Screaming Mimi (1958)

Screaming Mimi, directed by Gerd Oswald, is a 1958 crime thriller based on Fredric Brown's 1949 novel The Screaming Mimi.

The movie opens with a blonde almost getting sliced up by a guy with a knife. The guy gets shot. The blonde ends up holding the knife. Nobody thinks the blonde is anything other than an innocent victim but she has a major crack-up and ends up in a mental hospital, under the care of Dr Greenwood (Harry Townes). The blonde is Virginia Wilson (Anita Ekberg). Dr Greenwood takes a very close personal interest in her case. Very close. He tells her that as soon as she’s cured they will go away together, but she has to trust him and everything he tells her to do.

Six months later Virginia has become a successful nightclub entertainer, using the stage name Yolanda Lang. Her manager is Bill Green, who is in fact none other than Dr Greenwood.

There’s a slasher murderer (dubbed the Ripper) loose in the city and Yolanda almost becomes the latest victim. She is saved by her faithful dog Devil. He’s a mean crazy dog but he adores his mistress and he would die to save her.

Reporter Bill Sweeney (Philip Carey) gets mixed up in the case. He thinks there’s a good story here. He’s also rather taken with the glamorous Yolanda.

What convinces him that there’s a great story here is the Screaming Mimi herself. The Screaming Mimi is a statuette of a half-naked terrified girl. Only a handful of these statuettes were ever made. Yolanda had one. And one was found by the body of the Ripper’s first victim. Add to this that the first victim, Lola Lake, was like Yolanda a beautiful blonde dancer and any reporter would sense that this is a story.

This is a movie that doesn’t cheat. When the solution is revealed it’s perfectly consistent with everything that has come before. The clues were there. They were subtle, but they were there.

We, the audience, know something very important that the protagonists don’t know. We know this thing, but we don’t know what it means. It could have several different entirely plausible explanations.

One difficulty for this film is that Yolanda’s act has to be super-sexy. The poster after all describes her as a stripper. But this was 1958 so she can’t possibly take her clothes off. She can’t take any of her clothes off. The problem is solved by adding some fetishism, with Yolanda dancing in shackles and chains (this is just a wild guess but there could be some symbolism here folks).

Overall this works. The movie has a subtly perverse feel which is totally consistent with the story.

What’s cool is that this is a Hollywood psychiatry movie. I just love psychiatry movies. And being the 50s you know there’ll be at least some half-baked Freudianism in there somewhere. I love these movies for the same reason I love voodoo movies - they involve a weird crazy belief system that makes no rational sense but it’s huge amounts of fun.

This one is particularly cool because right from the start we can see that the psychiatrist seems at least as crazy as his patient. And the psychiatry stuff is pleasingly loopy.

The movie’s biggest strength is Anita Ekberg’s performance which at first seems stiff but eventually you realise that Miss Ekberg knew exactly what she was doing. She nails the character perfectly. Her dance routines are a highlight as well.

There are those who are going to insist that this movie is film noir. I don’t think it is, although it has noirish touches. I think it’s more accurate to see it as an anticipation of the later giallo genre. It’s no coincidence that Dario Argento’s landmark 1970 giallo The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) is also a loose adaptation of Fredric Brown’s novel The Screaming Mimi.

Screaming Mimi is a very underrated movie. Highly recommended.

The Spiders (1919-20)

The Spiders (Die Spinnen) is one of Fritz Lang’s earliest films. The original intention was to make four linked feature films. Only two were completed - The Golden Sea (Der goldene See) in 1919 and The Diamond Ship (Das Brillantenschiff) in 1920. Both were written and directed by Lang. The great Karl Freund did the cinematography on part 2.

These two movies combine action and adventure in exotic locales with romance and intrigue.

I think it’s fair to say that Lang’s movies became more complex and interesting when he started collaborating with Thea von Harbou. She added a bit more psychological depth. Having said that there are still plenty of distinctive Langian themes and Langian touches in this very early movie.

The hero of The Golden Sea is playboy sportsman Kay Hoog. He is about to compete in a major yacht race when he finds a message in a bottle. The message was written by a Harvard professor who vanished five years earlier. The message speaks of a lost civilisation and hidden treasure, and gives the geographical location in which both can be found. This appeals to Kay Hoog’s sense of adventure and sportsmanship a lot more than a yacht race. He sets off in pursuit of the treasure although it’s reasonable to assume that the adventure attracts him more than the treasure.

He discovers a lost remnant of the Inca Empire. There is plenty of gold, but also plenty of danger. The Incas still practise human sacrifice and Kay might well be the next sacrifice.

He also rescues a beautiful Inca high priestess, Naela (Lil Dagover). They fall in love. The fly in the ointment is that she’s the who will have to offer Kay as a sacrifice to the sun god.

His other problem is the Spiders, a secret and ruthless criminal society who are also after that gold. His particular problem is the leader of the Spiders, the glamorous but wicked Lio Sha (Ressel Orla). He doesn’t yet know just how dangerous a woman she is.

Kay and Naela have lot of narrow escapes. There are exciting action sequences. There are some splendid visuals. The sets and costumes are impressive.

Lil Dagover makes a fine heroine. And Lio Sha is convincingly devious.

Kay is determined to escape and to take Naela with him.

In The Diamond Ship Kay Hoog and the Spiders have some unfinished business to attend to.

At stake in this episode is a diamond in the shape of the head of Buddha. Stolen 400 years earlier it is believed to be the key to restoring Asian greatness and independence from the European great powers. Lio Sha and the Spiders want that diamond. So does Kay Hoog.

The search takes Kay into the hidden Chinese city beneath the streets of San Francisco’s Chinatown. Lio Sha has embarked on the ship Storm Bird.

There’s a kidnapping and there are exciting chases through hidden passageways, betrayals and plenty of gunplay.

The Spiders anticipates thematic elements that would appear in Lang’s slightly later movies. The sinister secret criminal organisation, the shadowy conspiracies and the hints of paranoia would be quite at home in Dr Mabuse: The Gambler (1922) and Spies (1928).

There’s a fascination with secret worlds and also with technology (which would play such a large rôle in Lang movies such as Metropolis and Woman in the Moon).

To appreciate this movie fully you need to know something of the popular culture landscape of the time. Diabolical criminal masterminds were all the rage. The first great example of the breed, Dr Nikola, had been created by Australia writer Guy Boothby in A Bid for Fortune in 1895. It was followed by a sequel, Dr Nikola Returns. By the time Lang made this movie Sax Rohmer had written his first three Dr Fu Manchu novels. In 1911 Fantômas, created by by Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre, made his first appearance in print. Louis Feuillade’s first Fantômas movie serial was released in 1913. Lang was tapping into a major pop culture obsession of the time.

The Spiders demonstrates the extraordinary technical sophistication of the German film industry in 1919 and the 29-year-old Lang’s confidence and ambition.

For many years this film was thought to be lost but a print was found in the 1970s.

The Spiders is a rather outrageous rollicking adventure romp. Highly recommend.

The Kino Classics DVD offers a reasonable transfer given the film’s age and rarity.

It’s interesting that almost at the end of his career Lang returned to Germany and made another two-part movie, known popularly as the Indian Epic, with a somewhat similar feel to The Spiders.

Anne of the Indies (1951)

Anne of the Indies is a 1951 Twentieth Century Fox pirate adventure movie directed by Jacques Tourneur. It belongs to the small sub-genre of movies about lady pirates. It may have been inspired by the adventures of the real-life woman pirate Anne Bonny (the time period is exactly right) but in fact the story has little connection with that lady’s career. The main similarity is that the pirate in the film is, like Anne Bonny, Irish.

The pirate Captain Providence has been preying, very successfully, on English shipping. He’s a mystery man. No-one has set eyes on him and lived to tell the tale. When he captures a merchant ship he has the whole crew put to death. As a result no-one knows that Captain Providence is a woman. She is Captain Anne Providence (Jean Peters).

Captain Providence has captured another merchantman. As her men are feeding the luckless merchantman’s crew to the sharks she notices a man in irons. This interests her. He is a Frenchman who claims to be a prisoner of the English. Anne hates the English but her attitude is that this Frenchman is an enemy of the English and that makes him an OK guy. No member of her crew would dare to suggest that she may have spared his life because he’s young and very handsome.

The Frenchman (played by Louis Jourdan who was a major heart-throb at the time) calls himself Pierre François. Anne isn’t a total fool. She has his cabin searched. A map is found. Or at least it’s half a map, a map showing the location of fabulous treasure buried by the famous buccaneer Henry Morgan. Anne is extremely interested when Pierre reveals that he knows how to find the other half of the map.

The lust for gold is not the only lust consuming Captain Anne Providence. This Frenchman excites her in a strange and unfamiliar way. The way a woman can be excited by a very good-looking very masculine man who knows how to romance women.

This causes a falling out with Anne’s mentor, the notorious pirate Blackbeard.

Blackbeard is fond of Anne but he’s not a forgiving man.

Whether you’re seeking treasure or love you always have to look out for hidden reefs and other hazards of the sea and that’s the case here. In fact seeking for love is a lot more dangerous than seeking for gold.

Of course there are many complications and twists to come. There is only one member of her crew whom Anne might be able to consider a friend and confidant, the drunken cynical ship’s doctor, Jameson (Herbert Marshall). He is worried about the situation. Her boisterous Scottish first mate Red Dougal (James Robertson Justice) doesn’t trust Pierre. But Anne can’t keep her hands off the handsome Frenchman.

Betrayal could come from any number of sources. It’s doubtful whether any of the characters in this tale could be described as honest upstanding citizens.

Of course there’s another woman, Molly (Debra Paget). I won’t spoil things by revealing where she fits into the plot but you’re probably going to guess that she and Anne are not going to get along.

There’s an extraordinary anti-English bias to this movie. Anne considers the English to be treacherous, cruel and wholly untrustworthy and she turns out to be right.

Anne Providence makes an interesting heroine. She’s brave, sexy, daring and quite sympathetic but there is the minor point that we have already seen her commit mass murder. I like the spirited performance of Jean Peters and she’s able to make Anne both wicked and sympathetic. Anne is a ruthless pirate but she’s a woman and Pierre has made her very much aware of that. Peters makes Anne a real woman who reacts in a believable way to emotional betrayal. Peters also makes us aware that Anne is a woman with sexual feelings.

Louis Jourdan, James Robertson Justice and Debra Paget are fine in their roles but Herbert Marshall is the standout among the supporting players, giving a subtle performance as a man with divided loyalties and a conflicted sense of duty.

There are plenty of nicely executed action scenes and the movie (shot in Technicolor) looks great. I believe some of the sea battle scenes were lifted from earlier Twentieth Century Fox pirate movies.

Anne of the Indies is a surprisingly nuanced pirate adventure with a complex protagonist who doesn’t always do what we expect her to do. The movie as a whole doesn’t adhere rigidly to the conventions of the pirate movie. It’s much more interesting than one expects it to be. In fact this is a terrific pirate movie and certainly the best lady pirate movie ever made. Very highly recommended.

The French Blu-Ray from BQHL offers a lovely transfer and includes the film in English with removable French subtitles, and it includes the movie on DVD as well. A very worthwhile buy.

If you’re interested in lady pirates you might also want to check out the rather entertaining Buccaneer’s Girl (1950).

Blondes at Work (1938)

Blondes at Work (1938) was the fourth of the Torchy Blane B-movies. Between 1937 and 1939 Warner Brothers made nine Torchy Blane movies, seven of them starring Glenda Farrell. It was one of the most successful B-movie series of its era.

In Blondes at Work ace girl reporter Torchy Blane sees two guys leaving an office building. There’s nothing suspicious about that except that one of the guys looks ill but Torchy is a reporter and she notices little things like that.

The sick guy was department store tycoon Marvin Spencer and now he has disappeared. The fear is that he’s been murdered. The police have to find him - he’s an important man. And that makes this a big story, so Torchy is interested.

Torchy has been getting regularly scoops for her paper, The Star, and that has upset the other papers who have sweetheart deals with the cops. Torchy is making them look silly and she’s making the cops look silly. Torchy gets her inside dope from her boyfriend, Lieutenant Steve McBride (Barton MacLane). McBride’s chief wants these leaks to stop. McBride agrees not to give Torchy any more information but Torchy soon finds a way around that. She figures out a way to get the info from his driver, the poetic but dim-witted Detective Gahagan (Tom Kennedy).

Marvin Spencer has of course been murdered, and Torchy gets the scoop. At every step of the investigations Torchy scoops her rivals.

The plot is nothing special. That doesn’t matter at all because this movie has lots of other things going for it. Its biggest asset is Glenda Farrell. She’s funny, she’s charming, she’s feisty, she talks like a machine-gun and she’s adorable. She plays Torchy in seven of the nine movies. The two movies without her were flops. The seven movies with her were hits.

Torchy is a reporter which means she has no morals whatsoever. She’d sell her own mother for a scoop. But she’s so adorable that we love her anyway, and apart from her lack of professional ethics she’s a nice girl.

The movie’s second asset is the pairing of Glenda Farrell with Barton MacLane as her cop boyfriend. They have perfect chemistry. They have romantic chemistry - they seem like a real couple. And they have superb acting chemistry. In every scene together they strike acting sparks off each other.

The film’s third asset is its pacing. There may not be much to the plot but director Frank McDonald makes sure that there always seems to be something happening. This film has so much energy and vitality.

It also benefits from the right blending of the mystery, romance and comedic ingredients. The romance and the comedy never slow down the action. Tom Kennedy as Gahagan is a comic relief character but he’s amusing without being irritating and he and Glenda Farrell really work well together in comic scenes. And the makers of the film, very sensibly, realised that there was no need to add any other comic characters. Everyone else plays it dead straight, which makes it even more fun to watch Torchy running rings around them.

Stylistically it’s standard Warner Brothers fare which means it has that slightly tough look which works perfectly here.

Blondes at Work is bright and breezy and a lot of fun and Glenda Farrell is a delight. Highly recommended.

The transfers in the Warner Archive DVD Torchy Blane set (which includes all nine movies) are extremely good.

I’ve also reviewed the first three movies in the series - Smart Blonde (1937), Fly-Away Baby (1937) and The Adventurous Blonde (1937).

Three On a Ticket (1947)

Three On a Ticket was the fourth of the five Mike Shayne PI thriller B-movies made by PRC in 1946-47, with Hugh Beaumont as Mike. Prior to this Twentieth Century Fox had made seven Mike Shayne movies with Lloyd Nolan. Despite the much lower budgets I actually prefer the PRC films. They’re closer in feel to the novels, they’re a bit grittier, they have less annoying comic relief and while I like Lloyd Nolan as an actor I think Beaumont was a better fit for the role.

The Mike Shayne private eye novels were published under the name Brett Halliday, a pseudonym used by Davis Dresser. Dresser wrote the early novels in the series while the later novels were written by an assortment of ghost writers. Mike Shayne is a pretty standard fictional PI and the books have a fairly hardboiled vibe.

Three On a Ticket begins when a guy walks into Mike Shayne’s office and promptly drops dead. A bullet in the guts can do that to you. Mike and his faithful secretary Phyllis (Cheryl Walker) are rather disconcerted. Mike doesn’t want the cops to know he was in the office at the time, mostly because the first thing he did was to conceal two vital pieces of evidence. One of them is a baggage claim ticket.

The dead guy was another PI, Jim Lacy. Mike used to be vaguely acquainted with him but preferred to keep his distance because of Lacy’s unsavoury reputation.

Dead guys can mean trouble but Mike’s next visitor is a very Iive blonde and they always mean trouble. The blonde is Helen Brimstead (Louise Currie) and she wants to hire Mike to do a very simple job. All he has to do is kill her husband.

Murder is not one of the services Mike provides for his clients but he strings her along because she tells him that Jim Lacy recommended him. Obviously the blonde is mixed up in whatever led to Lacy’s murder and Mike wants the answers to that. The blonde spins a yarn about having married a hoodlum named Mace Morgan. Now she wants to marry a rich respectable guy and Mace is blackmailing her.

All sorts of people seem to know about that baggage claim ticket, they all suspect Mike has it stashed somewhere and they all want it. The Feds want it as well. The blonde has been involved with some tough characters and they definitely want it.

The plot isn’t dazzling but it has a few reasonably decent twists.

Hugh Beaumont plays Shayne as a likeable rogue. Cheryl Walker as Phyllis is feisty. Louise Currie as Helen is a reasonably effective femme fatale type (although of course we don’t know for sure if Helen is a bad girl or if she just looks like one). The supporting players are adequate.

This is a PRC movie so it looks cheap (because it was) and it’s a bit rough around the edges) but it moves along briskly.

Sam Newfield may not have been a great director but he was very competent when it came to making B-movies on tight budgets.

Three On a Ticket is a solid enjoyable B-picture. Recommended.

All five PRC Shayne movies are included in DFVD set from Classic Flix. The transfers are nothing to get excited about but they’re perfectly watchable.

I’ve reviewed a couple of the earlier PRC Mike Shayne movies - the excellent Murder Is My Business (1946) and Larceny in Her Heart (1946). I’ve also reviewed the 1945 Mike Shayne novel by Brett Halliday Murder Is My Business.

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.

Shadow of a Doubt (1943) - Hitchcock Friday #12

Shadow of a Doubt, released in 1943, is one of Alfred Hitchcock’s most admired movies. For some bizarre reason it sometimes gets labelled as a film noir despite not having a single one of the defining characteristics of film noir.

The Newtons are a thoroughly conventional American family living in a small town in California. The eldest daughter Charlie (Teresa Wright) is very excited by the news that her favourite uncle, her mother’s younger brother, is coming for an extended visit. Charlie Newton was named after her Uncle Charlie, Charlie Oakley (Joseph Cotten).

Young Charlie slowly comes to suspect that her beloved uncle, whom she hero-worships, may be a criminal on the run. She slowly pieces together bits of evidence.

We know that Charlie is certainly on the run from something. That’s obvious right from the start. Of course a man might be on the run from many things - gambling debts, gangsters, an unhappy relationship, an irate husband, a minor scandal. All we know is that two guys have been following him.

We also know that Uncle Charlie is rather secretive. He hates having his photograph taken. He hates being questioned about his past.

Those two guys who were following Uncle Charlie turn up in town. They seem very interested in the Newton household. A bit too interested.

Young Charlie is disturbed by the arrival of detectives. She cannot believe Uncle Charlie could have done anything seriously wrong. But suspicion has taken root.

This movie makes an intriguing companion piece to Suspicion, made two years earlier. Both deal with a woman tortured by suspicions about a man for whom she cares. In both cases all the woman has are suspicions. She has no hard evidence.

Hitchcock was a great believer in the essential ingredient of suspense - the audience should know more than the protagonist knows. The suspense comes from the fact that our knowledge makes us fear for the protagonist’s safety. In Suspicion and Shadow of a Doubt he varied that formula. In both these movies the audience also has nothing but suspicions. We don’t know if the man in question is guilty or not. These are movies that combine mystery with suspense.

Both movies have an atmosphere of paranoia but that is not enough to qualify a movie as film noir. Shadow of a Doubt does not employ voiceover narration or flashbacks. The protagonist is not a true noir protagonist. Shadow of a Doubt is beautifully shot (by Joseph Valentine) but it does not have the classic noir visual style. Both these movies are psychological thrillers as well as suspense thrillers but their noir credentials are very very dubious indeed. If Shadow of a Doubt is film noir then every psychological thriller ever made is film noir.

Hitchcock was notorious for preferring to avoid location shooting but unusually Shadow of a Doubt was shot mostly on location. This was his first movie to have a really strong American flavour. Small town America does not serve as a picturesque background here. It is part of the very fabric of the story. It was as if Hitch wanted to shot on location to immerse himself fully in Americana and it worked.

Joseph Cotten gives one of his best performances. Uncle Charlie may or may not be a murderer but he definitely has a jaundiced view of life and yet he has charm and vitality. He’s complex and contradictory. Cotten manages to make him very likeable and very worrying at the same time. Teresa Wright is OK. The support cast is fine. Young Charlie’s father and his pal Herb (Hume Cromyn) provide comic relief with their shared interest in murder mysteries.

As it stands Shadow of a Doubt is a more successful movie than Suspicion although had Hitchcock been allowed to go wth his original ending for Suspicion then it would have been the better movie. Shadow of a Doubt still stands as one of Hitchcock’s two 1940s masterpieces (along with Rebecca). Very highly recommended.

The Blu-Ray looks great and includes an excellent documentary dating from 2000.