Private Detective 62 (1933)

Private Detective 62 (1933) is one of four movies in the Warner Archive DVD set William Powell at Warner Bros. Pre-code William Powell is always fun.

There’s a very odd prologue. Donald Free (Powell) is an American diplomat who has just been deported from France. It’s fairly obvious he was no diplomat but an American intelligence agent and the French not unreasonably took exception to his espionage activities. But we don’t find out exactly what he was up to and this entire angle has no connection to the rest of the movie.

Donald ends up having to swim ashore in New York but his problems have just begin. The Depression is in full swing. He can’t find a job and he’s flat broke. Finally he talks his way into a partnership with private eye Dan Hogan (Arthur Hohl). Hogan isn’t just down-at-heel, he’s pretty much down-and-out.

He hasn’t had a client for so long that he’s even more broke than Donald. But while Hogan is lazy and incompetent Donald is a live wire and the agency is soon back on its feet.

Unfortunately Hogan is also dishonest and while his connection with racketeer and gambling club owner Tony Bandor (Gordon Westcott) brings in lots of business Donald is increasingly uncomfortable with the increasingly ethically dubious nature of the agency’s jobs. He doesn’t like frame-ups and blackmail.

Tony has a very big problem. Janet Reynolds (Margaret Lindsay) has won huge amounts of money at his gambling joint. Tony can’t pay her what he owes her. Donald’s job is to frame her so that she can be blackmailed into not pursuing Tony for the money.

Donald falls for Janet straight away. She’s young and beautiful but he’s also attracted to her devil-may-care attitude and sense of fun. She gambles for the kicks, not the money.

The frame-up leads to an unexpected consequence and a possible murder rap.

That’s the plot and it’s a bit thin but quite serviceable. It would have been cool had the spy angle been developed a bit.

The movie’s biggest asset is of course William Powell. Donald is no Boy Scout but he has his limits and he’s reaching the point where he’s going to be totally morally corrupted if he’s not careful. Powell gets this across effectively. He’s always charming but I particularly like him when he’s charming and just a tad ethically challenged.

Margaret Lindsay is pretty good. There’s not quite enough chemistry between the two leads.

Ruth Donnelly is fun as Hogan’s disapproving secretary Amy Moran. Arthur Hohl as Dan Hogan is a sleazeball and a weasel and he’s terrific.

Michael Curtiz once again demonstrates his ability to make good movies in any genre.

A major plus is the 66-minute running time which means there’s no fat at all to this story. It zips along very smoothly.

How pre-code is it? There are lots of drug references. It’s very upfront about the sleazy nature of private detective work. There’s no suggestion that gambling is immoral, as long as you don’t welch on your debts.

The private eye genre was still in its infancy and this movie is only marginally hardboiled. It’s a setup that would, a decade later, have made for a decent film noir.

Private Detective 62 is lightweight but enjoyable and William Powell is just so watchable. Recommended.

Private Detective 62 gets a perfectly acceptable transfer.

I’ve reviewed other movies in this set - The Road to Singapore and the excellent High Pressure.

Forever Amber (1947)

Forever Amber is a glossy Technicolor 20th Century-Fox swashbuckling historical adventure romance directed by Otto Preminger (who was brought in to replace the original director John M. Stahl).

It was based on Kathleen Winsor’s steamy and scandalous 1944 novel of the same name which had attracted a firestorm of controversy and was banned for obscenity in many U.S. states. The Production Code Authority initially made it clear that they would not in any circumstances countenance a film adaptation. But they later relented. This was a fascinating period in Hollywood history, with growing pressure from the studios for a relaxation of the Production Code and a willingness by the Production Code Authority to compromise just a little.

Obviously the story had to be sanitised considerably but it does get away with quite a bit. It is made absolutely crystal clear that the heroine’s relationships with a series of men are sexual relationships.

The Catholic Legion of Decency condemned the movie on its release which helped to make Forever Amber a gigantic hit which broke box-office records.

The setting is England just after the Stuart Restoration in 1660. Bruce Carlton (Cornel Wilde) is seeking financial support from King Charles II for a privateering expedition. The King has reasons of his own for wanting Bruce to be far far away. The king fears that his latest mistress may be a bit too fond of the handsome Bruce.

On his way to London, at a little village named Marygreen, Bruce had met Amber St. Clair (Linda Darnell). Amber lives in humble circumstances and is about to be married off to a farmer, much to her horror. She does not see herself as a farmer’s wife. Amber has much higher ambitions. Bruce is good-looking and he has a title. He would make a splendid husband. But Bruce does not want an entanglement and sets off for sea without Amber.

Amber might be a gold digger but it is possible that she really does love Bruce. It becomes increasingly obvious that this really is the case.

Everything then goes wrong for Amber and she ends up in debtor’s prison. She becomes the mistress of a highwayman. She embarks on a career on the stage. In Restoration England it was assumed that all actresses were whores. She becomes the mistress of Captain Rex Morgan. And the things really start go wrong.

And there’s the baby to think of.

Amber will bounce back, and she will get kicked around again by fate and she’ll bounce back again.

Amber is the kind of heroine that Hollywood filmmakers liked at this time. She’s a very bad girl. She breaks all the moral rules. But she’s lively, likeable, feisty, exciting and very sexy. Rather than disapprove of her audiences were naturally going to adore her. Linda Darnell, a very underrated star, gives one of her best performance. She has no trouble making Amber a sympathetic complex bad girl. And for all her wickedness we know that she still loves Bruce. And while she breaks society’s moral rules she is never actually malicious.

Amber St Clair is not quite Scarlett O’Hara but the two women do have several things in common. They both have guts and they both have physical courage, but it’s a woman’s courage rather than a man’s courage. And they’re very hard to break - they both have a great deal of inner strength. A big difference compared to Hollywood today is that Hollywood in the 40s made movies featuring strong interesting female characters but they were very much women.

Linda Darnell really did deserve a better leading man. Cornel Wilde just doesn’t have the charisma needed. He’s the biggest weakness in the film.

George Sanders is of course terrific as King Charles II. He doesn’t play him as a mere wicked debauchee but as a man weighed down by duty who has to keep himself amused in order to keep going. And he plays him as a man who does actually have a sense of honour. He wants to get Amber into bed and he could abuse his power as king to force her to comply but he never does. That would be vulgar and dishonourable. Sanders also adds a slight sense of melancholy. Sanders and Darnell are by far the most impressive cast members.

It might seem like an odd movie for Otto Preminger to direct but considering his passionate loathing for the Production Code he might have enjoyed seeing how far he could push things.

Forever Amber doesn’t have a huge reputation, perhaps because it slots into every film genre that serious-minded critics automatically despise - it’s a costume drama, it’s a women’s melodrama, it’s a romance. It’s actually very enjoyable and Linda Darnell makes it very much worth seeing. Highly recommended.

Footlight Parade (1933)

Footlight Parade was the third of the 1930s Warner Brothers musicals with production numbers by Busby Berkeley. I’ve always considered 42nd Street to be the greatest of the series but having watched it again I think Footlight Parade may be even better.

It has not just great Busby Berkeley dance sequences. It also has Jimmy Cagney! Gangster movies had made Cagney a huge star but Footlight Parade gave him the chance to do what he really wanted to do - to be a song-and-dance man. Cagney is absolutely fantastic.

This time it’s not about putting on a broadway show, it’s about putting on prologues. These really were apparently a thing for a while. They were very short live song and dance shows which would precede the showing of a talking picture in a movie theatre. At the start of Footlight Parade broadway producer Chester Kent (Cagney) is facing ruin. Nobody wants musical comedies any more. Everybody wants talking pictures.

There are these prologues but they’re expensive. Then Chester has a brainwave - pre-packaged prologues which could be moved from theatre to theatre in a single unit. This will be much more cost effective.

The Chester Kent prologues are a huge success. But he has a deadly rival - Gladstone Prologues. And Gladstone keeps stealing Chester’s ideas. Chester is also being cheated by his chiselling business partners.

He has to come up with new ideas constantly and he’s in danger of cracking under the strain.

He has woman problems as well. His ex-wife is trying to fleece him. He’s fallen for a no-good dame, Vivian Rich (Claire Dodd). He doesn’t know it but she intends to take him to the cleaners as well. If only Chester would realise that his faithful secretary Nan (Joan Blondell) is the right girl for him and that she’s crazy in love with him.

Meanwhile mousy little typist Bea Thorn (Ruby Keeler) is hoping for her chance to show what she can do on stage. We just know that she will get her chance.

Naturally Dick Powell is on hand as well.

There’s just enough plot to keep things ticking over.

Cagney is amazing. Charismatic beyond belief, hyper-active, bouncing off the walls, talking faster than a machine-gun. He did that in his gangster movies as well but here he demonstrates his ability to be incredibly likeable.

And Cagney can play the driven dedicated producer and then do the song and dance stuff as well (and he was a superb dancer). He dominates the movie to a much greater extent than the producer characters in 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933.

Teaming Cagney and Joan Blondell was definitely a winning move. Not everybody likes Ruby Keeler but I think she’s sweet. And Claire Dodds makes a terrific calculating uber-bitch.

And then there are the Busby Berkeley numbers. The cat number is cute. The Shanghai Lil routine offers the promise of sin in the tropics. And the Honeymoon Hotel number is a joyous and very risqué celebration of adultery. The highlight however is By a Waterfall. Berkeley’s production numbers were staggering triumphs of organisation as Berkekley uses girls to create wild moving abstract paintings. Was there any way he could have made things even more difficult for himself? You bet - how about doing the whole thing in a gigantic tank, including underwater shots from multiple angles? The result is breathtaking.

Footlight Parade has less of a Depression feel than the earlier movies. It’s cheerful and optimistic. It’s such a total immersion in style class. Very highly recommended.

I’ve also reviewed 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933.

L.A. Confidential (1997)

I saw L.A. Confidential years ago and really disliked it. Rewatching it now has made me change my opinion quite substantially.

It was directed and co-written by Curtis Hanson, based on James Ellroy’s novel.

The first thing to note is one of my quibbles with this movie. It’s the 1950s but the men don’t wear hats. And not a single person smokes. So this is not the 1950s. And apart from those two details overall this movie is just not convincing at all in its attempts to capture the period flavour. A period settings for a movie is always a mistake. It never rings true. This one looks like 90s people on their way to a 50s-themes costume party.

Fortunately this movie does have a lot of other things going for it.

This is the story of three cops. They know each other slightly and they don’t like each other. All three are morally compromised in some way. All three will reach a point where they have to make a choice. A difficult possibly dangerous choice. But still possibly preferable to continuing on their present course.

Bud White (Russell Crowe) is considered a thug even by his fellow cops. Ed Exley (Guy Pearce) is a college grad fast-tracked for promotion and now he’s totally out of his depth as a detective lieutenant. Jack Vincennes (Kevin Spacey) no longer cares about the job. He’s a technical consultant to a TV cop show and he hobnobs with Hollywood types. He’s corrupt, but only in a very trivial way. He’s been doing business with sleazy scandal magazine publisher and part-time blackmailer Sid Hudgens (Danny DeVito).

This is a cop movie but it’s also a movie about Hollywood.

The plot starts to kick in with a massacre at the Nite Owl coffee lounge. Six corpses, blown apart by pump-action shotguns. There are three obvious suspects. And a rape victim’s testimony can put the case against them beyond doubt.

The plot is incredibly convoluted but that serves a purpose. What is really going is only very gradually revealed to both the audience and the three cops. Initially it seems like a routine if grisly crime. Then it starts to look like something a bit bigger, as other incidents seem to be tied in. Then it starts to look like something really big as more and more odd things that don’t fit start to fit. The audience doesn’t know just how big this case is going to get. Nor do the three cops.

There’s a very rich guy operating a high-class call girl racket. The gimmick is that the girls get plastic surgery to make them look like Hollywood movie stars. Bud has had a brief puzzling encounter with one of the girls. He thought she’d been beaten up but he was wrong. Then he meets Lynn Bracken (Kim Basinger). She’s also one of the whores. She’s the Veronica Lake look-alike. Bud gets involved with her. What is he up to? What is she up to? Is she going to be the femme fatale of the story? She sure looks like a femme fatale, but you can’t take anything in this story at face value.

The focus is on the three cops. Ed Exley is a Boy Scout but he’s ambitious and while he still thinks of himself as a moral paragon his ambition has corrupted him. He’s forgotten why he became a cop. Until something reminds him.

Jack Vincennes has long since lost sight of the reasons he became a cop. Morally he just goes with the flow, collects small payoffs and merely goes through the motions on the job. But ethically he has his limits.

Bud is the most interesting because right from the start he’s a mass of contradictions. He’s a vicious violent cynical thug but where women are concerned he’s a knight in shining armour. And there’s no fakery to it. He remembers why he joined the force. He saw a woman beaten to death. He became a cop to stop stuff like that from happening to women.

Lynn is a less central character but she’s interesting because you can’t predict her. She could turn out to be a Good Girl or a Bad Girl. Maybe she really has fallen in love with Bud.

One really interesting aspect to this film is that the evil comes from the corruption, not from the crimes themselves. The drug bust early on is pointless. They’re just a young guy and a young girl smoking a little weed. The prostitution racket harms no-one. The girls are well paid, they don’t mind the work and the guy who runs the racket treats them extremely well. The problem comes from the fact that making these activities illegal guarantees that the cops and city officials will become corrupted and that organised crime will become involved. It’s the corruption that is the source of all the evil.

It’s also worth noting that while Bud is aways trying to rescue damsels in distress he’s not trying to save Lynn. She doesn’t need saving. Maybe that’s why he falls in love with her.

Guy Pearce is good. Kevin Spacey is very good. Russell Crowe is superb, making Bud’s contradictions believable. Kim Basinger doesn’t have to do much more than make Lynn enigmatic, which she does.

I liked L.A. Confidential very much the second time around. Complex and tightly constructed. Highly recommended.

High Pressure (1932)

High Pressure, released in 1932, is one of the movies William Powell made during his time at Warner Brothers.

The Warner Archive released a four-movie DVD set of some of the lesser-known less remembered movies William Powell made during his time at Warner Brothers.

One of these movies is High Pressure, released in 1932. Powell is Gar Evans, a company promoter. He is not a con man. Well, not exactly. He will not do anything that is actually illegal. If he’s going to promote a company that makes bicycle clips there has to be an actual factory that manufactures actual bicycle clips. Gar’s genius lies in persuading investors and the public that such a company makes the finest bicycle clips ever devised and that the company will soon be bigger than Standard Oil.

In this case it’s a company that makes artificial rubber from sewage. “Colonel” Ginsburg (George Sidney) assures him that the process actually works and produces actual artificial rubber. He has seen the formula devised by the genius scientist. Thus reassured Gar sets out to create the necessary hype. He will sell people on the idea that the Golden Gate Artificial Rubber Company is a goldmine and that they would be crazy not to put money into it.

It’s all about creating the right impression. If you rent a luxurious suite of offices, expensively furnished, in a fancy office building people assume the company really is going to become a vast business empire. Everything gives the impression of prosperity even though the impression has been created by borrowed money. And he has an uncanny ability to persuade people to offer him insanely attractive deals, such as halving the rent on the suite of offices.

Gar is careful not to tell any actual lies. He simply presents the truth in an imaginative and artistic way.

Soon the company is booming. The stock price is skyrocketing. Nothing can stop the Golden Gate Artificial Rubber Company. And the great thing is, it’s all on the level. The artificial rubber processing system really exists. At least Gar assumes that it exists. The Colonel assured him that the inventor had assured him that it works. It must be on the level. It has to be. Gar would just feel a bit happier if they could actually find the inventor. Nobody else has been able to make any sense of his formula.

If the invention doesn’t exist they’ll all end up behind bars.

Gar has woman problems as well. He’s been stringing Francine (Evelyn Brent) along for years but his promises of marriage never seem to come to anything. Francine is getting fed up. She’s also suspicious that Gar might have his eyes on his new secretary, a pretty blonde.

It has to be said that Evelyn Brent is just a little bit dull.

There are some terrific character actors in the supporting cast. Guy Kibbee, who pays the hapless clueless president of the company, is always a delight. And there’s Charles Middleton - Fu Manchu himself!

High Pressure loses focus at times. It’s William Powell who carries the movie and he does so effortlessly. He’s all manic energy and bravado and fast talking slick ultra-confidence. He’s in superb form. Gar is a bit of a scoundrel but he’s so much fun and has so much charm. We don’t care if he’s not entirely honest. He’s so brazen that we want him to succeed.

High Pressure is sparkling entertainment and a treat for William Powell fans. Highly recommended.

The DVD transfer is extremely good.