on the ladder. The objective is his subordinate Filchock (J.D. Cannon) is to take over McLeod’s job. Scorpio is an outsider. He’s just a contractor. He wants to become an insider. Then he too will have power. Cross was an idealist once but now he has no idea what his aims are, other than survival. He is amused by the fact that his KGB opposite number, Zharkov, still has beliefs.

What’s interesting is that nobody knows or cares what the case is about. Some secrets were exchanged. Nobody cares what they were. They’re just poker chips.

The CIA are definitely the bad guys but they’re not so much evil as just totally amoral. The characters have no clear motivations because they believe in nothing but the game.

Scorpio is not a meaningless movie. It’s an intelligent provocative movie about the meaningless empty world of espionage. Highly recommended.

I’ve also reviewed Winner’s best-known movies, Death Wish (1974) and The Mechanic (1972). You can see certain common themes running through both these movies and through Scorpio as well.

The Face at the Window (1939)

The Face at the Window is a 1939 Tod Slaughter melodrama and if you’ve never seen a Tod Slaughter melodrama I can assure you that it’s a unique experience. And, in my opinion, a wonderful experience.

Tod Slaughter (1885-1956) had had a long career on the stage and was managing his own theatre company as well as acting when in the early 30s he came up with the brilliant idea of reviving Victorian melodrama. At that time everybody had heard of Victorian melodrama but most people had never actually seen one. It was a successful move by Slaughter.

It was obvious that movie adaptations had potential and in 1934 Maria Marten, or Murder in the Red Barn gave Slaughter his first starring film role. It was the first of a string of cinematic Tod Slaughter melodramas. These were popular in Britain and were shown on American television in the 50s.

It is important to understand that The Face at the Window (based on an 1897 play by F. Brooke Warren) is pure unashamed out-and-out melodrama. The title card at the beginning makes that clear. It also makes it clear that we are not expected to take the movie too seriously - we are expected to enjoy ourselves.

This is a crime melodrama and a horror melodrama with even a slight hint of science fiction.

It is Paris in the 1880s. M. de Brisson’s bank has been robbed. A member of the bank staff was killed. The knife in the back indicates that the killer was The Wolf, a notorious madman who had been terrorising the city. His crimes are always preceded by the appearance of a hideous face at a window and by the sound of a wolf howling. M. de Brisson faces ruin, until the Chevalier del Gardo (Tod Slaughter) steps in to restore the bank’s credit.

The Chevalier demands a price for this assistance - he wants to marry M. de Brisson’s pretty daughter Cecile (Marjorie Taylor).

Cecile is horrified and in any case she in love with a nice young man, Lucien Cortier (John Warwick), a teller at her father’s bank.

Now we see the first indications of the Chevalier’s villainy. He frames Lucien for the robbery and murder, in the belief that with his rival out of the way he will be able to persuade Cecile to marry him.

More villainy follows and the love between Lucien and Cecile seems doomed. Only one thing can save poor Lucien from the guillotine and it’s such a fantastic idea that it seems unbelievable.

There are thrills and scares. There are a couple of slightly ghoulish moments. There is romance and of course there is a lovely young girl who may be forced to marry a sinister and sleazy (and lecherous) villain.

You cannot judge a movie such as this by conventional standards. This is not 1930s melodrama. This is melodrama of the Victorian age, done in the manner of the Victorian age. It is supposed to be contrived and outrageous. It is supposed to be over-the-top.

You also cannot judge Tod Slaughter’s acting by conventional standards. He knew exactly what he was doing. He was not trying to do film acting. He was giving the kind of performance you would have seen on the stage in 1897. It’s an artfully contrived and calculated performance. He wants to provoke delicious shudders. He would not have been disturbed had cinema audiences booed and hissed at his character’s perfidious villainy.

It’s all huge amounts of fun. It was clearly done on a limited budget but that works in the movie’s favour. It doesn’t matter that this movie is stagey. That is actually what director George King and star Tod Slaughter wanted.

The Face at the Window is highly recommended.

For years the Tod Slaughter melodramas were available on DVD but in awful public domain releases. The Kino Lorber Blu-Ray on the other hand looks pretty good and there’s an audio commentary.

I’ve reviewed quite a few of the Tod Slaughter melodramas - Maria Marten, or The Murder in the Red Barn (1935), Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1936), Crimes at the Dark House (1940) and The Greed of William Hart (1948).