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.

Dante’s Inferno (1967)

Dante’s Inferno is a 1967 Ken Russell documentary/biopic about Pre-Raphaelite painter/poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti. It was made for the BBC and screened as part of their Omnibus series.

Russell had been making arts documentaries for the BBC since 1959. At first they were fairly conventional documentaries. The BBC did not approve of having actors portraying historical figures in documentaries. That policy was gradually eased. For The Debussy Film Russell solved the problem by having a film within a film. The critical acclaim for the Debussy Film finally convinced the BBC to let Russell make his documentaries the way he wanted to. It was one of the most sensible decisions the BBC made during the 60s.

Russell’s later BBC documentaries, Dante’s Inferno, The Dance of the Seven Veils and Isidora, are hybrid dramatised documentary-feature films but in practice they’re really feature films. They were in black-and-white and in the 1.37:1 aspect ratio so they were suitable for TV broadcast but they were shot in 35mm so that they could be given at least limited theatrical releases.

Russell was fascinated by artists and composers but he wasn’t interested in treating these figures worshipfully. He wanted to get down to the nitty-gritty of what made them tick. He was interested in genius, but he was particularly interest by geniuses who were either failures in their personal lives or partial failures in their artistic lives.

These mid-60s films are essentially Ken Russell’s personal response to various artistic figures.

The Pre-Raphaelites were all but forgotten by the beginning of the 1960s but there was about to be an explosion of renewed interest in the movement. Dante’s Inferno certainly played some part in fuelling this renewed enthusiasm.

Dante’s Inferno focuses a great deal on Rossetti’s relationships with women, especially his difficult relationships with Lizzie Siddal and Jane Morris. Lizzie Siddal modelled for Rossetti, became his muse and a complicated romantic involvement began. For various reasons (some of them quite reasonable) Rossetti put off any thoughts of marrying her. Lizzie’s health problems led to a reliance on laudanum which became a serious addiction.

Lizzie painted and wrote poetry as well. Her paintings have been ludicrously overpraised for ideological reasons. She had some talent, but those talents were very limited.

In Russell’s version Siddal’s insistence on scrupulous defence of her virginity and Rossetti’s unwillingness to marry her led to predictable problem. A few years later Jane Morris (one of the most famous artists’ models of all time) entered his life which led to a fraught romantic triangle between Rossetti, Jane ands Jane’s husband William Morris. The fact that William Morris and Rossetti were close friends and artistic colleagues complicated things further.

Like all the Pre-Raphaelites Rossetti was besotted with the Middle Ages, with the romance and the chivalry. It was an ideal to which to aspire but he was never able to Iive up to those ideals. The ideal of courtly love was an impossible ideal for Rossetti. He enjoyed the more carnal varieties of love too much.

Rossetti’s career began to falter, partly due to his own drug addiction but perhaps also to the invariably less than unhappy outcomes of his passionate love affairs with women. In this film Russell certainly suggests that he was also increasingly aware that he had failed to live up to his lofty ideals.

As Rossetti Oliver Reed gives one of his finest performances. Reed could be mercurial and passionately intense and extravagant as an actor but he could also be subtle and sensitive and he had extraordinary charm and all of these qualities are in display here.

Judith Paris as Lizzie is wan and needy but that’s presumably deliberate and is perhaps a fair interpretation of Siddal.

Casting Gala Mitchell as Jane Morris was a masterstroke. She was a model with no acting experience but she looks perfect. She has the same kind of beauty as Jane Morris. She looks like the ideal Pre-Raphaelite woman. Mitchell doesn’t get much dialogue. She doesn’t need it. She just has to look Pre-Raphelite-ish and stunning.

One of the things that amuses me about modern critics is the way they so often respond to what they wish the movie said, rather than to what it actually says. There’s a good example here, among the extras. The critic naturally reads Rossetti as the villain and Lizzie as the victim and sees the brilliantly talented Lizzie as having been sucked dry artistically and emotionally by Rossetti. But when you actually watch the movie Lizzie comes across as a whiny, needy, manipulative emotional vampire. And her overdose comes across as a passive-aggressive act. “If I kill myself he’ll be sorry.” Watching the movie one gets the impression that it was Lizzie who sucked Dante dry emotionally. And the movie makes it clear that Lizzie’s talents were meagre.

Russell wanted to make Dante’s Inferno in colour but the BBC wouldn’t come up with the money.

Dante’s Inferno is a typical Ken Russell biopic - it’s his own totally personal response to Rossetti. It’s a brilliant movie, as good in its way as any of his later feature film biopics. Highly recommended.

The BFI Blu-Ray also includes the equally good Isadora and Always On Sunday, his film on Henri Rousseau.

The Big Diamond Robbery (1929)

The Big Diamond Robbery was the final silent film for legendary cowboy star Tom Mix. It came out in 1929, right at the end of the silent era.

This is a western but it’s a contemporary western (which seems to be true also of the other film included in the Blu-Ray set). This is a movie made in the 1920s, and set in the 1920s. So while part of the action takes place in the West this is not quite the Old West, not quite the Wild West.

Tom Mix is Tom Markham and he’s in New York. He meets a girl and she’s on horseback but the second time he meets her she’s been arrested for speeding in her sports car. She is Ellen Brooks (Kathryn McGuire).

She has so many previous offences that this time she’ll get jail time for sure. Except of course she won’t. She’s rich.

Her very rich daddy has just bought her a fabulously valuable diamond.

The diamond is stolen. Tom steps in to help retrieve the stone.

To punish her for being a bad girl Ellen is banished to the ranch in Arizona. Tom seems to be the manager of the ranch.

So now the action moves out West.

The thieves are still after that diamond and now they’re in Arizona too.

There’s a stagecoach holdup and a war party of braves from the local tribe attacks the stagecoach as well. But appearance can be deceptive.

So this a hybrid film. The first half is an urban crime thriller with shootouts with machine-guns and car chases. Later it becomes a western, but not really a western. Tom does some trick riding and chases the bad guys’ car on horseback. It’s really just a crime thriller that features a cowboy.

It’s all very lightweight but it has action, comedy and romance and it’s fast-paced and done with a certain amount of panache. The plot is paper-thin.

Tom Mix is no great shakes as an actor but all he really has to do is look like a square-jawed cowboy hero and ride a horse well and and he manages those things easily enough.

Kathryn McGuire is likeable enough. She isn’t really a Spoilt Rich Bad Girl. She just needed to get out of the city and meet a handsome cowboy.

This is a good-natured romp and the running time is short enough to ensure that it won’t wear out its welcome.

I’d be willing to see more Tom Mix movies although I would like to see him in a full-blown western.

The Big Diamond Robbery is recommended.

It looks terrific on Blu-Ray and they found a tinted print. I love tinted movies.

The Road to Singapore (1931)

The Road to Singapore, released in 1931, is one of the movies William Powell made after moving from Paramount to Warner Brothers.

It’s a pre-code melodrama with a tropical setting. There truly is nothing I love more than sex, sin, madness and scandal in the tropics. The setting in this case is a seedy flyblown port named Khota somewhere in the British Empire, possibly in India or Ceylon.

The heat, the isolation, the boredom all serve to encourage dangerous illicit passions and forbidden lusts.

And apparently some of these outposts of the British Empire really were notorious for steamy sexual liaisons that were not necessarily sanctified by marriage.

There is much consternation in Khota. The rumour is that Hugh Dawltry (William Powell) is back. He left some time earlier after a scandal - a matter of stealing another man’s wife. He has now returned aboard a steamer. Onboard he encountered Philippa Crosby (Doris Kenyon) and she certainly aroused his interest.

He lures her to his bungalow and makes a rather desultory (and unsuccessful) attempt to seduce her. They both know it won’t end there. The attraction is still there.

Philippa has come to Khota to marry the very respectable and dedicated Dr George March (Louis Calhern).

Marriage is a disappointment to Philippa. She was hoping for romance, passion and excitement. George is a crashing bore and is interested only in his work. Of course Philippa is not going to offer any encouragement to Dawltry. He is clearly a bounder. And he drinks too much. And he’s the sort of man who might be dangerous to a lady’s reputation, and to her morals. No, she certainly won’t encourage him. On the other hand dangerous men can be rather exciting. Especially good-looking charming dangerous men.

George’s young sister Rene March (Marian Marsh) is also not immune to the charms of such men. She’s a sweet girl but an incorrigible flirt. And she’s in the mood for playing games.

Naturally George suspects that Dawltry has evil intentions but he’s inclined to assume that Rene is his target. He doesn’t really trust either Philippa or Rene. And he’s aware that it’s an established medical fact that the tropical heat can drive a woman man-crazy. He broods.

Whether Dawltry really does intend to seduce either woman is uncertain, although the thought has certainly crossed his mind. He’s no Boy Scout.

In the pre-code era a screenwriter was under no constraints in regard to the ending of a story. It could end with virtue triumphant, or virtue vanquished. It could end happily, or tragically, or ambiguously. A good pre-code melodrama such as this one keeps the audience guessing about such things.

William Powell gives an assured performance and succeeds in keeping us unsure just how much of a cad Dawltry is. Marian Marsh is naughty and adorable. Louis Calhern is effective as a well-meaning but pompous and ineffectual man who has zero understanding of women. Doris Kenyon is fine as Philippa.

Alfred E. Green was a solid journeyman director who made his best films in the pre-code era, his most famous being Baby Face (1933). His Union Depot (1932) is rather delightful. He wasn’t usually flashy but in The Road to Singapore he pulls off a very ambitious very impressive long tracking shot and it’s not a mere gimmick - it enhances the feel of encroaching tropical madness.

The Road to Singapore is a fine overheated melodrama and it’s highly recommended.

Jagged Edge (1985)

Jagged Edge, directed by Richard Marquand, is a twisted 1985 thriller that more or less fits into the erotic thriller and neo-noir genres (two genres that overlap to a very considerable extent).

What attracted me to this movie is that it was scripted by Joe Eszterhas and I happen to be a huge admirer of his work. I particularly admire the Joe Eszterhas movies that critics hated.

Jagged Edge begins with the brutal murder of the fabulously wealthy Page Forrester. The ambitious and not very ethical D.A. Tom Krasny (Peter Coyote) decides that Page Forrester’s husband Jack (Jeff Bridges) is the most likely suspect. Jack does have a plausible motive - his wife controlled the purse-strings and he now stands to inherit a vast fortune. The evidence against Jack Forrester is very thin and very circumstantial but the case will be a media circus and successfully convicting Jack Forrester would be very good indeed for Tom Krasny’s political career. Krasny orders his investigators and the cops to ignore all other possible suspects. He intends to nail Jack Forrester.

Jack’s defence attorney is Teddy Barnes (Glenn Close), a brilliant but troubled trial lawyer who gave up criminal work (she had been a spectacularly successful prosecutor) because she got sick of the wallowing in the gutter that was involved. She also quite criminal work because of what she considered to be heinously unethical conduct by D.A. Tom Krasny.

For complicated reasons she agrees to defend Jack.

Naturally Teddy (who is divorced) gets emotionally and sexually involved with her client. This may or may not start to affect her judgment.

She’s fairly convinced that Jack is innocent.

There are inevitably a lot of courtroom scenes. I have never been a fan of courtroom scenes (which tend to be overly talky) but they’re handled well.

As you would expect there are plenty of surprise witnesses and every time the case seems to be shifting in Jack’s favour it starts shifting against him. And Teddy begins to suspect that Krasny may be up to some of his old sleazy tricks.

This also sounds like pretty standard stuff but the expected plot twists are adroitly done and there are some genuinely surprising twists. And the twists just keep coming.

What makes this movie work is that it manages to keep us in doubt about Jack’s guilt or innocence right up to the end. He seems like such a nice charming likeable guy, a guy who couldn’t possibly butcher his wife, which makes us sure he’s innocent. On the other hand he is rather cocky and he does have a very smooth line with the ladies and he does handle his seduction of Teddy like an experienced seducer, which makes us think he might be guilty. He’s such an ambiguous character that we just can’t be sure.

And of course Teddy can’t be sure either. She has to consider the possibility that she is being blinded by emotion. Her judgment might also be swayed by an event in her professional past which I can’t say any more about for fear of hinting at a spoiler.

Jack is a fascinating character and Jeff Bridges does a fine job with the part.

Teddy is an interesting woman. She’s a superb lawyer but she’s under both personal and professional pressure and she’s not handling either very well. What I like most about her is that she’s not a clichéd lady super-lawyer - she has real vulnerabilities and she’s only just holding it together. She’s an actual woman, rather than a Girlpower Icon. I’ve strongly disliked Glenn Close in other movies but she’s really very good indeed here.

There’s only one very tame sex scene but this movie’s claim to being an erotic thriller rests on the possibility of a twisted sexual motive for murder. Once again this movie is nicely ambiguous - it’s not clear if the murder of Page Forrester is a sex murder or not. There’s also a hint of kinky sex.

The movie’s claims to being neo-noir are fairly strong, with the interesting twist that it might involve an innocent man being sucked into the noir nightmare world but Teddy Barnes could also be sucked into that world.

While the plots are quite different Eszterhas’s script here does share some DNA with his script for Basic Instinct. They have a slightly similar feel and tone. Which you would expect. Eszterhas was extremely pleased with Jagged Edge, and rightly so.

I certainly can’t fault Richard Marquand’s directing.

Jagged Edge did extremely well at the box office. It’s a fine thriller with complex characters and relationships and it’s highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed quite a few of the movies written by Joe Eszterhas - Sliver (1993), Basic Instinct (1992), Showgirls (1995) and Jade (1995) - and I’ve loved all of them.

Saint Jack (1979)

Peter Bogdanovich’s Saint Jack, based on Paul Theroux’s novel, came out in 1979. Because of Bogdanovich’s insistence on having Ben Gazzara play the lead role rather than a big name star major studios wouldn’t touch the movie (they wanted Paul Newman) so it ended up being made by New World Pictures with Roger Corman himself producing.

My reaction to this movie is very similar to my reaction to Bogdanovich’s earlier The Last Picture Show (1971). I can see what Bogdanovich is trying to do and I think he succeeds in doing it, but I’m just not necessarily particularly interested in the result.

This is a deep dive into squalor, moral corruption and nihilism.

Jack Flowers (Gazzara) is an American expatriate in Singapore in 1973. He runs a whorehouse but he wants his own whorehouse. This gets him into a lot of trouble. He befriends a seedy English expatriate, William Leigh (Denholm Elliott).

Jack has a girlfriend but she no plays no part whatsoever in the story.

Jack falls foul of gangsters. He then goes into business with the smooth but creepy Eddie Schuman (played by Bogdanovich himself). It’s never explicitly stated but we assume Eddie is CIA. He’s certainly involved in the kinds of sleazy illegal immoral activities we would expect from a CIA agent.

Jack gets to manage a huge brothel for the CIA and is persuaded to engage in some political blackmail.

Not much really happens. It’s that kind of movie.

There are really only two characters with even the slightest amount of depth, Jack and William.

We get no backstory at all on any of the characters. For me that’s one of the movie’s biggest strengths. I prefer movies in which a character’s personality is slowly revealed through their actions, rather than having it explained to the viewer.

In this case we learn almost nothing about Jack except that he’s a loser drifting through life. I can see why Bogdanovich wanted Gazzara rather than Paul Newman. Gazzara has zero charisma, which suited Bogdanovich’s purposes.

At the end we get a hint that Jack is a loser but he isn’t a louse, but then we knew that from the beginning from the fact that he treats his whores kindly and is as honest as you can be while being a criminal.

Denholm Elliott is always fun to watch but William remains an enigma.

I assume that that was Bogdanovich’s intention. Jack and William are both empty shells.

There is perhaps a very slight Graham Greene flavour - European expatriates slowly subsiding into moral corruption and despair.

On the audio commentary Bogdanovich tells us that most of the smaller roles were played by non-actors and much of the dialogue was improvised. I have never understood why some directors like doing this. You usually end up with a movie that is rather flat, and that’s the case here. Since the movie is also too long the whole thing drags quite badly in places. It lacks energy. But then that might have been the director’s intention - to emphasise the hopelessness and emptiness.

Singapore in this movie is a city of the damned. A city of degradation and violence, a city of whores, gangsters and corrupt cops. All of the European expatriates know they should go home but perhaps they can’t because they know they serve their damnation.

Is there a chance that Jack might have a chance of achieving redemption? You’ll have to watch the movie to find out.

The Vietnam War plays a background role, with American servicemen on rest and recreation leave heading straight for the brothels. It’s as if the East is corrupting the West at the same time as the West is corrupting the East. The only thing that could make things worse would be for the CIA to show up, which they do.

I didn’t exactly enjoy this movie but there are plenty of interesting aspects to it. It’s an odd emotionally distanced movie.

It was a box office flop. Bogdanovich made these odd movies that as his career progressed seemed increasingly to alienate both audiences and critics. He didn’t quite fit comfortably into the New American Cinema mould. Most directors of that period would have succumbed to the temptation to insert a crude political message into Saint Jack but Bogdanovich is more interested in social alienation than politics. He wasn’t predictable enough. After Paper Moon he had a whole string of flops, including Daisy Miller which I personally think is a superb movie.

Despite its flaws and quirks Saint Jack is worth seeing. Recommended.

The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946)

I saw the 1946 Hal Wallis production The Strange Love of Martha Ivers many years ago but remember absolutely nothing about it so seeing it now on Blu-Ray it’s all new to me.

The setting is a small town, Iverstown. We begin with a prologue. It is 1928. Young Martha Ivers is a poor little rich girl living with her sadistic tyrannical aunt. The aunt’s lawyer O’Neil is hoping for a share of the riches to send his bookish timid son Walter to Harvard.

Martha has run away yet again, aided by abetted by young Sam Masterson who shares Martha’s desire for freedom and adventure. Once again Martha gets caught. Then tragedy strikes but maybe it’s good luck for Martha and for the weaselly Walter.

Twenty years later Sam Masterson (Van Heflin) just happens to suffer car troubles and ends up back in Iverstown. He hasn’t seen the place since 1928.

Sam meets an interesting blonde, Toni Marachek (Lizabeth Scott). It’s a pickup, of a sort. Toni has a bus to catch but now that she’s met Sam the bus doesn’t interest her. She wonders if he would object to having a passenger when his car is repaired and he leaves Iverstown. When Lizabeth Scott makes a suggestion like that you don’t say no.

Toni is fascinating, vulnerable, troubled, lonely and desperate. The kind of gal you just know is going to lead you into a whole world of trouble but Sam doesn’t care. He doesn’t even care when she tells him she’s just been released from prison.

Martha now owns and controls Iverstown and she owns and controls Walter (Kirk Douglas). Walter is now the DA but he takes his orders from Martha.

Walter seems much too worried about Sam’s reappearance. Sam finds this puzzling.

Sam, Toni, Martha and Walter are soon caught in an intricate web of jealousy, suspicion, betrayal, guilt and fear. Fear of the past. In their own ways they’re all haunted by the past. It’s also a web of misunderstandings. None of then know as much as the others fear they do.

There are plot twists but it’s the character twists that are most interesting.

These are complicated people with tangled motivations which they themselves don’t fully understand. They’re unpredictable because they themselves have no idea what they’re going to do next.

These are people who might be evil, or mad, or weak, or deluded or just selfish. There are no straightforward heroes or heroines but also no straightforward villains or villainesses.

It’s interesting to see Kirk Douglas playing a weak, cowardly failure of a man. He’s dangerous in the way that cowards are always dangerous.

Van Heflin gives a nicely nuanced performance.

Lizabeth Scott is excellent. Barbara Stanwyck is at the top of her game. You figure one of these two will be the femme fatale, but which one?

This film is at best marginally film noir. It lacks the noir aesthetic. It’s more of a cruelly twisted melodrama than a noir. It does have some noir touches however so if you want to consider it film noir you can.

Either way The Strange Love of Martha Ivers is an extremely good extremely interesting movie.

It’s on Blu-Ray from Kino Lorber.

Death Trap (1962)

Death Trap is a competent 1962 entry in the British Merton Park Studios Edgar Wallace cycle.

Paul Heindrik (Albert Lieven) is a ruthless but successful middle-aged investment banker. His feckless stepson Derek (Kenneth Cope) is in over his head financially and is desperately trying to persuade his stepfather to bail him out, but so far it’s no dice.

Paul’s Jean Anscomb (Barbara Shelley) has been listening in on Paul’s conversations and going through his briefcase.

Her disreputable friend Ross Williams (John Meillon) is just out of prison where he’d been sent after embezzling clients’ money from Paul’s firm. Maybe he was set up and maybe he wasn’t but he has convinced himself that Paul owes him. He is about to spot an opportunity for blackmail.

A woman, Carol Halston (Mercy Haystead), turns up at Paul’s office. A few weeks earlier her sister Moira died of an overdose of sleeping pills. The inquest brought in a finding of accidental death. Carol isn’t entirely convinced. The day before she died Moira withdrew seven thousand pounds from her bank. No trace of the money can be found, although several of the characters have come up with definite theories.

So we have a bunch of people who are all ethically challenged to some degree. Some might be involved in serious crimes. Some may simply be a bit foolish.

And then a man is deliberately run down by a car. He is linked to Paul Heindrik and to these other characters. That makes two sudden deaths. One is definitely murder, the other might possibly be.

The viewer knows more than the police but there’s a lot of important stuff that we don’t know, and the motives remain a mystery.

This movie does a fine job of keeping us guessing about the characters. We know that one of them is a criminal but we honestly don’t know about any of the others. Their behaviour might invite suspicion but they might be innocent.

There’s some decent suspense. There’s a killer who is highly likely to kill again and a character we have come to be fond of is in very real danger.

Detective Inspector Simons (Leslie Sands) is one of those thorough coppers who doesn’t take anything at face value and he’s very quick when it comes to spotting connections.

Merton Park Studios never had any problems assembling very competent casts for these movies. It’s Barbara Shelley, looking rather glamorous, who delivers the star power. All the cast members deliver suitably ambiguous performances.

Look out for a young Barbara Windsor in a small role, looking cute wearing nothing but a towel!

Director John Llewellyn Moxey had a prolific career in both British and American TV and helmed several of these Edgar Wallace B-films including the very good Face of a Stranger (1964), Downfall (1964) and the excellent Ricochet (1963). He was a very competent artisan.

John Riddick wrote the well-constructed script for Death Trap as well as scripting others of the Wallace films including The Partner (1963), The Double (1963) and the very fine The Rivals (1963).

Death Trap is included in Network’s Edgar Wallace Mysteries Volume Four DVD set. It gets a very nice transfer.

Death Trap is well-crafted and enjoyable. Highly recommended.