Lured (1947)

Lured was directed by Douglas Sirk in 1947 but if you’re expecting to see signs of the Sirk style of the 50s then I’m afraid you won’t find much of it in this movie. And if you’re expecting a film noir (and it’s labelled as such on both wikipedia and IMDb) then you’re going to be similarly disappointed.

It’s a straight mystery/suspense thriller. The good news is that while it’s no masterpiece it’s still worth seeing.

Sandra Carpenter (Lucille Ball) is an American working as a taxi dancer in London. A serial killer has been at work in London, finding his victims by placing ads in the personal columns. When he kills he sends Scotland Yard a poem describing his latest murder. His latest victim happens to be Sandra’s best friend.



Inspector Harley Temple (Charles Coburn) is increasingly desperate to find some lead. When he brings Sandra in for questioning he realises immediately he’s dealing with a smart level-headed woman. Just the kind of woman Scotland Yard needs. Sandra Carpenter finds herself on the payroll of the Metropolitan Police, working a very dangerous assignment indeed - she is going to be used as bait to catch the poet killer.

Inspector Temple picks likely looking personal ads for her to answer, bringing her into contact with an assortment of men all of whom are sufficiently suspicious that any one of them could conceivably be the killer.



Sandra hasn’t yet found the murderer, but she has found love, with one of the suspects. Robert Fleming (George Sanders) runs a very up-market night-club. It’s a profitable business but one suspects that his motivation for running a night-club has as much to do with meeting attractive young women as it has to do with making money. He’s a self-confessed cad, but does that make him a killer?

Another suspect is his business partner Julian Wilde (Cedric Hardwicke). There’s also a sleazy butler who recruits parlour maids for a white slavery ring. And an equally sleazy South American businessman who runs the white slavery ring. And there’s a slightly deranged dress designer (Boris Karloff) who uses the personal column to find young ladies to model his dresses for him, in private. They all seem like plausible suspects.



Of course it’s inevitable that the killer will choose Sandra as his next victim, and he taunts Inspector temple by sending him the death poem before he does the killing. Now Scotland Yard must find the killer before he gets to Sandra.

For 1947 the movie does have a rather decadent, even slightly perverse, feel. Apart from the white slavery angle there’s also the fact that the killer bases his death poems on the poems of Baudelaire.



Lucille Ball is surprisingly good. She plays it straight. There is mercifully no trace of the Lucy of her later comedy TV series. She’s feisty and likeable. George Sanders is of course delightful. Charles Coburn seems to be in every old movie I see these days, playing either loveable rogues or, as in this case, loveable police detectives. Boris Karloff is creepy and sympathetic, as only Karloff could be. As an added bonus you get George Zucco - as a heroic Scotland Yard cop.

This was apparently a remake of a 1939 Robert Siodmak movie, Pièges. The Blackhorse Entertainment Region 2 DVD doesn’t have any extras but picture quality is very acceptable. If you can find this one for a reasonable price it’s worth grabbing. As I said at the beginning it’s no masterpiece but it’s solid entertainment.

Follow the Fleet (1936)

Follow the Fleet came about halfway through the cycle of RKO Fred and Ginger musicals. I’ve now seen five of these movies and this one is, so far, my least favourite.

Bake Baker (Fred Astaire) and Sherry Martin (Ginger Rigers) had been a successful dance partnership, until Bake made the mistake of asking Sherry to marry him. Her refusal brought about the break-up of their professional relationship and Bake was so cut up he ran away to sea and joined the navy. Now the fleet is back in port and Bake is trying to rekindle the old partnership.

Sherry has a sister named Connie (Harriet Hilliard). When Sherry headed off to the big city to find fame, fortune, fun and romance Connie stayed home in the Midwest. Now Connie has decided she’d like some of that glamour and excitement herself. The trouble is, she looks like a prim and proper school teacher. Sherry assures her this is no problem, and gives her friend Kitty Collins (Lucille Ball) the task of doing a makeover on Connie.



This is the first of the movie’s problems. Post-makeover Connie certainly looks glamorous enough but this can’t disguise the fact that Harriet Hilliard has zero screen charisma. This wouldn’t be a problem except that Connie is not a minor character. The subplot involving her attempted romance with Bake’s shipmate Bilge Smith (Randolph Scott) takes up a considerable portion of the movie.

Connie decides that the best way to win a sailor’s heart is by giving him a ship. She just happens to have one. It was her father’s. It’s currently at the bottom of the sea but it’s salvageable and she intends to salvage it and refurbish it and then Bilge will just have to marry her.



Meanwhile Bake’s efforts to further Sherry’s career are coming close to ruining it instead. To save her career and to save Connie’s ship he realises there’s only one thing to do - to put on a show! That’s about it as far as plot goes.

The second big problem with this movie is that the Astaire-Rogers relationship lacks the fire that it has in their best movies.



The third problem is that the musical and dance numbers aren’t quite up to standard. The Let’s Face the Music and Dance number is much-praised, and rightly so, and it’s nice to see Ginger doing a solo dance routine (the only one she does in the entire series) but some of the other dance sequences aren’t as inspired as those in their other movies. There are also a couple of very insipid songs performed rather uninterestingly by Harriet Hilliard. Irving Berlin provided the slightly uneven score.

Yet another problem is that at 110 minutes the movie it a touch too long and the pacing falters at times.



There’s also the slightly questionable decision to take the stars out of their accustomed sophisticated surroundings. Fred Astaire chewing gum just isn’t the real Fred Astaire.

Having said all that, even a subpar Fred and Ginger movie is still a Fred and Ginger movie and there’s still plenty of entertainment value here. It’s still a good movie and a must-see for Fred and Ginger fans (and I certainly include myself among that company). Just don’t expect it to reach the heights of Top Hat or Swing Time or Shall We Dance.

The Warner Home Video DVD release includes a brief documentary featurette.

The Second Woman (1950)

Ignore the fact that The Second Woman has been claimed by some folks as a film noir. Accept it as a Hitchcockian psychological thriller and you’ll have a reasonably good time with it.

It was made in 1950, when Hitchcock was very hot box office indeed. So this one rips off not one, but no less than three, Hitchcock hits. OK, so it isn’t as good as a genuine Hitchcock movie. Most films aren’t. It’s still fun.

It starts off seeming like an almost direct steal from Rebecca - the voiceover of a woman talking about the past, the ruin of a spectacular house, then the story starts in flashback.



The house in question belongs to Jeff Cohalan, a brooding hero still mourning the tragic death of his bride Vivian a year earlier. We don’t see her, just a painting of her. He finds it painful to talk about her. More shades of Rebecca.

The flashback takes us back to a meeting on a train, where charming but moodily tragic architect Jeff Cohalan (Robert Young) encounters Ellen Foster (Betsy Drake). He’s just been chatting to an old friend of his, a psychiatrist, who is very worried about him. Now we’re starting to get into Spellbound territory. We’re introduced to the idea that Cohalan may be more than just troubled, he may be seriously unstable or even quite mad.



Cohalan and Ellen hit it off pretty well. He even invites her into his house, an event that causes general amazement since he has allowed no-one at all to enter the house since the tragedy a year earlier. Apart from mourning his loss our hero also seems to be somewhat given to self-pity, even possibly just a little paranoid. He believes he is shadowed by bad luck. Everything goes wrong for him. And indeed everything does seem to go wrong for him. His horse has to be destroyed when it breaks its leg in mysterious circumstances. His dog does suddenly. His painting of Vivian is ruined, his roses wither and die. But is this bad luck, or is someone out to get him? Or is he insane and is he doing these things to himself, possibly out of guilt?

We find out more about his past. Vivian had been the daughter of his friend Ben Sheppard. On the eve of the wedding she was killed in a car accident, with Cohalan being the driver at the time.



Cohalan becomes ever moodier while the evidence that he may be suffering from delusions steadily mounts. Now we move into Suspicion territory as the psychiatrist warns Ellen she may be in danger from him. She chooses to continue to believe in him. She believes she can help him to uncover the solution to the mysterious events that have haunted him.

It’s a rather handsome movie with some great location footage of the California coast. Cohalan’s house is an impressive modernist structure in a truly spectacular setting.



Robert Young was surely the most irritating American actor of the 30s. His performance here comes as pleasant surprise - the annoying mannerisms and the tiresome constant jokiness have disappeared and he pulls off the dark suffering hero thing very competently. Betsy Drake is a engaging enough heroine. John Sutton fulfills the sinister, oily cad role extremely well as Keith Ferris, who is another protégé of Ben Sheppard’s.

The Second Woman was made by Cardinal Pictures, an outfit responsible for several good noirish thrillers around this time including D.O.A. and Impact. It’s in the public domain. My copy came from one of Mill Creek’s budget mystery movie boxed sets. The print is a bit washed out but it’s generally quite acceptable. This is by no means a great movie but it’s solid entertainment.

Love Before Breakfast (1936)

Love Before Breakfast is not one of Carole Lombard’s better films, but even a second-rank Carole Lombard film is worth seeing. Lombard plays Kay Colby, and she has two men wanting to marry her. She’s more or less engaged to Bill Wadsworth (Cesar Romero) but she doesn’t seem entirely sure she wants to marry him.

The very rich Scott Miller (Preston Foster) is Wadsworth’s romantic rival, and Miller is so determined to get her he buys the company Wadsworth works for just so he can send his rival to Japan to get him out of the way. Miller then sets to work wooing Kay. Which is not an easy task. Kay thinks she hates Miller but it seems she might simply be trying to persuade herself she’s still in love with Bill.

When Scott finally decides that maybe it’s futile pursuing her Kay panics. She’s done everything possible to discourage him but when he actually becomes discouraged she’s devastated.

No matter how talented they might be a romantic comedy star needs a co-star they can strikes sparks off and this was perhaps particularly true of Lombard. In My Man Godfrey and Twentieth Century she found co-stars who were worthy of her in the persons of William Powell (to whom she had been married) and John Barrymore.

But in Hands Across the Table she found her ideal co-star in the perhaps slightly surprising person of Fred MacMurray. Lombard and MacMurray had a magical chemistry and were to be teamed again in The Princess Comes Across and the delightful True Confession.

That kind of chemistry is sadly lacking in Love Before Breakfast. Cesar Romero as Bill and Preston Foster as Scott just don’t have the necessary charisma to convince the audience that a woman like Carole Lombard would be interested in them.

The other problem is that Lombard’s talents, although impressive, were rather specialised. In a conventional romantic comedy she wasn’t really at her best. It was in the screwball comedy that she really bloomed, and in that particular style of movie she had no equal. Other actresses made one or two great screwball comedies (such as Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby) but Lombard was the queen of the screwball comedy. She needed to play a character with the madcap quality of the screwball comedy heroine and she needed a script with plenty of zaniness.

Love Before Breakfast is just a tiny bit too conventional to unleash the full Lombard potential.

Despite all these caveats Love Before Breakfast is still an entertaining and likeable movie, and Lombard puts everything she has into the performance. Just don’t expect the kind of sublime movie magic she and Fred MacMurray delivered in Hands Across the Table.

The movie is included in the superb Carole Lombard Glamour Collection DVD set, which is most definitely worth buying.

Impact (1949)

Impact is a 1949 film noir that is not quite a neglected masterpiece but is still better than its fairly modest reputation would suggest.

Walter Williams (Brian Donlevy) seems to have it all. He has worked his way up from the shop floor to his current position as head of a major car manufacturer. He has a beautiful young wife. His marriage appears to be perfect. And to top it all off, he’s basically a decent likeable guy and he’s well-respected and generally well thought of. Although he’s a tough businessman who has the sense to realise that success serves no purpose unless you’re prepared to give yourself a break now and then to enjoy the fruits of that success.

Of course in film noir appearances can be deceptive. In fact his lovely young wife Irene (Helen Walker) has a lover and the two of them are plotting to murder him.



There are major surprises in store for all of them as the murder attempt on a lonely country road goes badly awry. Williams survives while the lover dies in the wreck of Williams’ car. Williams, suffering from a mild concussion, wanders off in a daze and then grabs a ride on a passing furniture van. He ends up in a little town called Larkspur. The following morning he picks up a copy of the newspaper and discovers that he is officially dead. The body in the car had been burned beyond recognition and the police made the natural assumption that it was him.

By this time he has figured out that his wife wanted him dead. Angry and disillusioned, he has no desire to return to his home in San Francisco. And Larkspur seems like a nice little town. It seems even nicer when he meets Marsha Peters (Ella Raines). Her husband had been killed in the war and now she’s trying to run their gas station on her own. Unfortunately she’s not the world’s greatest mechanic, although it has to be admitted that she looks quite amazingly cute in her mechanic’s garb.



Walter Williams on the other hand is very very good indeed at fixing cars - it’s how he started his career. She discovers this by accident. She has no idea who he really is but she needs a good mechanic desperately and she offers him a job. Right now working in a gas station seems a lot more attractive to him than returning to his murderous wife so he accepts. Pretty soon he and his new boss are going out together and well on the way to falling in love.

While Walter slowly regains his trust in life and love things have been happening in San Francisco. The police have put the pieces of the puzzle together but without realising there are pieces missing. As a result they have come up with the wrong picture, but what they do know is that the car wreck was no accident, it was murder. And Irene Williams looks like a very plausible suspect.



There are plenty of plot twists after this including some original and unexpected ones. The pieces of this jigsaw puzzle can be fitted together to make a whole succession of different pictures. It’s really a pretty nifty little plot.

There’s a quite impressive and interesting array of talent behind this movie, including Oscar-winning cinematographer Ernest Laszlo. Even more interesting is Dorothy Davenport who co-wrote the screenplay. She directed several movies including a great little early 30s exploitation shocker, The Road to Ruin.



The movie benefits from a very strong cast. Brian Donlevy and Ella Raines are extremely good while Helen Walker is a deliciously evil femme fatale. Charles Coburn is the loveable Irish cop in charge of the case. While his performance is fine the character is perhaps a bit too loveable and this weakens the dramatic tension in the later stages of the film.
It’s sad to see Anna May Wong reduced by this time to minor parts - she plays the WIlliams’ maid.

Visually there’s not too much noir style in evidence but the attempted murder scene on a mountain road is absolutely dripping with ominous atmosphere.



This one’s in the public domain but there are apparently a couple of pretty decent DVD editions. My copy was included in one of the Mill Creek public domain boxed sets and it’s a surprisingly serviceable print.

Not quite in the first rank perhaps, but a very good second-rank noir and definitely worth catching.

Jezebel (1938)

The popular legend regarding Jezebel is that Bette Davis got the part as a consolation prize for missing out on the role of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind. As a result it’s usually dismissed as a poor man’s Gone With the Wind.

In fact Jezebel was released first, but that was because the production of Gone With the Wind dragged on for so long. Warner Brothers therefore managed to bear Selznick to the punch with their own southern epic. Jezebel earned Bette Davis her second Oscar, and was the beginning of a fruitful collaboration between the star and director William Wyler. So even if the popular legend is true the movie ended up being a major step forward in Davis’s career.

The superficial similarities between the two stories are best ignored. Although they both feature a strong-willed southern belle Jezebel is quite capable of standing on its own merits.



Davis is Julie Marsden, and to describe her as strong-willed would be woefully inadequate. She’s determined to have her own way, not only at the risk of destroying others but even at the risk of destroying herself. She simply can never back down. She is going to be married to be married to handsome young banker Preston “Pres” Dillard (Henry Fonda) but she is not satisfied that she has him sufficiently broken to the saddle yet. She intends to make sure the job is done properly before the marriage takes place. Early in the movie we see her dealing with a badly behaved colt and it’s clear that as far as Julie is concerned the only difference between training a horse and training a man is that men take just a little longer.

Unfortunately she makes one disastrous miscalculation in training Pres. She loses him, and losing something that she wants is something that has never happened to her. She doesn’t like it. She intends to do something about it. The price will be terrible, but that doesn’t make her hesitate for a moment. Her instrument will be a former beau of hers, Buck Cantrell (George Brent). The drama will be played out against the background of the disastrous yellow fever outbreak in New Orleans in 1853.



The problem with most of the writing on this movie is that it obsesses over Davis’s character and her performance and on trying to give a feminist interpretation of the movie’s treatment of Julie. While Julie is certainly central to the film this blinds many people to the possibility that there may be more going on in this film. In fact in some ways this is an even more interesting examination of the culture of the Old South than Gone With the Wind.

The real theme of the movie is the reckless violence that is the inevitable by-product of the southern obsession with honour, and the stiff-necked and unthinking pride that motivates this obsession. The men slaughter each other in duels with no more thought than they would put into the question of whether to go to the theatre tonight or not.



It’s surprising this theme has been overlooked, because it’s actually stated quite explicitly several times, especially just before the duel that will have such devastating repercussions. Julie’s mother remarks that it’s easy for southern women to start the southern men quarreling but it’s impossible to stop them. Julie also makes some bitingly ironic remarks about the realities of southern chivalry, and about the southern determination to cling to their customs.

In this movie we see that this fatal pride is not confined to the men. Julie displays the same insanely exaggerated pride, the same unwillingness to back down, the same terrifying recklessness. It’s this proud self-destructiveness that is the cause of every disaster in the story, even including the yellow fever epidemic (since the city authorities have been repeatedly warned of the vital necessity of draining the swamps near the city but have contemptuously rejected the warnings). And of course lurking in the background is the coming war, and again at several points in the film we see the stubborn refusal on the part of southerners to accept the possibility that a war might end with their own defeat. Just as Julie refuses to accept the idea of defeat.



Which is not to say that the movie is unsympathetic to its characters. Their excessive pride is intimately bound up with a deep and abiding love for the land that has nourished them. Julie tries to explain this to Pres after he returns from a period in the North filled with scorn for the ideals and the culture of his own land. There’s a tragic inevitability to events, as people do things that will lead them to disaster because they are simply unable to imagine any other way of behaving.

For Julie the crucial event is her humiliation at the ball, a humiliation which is entirely self-inflicted. This ballroom scene is Wyler’s masterstroke. Bette Davis of course was always inclined to take her performances to emotional extremes but Wyler keeps this tendency in check so that when the moments of emotional overload come they are all the more effective.



George Brent is the surprise packet in this movie - he’s very very good indeed. As for Henry Fonda, while I’m always of the opinion that any movie could only be improved by replacing him with another actor, any other actor, in this movie he is at least adequate.

While it’s true that it lacks the scope of Gone With the Wind, and while it’s equally true that Julie is a less complex character than Scarlett O’Hara it’s also true that if you can such comparisons aside there is much to ponder and much to enjoy in Jezebel.

This Woman Is Dangerous (1952)

Joan Crawford apparently considered This Woman Is Dangerous to be her worst movie. Despite this it’s not entirely without interest.

This was her last movie under her contract with Warner Brothers. It had been a very successful seven years but by 1952 when This Woman Is Dangerous was made Crawford felt it was time to move on. Her next movie, Sudden Fear, was an RKO release and it garnered her an Academy Award nomination so perhaps she had a point.

Crawford plays Beth Austin, a successful gang leader. Before this she had certainly played women who were involved with mobsters (as in the excellent The Damned Don't Cry in 1950) but this time she’s a fully fledged gangster.



She’s the brains of the outfit. The Jackson brothers provide the muscle. Matt Jackson is Beth’s boyfriend and he’s a loose cannon to say the least. His brother Will is more vicious but more stable while Will’s wife Ann is the other permanent member of the gang. Other crooks seem to be recruited as needed.

Their specialty is daring robberies and their method makes use of Beth’s veneer of classiness. She is able to appear right at home in expensive hotels and casinos and she can coordinate the robberies from the inside. How an ex-con like Beth came by this veneer of class is never explained.



Now Beth has a major problem. She is going blind. An operation will be required to save her sight and the only surgeon capable of doing it is in Indiana. She sets off for Indiana leaving instructions for the rest of the gang to lie low after their latest heist. As might have been predicted the hot-headed Matt’s idea of lying low involves shooting cops so no the heat is really on.

Matt is insanely jealous. Mostly his jealousy is unjustified and unreasonable but this time he really does have something to be jealous about. Beth has become more than a little friendly with her handsome charming eye surgeon, Dr Ben Halleck (Dennis Morgan). He has real class and makes Matt look like the loser he is. Romance is blossoming.



Unfortunately this romance faces other obstacles apart from Beth’s psychotic criminal boyfriend. The FBI is on her trail and they’re on the trail of the rest of her gang as well.

Where this movie goes wrong is with Joan Crawford’s character. She’s too classy and too much the lady to be convincing as an ex-con and mobster, at least without some kind of backstory which the movie fails to provide. Crawford is watchable, as always, but the script gives her little to work with. Dennis Morgan as the eye surgeon is a bit too bland and too nice to be the sort of man that a dangerous female mobster would fall for. David Brian as the out-of-control trigger-happy boyfriend is great fun.



The plot is difficult to take seriously but despite its flaws This Woman Is Dangerous is still enjoyable silliness with a definite camp edge to it.

You can get it on DVD-R in the Warner Archive Collection.