The House of the Seven Hawks (1959)

The House of the Seven Hawks is a 1959 British thriller directed by Richard Thorpe.

Robert Taylor is John Nordley, an American who operates a charter boat service in a small British port. His latest job involves a brief cruise in English coastal waters. His passenger is a Dutchman named Anselm. Anselm wants Nordley to take him to the Netherlands. That could cause problems with the British authorities. Nordley had not informed them that he would be heading to a foreign port. But Anselm is paying well.

It’s established from the start that Nordley is a nice guy but perhaps not scrupulously honest. He’s not quite a crook but he can be persuaded to bend the rules and perhaps venture just a little bit outside the strict letter of the law.

He makes it to a Dutch port but by this time his passenger is deceased. Nordley assumes the man had a heart attack.

He’s puzzled when the man’s daughter appears in a small power boat and invites herself aboard his yacht just before he reaches that Dutch port. He’s even more mystified that she seems to be looking for something and having failed to find it she departs very suddenly.

Nordley has already found something curious, a letter with a diagram, among Anselm’s effects.

The Dutch police have astonishing news for Nordley. His passenger was not a man named Anselm. He was a high-ranking Dutch police officer, Inspector Sluiter, engaged in a mysterious investigation in England.

Both Nordley and the Dutch police are puzzled by Sluiter’s actions. Was Sluiter involved in something shady?

Nordley has another surprise in story for him. That girl who came to meet his yacht is no relative to the dead man. She is Elsa (Linda Christian). And now another woman has shown up who really is Inspector Sluiter’s daughter, Constanta (Nicole Maurey). Nordley is not sure that he trusts either woman. They’re not sure that they can trust him.

The mysterious Captain Rohner (Eric Pohlmann) is interested in that letter as well. Nordley has no doubt that Captain Rohner cannot be trusted at all but he is open to the idea of a deal, if the terms are favourable.

That letter is a key, in a metaphorical sense. A key to something interesting, fascinating and valuable. Probably not legal, but nobody involved in this tale is overly concerned with legalities.

Robert Taylor is ideally cast. He did the world-weary slightly morally corrupted thing so very well in so many movies at this period and he does it extremely well here.

Eric Pohlmann is always an absolute joy to watch and he’s in fine form here. Nicole Maurey and Linda Christian are good. Philo Hauser is fun as Nordley’s useful but very disreputable and thoroughly untrustworthy friend Charlie Ponz.

The plot is nicely worked out. There’s not much action (although there is some). Mostly the movie relies on an atmosphere of double-dealing and general moral murkiness.

This is a low-key but fine entertaining thriller and I do enjoy nautical thrillers so it’s highly recommended.

The Warner Archive DVD offers a very satisfactory transfer.

This movie was based on the 1952 novel The House of the Seven Flies by Victor Canning, a now forgotten but very fine British thriller writer.

Dead Calm (1989)

Dead Calm is a 1989 Australian suspense thriller directed by Phillip Noyce, based on a novel by Charles Williams.

It’s a nautical thriller. John Ingram (Sam Neill) is an Australian naval officer whose son was killed in a car accident. His wife Rae (Nicole Kidman) survived the accident. The accident was not her fault. They both need time to recover. A cruise on John’s yacht seems like the perfect answer.

They spot a black schooner. A guy in a dinghy rows across from the schooner. He is Hughie Warriner (Billy Zane). He claims to be the sole survivor of a bizarre tragedy. The other five people on board the schooner died of food poisoning. Hughie claims the schooner is slowly sinking.

John is no fool. He’s spent twenty-five years at sea. He isn’t the slightest bit convinced by Hughie’s story. He locks Hughie into a cabin and rows across to the schooner to investigate. It becomes apparent that very bad very strange things went on aboard that schooner. Meanwhile Hughie has escaped and he’s hijacked John’s yacht, with Rae aboard.

John is stranded on the schooner. There is no wind and the engine doesn’t work. Rae is stuck on the yacht with a guy who could be merely a bit unbalanced but could be a total psycho. The latter seems more and more likely. Either way he’s extremely dangerous.

There are now essentially two stories going on. John, on board the schooner, tries to unravel what really happened on that unlucky vessel. It seems to have been some sort of sex cruise, with some very dangerous games being played.

Rae, on the yacht, has to find some way to subdue or trick Hughie so that she can stay alive and rescue her husband. This is becoming rather urgent. The schooner is slowly sinking.

Hughie’s intentions are frightening because they’re unknown. He might be a killer, he might have been a victim. He may be sexually obsessed with Rae. Or, more worrying, he may have created some weird romantic fantasy in his head, a fantasy in which he and Rae sail the South Pacific together. He may intend to kill Rae. He may intend to rape her.

It’s Rae’s story that becomes the main focus. That puts a lot of pressure on Nicole Kidman who was at that time a young relatively inexperienced actress and unknown outside Australia. She is more than equal to the challenge. This is the movie that demonstrated that Kidman could easily carry a film as a lead actress. And Rae is an interesting character. She’s no action heroine, just a resourceful woman fighting for survival. And she’s fighting to save her man. That will make her fight very hard indeed. Kidman makes Rae likeable and convincing. Rae could make things easier for herself by simply killing Hughie but, quite realistically, she is very reluctant to take that step. She’s an ordinary woman. Killing does not come naturally or easily to her.

Rae has one thing going for her. She’s a Navy wife. She knows boats and she knows the sea.

While Kidman is the standout performer both Sam Neill and Billy Zane are excellent.

These three people are the only significant characters in the movie, in fact for most of the running time they’re the only characters. The three leads had to be good and they had to work well together. They’re all equal to the job.

The cinematography is gorgeous. The location shooting was done on the Great Barrier Reef and the natural beauty nicely counterpoints the unnatural horrors.

The only character developed in any detail is Rae. Having lost her only child she comes to the realisation that her husband is all she’s got, but she loves him so that’s enough. She will do whatever it takes to save him. Nicole Kidman never goes over-the-top but she does a fine job letting us know what makes Rae tick.

We don’t know exactly what makes Hughie tick but that’s a plus rather than a minus. It makes him more frightening. It also means that Rae cannot reason with him.

Dead Calm doesn’t try to do anything too fancy. It’s a suspense thriller and it doesn’t get bogged down with extraneous details to any great extent. It just happens to be an extremely well-executed suspense thriller. It’s obviously a must-see if you’re a Nicole Kidman fan. Highly recommended.

The DVD release is barebones but the transfer is very good. There’s been a Blu-Ray release as well.

Philip Noyce went on to direct the criminally underrated erotic thriller Sliver (1993).

Campbell’s Kingdom (1957)

Campbell’s Kingdom is a slightly unconventional 1957 British thriller. It was based on the 1952 Hammond Innes novel of the same name. Innes is now largely forgotten but he was one of the great thriller writers.

This is a frontier adventure tale of sorts. Bruce Campbell (Dirk Bogarde) arrives from England to take up his inheritance in the wilds of Canada. His inheritance is known as Campbell’s Kingdom. It’s a completely worthless tract of land, but Campbell doesn’t think it’s worthless. His now deceased grandfather thought there was oil there. Nobody ever believed him. His grandfather was accused of fraud and sent to prison. But Bruce Campbell believes his grandfather was right.

He has his own reasons for believing and he has his own reasons for being determined to find that oil. Those reasons do not include greed. Even if there is oil Bruce Campbell will never see any money from it.

His immediate problem is Owen Morgan (Stanley Baker). Morgan, a very shady construction contractor, has a contract to build a dam. The dam will flood Campbell’s Kingdom. After that, even if there is oil there, no-one will ever be able to be able to find it or access it.

The most recent geological survey by the seismological surveyor, Bladen (Michael Craig), confirmed what everybody knew. There is no oil. But a conversation with Bladen arouses Campbell’s suspicions. And that conversation arouses Bladen’s suspicions as well. He is an honest man. Perhaps he has been deceived in some way as well.

Test drilling would provide the answer but in a few short weeks the whole valley will be underwater. Even worse, Morgan controls all access to Campell’s kingdom. There is no way to do any test drilling. But Campbell has a plan.

And he has the man to help him carry it out. James MacDonald (James Robertson Justice) is a wildcat oil driller and he’s a man prepared to take a huge gamble.

This is a thriller with almost no violence at all. There’s crookedness and skullduggery but not violence. There is however plenty of action and excitement. And explosions! And there are two race-against-time elements. Ralph Thomas was the director. He made fine movies in lots of different genres, in fact in just about every genre you can name including some good thrillers. It’s no surprise that he is able to get plenty of thrills out of this story.

Dirk Bogarde might seem an odd casting choice but it works. This is a clash between two men representing very different types of masculinity. Stanley Baker as Morgan is aggressive, overbearing, hard-driving and overtly macho. Bruce Campbell is quiet, passive and self-effacing but he does not lack courage and under the surface is a steely determination and an iron will. This is a guy who never backs down and never gives up. Which is why the casting of Bogarde works - he is the perfect counterpoint to Baker.

Michael Craig plays Bladen as a nice guy but he’s also tougher than he looks. James Robertson Justice is of course a delight.

There is, naturally, a girl. Jean Lucas (Barbara Murray) played a part in Bruce Campbell’s past, a part of which Campbell knew nothing. For a number of reasons she knows she cannot play a part in his future. This is in spite of the fact that she fallen instantly head over heels in love with him, and he’s obviously pretty fond of her. Barbara Murray plays her as feisty and likeable.

Look at for Sid James in a small role.

Hammond Innes always made superb use of either nautical settings or settings in the frozen wastes of the North. He had a real feel for such settings, and that’s reflected in this movie. There’s some lovely location shooting, all done in Italy (with the Dolomites standing in for Canada). The special effects are extremely well done.

It’s refreshing and unusual to see a movie in which the oil men are the good guys.

Campbell’s Kingdom is unusual enough to be interesting, it looks great, it has excitement and some romance and some fine acting. Highly recommended.

The Blu-Ray from the now defunct Network is still available and it looks lovely.

The Eyes of Laura Mars (1978)

The Eyes of Laura Mars is an important movie for several reasons. The obvious one is that it was scripted by John Carpenter. Carpenter was making a name for himself as a screenwriter at that time. His directing career would soon take off as well. In a very brief period he would write the screenplay for The Eyes of Laura Mars, would write and direct the TV-movie Someone’s Watching Me and then write and direct Halloween. But The Eyes of Laura Mars was his first real experience working for a major studio on a major production.

The script had apparently been floating around for a while and a lot of writers aside from Carpenter were involved at some stage. Which means it may not be fair to blame Carpenter for some of the deficiencies in the script.

Irvin Kershner was offered the directing job. He was an experienced director although not perhaps a terribly distinguished one. He has the distinction of having directed the worst Bond movie of the pre-Daniel Craig era, the trainwreck that was Never Say Never Again. Would The Eyes of Laura Mars have been better with Carpenter directing? Perhaps.

The Eyes of Laura Mars is also interesting because it has a slight giallo feel.

This movie is also important because although it was made in 1978 it has very slight hints of the 80s. It’s like a proto-80s movie. In some ways it’s very 70s. New York City as a garbage dump, a world of violence, sleaze and squalor. But Laura Mars is rich and famous. Her world is a world of glamour, style, high fashion and money.

And it’s a suspense thriller with hints of the supernatural (or at least the paranormal), something you see in a few European movies of the 60s and 70s but don’t expect in a Hollywood movie.

Laura Mars (Faye Dunaway) is a very famous very successful photographer. It appears that she works in both the worlds of fashion photography and art photography. She’s a celebrity. And she’s controversial. Her photographs depict both high fashion and savage violence.

While doing a fashion shoot she has a vision. It has happened once before. A vision of murder. On the first occasion the murder actually did take place. And now it’s happened again.

The idea of someone seeing visions of murders before they happen was far from original. It is however given a few twists here. The visions are linked to her photography. If a photographer is a voyeur then she’s a voyeur of murder, but a kind of psychic voyeur of murder.

She finds out from cop Lieutenant John Neville (Tommy Lee Jones) that many of her earlier photographs bear uncanny similarities to police crime scene photos, photos that no-one outside the police department has seen. She may have been having these visions of future murders for quite some time without being aware of it.

What really freaks her out is that her interest in violent subject matter is a comparatively recent thing and she can’t explain why she suddenly developed this interest. It was just something that she felt compelled to do.

Laura will have further visions and there will be further murders.

Laura herself is not a suspect but it’s obvious that the murders have some kind of connection to her.

I have mixed feelings about Faye Dunaway but that may not be her fault. Apart from Chinatown she had a knack for being in movies that I really disliked. I don’t think of her as a bad actress. She’s pretty good here.

The movie does have a few definite weaknesses. The paranormal element could have been really interesting but is not developed fully. The screenplay really does have that “subjected to numerous rewrites” feel, because in fact it really did go through countless rewrites. The various thematic elements in the story, potentially interesting in themselves, just don’t quite come together as a coherent whole.

There is a clue early on that makes the identity of the killer very very obvious.

Perhaps the best thing about this movie is that the Laura Mars photographs were done by the great Helmut Newton. They’re superb. The two most successful and striking scenes are the fashion shoot scenes.

This movie has a few problems but don’t be put off by that. It’s an exceptionally interesting film that just doesn’t feel like a 1978 Hollywood movie. The giallo influence is very obvious and the world of high fashion figures in many notable gialli. The voyeurism theme is handled extremely well. I liked the way Laura is a voyeur but not just in the obvious ways (which she’s intelligent enough to be aware of) but in ways of which he’s not consciously aware. She is is some ways a passive voyeur - the images control her rather than her being in control of the images. And that’s disturbing for a photographer. Photographers manipulate reality but Laura is herself being manipulated.

The Eyes of Laura Mars is well worth seeing. Highly recommended.

Non-Stop New York (1937)

Non-Stop New York is a 1937 British murder mystery thriller with much of the action taking place on a new highly advanced transatlantic flying boat.

Jennie Carr (Anna Lee) is an English chorus girl in New York. She’s down on her luck. In fact she’s starving. Then she meets a friendly lawyer. He invites her back to his apartment with the promise of a meal. Surprisingly his intentions seem to be honourable.

We soon find out that he’s a lawyer with some shady associations.

Jennie also encounters a tramp, stealing food from the lawyer’s apartment.

A bunch of rather unpleasant men burst in, it leads to murder and the intruders order Jennie to make herself scarce. The men were of course gangsters.

The chief gangster Hugo Brant later decides it would be unwise to allow a witness to live. Jennie doesn’t know it but she’s marked down to be rubbed out.

Meanwhile the tramp, who is wholly innocent, is arrested and convicted of the murder. He is to be executed.

Lots of complications follow in quick succession. Jennie ends up in prison back in England. She isn’t in for long, but long enough for her not to realise that she is now the missing star witness in a murder trial. And then she finds Scotland Yard Inspector Jim Grant (John Loder) won’t believe her.

All these complications serve to being a motley group of people together on a new luxury airliner capable of flying non-stop to New York. It’s a race against time for all of them. There’s Jennie, there are gangsters who are after her, there’s a blackmailer and a Scotland Yard cop.

It’s all fairly lighthearted and the plot is serviceable rather than brilliant but there are jus enough complications to it to ensure that there is always something happening. The pacing doesn’t falter at any stage in the movie’s modest 69-minute running time.

Mercifully the comic relief is kept to a minimum. It’s mostly provided by a young boy who is a musical prodigy but he is actually quite amusing.

Anna Lee had a very long career but never quite achieved the stardom she deserved. In this movie she’s funny, sweet, charming, sexy and adorable. She has that ability to light up the screen.

Jon Loder is likeable as the Scotland Yard cop. Francis L. Sullivan is deliciously sinister as gangster Hugo Brant and Frank Cellier is fun as sleazy blackmailer Sam Pryor.

The mighty six-engined flying boat looks reasonably impressive and the cool thing about it is that it features a promenade deck - you can step outside for some air mid-flight. It makes a fine setting for a crime thriller and it adds what would have been at the time an ultra-modern feel.

There’s an effective and exciting mid-air action climax.

This is an unassuming but entertaining lightweight thriller with some humour and some romance. It really is good fun. The delightful Anna Lee and the aerial setting are bonuses. Highly recommended.

You have to love the poster - a nude Anna Lee rendered as an aeroplane.

This movie can be found if you’re prepared to do a bit of looking.

Twisted Nerve (1968)

Twisted Nerve is a 1968 British suspense thriller starring Hayley Mills, although it’s a bit more than just a straightforward suspense film.

Martin Durnley (Hywel Bennett) is a slightly odd young man. His brother Georgie had to be put away in a home. Georgie suffers from a genetic abnormality. He still has the mind of a toddler.

There are perhaps a number of reasons for Martin’s oddness. His father died, his mother remarried, and he hates and despises his stepfather. The family is extremely rich, so Martin has always been coddled and spoilt and the family money has always come to his rescue when he gets into scrapes. It’s also possible that he has suffered from anxiety, fearing he might be abnormal in some way as well. HIs mother has always feared that might be the case - perhaps her anxieties have rubbed off on Martin. Martin is in fact rather intelligent, but he’s irresponsible, difficult, rebellious and trouble-prone.

Quite by accident he encounters a very pretty very charming young woman, Susan Harper (Hayley Mills), in a toy shop. Martin steals a very cheap toy and is caught. He pretends to be simple-minded and pretends that his name is Georgie. In fact he has in a way adopted his brother’s identity. It works. The store manager is sympathetic and Susan feels sorry for him that she pays for the stolen toy. Martin has no difficulty in fooling people into thinking that he has the mind of a five-year-old.

Martin starts following Susan. He meets her again. Susan lives in a slightly unusual household as well - she lives with her mother Joan (Billie Whitelaw), a young Indian medical student who is the lodger, and also Joan Harper’s live-in lover Gerry Henderson (Barry Foster).

Martin turns up on the doorstep, in the pouring rain, more child-like than ever and apparently with nowhere to go. Susan insists that he be allowed to stay. So he moves in.

This is where the movie gets interesting, with all sorts of disturbing sexual tensions. Both Susan and her mother Joan think Martin has the mind of a small child but they also cannot help noticing that physically he is a very attractive young man with a rather nice body. Susan isn’t at all sure how she feels. Martin does get a bit physically affectionate at times. Joan is definitely sexually attracted to him, which of course makes her rather confused and uneasy.

We know this is not going to end well. What makes it more interesting is that we really don’t know at first just how genuinely child-like Martin is. Intellectually, in some ways, he’s an adult. Physically he’s an adult. We always have to keep in mind the complexity of the characterisation. Martin is pretending to be child-like both intellectually and emotionally but he really is child-like emotionally.

It’s obvious that his mother has never wanted him to grow up, and it’s obvious that he has discovered certain advantages in not growing up. He can get away with being irresponsible. He can behave like a naughty small boy (as he does when he steals the cheap toy) and get away with it. He can remain in many ways a spoilt little boy.

It’s very clear that this has had consequences for his sexual development. He has never learnt to deal with women on adult level. He has never even got as far as dealing with girls on the level of an awkward teenager. He deals with females on the level of a small child but he is physically mature and has normal male sexual urges. It’s obvious that he regards sex with guilt, shame and fear.

He is not only probably a virgin - he appears to have major guilt, shame and fear in regard to any kind of sexual arousal, so he cannot even satisfy his sexual urges through self-pleasuring. The early scene with the mirror, and the final scene with another mirror, make it obvious that a soon as he becomes sexually aroused the guilt, shame and fear kick in and he can go no further. He has at least two opportunities for sex in the movie and in both cases he cannot go through with it.

As a result he feels inadequate, which accounts for his odd fixation on Tarzan and on bodybuilding. They’re wish-fulfilment fantasies of normal masculinity.

The writing credits include two very notable names. Roger Marshall was one of the greatest of all British television writers, the man who created the best TV private eye series ever made, Public Eye. Leo Marks wrote the notorious (and superb) Peeping Tom and there are definite similarities between Peeping Tom and Twisted Nerve. The experienced and reliable Roy Boulting directed.

This was an incredibly fascinating era in British cinema. British censorship in the 60s was draconian. This started to relax right at the end of the decade. By the late 60s British filmmakers were increasingly restive under these restrictions. They wanted to make grown-up movies, and they wanted to deal with love, sex and human relationships honesty and openly. This led to a spate of fascinating movies including All the Right Noises (1970), Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush (1968), Baby Love (1969) and the superb I Start Counting (1969). And although it’s usually dismissed as a sex comedy I would add Pete Walker’s excellent Cool It, Carol! (1970) to the list.

It was also a time of media frenzy about the “permissive society” which led to interesting if depressing movies such as Her Private Hell (1968) and Permissive (1970).

Twisted Nerve is a very dark extremely well-executed suspense thriller with a nicely subtle sense of creeping menace. Highly recommended.

Umbrella’s Blu-Ray offers a lovely transfer with a number of extras.

Le Boucher (1970)

Le Boucher (The Butcher) is a 1970 Claude Chabrol film.

Chabrol was associated with the French New Wave (Nouvelle Vague). He was a fanatical admirer of Hitchcock. You’ll often find him described as the French Hitchcock. Having seen half a dozen of his movies I have no idea why anyone would see him as a French Hitchcock. In the films of his that I’ve seen Chabrol’s approach does not even slightly resemble Hitchcock’s.

That’s not intended as a criticism of Chabrol. Just because he admired Hitchcock does not mean that he wanted to slavishly copy Hitchcock’s techniques. Chabrol had his own ideas on how to make movies. Whether or not you think they were good ideas is up to you, but they were his own ideas.

Hitchcock’s approach to suspense was invariably to give the audience vital information denied to the protagonist. That creates fear by making us fearful on behalf of the protagonist - we know he is in danger but he doesn’t know that.

In this movie we know only what the protagonist knows. We discover things as she discovers them.

Helen (Stéphane Audran) is the school headmistress in a small French town. At a wedding she meets the local butcher, Popaul (Jean Yanne). They flirt in a tentative way. A day or so later they have dinner together. There’s obviously some attraction there, and they like each other. Helen is not the sort of woman who jumps straight into bed with a man. Popaul is not the sort of man who expects a woman to do that. He behaves like a perfect gentleman. They start to become fond of one another but they’re both taking things slowly. We slowly come to like both of them as well.

What I like is the way Chabrol focuses for so much of the movie on this slowly blossoming romance between Helen and Popaul. The unsettling elements are introduced in the background and appear to have no connection whatsoever with these two people.

We get a wonderful idyllic scene of the children playing in the schoolyard supervised by their pretty young headmistress. She obviously loves the children and they love her. This is a peaceful harmless sleepy little town.

Then we see the two black police vans pull up in the background, and the gendarmes have a police dog with them. A police dog always means something very bad - perhaps a missing child, perhaps a search for a body.

We find out, purely because one of the kids has heard this from his dad, that the dead body of a woman has been found in the woods. This has nothing to do with our two tentative lovers but we are now just a little uneasy.

The unease slowly builds as Helen discovers something that may be a clue or it may not be. We know no more about it than Helen does.

But we are getting worried. There are more murders.

There are a couple of lovely visual moments - the dripping blood scene is superbly done.

While it’s not a Hitchcock-style thriller there is an intriguing echo of Vertigo - the shots of the back of Stéphane Audran’s dead, focusing on her hair, mirroring those famous shots of Kim Novak in Vertigo. Given Chabrol’s fondness for Hitchcock it’s a certain that he added these shots as a playful reference. Chabrol liked playing cinematic games.

And Stéphane Audran is the Hitchcock Ice Blonde type, so it works.

This is very much a slow-burn thriller.

There isn’t much actual suspense, in fact hardly any. But there is a growing sense of dread. In that respect this movie perhaps functions more like a horror movie than a thriller.

Don’t think of this as a Hitchcock-style thriller. Just enjoy it as a Chabrol movie. It’s a very good Chabrol movie. Highly recommended.

The old Pathfinder DVD offers a perfectly acceptable 16:9 enhanced transfer. The availability of Chabrol’s movies in English-friendly versions has always been rather spotty.

I’ve also reviewed Chabrol’s fascinating but eccentric The Champagne Murders (1967) and the extremely interesting Innocents With Dirty Hands (1975).

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.

Bulldog Drummond’s Secret Police (1939)

Bulldog Drummond’s Secret Police is a very late entry in Paramount’s popular Bulldog Drummond B-movie cycle.

Captain Hugh Drummond (John Howard) is about to marry his lady love, Phyllis Clavering (Heather Angel). He has decided that they will live in his ancient ancestral home, Rockingham Tower, which has been closed up for years.

A tedious ongoing gag in these movies is that Hugh and Phyllis are always about to get married but then Hugh gets caught up in another crime-fighting or espionage adventure and the wedding gets postponed once again.

In this case the first sign that wedding bells might not be in the offing after all is the arrival of a dotty historian, Professor Downie (Forrester Harvey), who claims to have found evidence that there is a fabulous treasure hidden somewhere in Rockingham Tower. It is the treasure of King Charles I, concealed there after the Battle of Naseby in 1645.

However there is dirty work afoot, there is murder and it is clear that someone else is after that treasure.

To find the treasure Hugh will have to crack a fiendishly complex 17th century cypher. Everybody knows that Rockingham Tower is riddled with secret passageways but no-one knows how to find them.

After several further murders it all leads up to a fairly exciting action finale.

The character Bulldog Drummond was created by H. C. McNeile (using the pseudonym Sapper) in 1920 and featured in a wildly successful series of thriller novels. The character in these B-movies bears no resemblance whatsoever to McNeile’s character. McNeile’s Drummond is a larger-than-life character, much more ruthless, much edgier, much rougher, much more boisterous and rambunctious and has a schoolboy sense of humour. A far cry from the bland debonair upper-class nonentity of the movies.

The movies are played mostly for comedy. In fact almost entirely for comedy. This was the same mistake that made the 1930s Perry Mason movies almost unwatchable. Bulldog Drummond’s Secret Police is mostly comic relief with a few thriller elements thrown in.

There is quite a bit of humour in the novels. The difference is that the humour in the novels is actually funny and it doesn’t overwhelm the thriller stories.

The novels also have properly constructed properly thought-out plots which is more than can be said for the paper-thin plot of this movie.

John Howard is not a terrible actor but he’s totally wrong for the part. Reginald Denny is exasperatingly tiresome and unfunny as Hugh’s pal Algy Longworth. Elizabeth Patterson as Phyllis’s aunt adds even more unnecessary and irritating comic relief.

Worst of all we get an extended dream sequence which is just an excuse to pad out the running time with clips from earlier movies in the series.

The action sequences at the end are done quite well but they’re not enough to compensate for the tedium one has to go through first.

Bulldog Drummond’s Secret Police is a chore to watch. I’d avoid this one.

I have a copy of this movie in a Mill Creek 50-movie pack. The transfer is as you’d expect - it’s watchable but rather poor.

This movie is ostensibly based on H. C. McNeile’s 1929 novel Temple Tower but has almost nothing in common with the novel. Don’t judge the Bulldog Drummond novels on the basis of these mediocre B-movies. They’re highly entertaining. I’ve reviewed Temple Tower elsewhere and it’s very good.

Play Misty For Me (1971)

Play Misty For Me, released in 1971, was Clint Eastwood’s directorial debut. And a very impressive debut it was.

This is a stalker movie, but it’s a man being stalked by a woman. It's also a psychological thriller. Dave (Clint Eastwood) is a DJ. He plays requests. A woman keeps ringing, asking him to play Errol Garner’s Misty. She rings constantly. Then Dave sees a woman in a bar. She looks like she’d be worth picking up. He picks her up. He finds out her name is Evelyn. She’s the Misty lady. That should perhaps have been the first red flag, the fact that she’s some kind of obsessed fan should have been the first indication that maybe she can be a bit obsessive.

Dave isn’t thinking that far ahead. He just wants a simple one night stand with no complications and Evelyn assures him that that’s all she wants.

The next day she turns up on his doorstep. His nightmare has begun. There is simply no way to convince her that this was never anything but a casual hook-up. She is convinced that he’s madly in love with her. When he tries to make it clear that he has zero interest in any kind of relationship she takes it badly. Really badly. And when Evelyn takes things badly the results tend to be spectacularly messy.

Dave isn’t scared yet, just exasperated, but the terror is about to begin.

Dave has a girlfriend, Tobie (Donna Mills). He’s in love with Tobie. But Dave has this problem with women - he just can’t keep away from them. Dave is no Boy Scout, but on the other hand his relationship with Tobie hasn’t really reached the committed relationship stage. Tobie knows he sleeps with other women. She hasn’t really made a commitment either. It’s not like having a one night stand with Evelyn is some heinous moral crime.

Everything would be fine, except that for Evelyn it’s not a one night stand. It’s not even an affair. It’s true love, of the totally obsessive variety. As Jessica Walters puts it in an interview included as an extra, as far as Evelyn is concerned she has to have this man or she will die. Evelyn has a very tenuous grip on reality. She believes what she wants to believe and she hears what she wants to hear. She’s unstable, with the potential to go right off the rails, but Dave can’t foresee any of that.

Adrian Lyne’s 1987 Fatal Attraction is more or less a remake of Play Misty For Me. Play Misty For Me is by far the better film for a variety of reasons. Clint Eastwood is a much better director than Adrian Lyne. As an actor he’s much better cast than Michael Douglas in Fatal Attraction. He’s a much more sympathetic hero and we need to be on his side. Michael Douglas could be extraordinary in the right role but playing a basically decent regular guy was not within his range.

And Jessica Walters gives a vastly better performance than Glenn Close - she manages to be both more terrifying and more sympathetic. Evelyn is a deranged psycho but Walters gives her an odd vulnerability. Her performance is both more over-the-top and at the same time more subtle and more believable. It’s a great performance.

Eastwood’s own performance is also excellent. Dave is no macho action hero type. He’s an easy-going rather laid-back guy. He’s totally out of his depth in this situation. And he’s frightened. He feels like a trapped animal which is pretty much what he is. It’s an effective low-key performance.

Look out for Don Siegel, who directed Eastwood in some of his most famous roles, in a small acting part as a bartender.

This being Eastwood’s first movie as a director he was given a very small budget. He wasn’t bothered by this. As far as he was concerned what mattered was that he was going to be allowed to direct it. He knew the lady (Jo Heims) who had written the original treatment and it was something he really wanted to direct. He does a very assured job.

Eastwood understands the basic technique of suspense. We, the audience, know what Evelyn is going to do next but the other characters don’t. The other characters, not just Dave but the cops as well, continually underestimate the dangers. They just don’t realise how crazy she is. The audience however knows that she really is incredibly dangerous and incredibly crazy.

One thing I love about this movie is that we get no backstory at all on Evelyn. No half-baked Freudian explanations for her behaviour, no stuff about childhood traumas. That kind of thing always ends up being unconvincing and phoney. We have to judge Evelyn entirely on what she does and says in the course of the story. I like that.

This is a good solid suspense thriller. Jessica Walters is extraordinary. Highly recommended.

Universal’s Blu-Ray looks terrific and there are some very decent extras.