Double Door (1934)

Double Door is a 1934 Paramount release and it came out in May of that year so it is a pre-code movie. It has definite claims to being a horror movie, but not in the style of the 1930s Universal horror films. There’ll be more to say on the subject of genre later.

It was based on a hit play of the same name by Elizabeth McFadden. The play itself was based on the real-life story of the fabulously wealthy but bizarre Wendell family. The last of the Wendells died in 1931.

McFadden denied that her play was based on the Wendells but the parallels between that family and McFadden’s fictional Van Brett family are so striking that it stretches credibility beyond breaking point to believe that the Wendells were not the inspiration for the play.

The setting is Manhattan in 1910. A wedding is taking place in the Van Brett family mansion. It might be 1910 but despite the family’s vast wealth the house seems decades out of date. The past is an oppressive presence.

The family is ruled by the formidable Victoria Van Brett (Mary Morris). Under the terms of her late father’s will she controls the money. Her sister Caroline (Anne Revere) and her half-brother Rip (Kent Taylor) are entirely dominated by her. Right from the start we sense that Victoria is not quite sane and is consumed by hatreds and resentments. We will quite soon discover that she is not sane at all and that she is very definitely evil.

Rip has married Anne Darrow (Evelyn Venable), a nurse. Victoria is furious at the idea of a Van Brett marrying someone from outside the Van Brett’s social class. To her marrying a nurse is not much better than marrying a shop girl or a parlour maid. Victoria is determined to wreck this marriage and her overwhelming and controlling personality and iron grip on the purse-strings puts her in an excellent position to do so. Victoria will stop at nothing to destroy the marriage and to destroy Anne.

Rip is pleasant enough but he’s a weakling and a fool. Anne has one ally, Rip’s best friend Dr John Lucas (Colin Tapley), but there’s a complication. Dr Lucas had at one time been in love with Anne and Victoria can (and will) use that fact to plant seeds of suspicion in Rip’s mind.

Anne is soon engaged in a desperate and seemingly losing fight to save not just her marriage but her sanity as well. Victoria’s madness reaches epic proportions.

Mary Morris gives us an extraordinary portrait of malevolent insanity which is truly amazing to watch. Paramount’s promotion of the movie compared her to Karloff and Lugosi and the comparison has some substance to it. Victoria Van Brett is a full-blown monster, albeit a human monster.

Anne Revere takes stagey overacting to levels never previously thought possible.

Evelyn Venable is a likeable enough heroine. This is a movie entirely dominated by the women. Both Kent Taylor and Colin Tapley are adequate but a bit colourless

This is out-and-out melodrama. From the start there’s an atmosphere of suppressed hysteria in the Van Brett household and the hysteria soon bursts into full bloom.

There’s also a very strong gothic feel. There’s something slightly decadent and Poe-like in the descent into collective madness of the slowly decaying and degenerating Van Brett family.

It’s not really the plot that matters so much as the overheated claustrophobic atmosphere and the extraordinary menace projected by Mary Morris’s bizarre but fascinating performance.

And there are some genuine horror moments. There are no hints at all of the supernatural. The Van Brett mansion is hunted not by ghosts but by very human evil. The other characters are trapped is a web of malevolence spun by Victoria.

Double Door is an oddity but an extremely interesting one and it’s highly recommended.

The Kino Lorber Blu-Ray looks nice and includes some extras.

Faithless (1932)

Faithless is a 1932 MGM pre-code movie and it effectively marks the end of Tallulah Bankhead’s Hollywood career. There’ll be more to say about Miss Bankhead’s career later.

Faithless starts out as a breezy comedy of manners among the rich and the famous. It turns into a gritty harrowing social realist drama about survival during the Depression. I would assume that audiences were not expecting that sudden dramatic turn which may be why it failed to ignite the box office. And this is not a movie one would have expected from MGM.

Carol Morgan (Tallulah Bankhead) is a spoilt rich girl. She is accustomed to getting whatever she wants. She wants the handsome Bill Wade (Robert Montgomery). He wants her as well. The problem is money. Carol is fabulously rich. Bill has a moderately well-paid advertising job. He insists that they will have to live on his income. Carol thinks that’s the most absurd thing she’s ever heard.

They finally decide they will marry and they celebrate their decision by sleeping together. But that money is still a problem and the wedding is cancelled.

Bill had assumed that once they had had sex she would naturally agree to marriage on his terms. What kind of girl would sleep with a man and then refuse his offer of marriage? Carol for her part had assumed that once they had had sex he would naturally agree to marriage on her terms. What kind of man would sleep with a girl and then not marry her?

It’s the start of an on-again off-again relationship.

Meanwhile fate has nasty surprises in store for both of them. Carol’s fortune has been swallowed up by the Depression. She is now penniless. Now surely she’ll have to marry Bill on his terms, but she doesn’t. Bill loses his job. He’s penniless as well. Their initial problems were caused by too much money; their later problems are caused by too little money.

From this point on I will be mentioning some of the plot twists because it’s impossible to discuss this movie without doing so. If you’re super-spoilerphobic bear that in mind. I will certainly not be revealing the ending and the great thing about pre-code movies is that you can never predict the endings.

Carol lives off her friends for a while and then becomes a kept woman. Mr Blainey (Hugh Herbert) isn’t really a monster but he’s paying her for services rendered and he expects her to render those services, which she obviously does.

Carol and Bill meet again, drift apart again, meet again.

Carol ends up working as a street prostitute. But there are more plots twists to come.

This movie is about as pre-code as a pre-code movie could get and then some. Once the Production Code started to be enforced in 1934 this movie could only have one possible ending. Carol would have to die to atone for her sins. She has committed no less than three major moral sins any one of which would require her to die under the Code.

But that’s not what happens here. This movie doesn’t just cheerfully ignore conventional moral codes, it confronts them head on. It even dares to suggest that the criminalisation of prostitution is far more evil than prostitution itself.

Carol is not presented as a bad woman. She does what she has to do. This movie even goes so far as to suggest that since she has very good reasons for her actions her flaunting of the traditional moral codes actually makes her a more truly moral person than those who enforce those rules.

Tallulah Bankhead had been a huge star on Broadway. Paramount signed her to a contract but her attempts to establish herself as a film star failed for various reasons. She’s a fine actress but she is a bit stagey and she does project a rather brittle persona. Paramount did not quite know how to use her. Faithless was made at MGM and clearly they weren’t sure how to use her either. Her career ended with two melodramas, this one and Devil and the Deep. Brittle social comedies might have been more her forte. Perhaps she should have been making the kinds of movies that Kay Francis made.

I suspect that Miss Bankhead’s problem is that she never found a director who knew how to utilise her unusual talents properly, the way Josef von Sternberg knew how to utilise Marlene Dietrich’s unusual talents. Bankhead made too many movies with second-rate directors. She did make a half-hearted attempt to return to movies in the 1940s and of course won acclaim for her performance in Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat. Having said all that, on the whole I like her performance here.

It’s also interesting in that Carol really is a nasty spoilt bitch at the beginning but her personality change is convincing. She was a nasty spoilt bitch because she had zero actual life experience. When she gets some life experience she changes, which can happen. It’s called growing up.

I’m not a Robert Montgomery fan and this movie did not change my opinion.

Faithless works because it doesn’t pull its punches. It’s not afraid to show us the full range of the miseries and the desperation caused by the Depression, it’s not afraid to go full-bore melodrama and it’s not afraid to be extraordinary sexually frank even by pre-code movies. It has its flaws but it hits hard and it’s highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed a couple of other Tallulah Bankhead pre-code movies - Devil and the Deep (1932) and The Cheat (1931) - and they’re worth seeing.

The Long Wait (1954)

The Long Wait is a 1954 Mickey Spillane adaptation but it’s not a Mike Hammer film. Between 1947 and 1952 Spillane wrote half a dozen Mike Hammer books which sold in immense quantities. Spillane went on to be one of the biggest selling novelists in history.

And in 1951 he wrote the noir novel The Long Wait. I haven’t read the novel but apparently several structural changes were needed to make it work as a movie.

The movie opens with a guy getting smashed up when a car plummets down a hillside and bursts into flames. We will later find out that the guy, played by Anthony Quinn, is Johnny McBride. McBride ends up with severe burns to his hands and total amnesia.

He tries to make a new life for himself but he can’t settle down. He’s quick-tempered and brooding. Then he comes across a clue that suggests that he hails from a town named Lyncastle. He heads for Lyncastle in hopes of rediscovering his identity and his past.

This turns out to be a big mistake. Johnny didn’t know he was wanted for murder. He also didn’t know that a big-time racketeer named Servo wanted him dead.

He knows he has to find Vera. He doesn’t remember her but he does know that she was his girl in his old life.

He soon finds himself with way too many blondes in his life (of course some would say you can’t have too many dangerous blondes in your life). Any one of these blondes could be Vera. He doesn’t remember what Vera looked like.

All the blondes seem to like Johnny a lot. Blondes just seem to find him very attractive. Dames in general seem to find him very attractive. Of course Johnny is played by Anthony Quinn, an actor with plenty of charisma and animal magnetism, so we don’t find this too difficult to believe.

Johnny finds out a few things about that murder. He doesn’t know for sure whether he committed the murder or not but he’s starting to have a sneaking suspicion he may have been framed. Lyncastle isn’t quite the idyllic place it seems to be on the surface. Racketeer Servo owns almost the whole town. There’s endemic corruption.

People start shooting at Johnny, which naturally leads him to believe he’s on to something.

The plot is very contrived indeed. I don’t mind that too much. To me film noir is a bit like melodrama. It doesn’t deal with reality, but with a kind of heightened or exaggerated reality. In the world of film noir once fate decides to destroy a man there’s no escape and if some coincidences are needed to bring that about they can be accepted. The plot is contrived but it does come together at the end.

There’s enough in this movie to qualify it as a true film noir. An ambiguous protagonist caught in a web. A whole raft of femmes fatales. An atmosphere of existentialist angst. Corruption. And lots of sexual tension.

And visual style. There are some absolutely superb visual moments in this film, especially in the latter stages. There are some wonderful combinations of inventive staging and noirish lighting (by cinematographer Franz Planer). There are also nicely staged action sequences. The late scene in the abandoned power station is one of the best visual set-pieces in all of film noir. It really is magnificent.

Anthony Quinn has the necessary star quality and the right tough guy vibe. Peggie Castle is truly excellent as Venus, the most glamorous of the blondes. There’s an excellent supporting cast.

Victor Saville does a very very fine job as director. This is a supremely well-crafted movie.

For my money The Long Wait is the best film adaptation of a Mickey Spillane novel. Gripping, tightly plotted with some decent suspense, terrific atmosphere and lots of noirness. Very highly recommended.

The Classic Flix Blu-Ray release looks lovely. You get the movie on 4K as well - I have no interest in 4K so I’ll be using the 4K disc as a drinks coaster. But the Blu-Ray does look great. There’s an excellent audio commentary by Max Allan Collins.

Vice Squad (1953)

Vice Squad (AKA The Girl in Room 17) is a 1953 crime film. It’s included in one of Kino Lorber’s film noir boxed sets so you know there’s very little chance it will be a film noir. It isn’t. It’s a straightforward police procedural.

You might assume that this is a B-movie but the 88-minutes running time is a clear indication that that is not technically the case although it’s clearly a rather low-budget production. It’s a United Artists release.

Captain ‘Barnie' Barnaby (Edward G. Robinson) is chief of detectives. His day begins with a cop getting shot when a car is stolen, but circumstances suggest there might be more to it. There’s a witness but he’s smart enough not to talk to cops without having his lawyer present.

Barnie receives some information about a planned bank robbery. He stakes out the bank.

Meanwhile he works on that reluctant witness. Barnie uses the standard police methods, denying the witness his legal rights, detaining him illegally, harassing him and framing him for crimes he did not commit. It’s all in a day’s work for this cop.

Barnie also thinks he might get some information from Mona Ross (Paulette Goddard). Mona runs an escort service. It seems to be semi-legal, with the girls being no officially call girls. She still gets regular harassment from the cops. The arrangement seems to be that she’s allowed to stay in business as long as she acts as a snitch for the cops.

Barnie’s stakeout goes badly wrong, putting members of the public in danger. Two of the gang members make their getaway with a girl as hostage.

My problem with this movie is that we’re supposed to accept Barnie as a noble cop hero but he tramples all over citizens’ legal rights, intimidates a witness into giving phoney evidence and abuses his powers in every way imaginable. Almost everything he does is unethical, illegal, immoral and unconstitutional. We’re supposed to think this is OK, that it’s perfectly acceptable for cops to be above the law.

Of course viewers today may be tempted to see this as a deliberate attempt at moral ambiguity, with the cops breaking the law just as much as the crooks. You do have to be careful not to read things into old movies, things that may never have been intended. On the other hand you also have to be careful not to assume that movie-makers of the past were incapable of making movies that worked on more than one level, or that dealt with moral murkiness.

I think it’s reasonable to assume that screenwriter Lawrence Roman (and the author of the original novel Leslie T. White) did have some awareness that the cop hero here is in danger of becoming morally compromised.

This gives the movie perhaps a very slight noir flavouring.

Edward G. Robinson didn’t want this part but he needed the money. At times he’s good, at other times he seems to be just phoning it in.

Paulette Godard is the standout performer here, showing some enthusiasm and flair.

The supporting players are all quite competent. Lee van Cleef makes an appearance in a minor supporting role.

There’s a reason you’ve never heard of director Arnold Laven. He spent most of his career in television. He does a fairly sound job here. Cinematographer Joseph F. Biroc manages some noirish atmosphere.

So Vice Squad is a flawed but interesting police procedural. Recommended.

Kino Lorber have provided a very nice Blu-Ray transfer. Gary Gerani’s audio commentary is a worthwhile extra.

Blonde for a Day (1946)

Blonde for a Day is a 1946 private eye thriller featuring Mike Shayne.

The Mike Shayne Private eye thrillers of Brett Halliday (a pseudonym used by Davis Dresser) began publication in 1939 and were successful enough to attract the attention of Hollywood. 20th Century-Fox made seven Mike Shayne B-movies between 1940 and 1942, all with Lloyd Nolan as Shayne. PRC then made five more films in 1946 and 1947 with Hugh Beaumont taking over the lead role.

The 20th Century-Fox and PRC films are best regarded as two distinct franchises with rather different flavours. The Fox movies tend to be lighthearted semi-comic crime films. The PRC movies have a slightly tougher grittier feel. For my money Lloyd Nolan’s interpretation of the role is a bit too whimsical. Hugh Beaumont takes a more no-nonsense approach to the role which I much prefer.

Blonde for a Day is number three in the PRC series. Crusading reporter Tim Rourke (Paul Bryar) has been publishing hard-hitting exposés on a crime syndicate. His editor, Walter Bronson (Frank Ferguson) fears he’s going too far. Tim figures he’ll soon be out of a job. And gambling boss Hank Brenner (Mauritz Hugo) might be tempted to try to shut him up for good. Tim sends a wire to his old buddy, San Francisco PI Mike Shayne, asking for some help.

Somebody does go gunning for Tim Rourke.

Mike finds evidence in Tim’s apartment that he was visited by two blondes on the day of the shooting. One of the blondes might possibly have been Bronson’s wife. She’s been carrying a torch for Tim for a while.

So there are two possible motives for the shooting, the gambling exposés and the fact that Tim has been a bit too friendly with the boss’s wife. We will later find out that there’s a blackmail angle as well.

There have been other murders, and a blonde is suspected.

There’s a plethora of blondes in this movie. Blondes always mean trouble.

One of those blondes turns up dead.

Hugh Beaumont can trade wise-cracks effectively and he makes Shayne seem like just enough of a tough guy to be a convincing PI. Kathryn Adams, who was married to High Beaumont at the time, is good as Shayne’s feisty likeable secretary/girlfriend Phyllis (and she gets a chance to show that she can throw a pretty good punch). Cy Kendall is solid as the perpetually grumbling Detective Lieutenant Pete Rafferty.

The supporting players are all perfectly adequate.

Compared to major studio B-pictures PRC’s productions were very low budget but that works to the advantage of these PRC Mike Shayne films. They lack glamour but they have a slightly seedy feel and after all the world of the private eye is pretty seedy.

Don’t expect a spectacular action finale. Not on a PRC budget.

This is a solid unassuming B-movie that moves along nicely and it delivers entertainment value. Recommended.

I’ve reviewed the first two PRC Mike Shayne movies, Murder Is My Business (1946) and Larceny in Her Heart (1946). I’ve also reviewed some of the Fox Shayne movies, including the best of them, Blue, White and Perfect (1942) and Sleepers West (1941) which is not too bad.

Nightmare (1956)

Nightmare is a 1956 film noir written and directed by Maxwell Shane. It is based on a Cornell Woolrich novella and it’s very difficult to make a bad movie when you have a Woolrich story as your source material.

What’s interesting is that Shane’s first feature film, Fear in the Night (1946), was based on the same Cornell Woolrich novella. A decade after that film Shane decided that he could do a much better job with the material and Nightmare is certainly more ambitious and more accomplished. Nightmare would be Shane’s final feature film so his directing career began and ended with the same story.

For his 1956 remake Shane switched the scene of the action to New Orleans which was a rather good move. For some reason New Orleans had been under-used as a noir location but it’s the perfect setting for a movie with a slightly spooky mysterious vibe.

It also offered the opportunity to give the movie a more jazz-fuelled feel.

Stan Grayson (Kevin McCarthy) is a jazz musician and he’s just had a terrible nightmare about killing a man in a strange mirrored room. In the struggle (in the nightmare) Stan rips off one of the buttons of his victim’s coat. What worries Stan is that when he wakes up he is clutching that button. He also has a key which he has never seen before. Could Stan be a murderer? But why would he have killed a man he has never seen before?

Stan decides to ask his brother-in-law Rene Bressard (Edward G. Robinson) for advice. Rene is a Homicide cop. Rene assures Stan that he’s just suffering from overwork. Then Rene, his wife Sue, Stan and Stan’s singer girlfriend Gina (Connie Russell) go on a picnic. Trying to avoid a downpour they are led by Stan to an empty house. Stan has never been to this house but he knows how to get there and he knows where the spare key is hidden. There’s a mirrored room in the house - the room from Stan’s dream. And that mysterious key fits the locks in that room.

Rene now figures that Stan really is a murderer and Stan figures the same thing. But there are major plot twists to come.

Stan of course has considered the possibility that he has gone crazy. There are other possibilities. The nightmare was obviously very significant.

Changes were made to the plot for the 1956 remake and both film versions differ in some ways from Woolrich’s story.

One thing that should be noted is that the poster for the movie (reproduced on the Blu-Ray cover) gives away the entire plot of the movie. I’m not going to do that but if you’re concerned about spoilers just don’t look at that disc cover!

Kevin McCarthy is excellent as the confused and worried Stan, a nice guy whose whole world is suddenly falling apart. Edward G. Robinson gives one of his kindly wise older man performances, mixed with one of his aggressive tough guy performances.

The actresses are fine but the focus here is very much on Rene and Stan and McCarthy and Robinson are both so good that the female stars inevitably get overshadowed.

This is a visually rather impressive movie. The New Orleans locations are used well. The camerawork combines with the music to give that crazy disturbing jazzy feel that the story requires. There’s a nice use of mirrors. Not just the mirrored room, but there’s another very cool mirror shot early which doesn’t advance the plot but just adds subtly to our sense of unease.

There’s a lot of Freudian stuff. It’s half-baked Freudianism, but Freud’s Freudianism was half-baked as well so it doesn’t matter. Freudian nonsense always adds some fun.

You might think I’m being persnickety about that poster but I do think it weakens the movie. The movie works better if you don’t know the answer to a couple of the key questions which cause Rene and Stan so much anguish and bewilderment, and the poster makes those answers much too obvious. Perhaps Shane really did want us to know the answers, but the way he structures the movie suggests to me that that was not the case.

Is this film noir? I would say no, but it’s definitely noirish. Always bear in mind that the movie was made in 1956 when no-one had heard of film noir, so it was never intended as a film noir and there’s no sense complaining that some of what are now seen as essential noir ingredients are missing. This is an entertaining psychological crime thriller and it’s recommended.

Kino Lorber have provided a very nice Blu-Ray transfer.

Dick Tracy Returns (1938 serial)

Dick Tracy Returns was the second of Republic’s Dick Tracy serials. It came out in 1938. This time it’s directed by William Witney and John English and nobody did serials better than those two. It also means that the cliffhangers will be above average.

Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy comic strip began its run in 1931. It’s still running today.

In this serial Dick Tracy has become an F.B.I. agent.

Dick’s latest case puts him up against Pa Stark and his five sons (obviously a reference to Ma Barker and her notorious boys).

And Pa Stark is played by Charles Middleton, Ming the Merciless himself. He is always a joy to watch. In this serial he’s not a wildly colourful villain but he is ruthless and menacing.

Ralph Byrd plays Dick Tracy and it’s fair to say that he was the definitive screen Dick Tracy. He makes Tracy a square-jawed hero but not too much of an an exaggerated comic-book hero. He resists the temptation to go over-the-top. His Tracy is a remorseless but quietly efficient crime-fighter.

Pa Stark dabbles in various kinds of criminality, from a relatively straightforward armoured car robbery to extortion and even espionage. His plans are elaborate but his boys don’t always execute those plans successfully.

A major problem that arises for Pa Stark early on is that his youngest son “Kid” Stark falls into the hands of the police and is facing a murder rap.

That murder rap is a personal matter for Dick Tracy. The murdered G-Man was one of his protégés.

Pa’s solution is to eliminate the witnesses, but that solution just seems to create more witnesses to more crimes. Dick Tracy becomes a witness but eliminating him is going to prove to be quite a challenge.

The science fictional elements of the first Dick Tracy serial have been dropped but there is still plenty of technology. 

Naturally there is some aerial action - aviation was a 1930s obsession so any crime serial worth its salt was going to include aerial adventure. You know there will be narrow escapes from doomed aircraft.

The Republic serials directed by Witney and English are always fast-moving. Never give the audience time to worry too much about the plots, just make sure that there is always something breathlessly exciting or tense happening. Have lots of things getting blown up. Witney and English always did superior action scenes.

Naturally Pa Stark’s criminal schemes tend to involve cars, aircraft and explosions and some modern technology (just as a new high-powered astronomical telescope), and abandoned mines and all the stuff that makes 1930s/40s serials so much fun.

Dick Tracy Returns is fine entertainment. Highly recommended.

VCI’s released a DVD boxed set containing three Dick Tracy serials. It offers perfectly acceptable image and sound quality and it’s a very good buy.

The first of the Republic Dick Tracy serials, Dick Tracy (1937), was not directed by Witney and English and has a different feel but it’s very enjoyable. I’ve also reviewed the two best Witney-English serials - Daredevils of the Red Circle (1939) and the magnificent Spy Smasher (1942).