Mystery of Marie Roget (1942)

Mystery of Marie Roget is a 1942 adaptation of an Edgar Allan Poe story. Now there have been countless movies ostensibly based on stories by Poe many of which have only a tenuous connection with the source material. This movie was based on one of Poe’s three detective stories, stories which have a very strong claim to being the first-ever genuine detective stories. Once again, the Poe connection turns out to be somewhat nebulous.

It does at least feature a character named Dupin. But instead of the brilliant amateur detective C. Auguste Dupin this one, Dr Pierre Dupin (Patric Knowles), is a Paris police detective who appears to be a pioneering forensics scientist.

The setting is Paris in 1889. The very popular musical comedy star Marie Roget has disappeared without a trace. After ten days there seems little hope that she will be found alive. And indeed her dead body is finally found.

Since Marie Roget is played by the star of the movie, Maria Montez, we’re not the least bit surprised when she turns up very much alive. This is not a spoiler. This happens right at the beginning of the movie. The supposed disappearance of Marie Roget is merely the start of the story.

There is certainly a mystery involving Marie Roget. The mystery also involves her sister Camille (Nell O’Day), their eccentric grandmother (played by Maria Ouspenskaya), the grandmother’s pet leopard, a young man named Marcel (Edward Norris) who has been romancing both sisters and a middle-aged government official named Beauvais (John Litel) who is making a fool of himself over Marie.

There is also an immense inheritance at stake.

The grandmother is convinced that an attempt will be made to murder Camille. She wants Dupin to act as bodyguard. Dupin agrees reluctantly, mostly because there is something about Marie’s disappearance that puzzles and fascinates him.

Dupin will play the master detective role, with Lloyd Corrigan as the Prefect of Police Gobelin being the comic relief sidekick.

The plot has some reasonable twists and a few very unconvincing elements. It works well enough overall.

At this stage Universal had not yet figured out what to do with Maria Montez, although they did know they wanted to make her a star. She’s probably a bit miscast here. She also doesn’t get a huge amount to do.

Patric Knowles is not wildly exciting but he’s a serviceable hero. Maria Ouspenskaya has fun as the crazy grandmother. The other cast members are adequate without being dazzling.

Rigid genre boundaries did not exist in Poe’s days and in the first of his Dupin detective stories, The Murder in the Rue Morgue, he incorporated elements we might be more inclined to associate with horror. Universal had had some success with an adaptation of that story and obviously hoped to repeat that success. As a result Mystery of Marie Roget does have a few macabre touches (faceless corpses and body parts stolen from the morgue).

The period setting is done quite well although it certainly does not have a noir look. There’s a pretty decent horse-and-carriage chase and a couple of moderately effective action scenes.

Mystery of Marie Roget is enjoyable enough if you don’t set your expectations too high.

It’s included in Kino Lorber’s Film Noir: The Dark Side Of Cinema XVI Blu-Ray boxed set. Needless to say Mystery of Marie Roget has not the remotest connection with film noir. The transfer is nice and there are two audio commentaries.

Tangier (1946)

Tangier is included in Kino Lorber’s Blu-Ray boxed set Film Noir: The Dark Side of Cinema IX. Like most of the movies included in these sets Tangier is not film noir at all. That doesn’t really matter. These days the only way that interesting lesser-known Hollywood movies of that era are going to have any chance of getting released on Blu-Ray is to have the film noir label slapped on them. And there are so many such movies that really do deserve to get released and get seen.

Tangier, made by Universal in 1946, seems superficially like a lower budget version of Casablanca. They have the same kind of exotic North African locale, Casablanca has Rick’s Cafe Americain and Tangier has the Ritz Hotel as an equivalent nightclub setting. The war plays an important role in the background of both films. The plots are not all that similar but one imagines that Universal were hoping that audiences would make the connection.

Tangier was a star vehicle for Maria Montez. She plays a dancer named Rita. As you might expect of a character played by Maria Montez Rita is incredibly glamorous. She’s also a bit of a romantic adventuress.

Rita is the headline act. Her pal and fellow dancer Dolores (Louise Allbritton) is somewhat in her shadow. Rita and Dolores have discovered that if Dolores dons a black wig and wears an exact copy of Rita’s costume she can take Rita’s place in a dance routine. That can be handy on occasions when one of Rita’s romantic adventures calls for her to be somewhere else without her absence from the club being noticed. This will play an important part in the movie’s plot.

In this case Rita wants to do a spot of burglary. She breaks into the room of another guest, a businessman. She finds something very interesting, a very valuable diamond, but the burglary goes awry when her dance partner Ramon (Kent Taylor) shows up. Now there’s a murder that is going to be quite inconvenient.

A lot of the inconvenience will be caused by the local military police chief Colonel Artiego (Preston Foster). The flamboyant and possibly slightly corrupt Artiego is very keen to romance Rita.

Also hoping to romance Rita is disgraced reporter Paul Kenyon (Robert Paige). He’s also hoping to revive his career.

Everyone would like that diamond but most of the characters have other complicated personal agendas as well, such as revenge. The plot is fairly twisty and fairy satisfying.

The acting is mostly pretty good. Robert Paige is a perfectly serviceable male romantic lead. Preston Foster is excellent as the morally ambiguous police chief.

But this is Maria Montez’s movie. As always she puts everything into her performance and there’s nothing naïve about her acting here - she understands the woman she’s playing and she nails her perfectly. And as always Montez projects exoticism and staggering amounts of glamour.

Nothing annoys me more than to see Montez’s movies and performances labelled as camp. That suggests that they were bad movies and that she was a bad actress. She may have had a limited range but within that range she was a very capable actress. And Tangier is a very competently made adventure/romance thriller.

This movie does look like film noir but it’s always important to bear in mind that nobody in 1946 was consciously making film noir or consciously adopting a noir visual style. What we today see as the noir visual style was simply a popular visual approach used at the time in various genres - mysteries, thrillers, private eye movies, spy films etc. Creating a moody effect with shadows was something that cinematographers had mastered and Woody Bredell (who shot this film) certainly knew how to do such things.

This is of course a movie with an exotic setting shot entirely on a sound stage and on the backlot. That’s part of the appeal of movies such as this. This movie does not take place in Tangier, it takes place in the Tangier created by the Hollywood dream factory. It’s a fantasy world of danger, intrigue, adventure and romance. That why we watch movies - to escape into a fantasy world that is much more exciting than reality.

Tangier is not a great movie but it’s solid entertainment and Maria Montez in full-blown glamour gal mode is always watchable.

As usual Kino Lorber have provided a lovely transfer.

Gypsy Wildcat (1944)

Gypsy Wildcat is one of the Technicolor adventure/romance romps that Maria Montez made at Universal in the mid-40s.

Although she was born in the Dominican Republic and was labelled the Caribbean Cyclone there was nothing Caribbean about Maria Montez. She was Spanish. Her father was a Spanish diplomat. She had that particular kind of fiery Spanish beauty. She specialised in exotic roles such as Arabian princesses and Pacific island queens. This time she’s a gypsy girl, but she has a secret.

As with some of her other movies (such as White Savage) the setting is very vague. The story takes place in what is essentially an imaginary land. It’s presumably somewhere in Europe and since there are bows but no firearms we can assume it’s the late Middle Ages. The gypsy tribe led by Anube (Leo Carillo) has arrived in the lands of Baron Tovar (Douglass Dumbrille). But trouble is following them. Carla (Montez) and Valdi (Curt Bois) see a man fall dead from his horse with an arrow in him. A man (we later find that he is Michael, played by Jon Hall) appeared to be in pursuit of the dead man. But Carla and Valdi do not actually see Michael kill this man.

The gypsies naturally find themselves suspected of murder. Michael has taken refuge in their encampment and Carla is determined not to betray him to Baron Tovar’s soldiers. She feels sure that he is no killer.

It all gets a bit complicated. The baron is determined to bring the killer to justice but we suspect that the baron probably knows quite well who the killer really is. We don’t trust this baron.

The gypsies are threatened with all sorts of fates. Some of the gypsies would like to hand Michael over to the baron. Tonio (Peter Coe) would certainly like to do this. He’s in love with Carla and he’s insanely jealous of Michael to whom Carla is clearly attracted.

Of course things are not quite what they seem. There’s that medallion that Carla wears. It has some significance, and Baron Tovar recognises its significance.

There’s plenty of action, the heroine and the hero as well as the gypsies are in great danger and people get thrown into dungeons. There are daring escapes from certain death. It’s all great fun.

It’s a very lighthearted movie although there is one unexpected rather dark moment towards the end.

Nigel Bruce shows up briefly to steal a few scenes as the sheriff who is going to conduct Carla’s wedding, a wedding she wishes to avoid at all costs.

There’s the usual mixture of romance, adventure and comic relief and there’s lots of singing and dancing by the gypsies.

One weakness in this movie is that Baron Tovar as played by Douglass Dumbrille is not the larger-than-life melodrama villain that the story really needed. HIs performance is much too restrained.

Jon Hall is a decent enough hero. Gale Sondergaard is good as the fortune-teller Rhoda.

But this is a Maria Montez movie and she takes centre stage, and that’s as it should be.

Maria Montez became, for a very brief moment, a very big star. It was never going to last because she really was a very limited actress. She’s one of those actresses of whom it’s been said with some justice that they are stars rather than actresses. Miss Montez was never going to have a long career as a star because lighthearted adventure/romance romps were the one thing she could do. But it was something that she did supremely well. She was gorgeous, she had screen presence and she had star quality. For a few brief years her star shone very brightly indeed.

Gypsy Wildcat is included in the new three-movie Maria Montez-Jon Hall Blu-Ray set from Kino Lorber. The transfer is excellent and there’s an audio commentary.

Maria Montez’s movies are all delightful and this is no exception. She doesn’t do any real acting here but she doesn’t need to. She just does the Maria Montez thing that she did so well and it’s enough.

Gypsy Wildcat is thoroughly enjoyable and it’s recommended.

I’ve also reviewed Siren of Atlantis (1949) with is Maria Montez’s best movie by far, a movie in which she does some quite creditable acting. And I've reviewed another fine Maria Montez movie, Arabian Nights.

Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (1944)

Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves is a 1944 adventure romance from Universal, starring Maria Montez. It was shot in Technicolor so this is no B-movie. By Universal standards (they didn’t have the kind of money that MGM or Paramount would have thrown at a production like this) it counts as a lavish costume epic.

You won’t be surprised to learn that the movie has very little (in fact almost nothing) to do with the original story Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (which is of course one of the tales of the Arabian Nights). The movie turns the pauper Ali Baba into the son of the Caliph of Baghdad and it turns the band of cut-throats, thieves and murderers into courageous freedom fighters against the evil Mongols (who do not appear in the original story at all). This allows the writers to add some clumsy wartime propaganda about the crusade for freedom and democracy.

In the movie version the Mongols have captured Baghdad and slain the Caliph. The Caliph’s son Ali escapes. Wandering through the countryside he sees a band of robbers emerge from a cave. The leader of the thieves utters a magic word and the stone portals of the cave close. Once the thieves have ridden off Ali uses the magic word to open the portals again and finds a cave overflowing with treasure. In the original story Ali proceeds to rob the thieves of their treasure but that would make the hero of the story a thief himself and that was obviously not acceptable in a 1944 Hollywood movie.

So instead Ali (renamed Ali Baba by the thieves) persuades the thieves to join him in freeing the land from the wicked Mongols, thus ensuring that freedom will triumph.

Ten years later Ali Baba (now played by Jon Hall) is the de facto leader of the band of thieves and freedom fighters.

The plot gets going when the thieves decide to kidnap the betrothed of the wicked Mongol Khan Hulagu. What Ali doesn’t know is that the lady in question is his childhood sweetheart Princess Amara (Montez).

Amara is Arabian and secretly hates the Mongols and of course she doesn’t want to marry Hulagu. Her father (the treacherous brother of the murdered Caliph) has forced her into it.

There are usual adventures and complications that you expect in a swashbuckler, with Ali and Amara not recognising each at first and not realising that they are destined to be together, no matter the cost.

Director Arthur Lubin handles the action scenes reasonably well. The film slows down a little in the middle.

It soon becomes obvious that this is more of a Robin Hood movie than an Ali Baba movie. The Mongol Khan can be seen as either the wicked Prince John or the equally wicked Sheriff of Nottingham, Princess Amara is obviously Maid Marian and Ali Baba is even more obviously Robin Hood (with the Forty Thieves being Robin’s Merry Men).

I must say that I’m very fond of Maria Montez. No-one is going to claim she’s a great actress but she has the fieriness and the exotic beauty to be perfect for this sort of rôle in this sort of film. Montez was Spanish (although born in the Dominican Republic) but that wan’t going to deter Hollywood from casting her as an Arabian princess. Spanish, Arabian - it was all the same to Hollywood. And in a way they were right. What they needed was an actress who could be exotic and Montez could do that with ease.

This movie reunites Montez with Jon Hall, her co-star in Arabian Nights (also an excellent adventure flick) and Cobra Woman (which is great fun). He’s not Errol Flynn or Tyrone Power but he was OK as a cut-price adventure hero and it’s Montez’s star power that carries the movie anyway (and yes, in this genre she really did have a certain star power).

Turhan Bey is good as Amara’s slave. Kurt Katch is a fairly effective villain as Hulagu. Andy Devine (with his distinctive voice) provides comic relief without being too irritating and without distracting from the adventure and the romance which is what the movie is all about.

I should mention that the opening credits are done in a very clever way.

My copy of the movie is the old Universal Backlot Series DVD which looks very good. There are now both US and UK Blu-Ray releases which I’m sure look even better.

Personally I prefer Arabian Nights with its more interesting visuals and its fairytale atmosphere. Montez also starred in the extremely interesting Siren of Atlantis which is also a bit more interesting than this one.

Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves is still a well-mounted second-tier swashbuckler. Recommended.

Arabian Nights (1942)

Arabian Nights was Universal’s first attempt at a blockbuster movie made using the three-strip Technicolor process. It was a major hit on release in 1942 and it spawned several follow-ups set in the world of Islam. Of course a Universal blockbuster was not going to have the budget of an MGM blockbuster but Universal were very good at making cheap movies look classy and visually arresting.

To say it’s based on the classic tales of The Thousand Nights and One Night is perhaps a bit of an exaggeration. Inspired by these tales might be closer to it. Loosely inspired. In fact producer Walter Wanger cheerfully admitted that it was to a large extent a western with camels. That’s true up to a point, but it has the atmosphere and exoticism of the East and that atmosphere was a major factor in its success.

John Rawlins directed. He was a competent B-movie director and this is one of his few really major productions.

The Caliph Haroun-Al-Raschid (Jon Hall) has put down a revolt by his wicked brother Kamar (Leif Erickson). Kamar wanted his throne but more than that he wanted the dancing girl Scheherazade (Maria Montez). And Scheherazade (listed incorrectly in the credits as Sherezade) does not want to a dancing girl. She wants to be a queen. Kamar was captured but escapes and Haroun-Al-Raschid, badly wounded, is saved from death by the acrobat Ali ben Ali (Sabu). He is nursed back to health by Scheherazade.

Now Haroun-Al-Raschid has to find a way to survive and eventually regain his throne, and of course he has now fallen in love with Scheherazade. They both end up being captured by slavers and have the usual adventures. Kamar is determined to find Scheherazade and he’s willing to go to any lengths to do so. There’s lots of palace treachery, and Haroun-Al-Raschid Scheherazade have lots of narrow escapes. The faithful Ali and a motley assortment of carnival types prove to be vital allies.

Maria Montez was already carving out a niche for herself as a B-movie queen when Arabian Nights turned her into a bona fide star. Montez was a Spanish actress (although born in the Dominican Republic) and her exotic beauty was her major asset. Some might be unkind enough to say it was her only asset but while she was no great actress she was quite adequate for the kinds of rôles she played. In fact she was absolutely perfect for such rôles.

Jon Hall was a bit exotic as well, being half-Tahitian. He was pretty much a male version of Maria Montez - very limited as an actor but a competent adventure movie leading man.

Sabu was the first Indian actor to become a major movie star in the West. And he became a very big star indeed, initially in big budget adventure films for Alexander Korda in England and then in Hollywood. Sabu’s major asset was that he was not only remarkably athletic, he could also act.

The supporting cast has its share of exotics as well, including the Viennese-born half-Turkish half-Jewish Turhan Bey, another actor ideally suited to these sorts of pictures.

The cinematography by Milton R. Krasner (who later won an Oscar and photographed  some pretty spectacular epics) is a definite bonus. The art direction is also excellent. I love the pool in the harem - it looks like a kind of fantasy Club Med.

Of course this being the 40s there has to comic relief, which is provided by Aladdin (constantly looking for his lost lamp) and Sinbad (constantly boring people with his stories of his adventures as a sailor). Casting Shemp Howard (of the Three Stooges) as Sinbad the Sailor is something that could only happen in Hollywood. Since this is clearly a movie intended to appeal to family audiences one can’t complain too much about the comedy.

The Universal Cinema Classics DVD looks splendid. The only extra is an introduction by Robert Osbourne.

Arabian Nights is a B-picture with a bigger budget than usual and that’s why it succeeds. It has the charm of an adventure B-picture but it looks fairly impressive. It’s quite content to provide spectacle and harmless entertainment. It’s not trying to tell us anything profound about the human condition. As well as being commercially successful it picked up four Oscar nominations.

Arabian Nights is a entertaining blend of action, comedy and romance in a romantic fairytale setting. Highly recommended.