His Kind of Woman (1951)

His Kind of Woman is one of those films that can best be described as a glorious mess. It is in fact two different films spliced uneasily together, films from entirely different and incompatible genres, but both films are terrific and compulsively watchable.

Why is it such a mess? The answer to that one is easy - Howard Hughes. John Farrow directed the movie and came up with an excellent film noir. Hughes meddled, ordered Richard Fleischer to reshoot many scenes and beefed up Vincent Price’s role to the point where it becomes a film within a film. So you have a fine film noir but mixed in with it you have a delirious Hollywood comedy spoof. But it’s a genuinely funny and delightful comedy spoof and although it doesn’t fit with the rest of the movie it’s so much fun that in a perverse way I’m almost grateful to Hughes. Without his meddling Price would never have had the chance to play one of his best ever comedy roles.



Robert Michum is down-on-his-luck professional gambler Dan Milner. To pay off his debts he accepts a job. All he has to do is fly to Mexico and hang around for a while and then sail off on a yacht, and he will get to collect $50,000. Yes, it does sound too good to be true, and Milner is no fool but he’s a Robert Mitchum film noir hero and a mixture of curiosity and fatalism (plus the rather pressing need for money) decides him to accept the offer.

In fact it’s part of a scheme to get deported gangster Nick Ferraro (Raymond Burr) back into the United States. Ferraro will have plastic surgery to make him resemble Milner and then Milner will have an unfortunate accident. Milner realises even at the start that there’s a good chance the men paying him fifty grand don’t intend for him to live long enough to spend it but he figures he might be able to double-cross them and get away with it. And if not, well those are the breaks. And he is a gambler.



He shares a plane down to Mexico with singer Lenore Brent (Jane Russell). She claims to be a fabulously wealthy heiress. Milner has his doubts. He suspects that whatever she’s up to it’s probably not strictly legal but he likes her and she’s a looker and she’s fun. She’s his kind of woman and he can overlook one or two minor character flaws. It’s soon clear that he’s her kind of man as well. Unfortunately she has a boyfriend, movie star Mark Cardigan (Vincent Price). Mark has everything a gal could want - he’s rich and famous and he’s a nice guy and he’s generous. Unfortunately he also has a wife. Dan Milner and Mark Cardigan hit it off pretty well. Milner is hardboiled but with a soft centre and he’s an easy-going guy. Mark Cardigan and Lenore Brent are both phonies but he likes them.

Milner starts to figure out what the bad guys have planned for him. Luckily he finds an unexpected ally in Mark Cardigan. Mark is a keen, indeed obsessive, hunter. His hunting and marksmanship skills will prove useful. Mark knows he’s a phony but now maybe he’ll finally get the chance to be a real hero, just like the hero of a Mark Cardigan movie.



Once Milner is in Mexico the movie starts to fragment into disconnected and often irrelevant subplots, with the Mark Cardigan subplot gradually developing to the point where it’s pretty much an entirely separate movie. The constant intercutting between the main plot and this subplot becomes distracting but Mitchum and Burr are so good in the main film noir plot and Price is so good in his subplot that you can’t stop watching.

Jane Russell provides the only real link between these subplots and it must have been difficult for her switching between the femme fatale role in her scenes with Mitchum and the scenes with Price that become more and more like screwball comedy. She keeps her footing though and her sure-footedness is all that holds the movie together. Lenore Brent is the kind of lighthearted “bad girl who’s really not so bad after all” role at which Russell excelled.



Mitchum gives one of his trademark performances as well. Milner is no Boy Scout but he’s forced into acting the hero and he accepts his destiny with typical Mitchum fatalism. Burr is wonderfully vicious and sadistic as Ferraro.

The main film noir plotline is nicely developed and Farrow and his cinematographer Harry J. Wild get the film noir atmosphere right. There are an extraordinary number of low-angle shots. I’ve never seen so many ceilings in a Hollywood movie of this era, and all the ceilings seem to be pressing down on the characters as if the roof were about to literally fall in on them. It’s an odd but interesting touch. The suspense is well-maintained despite the constant intercutting between action/suspense scenes and action/comedy scenes and it’s a tribute to Farrow’s skills that this remains so despite Hughes’ meddling.



The scene in which Mark Cardigan sets off in pursuit of the bad guys in a small boat full of Mexican policemen and takes up a heroic position in the prow quoting inspiring lines from Shakespeare as the boat slowly sinks serves as a perfect metaphor for the whole movie. It’s a disaster but it’s a heroic disaster that is enormously entertaining to watch. With all its faults it’s definitely worth seeing.

It was released in Region 1 by Warner Home Video but my copy is the British all-region DVD from Odeon, with no extras but a very satisfactory transfer.

Summer Storm (1944)

Summer Storm is one of Douglas Sirk’s earliest Hollywood films although he was already an experienced director in his native Germany when he arrived in the US. It’s a rather odd and uneasy adaptation of an 1884 Anton Chekhov 1884 novella, The Shooting Party . Sirk and Rowland Leigh shared the writing credit.

The setting is switched to 1912, allowing the movie to start in the post-Revolutionary Soviet Union and for the main story to be told in flashback. The only possible reason I can think of for this is that Hollywood in 1944 was besotted by America’s wartime ally and that it was a contemptible effort to show the brutal and vicious Soviet dictatorship in a favourable light.



George Sanders is Judge Fedor Mikhailovich Petroff, a man who has lived the decadent lifestyle of the Tsarist aristocracy and is suddenly seized by the desire for marriage and respectability. Nadena Kalenin (Anna Lee) is a suitable match and Petroff believes he is in love with her. He believes it until he meets a beautiful peasant girl, Olga Kuzminichna (Linda Darnell). It is lust at first sight. Nadena Kalenin breaks off their engagement when she discovers his dalliance with this peasant bombshell.

Petroff’s friend Count Volsky (affectionately known as “Piggy” and played by Edward Everett Horton) has no intention of reforming. He also falls under Olga Kuzminichna’s spell but her father has married her off to his steward Urbenin. Urbenin is a peasant, and Olga Kuzminichna has much higher ambitions, but at least Urbenin is a relatively prosperous peasant and life with him promises to be an improvement on life with her drunken father. She has not however given up her ambitions. She continues her affair with Petroff whilst also (unbeknownst to Petroff) encouraging the attentions of Count Volsky.



Of course this ménage à quatre will inevitably end in disaster, culminating in the tragic shooting party from which Chekhov’s novella took its title.

The screenplay provides the material for the sort of melodrama at which Sirk excelled but unfortunately the movie veers uneasily between melodrama and comedy. Sirk demonstrated two years later with the excellent A Scandal in Paris that he could (rather surprisingly) handle a light-hearted romp very adeptly. The problem is that combining melodrama and comedy in the same movie is a difficult if not impossible trick to pull off. In this movie the two genres clash disastrously. Melodrama has to take itself fairly seriously. You can do melodrama with irony, but not as comedy.



Most of the blame for this can be assigned to Edward Everett Horton. He was a fine comic actor but his performance here is hopelessly out of place. Unfortunately the movie is saddled with further unnecessary comic relief in the form of Olga Kuzminichna’s drunkard father.

George Sanders would have seemed a good choice for the role of Petroff but the normally sure-footed actor never seems to get a handle on the role. Partly this is because the part is underwritten and the character is colourless and dull (which is almost unheard of for a George Sanders performance). Petroff seems unsure if he wants to be a decadent aristocrat or a respectable and dedicated civil servant and family man. This potentially interest conflict is never developed and the characterisation comes across as confused rather than complex.



The one bright spot is Linda Darnell, an underrated actress who gave a superb performance the following year in Otto Preminger’s Fallen Angel. She’s totally unconvincing as a Russian peasant but she’s totally convincing as a scheming femme fatale who oozes sex from every pore.

While Darnell and Sanders seem to understand that the movie needs to be played as melodrama Edward Everett Horton is convinced he’s doing a screwball comedy. The combination of this acting dissonance with Sirk’s uncertain direction and Sanders’ hesitant performance fatally undermines the movie. This is Sirk’s worst American movie, worth seeing only for Darnell’s energy, enthusiastic wickedness and hyper-sexuality.

The Odeon all-region PAL DVD gives us a handsome print but without any extras.

The Unholy Four (1954)

Before establishing himself as one of the masters of gothic horror director Terence Fisher honed his skills making crime B-movies like The Unholy Four (original British title The Stranger Came Home) for Hammer Films in the early 50s.

Some of these films, such as Stolen Face, were excellent. Others, such as The Unholy Four, were not so good. It’s still a competent crime thriller if you don’t expect too much from it.



Philip Vickers (William Sylvester) suddenly returns home after a mysterious four-year absence during which time he had been presumed dead after an accident on a fishing trip. No-one is particularly pleased to see him back, including his wife Angie (Paulette Goddard) and the three friends who had been with him on the ill-fated fishing trip. The truth is that the four friends on that fishing boat in Portugal were not especially good friends. The main problem between them was Angie Vickers. It seems that at least two of Philip’s companions had been in love with her while Philip’s rather prickly personality didn’t endear him to anyone.

Philip’s story is a strange one. During a trip ashore, a trip that had involved a considerable consumption of intoxicating beverages, someone slugged Philip and pushed him into the water. They had already drugged him by doctoring his drinks. They assumed (and hoped) that he had then drowned. But he didn’t drown. He survived, but was left with a head injury that left him with a four-year case of amnesia. Eventually hazy memories came back to him, memories of the voice of his would-be murderer, but he can’t identify the voice.



Now that he’s back the old tensions are back as well. Angie’s admirers have been competing for her affections and Philip Vickers’ temper has not been improved by his four lost years. When Harry, one of the four men from that fishing trip, is found dead Vickers seems the obvious suspect. But not the only suspect. Angie had been annoyed by Harry’s attentions so she might have killed him, and given that the marriage is less than blissful she might also have a motive for pointing the finger of suspicion at Philip. And Bill Saul (Paul Carpenter) would have had an equally good motive - to get both Angie’s husband and one of her suitors out of the way. Angie’s live-in companion/secretary Joan also had a motive for killing Harry and an even better motive for wanting to frame Philip. Inspector Traherne (Russell Napier) has too many suspects and not enough solid evidence.

And all the suspects seem to getting edgier and edgier, making them all even better suspects.



Fisher had not yet reached his peak as a director but he understood the basic rules of low-budget film-making - keep it moving along, keep it focused and don’t be tempted by unnecessary visual gimmickry. The workmanlike if not overly inspired screenplay by Michael Carreras was based on a novel supposedly by George Sanders although it was apparently ghost-written by Leigh Brackett.

Hammer’s invariable practice at this time was to import an American star who was either a second-rank star or whose box-office appeal was starting to falter - in other words someone who would be happy to get a starring role in a B-picture without wanting too much money. This policy worked surprisingly well with George Brent and Lizabeth Scott both giving superb performances in Hammer noirs. Paulette Goddard is rather less impressive. William Sylvester and Paul Carpenter are quite good though.



VCI paired this one with another Terence Fisher film, A Race for Life, in their Hammer Film Noir Volume 7 double-header. It’s a very decent print.

It’s more a psychological thriller/murder mystery than a film noir and while it fails to reach any great heights it’s a harmless enough time-killer. If you’re anxious to check out Hammer’s film noirs then go for the excellent Bad Blonde/Man Bait or the Stolen Face/Blackout double-headers (Volumes 1 and 2 respectively in this series) in preference to this one.

The Woman Condemned (1934)

There weren’t many women directors in the US film industry in the 30s. In fact there were two I can think of. One was the somewhat overrated Dorothy Arzner; the other was Dorothy Davenport. Davenport is now forgotten, which is perhaps a pity. The 1934 murder mystery The Woman Condemned is one of her films.

Dorothy Davenport was also notable for being just about the only female director to work in the shadowy but fascinating underworld of exploitation film-making in the 30s and 40s, the golden age of that strange phenomenon. She made several movies for Willis Kent Productions. They were one of those ultra-ultra-low budget outfits that were even further down the food chain than the Poverty Row studios. They did not belong to the The Motion Pictures Producers and Distributors Association (MPPDA) and thus were not bound by the Production Code.



Her 1934 effort The Road to Ruin is one of my all-time favourite exploitation movies. It has everything - booze, drugs, nudity, good girls gone bad, even strip poker! And it’s enormous fun. The Woman Condemned is a straight murder mystery but it’s not without interest.

It boasts a fiendishly complicated plot. Jane Merrick (Lola Lane) is a singer and a star attraction on a radio station. She suddenly announces she’s going on a vacation, and disappears. The radio station hires a female PI, Barbara Hammond (Claudia Dell) to investigate. She gets nabbed by the cops watching Merrick’s apartment from the fire escape and ends up in Night Court. A fast-talking reporter Jerry Beall (Richard Hemingway) gets her off the hook, but there’s a price. The judge is wise to Beall’s tall stories and decides to have some fun of his own. Beall’s story was that Barbara was his fiancée and was playing a practical joke. The judge plays his own practical joke. He marries them there and then.



This is somewhat disconcerting since the newlyweds had never met until ten minutes before the wedding. But they take it in a good spirit. After all they can always have the marriage annulled. In the meantime they might as well have dinner together. Over dinner Barbara decides that Jerry is really a pretty nice guy, and Jerry decides that Barbara is a pretty swell gal. Maybe they might even have a second date.

Before that can happen Barbara has to go back to work, so it’s back to the fire escape. And this time she not only picks up some interesting information, she finds herself witnessing a murder. And when she climbs in the window she picks up the gun, and when a neighbour walks in (he heard the gunshot) there she is holding the murder weapon. So when the cops arrive they arrest her.



Jerry knows that a swell gal like Barbara is no murderess, but how can he prove it? And the complex twists and turns of the plot have barely started at this point.

Now when I said this was a low-budget effort, I wasn’t kidding. In the world inhabited by companies like Willis Kent Productions a budget of a couple of thousand dollars was regarded as lavish. A shooting schedule of more than a few days would have been thought of as the wildest extravagance. Doing a scene in more than one take was simply hopeless self-indulgence. With the actors they could afford what they gave you on the first take was probably the best they were ever going to give you.

When judging Dorothy Davenport as a director you have to take this into account. The Road to Ruin showed that even under such conditions she could make an entertaining movie. The Woman Condemned lacks the outrageousness of that opus but it’s still a passable murder thriller.



This is not a movie that is likely to be released on a Special Edition Blu-Ray any time soon. The dodgy public domain prints floating about are as good as you’re ever going to see where this movie is concerned. My copy was from Mill Creek. Sound quality is very poor but the dialogue is quite understandable. Picture quality is at best fair with quite a but of print damage evident.

The insanely complicated plot makes this one worth a look if you can accept the rock-bottom production values.

My Sister Eileen (1942)

My Sister Eileen is a 1942 Columbia screwball comedy, and arguably it’s one of the best of its breed.

Ruth Sherwood (Rosalind Russell) and her sister Eileen (Janet Blair) live in Columbus Ohio. Ruth is trying to make it as a journalist and Eileen as an actress but even in the comparatively small pond of Columbus Ohio they’re still very small fish. Ruth decides that if you’re going to be a very small fish you might as well be a small fish in a big pond. In fact the biggest pond of all - New York. So, despite the forebodings of their father, they head for the Big Apple.



They end up living in a dingy basement rathole of an apartment in Greenwich Village with a crazy artist as a landlord. An added attraction is that a new subway is being constructed right underneath the building and the entire building shakes every time the engineers decide to do some blasting, which happens every few minutes But the good news is that the blasting only goes on for eighteen hours a day.

Their apartment seems to be a magnet for every crazy in New York. Most days Grand Central Station is slightly less crowded than the girls’ living room. The problem is that Eileen is a man magnet. She’s the bubbly sexy blonde while Ruth is the bookish type who’s never been a success with men.



Their careers don’t exactly take off. Men are interested in Eileen but it’s not her career they’re interested in. Ruth does eventually get to meet the eccentric editor of the prestigious glossy magazine The Manhatter, Bob Baker (Brian Aherne). He thinks she has potential as a writer but her stories don’t have enough going on. She explains that it’s difficult to write when you’re surrounded by compete chaos and insanity. Then Bob has a brainwave. Why doesn’t Ruth trying writing about the craziness that surrounds her?

It’s an inspired idea and Ruth writes a story called My Sister Eileen, because Eileen is the centre of all the madness. Bob loves the story but of course there are still plenty of obstacles to overcome before Ruth can find success and there’s the added complication that both Ruth and Eileen think Bob is the sort of man they’ve been looking for.



In true screwball comedy style the action is frenetic and everybody is working at cross purposes and everything gets crazier and crazier, culminating with half the Portuguese merchant marine dancing the conga through the apartment and Eileen winding up getting arrested for starting a riot. She doesn’t mind being thrown in the cells though because she meets some very cute policemen and they’re ever so nice to her. Men just can’t help themselves where Eileen is concerned.

Most importantly though there are not just ludicrous situations, the ludicrous situations are genuinely funny. The screenplay by Jerome Chedorov and Joseph Fields gives the players plenty of good lines and they make the most of them. Director Alexander Hall keeps the pacing tight.



Rosalind Russell is at her sparkling best. Ruth is wry and witty and despite all the setbacks she never gives up. It’s the sort of feisty and strong but very likeable and sympathetic character that she played so well. She gets plenty of solid support from the rest of the cast. Janet Blair is suitably ditzy as Eileen and proves to be the perfect foil for Rosalind Russell.

This is classic screwball comedy with the right mix of laughs, madness and romance. A total delight and a definite treat for Rosalind Russell fans.



This is one of the movies in volume 1 of the Columbia Icons of Screwball Comedy series. Each volume contains four movies and both are well worth grabbing.

Armored Car Robbery (1950)

Armored Car Robbery is not a film noir. It’s a tough gritty crime B-movie, more a police procedural in many ways, and it’s a very good one.

Made by RKO in 1950 it does have the film noir look with lots of night scenes, lots of scenes in dockside areas, cheap motels and the like - the whole paranoid seedy big city underworld feel.

Dave Purvis (William Talman) is a criminal who has always managed to say one step ahead of the law. He has no record. Now he plans a really big job - an armored car robbery. He has it all worked out. It’s foolproof.



Dave Purvis is proof that the smarter a criminal is, the dumber he is. He thinks he’s so thorough that he leaves nothing to chance. No loose ends. But right from the start chance steps in. He’s made a series of hoax calls to the police so he can time how long it takes them to get to Wrigley Field where the robbery is to take place. He knows they have three minutes to carry out the robbery. Unfortunately when the robbery actually occurs Detective-Lieutenant Jim Cordell (Charles McGraw) and his partner are two minutes away from Wrigley Field. There’s a shootout that leaves a dead cop and one of the gang badly wounded.

They make their getaway but with the wounded gang member bleeding profusely and clearly about to become a major liability.



Dave Purvis knows how to get rid of liabilities but again he’s not as clever as he thinks he is. He seems to assume that cops spend all their time sitting in police headquarters waiting for calls. It doesn’t occur to him that they spend a lot of time driving about the city making a nuisance of themselves to the criminal classes. And while doing this they have an annoying habit of noticing odd things. Odd things like cars getting pushed into the bay. And bloodstains where there shouldn’t be bloodstains.

It’s all going badly wrong and Lieutenant Cordell and his partner have found some other loose ends Dave Purvis overlooked. Like burlesque dancer Yvonne LeDoux (Adele Jurgens). She’s the wife of Benny, one of the gang members, but she’s also Dave Purvis’s girlfriend. The police are closing in but Purvis still thinks he holds all the aces.



Director Richard Fleischer was no auteur but he made some good films during his long career, including another classic crime B-movie, The Narrow Margin. Armored Car Robbery is cut from the same cloth as The Narrow Margin - a taut fast-moving very tense crime thriller.

Armored Car Robbery is an object lesson in film-making - there’s not a single unnecessary minute in the film, and there’s not a single minute that needs to be added. It’s an absolute model of efficiency. The planning of the robbery, the robbery itself, the hunt for the gang, the personalities of the key characters - all are sketched in with extraordinary economy. Never spend five minutes on a sequence that could be done just as effectively in three - that seems to be Fleischer’s motto here and it’s one of the secrets of making great thrillers.



There’s nothing fancy in Fleischer’s and there’s nothing fancy about the acting either but all the performances are effective. Charles McGraw is a great laconic hardboiled cop. William Talman is excellent as the egotistical and vicious Purvis and Adele Jergens is wonderful as the opportunistic and equally vicious burlesque queen.

It’s a low-budget movie that succeeds perfectly in doing what it sets out to do with energy and style and with a minimum of fuss, and without getting distracted by anything that is not strictly necessary. A great example of the crime B-movie at its best.



It was released on DVD in Region 1 by Warner Home Video and in Region 2 by Odeon. My copy is the Odeon version and it can’t be faulted. Highly recommended.

The Man from Laramie (1955)

The Man from Laramie was the last of the five westerns starring James Stewart that Anthony Mann directed in the 1950s.

Stewart plays Will Lockhart, a man who seems at first to be a rather amiable trader who arrives in the small town of Coronado with three wagons full of provisions for the store there. Pretty soon we discover that he’s a haunted man, haunted by the death of his brother and determined on taking revenge. Lockhart had been a captain in the US Cavalry and his kid brother had been in the service as well, until his patrol was ambushed and wiped out by Apaches. The Apaches had been armed with US Army repeating rifles and Will Lockhart wants to find the man who sold them the guns. When he finds him he intends to kill him.



Coronado turns out to be a tense unfriendly place. The big man around these parts is Alec Waggoman (Donald Crisp). He claims to own the whole town and all the country around it for three days’ ride. This proves to a slight exaggeration, but only a slight one. He owns everything except the Half Moon Ranch. That’s owned by Kate Canady (Aline MacMahon). Kate and Alec have a history, but not a happy one. Alec plans eventually to own everything, including the Half Moon Ranch.

He also hopes to establish a cattle dynasty. Unfortunately his only son Dave is not exactly ideal material for such a project. Dave is spoilt, impulsive, jealous and spiteful. He is also lazy and incompetent. Alec’s ranch foreman Vic Hansbro (Arthur Kennedy) has the job of trying to keep Dave in line and out of trouble, a formidable challenge.



Will Lockhart’s arrival in town is the catalyst that will bring the simmering tensions in Coronado to boiling point. When Dave and his boys find Lockhart and his men harvesting salt from a salt pan on the Waggomans’ Barb Ranch they burn Lockhart’s wagons and shoot his mules. Lockhart is not a man to forget this kind of treatment. Lockhart finds himself drawn into the complex and dangerous dramas of the unhappy town, dramas that escalate into a series of murders as his own obsessive search for the man he holds responsible for his brother’s death becomes enmeshed in the struggle for control of the Waggoman empire.

Vic is a key figure. An orphan, he was raised by Alec Waggoman and considers himself as having a claim on the ranch, a claim bitterly resented by Dave Waggoman. Now Alec Waggoman is in failing health and going blind and the question of who will succeed him is becoming urgent.



The villains in this movie are not the conventional sort of western villains. They’re bad because they’re weak. And their weakness makes them dangerous. Will Lockhart is a strong man but also a man driven by a dangerous obsession.

Since Anthony Mann directed some notable examples of film noir earlier in his career it’s tempting to see his westerns as a species of western noir. There’s some justification for this. His westerns do have a slightly noirish sense of fate. Characters make mistakes because they do the things that are in their nature. They seem almost unable to do anything else.



This applies to the hero in this movie as well as to the villains. Will Lockhart is a man driven not just by his desire for revenge but by the extraordinarily stubborn streak in his character. When a sensible man would walk away he dives right in.

James Stewart gave some of his most admired performances for Anthony Mann and he does a fine job here. Vic is arguably an even more interesting character than Lockhart although Arthur Kennedy is rather less impressive than Stewart. That’s perhaps personal prejudice on my part - he’s an actor I’ve never really been convinced by.



This was one of the first westerns made in Cinemascope and Mann makes the most of the format.

A very good, intelligent and complex western.

The Region 4 DVD is a handsome widescreen print although sadly lacking in extras apart from trailers.

The Sea Hawk (1924)

The 1924 silent film The Sea Hawk is not to be confused with the much better known 1940 Errol Flynn movie of the same name with which it has nothing in common apart from the pirates and the Elizabeth setting. The 1924 movie is however a terrific piece of swashbuckling fun combined with romance.

It’s based on the 1915 novel The Sea Hawk by Rafael Sabatini (1875-1950), one of the greatest of all adventure tales by one of the grand masters of the genre. Despite his name and his Italian birth Sabatini spent most of his life in England and wrote all of his many books in English. They were all perfect material for movies and many were in fact filmed, the best known being Scaramouche and Captain Blood.



This is one of the most faithful film adaptations you’ll ever see. Sabatini’s story is so good that there was really no reason to change anything.

Sir Oliver Tressilian (Milton Sills) is a very successful Cornish privateer. Not a pirate, but in Elizabethan times the dividing line between licensed privateers and pirates was notoriously thin. He is a brave noble sort of chap but with a reputation for being hot-headed and rather inclined to dueling if he feels his honour has been impugned. He is in love with Lady Rosamund Godolphin (Enid Bennett) but the match is bitterly opposed by her guardian Sir John Killigrew and by her violent and impulsive brother Peter. There is a further complication - Sir Oliver’s brother Lionel and Peter Godolphin are rivals for the affections of a lady of rather flexible morals. A duel between Sir Oliver and Sir John leaves the latter with a minor wound but doesn’t help matters, and then a drunken and enraged Peter Godolphin is killed by Lionel Tressilian.



It was a fair fight but there were no witnesses so the law is likely to regard it as a case of murder. Sir Oliver protects Lionel but then, inevitably given the poisonous relations between the two men, Sir Oliver finds himself under suspicion. He has the means to clear himself but Lionel, a man of little courage, fears that if his brother is cleared he will be accused of the murder. So he pays a rascally and notoriously treacherous sea captain, Jasper Leigh (Wallace Beery) to kidnap Sir Oliver and sell him into Moorish slavery. Sir Oliver’s sudden disappearance will naturally suggest that he was guilty and has fled.

Jasper Leigh’s ship is captured by the Spanish and Sir Oliver is sentenced to the living hell of life as a galley slave. He befriends a young noble Moor and when the Spanish ship is in turn captured by Moorish pirates Sir Oliver is more than willing to convert to Islam. It proves to be a wise move. Within a year he has become the famous Sakr-el-Bahr, the Sea Hawk, the most feared and successful of all Moorish corsairs.



Of course his story does not end there. He still loves Rosamund and still yearns to return to England. And he will encounter Captain Jasper Leigh again, and the treacherous sea dog will become an unlikely ally. He will need allies, having made dangerous enemies at the court of the Basha of Algiers. There will be further adventures, further sea fights and some unexpected plot twists.

Milton Sills makes a fine swashbuckler but it’s Wallace Beery who steals the picture as the loveable rogue Captain Jasper Leigh. The acting on the whole is fairly naturalistic by silent movie standards. There’s so much action that there’s really no need for the actors to go overboard, apart from Wallace Beery but he’s so much fun nobody is likely to complain.



The action scenes are spectacular and the Spanish and Moorish galleys are real galleys. It’s one of the most authentic Hollywood seafaring adventure movies you’re ever likely to see. The costumes and the sets are lavish. This was clearly a big-budget movie and it’s a visual treat.

The Sea Hawk has duels, murder, sea battles, treachery, romance, beautiful maidens sold in slave auctions, palace plots, double-crosses, noble heroes and just about every ingredient you could possibly wish for in an adventure movie. It’s all tremendous fun and non-stop excitement. It’s quite a long movie, just over two hours, but it packs so much plot and so much action in those two hours that there is no chance whatever of an audience becoming bored.



The Warner Archive DVD-R is a very good print with only very minimal print damage and it preserves the original tinting, one of the features of silent movies that I really love. Highly recommended.

No Orchids For Miss Blandish (1948)

No Orchids For Miss Blandish is a real oddity, a British attempt to make an American gagster film. It’s both a failure and a success. The American setting is totally unconvincing but it still manages to be a highly entertaining and surprisingly brutal crime thriller with a definite film noir tinge.

It’s based on the 1939 novel of the same name by the British thriller writer James Hadley Chase. He decided to write an American gangster novel although his knowledge of American gangsters (and America in general) was derived entirely from his reading of American pulp crime fiction. It was an enormous success and launched his long and lucrative literary career.



The 1948 film adaptation suffers from the same fault - this is an America of the imagination, an America that is a reflection of Hollywood crime movies. Everything about the American setting is subtly wrong. Or sometimes not so subtly wrong! Sid James’ American accent has to be heard to be believed. The actors are English and the accents are embarrassingly phony. But this movie simply doesn’t care. It races along with so much energy and enthusiasm that you end up not caring about such details either. In fact it’s part of the movie’s strange fascination.

It all starts with three punks trying to pull off a daring jewel theft. Miss Blandish (Linden Travers) is a fabulously wealthy heiress who owns jewels worth $100,000 and these punks have found out she’s going to be travelling to the country with her boyfriend with the jewel on her. Ambushing them up in their car and stealing the jewels should be dead easy. In fact the robbery ends with three people dead. The surviving thief gets the jewels, and he gets Miss Blandish. So far so good, but then he runs foul of the notorious Grisson gang.



Now mobster and gambling joint operator Slim Grisson (Jack La Rue) has the girl and the rocks. The gang figures this is a lucky break - her father will pay a huge random to get her back. what they don’t know is that Slim Grisson has been madly in love with Miss Blandish for a long time. His unrequited love takes an unexpected turn when she falls in love with him as well. He’s a violent ruthless gangster and that’s just the sort of man she has been waiting for all her life.

Their newfound love isn’t going to please the rest of his gang and it isn’t going to please Ma Grisson, the real leader of the gang (James Hadley Chase was fascinated by the story of Ma Barker and her boys). And they have not just the police to deal with but also a tough two-fisted newspaper reporter, Dave Fenner (Hugh McDermott). We know he’s an American newspaper reporter because he always carries a gun and shoots first and asks questions later and he slugs people a lot. That’s what American newspaper reporters do.



As the plot progresses, so does the body count. I lost count of the number of corpses. By the standards of 1940s British movies No Orchids For Miss Blandish is astonishingly (and quite graphically) violent. I have no idea how this movie got past the strict British censors. The idea seems to have been to make a movie that would be more hardboiled, more violent and more sexy than contemporary Hollywood crime films. The level of violence outraged British critics at the time.

There’s some terrific hardboiled dialogue. It might not always be authentically American but it’s still vastly entertaining.



The acting is excellent if you discount the accents. Jack La Rue is the only American in the cast. He’s a poor man’s Humphrey Bogart but he’s still pretty good. Walter Crisham is wonderful as his sadistic henchman Eddie. MacDonald Parke is memorably creepy as Doc, a struck-off doctor turned smooth hoodlum. Lilli Molnar joins in the scenery-chewing as Ma Grisson and Hugh McDermott is great fun as the gun-toting reporter. The casting of Sid James as a hardbitten New York bartender lends the movie a rather surreal touch.

There are surprising hints of sleaze, very unusual in a British movie of this period. The night-club scenes are quite well-mounted although the songs are fairly forgettable. The budget must have been reasonably substantial and technically the movie is impressive enough. St John Legh Clowes wrote and directed the film and he was clearly a believer in keeping the action moving along as rapidly as possible. It’s an approach that works for me.



The Region 2 DVD from Simply Media is barebones but otherwise more than satisfactory. It’s also been released in Region 1 by VCI.

This movie is like no other British crime movie of its era, a strange but very entertaining concoction and definitely worth a look.