Act of Murder (1964)

Act of Murder is a late (1964) entry in the British Merton Park Studios Edgar Wallace B-movie cycle.

The film plunges us straight into a romantic triangle. Actress Anne Longman (Justine Lord) quit the theatre to marry Ralph Longman (Anthony Bate). This did not please Tim Ford (John Carson). But given that Ralph is charming, civilised and rich and Tim is a whiny loser actor she probably made the sensible choice.

Anne and Ralph live in a farmhouse in the country. They are planning a holiday. They are going to swap houses with a very nice middle-aged couple in London. They’re looking forward to a couple of weeks in a luxury London flat.

The plot twists start early in this movie and they keep coming, and they’re clever and unexpected. Which means I’m not going to tell you anything at all about the plot, other than the fact that there are lots of things that are not what they seem.

Lewis Davidson’s screenplay really is impressive.

At first the plot twists are just odd and puzzling. Then they become creepy and disturbing.

We know that someone has some kind of devious plan but we have no idea which of the main characters that someone might be.

There’s a mystery here but we’re also in psychological thriller territory.

We can think of an obvious solution to part of the mystery but that leaves some nagging questions unanswered.

The paranoia level slowly builds.

Like most of the directors involved in this cycle of films Alan Bridges worked mostly in television but he did a few feature films including the rather good slightly offbeat 1966 science fiction movie Invasion. He does a pretty nice job here. Act of Murder has just a bit more style and polish than you expect in a low-budget movie, with interesting camera angles and a few welcome visual flourishes.

Anthony Bate and John Carson were always reliable actors and they’re both very good here, as is Justine Lord. All three leads manage to be ambiguous, which is exactly as it should be. None of them play their roles as obvious villains, but they don’t play them as paragons of virtue either. All the characters, including the minor characters, are to some degree morally compromised.

I don’t think any of these Edgar Wallace B-movies could possibly be described as film noir but this one does perhaps have just the faintest noir tinge.

There’s also an almost-nude scene which was about as daring as you could be in Britain in 1964. There’s definitely plenty of sexual tension.

Act of Murder is a very well-crafted above-average crime melodrama B-movie with a pleasingly hard-edged nasty streak to it. Highly recommended.

Act of Murder is included in Network’s Edgar Wallace Mysteries volume 6 DVD boxed set. These wonderful boxed sets are unfortunately becoming a bit hard to find now but if you come across them grab them. The 16:9 enhanced transfer (these movies were all shot in black-and-white and widescreen) is very nice.

West of Zanzibar (1928)

West of Zanzibar is a 1928 silent tropical melodrama with a major helping of horror. It was directed by Tod Browning and stars Lon Chaney.

It was remade four years later as a talkie (Kongo), directed by William J. Cowen and starring Walter Huston. Which is the better version? That’s a controversial question. Both versions are certainly outrageous. Sadly no complete uncut print of West of Zanzibar appears to have survived but at least reasonably complete prints have survived. Many of Browning’s most famous silent movies have not survived at all, or only exist as fragments.

West of Zanzibar begins with a prologue. Stage magician Phroso (Lon Chaney) has his wife stolen from him by Crane (Lionel Barrymore). The wife then has a daughter by Crane. Phroso vows revenge on the man who stole his wife, and on Crane’s illegitimate daughter.

Phroso loses the use of his legs in circumstances that are left a little unclear.

Eighteen years later Phroso, now known by the nickname Dead-Legs, is living in the heart of the African jungle, on the shores of the Congo River. He has collected a kind of human menagerie. He’s the physical cripple but his cronies are psychologically crippled. This includes Doc (Warner Baxter). Phroso needs him to keep the pain from his injuries at bay.

Phroso’ menagerie also includes Anna (Jacqueline Gadsdon), a prostitute. Phroso delights in humiliating her. Doc usually leaps to her defence, only to be intimidated into backing down. That humiliates him, which adds to Phroso’s pleasure.

Phroso makes his living by stealing ivory from rival traders. Or rather he steals ivory from one particular trader, whose name happens to be Crane. The local tribe serves Phroso loyally. He uses his skills as a stage illusionist to convince them that he is an immensely powerful witch-doctor. Phroso is a kind of king.

That illegitimate daughter of Phroso, Maizie (Mary Nolan), has been working in a brothel in Zanzibar. She doesn’t know it but that was Phroso’s doing. Now Phroso has lured Maizie to his jungle kingdom.

Phroso is ready to exact his vengeance, and a very cruel and twisted vengeance it is. He has a plan to deal with both Crane and Maizie.

Doc and Maizie start to fall in love but that doesn’t worry Phroso - he despises Doc but he is confident he can continue to wreck Doc’s life.

There are some nasty twists to come. Nasty for everyone concerned.

Lon Chaney is very good, but Walter Huston in the 1932 remake Kongo is a lot better. The acting in West of Zanzibar is a very mixed bag. Mary Nolan’s performance is of the sort that quite unfairly gives silent movies a bad name. In the equivalent role in Kongo Virginia Bruce is much more effective. Lionel Barrymore is less hammy than usual. Warner Baxter is quite good.  

Even though it’s much tamer than the remake this movie is guaranteed to upset sensitive souls.

The surviving print runs for 65 minutes but the original running time was 75 minutes. One can’t help suspecting that this is a censored print. There’s a vague hint that Phroso keeps his human menagerie under control by feeding them drugs but it’s not made explicit. We’re not told that Anna is a prostitute but it seems highly likely. All of the depravity - alcoholism, drug addiction, prostitution, white slavery and sadomasochism - is made quite explicit in the 1932 version, Kongo. Perhaps it was explicit in West of Zanzibar as well but those scenes were cut.

West of Zanzibar is quite a good movie and it’s worth seeing but Kongo is superb and an absolute must-see pre-code movie. West of Zanzibar is recommended.

China (1943)

China is a 1943 Paramount wartime adventure thriller.

David Llewellyn Jones (Alan Ladd) and Johnny Sparrow (William Bendix) are American businessmen and adventurers in China. This sounds like a setup for a fun movie but as we’ll see there’s not much fun to be had here.

It is 1941 and the Sino-Japanese War is raging. Jones and Johnny Sparrow trade with anyone, including the Japanese. Given that at this stage Japan and the United States are at peace there is of course absolutely no reason why they should not do so but we are constantly told how wicked Jones is to do this.

These two traders encounter Carolyn Grant (Loretta Young), a very moral American do-gooder. She wants them to use their truck to transport a dozen Chinese girls to Chungdu, well away from the advancing Japanese Army.

Jones sees no reason why he should do this. Eventually he changes his mind when he realises that the Japanese are wicked enemies.

Jones turns from a cynical hardbitten adventurer into an idealistic morally righteous crusader for freedom and democracy. We get some speeches to explain all this. Jones ends up deciding to take on an entire Japanese division with the aid of half a dozen Chinese guerrillas.

These girls are trainee schoolteachers who are going to build a new China and we get some speeches about that as well. We get quite a bit of speechifying.

Jones of course wants to find redemption, having previously devoted his life to wicked pursuits such as making a living and chasing girls. He must become a Hero.

This is a movie in which the leading man and leading lady have absolutely zero chemistry. It’s not as if they initially dislike each other. There’s just nothing. When, very late in the picture, we finally get a love scene between them it doesn’t ring true at all. And they still have zero chemistry.

Thee’s also a weird scene in which, totally out of left field, Johnny Sparrow declares his love for Miss Grant. He obviously doesn’t realise he’s the sidekick and the sidekick never gets the girl. Miss Grant however has pigeonholed him immediately as a sidekick and therefore unworthy of her love. And that scene is then quietly forgotten.

This is a very well-made movie. Australian director John Farrow had a great love for long takes and extended tracking shots and there are some fine examples of the latter in this film. Farrow had major faults as a director but he had his virtues as well and he was technically very accomplished. The action scenes are handled well, although they also have a real edge of nastiness. The audience is expected to take great glee in seeing Japanese soldiers mown down by machine guns. They are after all America’s enemies.

I have always disliked war movies and especially war movies made during wartime and this movie reminded me why. They are invariably propaganda and the propaganda in this movie is very crude indeed. The Japanese in this movie are fiendish cartoon villains. The Chinese are all brave and noble and honourable.

China also suffers from an excess of syrupy sentimentality.

Alan Ladd is one of my favourite actors but this is not one of his better performances. To be fair Frank Butler’s clumsy screenplay doesn’t give him much to work with. William Bendix is OK. Loretta Young is all self-satisfied moral righteousness. I love her early pre-code performances but here she’s rather dull and irritating.

China is pure propaganda from start to finish. The story and the characters don’t matter, what matters is bludgeoning the viewer with the message. I seriously advise you to avoid this movie.

Kino Lorber’s Blu-Ray release looks great.

They Died with Their Boots On (1941)

I’m not a fan of historical movies or of biopics and They Died with Their Boots On, a 1941 Warner Brothers release, is both. It’s a movie I was therefore always going to approach with a certain scepticism. I have never understood why anyone would want to make historical movies or biopics that are mostly pure fantasy and I have never understood why anyone would want to watch such movies.

This movie is also a western of sorts and it is very much an epic. That made Raoul Walsh the ideal director. Walsh had directed The Thief of Bagdad for Douglas Fairbanks in 1924 and while Fairbanks was very much the auteur and Walsh’s job was simply to put Fairbanks’ vision on screen it still provided Walsh with invaluable training in handling epic material and huge productions. And Walsh had already directed a western epic, The Big Trail, in 1930. There was no way that Raoul Walsh was going to be intimidated by a project such as They Died with Their Boots On.

And since this is a movie about George Armstrong Custer, one of the most colourful and controversial men in American history, Errol Flynn was a very obvious casting choice indeed. Whatever you think of Custer he was a larger-than-life character and Flynn was most definitely was a larger-than-life figure himself.

It’s a very long movie and it takes us two hours and twenty minutes to get to the Battle of the Little Bighorn. It begins with Custer’s extraordinary career at West Point which is not exaggerated very much. Custer really did have one of the worst disciplinary records in the history of that august institution.

While at West Point he meets Elizabeth Bacon (Olivia de Havilland). They both know they’re destined to get married, which they eventually do.

Custer’s spectacular career in the Civil War (he was a general at the age of 23) gets plenty of attention. Some of this stuff is historical and some is pure fantasy.

Custer fails to adjust to civilian life and starts to fall apart until his wife pulls some strings and gets him put back on the active list. He is to take command of a ragtag bunch of hopeless new recruits. He will build them into the legendary 7th Cavalry. There are battles with the Sioux until Custer and Crazy Horse (Anthony Quinn) decide they both want peace. Custer trusts Crazy Horse and Crazy Horse trusts Custer. They are both right to do so. Custer persuades Crazy Horse that he can trust the US Government as well and should sign a treaty. Trusting the US Government turns out to be a very big mistake.

The US Government is not the only problem. There are also crooked businessmen who want the last remaining lands of the Plains Indians. Every single businessman and politician in this movie is a liar, a cheat and a crook.

This is a movie that is very sympathetic to the Sioux and the other tribes and to Crazy Horse. Custer is the hero and always behave honourably but in the events leading up to the Battle of the Little Bighorn the movie makes it quite explicit that the US Government were the bad guys.

Custer and Crazy Horse are both brave, honourable decent men but they are helpless in the face of the manipulations of those crooked businessmen and politicians. And so they end up facing each other at the Little Bighorn.

Flynn is magnificent. He plays Custer like a dashing figure from an adventure novel and that is more or less how Custer lived his life. No-one did adventure heroes better than Flynn but here he gets the chance to show that he was quite capable of displaying subtlety and emotional depth as well.

Flynn and Olivia de Havilland always made a great romantic pairing and this film is no exception.

Mention must be made of Sydney Greenstreet’s wonderful turn as the army commander-in-chief Winfield Scott. He’s a joy to watch.

As you’d expect Walsh handles the action scenes with plenty of skill. There is a very real sense of tragedy to this movie. Custer is drawn inexorably to his fate by his thirst for both glory and honour. The movie is of course utter nonsense as history but that’s Hollywood. It’s still wildly entertaining. That sense of tragedy makes this more than just a movie about heroism. Highly recommended.

The DVD release includes a brief TCM featurette on the movie made about twenty years ago so it’s mercifully free of ideological lecturing.

Pursued (1947)

Pursued is a 1947 western that sometimes gets described as a noir western. We shall see.

It was directed by Raoul Walsh and photographed by James Wong Howe so you expect it to be visually impressive, and it is. The movie was shot in black-and-white in the 1.37:1 aspect ratio.

It was written by Niven Busch, a fine screenwriter who also wrote some great western novels including Duel in the Sun and The Furies, both of which were made into excellent movies.

It opens with a man obviously on the run from someone. The man is Jeb Rand (Robert Mitchum). A girl has come to him with some food and other necessities. She tells him he has to get as far away from here as possible but that he can’t go with him. We then get the backstory an extended flashback.

It begins in Jeb’s childhood. Something very bad happened. He was taken in by Mrs Callum (Judith Anderson) and raised with her son Adam and her daughter Thor (Teresa Wright) on a ranch just outside the town of Lone Horse.

Shortly afterwards, for no reason whatsoever, someone tries to shoot the young Jeb.

Jeb grows up. Mrs Callum’s ranch thrives. Then war with Spain comes. Jeb is sent off to fight and comes back a hero.

Jeb and Thor want to marry. Thor wants a long courtship. Jeb wants to get married straight away. He then wants them to move away. He doesn’t know why but he is sure something bad is going to happen. He is still troubled by bad dreams.

Jeb isn’t paranoid. There’s someone from his past who has spent years plotting against him, and he’s right here in Lone Horse.

There is tension between Jeb and Adam, which leads to a major confrontation.

There are shootings but Jeb can’t figure out why these things are happening. He ends up going into partnership with Honest Jack Dingle (Alan Hale) in a gambling saloon.

Things get weird between Jeb and Thor. There’s another shooting. And eventually Jeb ends up back at his childhood home for a kind of climactic showdown.

Some movies makes the mistake of revealing too much too soon. This movie perhaps conceals things for too long so that the behaviour of most of the characters is so incomprehensible that it’s hard to get engaged with the story.

There are obvious affinities with film noir, especially the use of the extended flashback. What strikes me much more forcibly are the film’s affinities with Spellbound. Hitchcock had made Spellbound just two years earlier and it was a major hit. Like Hitchcock’s film Pursued deals with a man haunted by traumatic childhood events which he cannot clearly remember or understand. And like Spellbound Pursued includes dream sequences.

Pursued also resembles Spellbound in being a muddled mess. Jeb has no idea what is going on in his head and nor do we. His behaviour is bizarre. Thor’s behaviour is bizarre. There’s a sinister character with a grudge against Jeb but the reasons for the grudge are obscure. When we find out the reason we can’t help thinking he’s been holding a grudge against the wrong person.

One interesting aspect to this movie is that there are several gunfights but not one of them is a fair fight. These are not the formalised duels you get in so many westerns. These are ambushes. You don’t give the other fellow a chance to draw his gun. You just plug him, preferably in the back.

Mitchum is OK. Teresa Wright is truly awful.

There really is nothing remotely film noir about Pursued. It’s more of an attempt at a psychological thriller western. Or a psycho-sexual thriller with the sexual bits left out. It has the hallmarks of a screenplay that had been butchered by the Production Code Authority or the studio. It just gives the impression that the characters’ actions are not sufficiently motivated. I suspect that there may been some more obviously Freudian themes that got watered down to the point of virtual non-existence.

For me Pursued is an interesting movie but a bit disappointing. It just doesn’t quite work. It’s still worth a look.

The Olive Films Blu-Ray looks great.

Week-End Marriage (1932)

Week-End Marriage (also released as Working Wives) is a 1932 First National picture that combines comedy with romantic melodrama.

Ken (Norman Foster) and Lola (Loretta Young) are young and in love and they’d like to get married but Ken doesn’t earn much at his job, not enough to support a wife.

Now Ken has been offered a business opportunity but it would mean two years in South America. He tells Lola that he’ll work hard and make plenty of money so that when he returns they can marry. Lola is devastated. She doesn’t want to wait for two years.

Lola’s sister-in-law Agnes (Aline MacMahon) is convinced that Lola just hasn’t tried hard enough to persuade Ken to marry her. And that Lola hasn’t been clever enough. You don’t just wait for a man to propose. You make him propose, in such a way that he thinks it’s his idea.

This leads to a very funny scene in which Lola puts Agnes’s teachings into practice.

There’s also the question of whether Lola should give up her job. Ken wants her to. Lola doesn’t think they can survive on Ken’s salary, and eventually persuades him to let her keep her job.

Lola’s career prospers while Ken’s goes down the gurgler. Ken cannot cope with the idea of being supported by his wife. The marriage becomes rather rocky.

Lola is offered a great job in St Louis. She’d be a fool to turn it down and she takes it. Ken stays in New York and he’s well and truly on the downhill slide.

Lola meets Peter Acton (George Brent) in St Louis. Peter is charming and successful and he’s crazy about her. He is definitely interested in marrying her.

Peter is not a scoundrel. He’s a really nice guy. He couldn’t help falling in love with Lola but he doesn’t try to push her. He just hopes that eventually she’ll realise that Ken is a loser and divorce him and marry Peter.

Then something happens in New York which puts Lola in the position of having to choose between the two men.

Loretta Young looks gorgeous (and wears some stunning gowns) and she’s adorable and funny. She gave so many great performances in the pre-code era and she’s excellent here with her star quality very evident.

For some reason lot of people don’t seem to like George Brent. I have no idea why. Perhaps he didn’t have a huge acting range but in the right roles I’ve always thought he was fine, and he certainly had charisma and charm to burn.

Aline MacMahon goes close to stealing the picture. She’s very funny and it’s a nicely nuanced performance - Agnes is feisty and smart and worldly and knows how to get what she wants but her intentions are good and she’s actually a kind generous woman.

Norman Foster as Ken is the weak link but it’s only fair to say that it’s a very unrewarding part. Perhaps another actor could have given a livelier performance but Ken is supposed to be a very passive guy who just never learns to take charge of his life.

The only real sign that this is a pre-code movie is that while Lola is in St Louis Ken finds another woman and they are very obviously cohabiting, and no unfavourable judgments are made on this situation. There’s also a scene that suggests that Lola and Ken actually have a sexual relationship - once the Production Code came in in 1934 any hint that married couples have sex was forbidden.

If you have a look at some of the online reviews you’ll find that this is a movie that has many modern viewers foaming at the mouth with rage. It’s actually a movie that tries to deal seriously with an important issue - the difficulties a woman faces in trying to combine a successful career with a successful marriage. The fact that the movie doesn’t offer the ideologically correct 2020s answer to this question seems to outrage a lot of people. I find it amusing that people will actually get angry at a 90-year-old movie.

Week-End Marriage has some genuinely amusing moments and takes the problems faced by its characters quite seriously. Recommended.

The Deadly Affair (1967)

The Deadly Affair is a 1967 British spy thriller directed by Sidney Lumet, although given that it’s based on a John le Carré novel (his first novel, Call for the Dead) thriller might be the wrong word. Let’s just call it a spy film.

Paramount’s 1965 adaptation of le Carré novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold had been much praised, and rightly so. Both movies tried to capture the distinctive le Carré atmosphere of failure and sordidness. John le Carré removed every trace of glamour from the spy fiction genre.

Call for the Dead was the novel that introduced le Carré’s most famous character, British spymaster George Smiley. Columbia had bought the rights to Call for the Dead but they did not have the rights to the George Smiley name so in this movie the character is renamed Charles Dobbs.

Dobbs/Smiley (who presumably works for MI5) has been given a very routine assignment. A senior Foreign Office functionary, Samuel Fennan, has been anonymously accused of having being a communist at Oxford in the 30s. Fennan points out that everybody at Oxford was a communist at that time and that half the current British Cabinet are ex-communists. Dobbs and Fennan have a laugh about this, it’s all very friendly, Dobbs assures Fennan that his security clearance is in no danger and that he has no need to worry. Fennan seems very cheerful. He then goes home and shoots himself.

Dobbs is mystified. He had given Fennan a clean bill of health. Why on earth would the fellow shoot himself? Now Dobbs has to speak with Fennan’s widow Elsa.

It’s the phone call that worries him. The early morning reminder call. The timing is odd, and why did Elsa Fennen lie about it?

Helping him out on the case is Inspector Mendel (Harry Andrews), the MI5 liaison officer with the local police.

And there’s something else worrying Dobbs. He’s being tailed. When someone tries to kill him he gets really interested.

The novel is a very good story but it’s not exactly cinematic and it’s rather talky. Attempts have been made to address that issue in the movie and to add a bit more excitement, with at least some success although it’s still very talky.

No-one will ever equal Alec Guinness’s performances as Smiley in the two BBC TV mini-series from 1979 and 1982 but I have to say that James Mason runs him a close second. Mason gets across Smiley’s ineptness in his personal life and his fussiness. Mason’s version has perhaps just a bit more edge. What makes the George Smiley of the novels so interesting is that he is a brilliant intelligence agent but outside of his professional life as a spy he is a total zero, a ludicrous failure, a man with no self-respect whatsoever. He’s not even a tragic failure. He wallows in his own humiliation and degradation. Presumably that’s how le Carré saw spies. Having been a spy himself he was presumably aware of their crippling psychological incompleteness.

Harry Andrews is excellent, as always. Roy Kinnear is very good as a sleazy pretty crook.

The women are more of a problem. Both the novel (not so much this novel but the George Smiley novels as a whole) and the movie put a lot of emphasis on Dobbs/Smiley’s sad pathetic personal life. Since their marriage his wife Ann has had more affairs than he’s had hot dinners. She sleeps with his friends and colleagues and in fact with any man who asks her. She is a thoroughly unpleasant woman, not because she’s promiscuous but because she enjoys humiliating her husband. He seems to enjoy being humiliated. You could call it a relationship based on emotional sadomasochism.

Dobbs/Smiley’s personal life is important since it emphasises the unhealthiness of the world of espionage. No-one who is psychologically or emotional healthy would become a spy. Harriet Andersson makes Ann Dobbs a very very unsympathetic character, which is the right way to play her. Unfortunately her performance is stilted and artificial and totally unconvincing.

Simone Signoret is all self-pity as Elsa Fennan. The one actress who really shines is Lynn Redgrave as Virgin Bumpus (yes, that’s her name). Virgin works in a theatre and may be able to give Dobbs some information. Lynn Redgrave is charming, ditzy and crazy but she does add a lighter touch which doesn’t hurt in an otherwise very serious and grim movie.

The major plot twist is something you should be able to see coming a mile away, which is a definite weakness in the storytelling.

It’s interesting that while le Carré depicted espionage as unglamorous and often nasty and was aware of the moral dubiousness of the spy world he was also a dedicated Cold Warrior. For le Carré the communists were most definitely the bad guys. And as pathetic and contemptible as Smiley might have been he was one of the good guys. You don’t get quite the same level of moral equivalence that you get in the Callan TV series which was also made in 1967.

This is a movie that was clearly intended to look drab and depressing and claustrophobic. It would have worked much much better in black-and-white but sadly by 1967 that was no longer a commercially viable option. Lumet wanted to shoot in black-and-white, was overruled by Columbia and asked cinematographer Freddie Young to come up with a way of shooting in colour but with much of the colour drained out. Which Young did, very successfully.

The Deadly Affair got very good reviews and did very poorly at the box office. It’s easy to see why. The film has very real virtues. The drab depressing visual style is totally appropriate for le Carré’s world. The downbeat mood and the atmosphere of despair and defeat are also appropriate. There’s also the emphasis on moral complexities rather than action. These are all things that critics would love and audiences would hate. And it has none of the elements audiences would crave. There’s not a single full-blooded action set-piece.

Most of all there’s no memorable leading lady. Harriet Andersson was a darling of the art-house crowd but totally unknown outside Sweden. She’s not glamorous, she’s not sexy (she’s the most unsexy nymphomaniac in history), she’s not charismatic. She was uncomfortable acting in English. Her performance is confused and unconvincing. Call me crazy if you like but I can’t help thinking that the right actress to play Ann would have been Joan Collins. If you watch Joan Collins in Warning Shot, made a year earlier, I think you’ll see what I mean. And The Deadly Affair desperately needed some glamour and some erotic heat to balance the downbeat stuff if it was going to draw in audiences.

I think The Deadly Affair is pretty good and I recommend it but it was always going to be box-office poison.

The Powerhouse Indicator Blu-Ray looks pretty good.

I reviewed John le Carré’s novel Call for the Dead not too long ago (and I was very impressed by it).

Ramrod (1947)

Ramrod is a 1947 western directed by André De Toth and starring Joel McCrea and Veronica Lake. It’s a range war movie.

Frank Ivey (Preston Foster) runs the valley. He runs it by intimidation and violence. He aims to control the whole valley. He also aims to marry Connie Dickason (Veronica Lake). Connie had hoped to marry another man, until Frank Ivey scared him off. Connie doesn’t intimidate easily. Not only does she have no intention of marrying Ivey, she intends to challenge his control of the valley. When her intended husband ran away he left her something - his ranch, the Circle 66.

The issue at stake is public grazing land. Connie has a legal right to graze her cattle on that land. Frank Ivey has no intention of letting Connie or anyone else have that land. He intends to have the whole valley.

Connie has an ally, of possibly dubious reliability. Dave Nash (Joel McCrea) is a good cattleman but he’s a drunk, or at least he was a drunk. Now he claims to have sobered up. Connie persuades him to work for her, as her ranch boss or ramrod.

There’s also Dave’s buddy Bill Schell (Don DeFore). He’s a good ranch hand and pretty tough although perhaps a bit of a loose cannon.

Connie will need tough ranch hands. Frank Ivey intends to destroy her and he starts by burning out her ranch house. The level of violence will increase. There will be shootings. Whether they’re murder or shooting in self-defence is debatable.

It’s a classic but conventional setup for a western but the real interest in this movie is the complex characterisations and the intricate web of romantic and sexual intrigues.

Dave has a girlfriend, Rose (Arleen Whelan). Their relationship is not yet really serious. She likes Dave but she likes Bill as well. Dave is sweet on Rose but he finds Connie sexy and fascinating. Connie is attracted to both Dave and Bill. Bill is attracted to both Connie and Rose.

Most of the characters turn out not to be straightforward. Rose seems to be the classic good girl and mostly she is, but she is stringing two men along. Bill is a nice guy but unpredictable and impetuous and he’s prepared to kill if he thinks it’s necessary. Dave is a decent man but he’s a flawed hero. He’s a bit of a loser. He’s a drifter and he has a reputation as a drunk.

The most intriguing character is Connie. She appears to be the femme fatale but while she is dangerous and she can be manipulative and ruthless she isn’t really evil. She’s strong-willed and determined but she is a woman and she has a woman’s motivations and she uses a woman’s weapons.

The key to understanding Connie is the prologue in which she sees her man, Walt Shipley, metaphorically castrated before her eyes. At which point her love for him dies instantly. Connie now realises that she cannot rely on a half-man like Walt. She needs to find a man upon whom she can rely, which means a man who possesses genuine masculinity. Masculinity is a major theme in this movie.

Modern critics and film academics are, by and large, incapable of understanding the movies of the past because they insist on viewing those movies through a 21st century ideological lens. As a result they can easily fall for the temptation to see Ramrod in feminist terms. We get a good example of this in the audio commentary here - an attempt to view this movie as Connie vs the patriarchy.

This is utter nonsense. This is a movie packed with powerless emasculated men. Walt Shipley very obviously. Connie’s father very obviously. The well-meaning but ineffectual sheriff. Dave, very obviously. Dave is a man who has been emasculated by grief, booze and an unwillingness to stand up for himself. This even applies to Bill, whose willingness to resort to violence is a sign of his essential powerlessness. The only man to whom this does not apply is Frank Ivey and his power is based on money and a willingness to act ruthlessly without regard to morality.

Connie has no interest in overthrowing the patriarchy. She has figured out that if you don’t have power and money you are a victim. It makes no difference whether you’re male or female. Connie has no desire to be a victim, which means she needs power and money. To achieve that she needs a strong masculine man by her side. She has a woman’s strength but she is no kickass action heroine. She needs a man whose masculine strength will complement her feminine strength. She just has to decide whether Dave or Bill would be the better choice.

There are power dynamics in this movie but they have nothing to do with 21st century gender politics. To the extent that there’s an ideological subtext it’s about 1950s ideological concerns, not those of today.

The standout performance here comes from Veronica Lake. Connie seems to be changeable but she isn’t. She simply plays different roles as the need arises - she can be the tough cookie, or the helpless damsel in distress or the seductive sex kitten. These varying masks that she assumes are entirely consistent with her character. She intends to survive. Lake always makes Connie believable. Connie is a complex character and Lake gives a complex performance.

Joel McCrea is extremely good. Dave has plenty of depth as well - he is a flawed hero trying to regain his masculinity and his self-respect.

Ramrod is a complex grown-up western filled with characters who are morally grey rather than good or evil which means you can’t make assumptions about how the story will end. A great western. Highly recommend.

The Arrow Academy Blu-Ray looks great.

Road To Paradise (1930)

Road To Paradise is a 1930 First National pre-code movie.

Loretta Young plays dual roles. She plays Mary Brennan, an orphan girl who has been raised by two good-natured crooks, Nick and Jerry (known as Jerry the Gent). Mary is a nice girl but she’s not entirely honest herself. It doesn’t take much effort to persuade her to join the crooks in a daring criminal enterprise.

Mary also has an unusual paranormal ability which will later become very important.

Young also plays wealthy socialite Margaret Waring. She’s very wealthy indeed.

Mary and her two crooked pals notice Margaret in a speakeasy. They are amazed by the resemblance. The two women look identical.

This gives the two crooks an idea. Having Mary impersonate Margaret could make it much easier to burgle Margaret’s house. One of the things they noticed about Margaret in the speakeasy was that she was wearing some very expensive jewels.

The burglary takes on a slightly farcical quality with a cheerful Irish cop spotting the two crooks on the roof and pursuing them with a notable lack of success. Various cops spend most of the movie in pursuit of these burglars

The burglary also leads to unintended consequences.

Everything hinges on the question of identity. There’s just no way to tell the two women apart.

One of the things that happened after the Production Code took effect in 1934 is that genre boundaries became more rigid. In the pre-code it was not uncommon to come across melodramas with some of the lighthearted character of comedies, and movies that were more or less comedies but with strong melodrama overtones. The tone of pre-code movies was often fluid.

In the pre-code era there weren’t too many rules. If for example you wanted to take a movie such as this one and add an element of the paranormal then you simply went ahead and did so. Road To Paradise is a typical pre-code oddity which simply ignores genre boundaries.

Loretta Young was aways a delight in her pre-code movies. This movie is no exception. She’s utterly adorable as the criminally inclined Mary. She handles the dual role quite successfully. The focus is more on Mary than on Margaret. Mary is very likeable - she’s a crook but she’d prefer not to be.

The best line in the movie is when one of the crooks who raised her comments, "I could never understand this desire for respectability. It always seemed kind of morbid to me.”

The other players are all perfectly adequate but this film completely belongs to Loretta Young.

This movie was directed by William Beaudine, later to become known as One-Shot Beaudine for his practice of never shooting retakes. In his later career, spent mostly making B-movies, that was understandable. His success was based on being able to bring low-budget movies in on time and on budget every single time. That doesn’t make him a bad director and in Road To Paradise he displays considerable skill.

What makes it recognisably a pre-code film is its indifference to the law. Being a criminal is OK as long as you’re basically a nice person. And if you’re a young sweet pretty female then it’s definitely OK.

Road To Paradise is cheerful and good-natured. Loretta Young is more than enough reason to give it a spin. Recommended.

This movie is included on a two-movie Warner Archive DVD paired with another Loretta Young pre-code film, Week-End Marriage.

The Truth About Youth (1930)

The Truth About Youth is a 1930 pre-code offering from First National Pictures. It’s notable for including both Loretta Young and Myrna Loy in its cast - I just love watching these two ladies in their pre-code films.

Richard Carewe (Conway Tearle) has raised the son of a deceased friend as his own son. This is where this movie can get a bit confusing, since the young man’s name is Richard Dane (he’s played by David Manners) and both these characters are referred to throughout the movie as Dick. Richard Dane also goes by the nickname Imp. In order to make things less confusing I will in the rest of this review refer to Richard Carewe as Richard and I will refer to the younger man as Imp. The fact that both men are named Richard will however become a plot point later on.

In raising the boy Richard has had help from various cronies (who are apparently the Imp’s joint guardians) and from his housekeeper, and also from the housekeeper’s lovely daughter Phyllis Ericson (Loretta Young).

It has always been assumed that the Imp will marry Phyllis. She is a sweet girl and thoroughly respectable. They seem to get along. Maybe they’re not wildly passionately in love but they have come to share that assumption that they will marry.

The worthies who have superintended the Imp’s upbringing have planned a surprise party for his twenty-first birthday. They patiently await the young man’s arrival but he does not return home until very very late. His excuse is that he had to attend a lecture. In fact Imp was pursuing a firefly. The firefly in question is Kara (Myrna Loy). She is a sexy night-club singer and dancer who is billed as The Firefly.

Imp is madly in love with Kara. He wants to marry her. Kara is madly in love with Imp’s money. What she doesn’t know is that Imp doesn’t actually have any money. Kara is going to be more than a little bit disappointed when she finds out.

Kara is by no means opposed to the idea of marriage but she simply cannot conceive of the idea of marrying a man who isn’t exceedingly rich.

Things start to get complicated, partly due to the fact that Richard Carewe and the Imp are both named Richard. There are wedding plans. There are misunderstandings. There are broken hearts. Richard Carewe decides to meddle and simply ends up making things more complicated.

The Truth About Youth is not a comedy but it’s by no means grim. It has some elements that we would associate with pre-code sex comedies and some elements more associated with melodrama. One of the things I love about the pre-code era is that genres had not yet solidified.

Conway Tearle as Richard Carewe is very dull but then the character he is playing is a very conventional man who takes life terribly seriously. He thinks a lot about duty.

David Manners is OK as the Imp. He is after all playing a young man who is a bit of an innocent and Manners gets that across. The Imp has had a sheltered upbringing and is wholly unequipped to resist Kara’s brazen sexual allure.

The acting honours definitely go to the women. Loretta Young has the more thankless role as the good girl but her performance is lively and charming. And she’s as cute as a button. Miss Young’s vivaciousness works in the movie’s favour - she’s delightful enough to seem like a serious rival to Kara for a man’s affections.

Myrna Loy got the plum bad girl role and obviously relished it. She could be very sexy indeed in her pre-code films. Kara is a very bad girl. She’s a gold digger and a brazen hussy. It’s impossible not to love her.

This a pre-code movie which means that you can’t assume you’ll get the conventional ending that the Production Code would have mandated had it been made after 1934. So the ending is not quite what you expect but I liked it.

The Truth About Youth is thoroughly enjoyable and the two lead female performances are a treat. Highly recommended.

This movie is paired with another First National pre-code offering, The Right of Way (1931), on a single disc in the Warner Archive series. The Truth About Youth gets a pretty decent transfer.