Month: May 2017

Ghosts on the Loose (1943)

GHOSTS ON THE LOOSE (1943)
Article 1857 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 4-15-2006
Posting Date: 9-12-2006
Directed by William Beaudine
Featuring Leo Gorcey, Huntz Hall, Bobby Jordan

The East Side Kids decide to help clean up a house for Glimpy’s newly married sister and her husband, and end up at the house next door, a supposedly haunted house actually peopled by Nazi propagandists.

This is the last of Bela Lugosi’s nine Monogram movies that I’ve gotten around to cover for this series, and among Lugosi fans, it is often considered his least interesting. And indeed it is; Bela Lugosi is barely in it and is given little to do; his most memorable moment involves the utterance of what surely sounds like a four-letter word during a sneeze. Nor do Frank Moran or Minerva Urecal (who both appeared with Lugosi in THE CORPSE VANISHES ) have much to do, either. Furthermore, the title is a cheat; there are no ghosts to be found, and the sequence of the movie involving the Kids being frightened in a haunted house is short, mild, and scareless. It’s no surprise that SPOOKS RUN WILD is the more popular Bela Lugosi / East Side Kids collaboration.

As an East Side Kids movie, though, it passes muster. I like the scene where some of the boys manage to get hold of a flower display without “stealing” it, there’s an amusing little reference to producer Sam Katzman, and I do find it highly amusing that a pre-stardom Ava Gardner is here playing Huntz Hall’s sister. Leo Gorcey is flirting a little with malaprops here as well. Serial fans will recognize Wheeler Oakman as one of Lugosi’s henchmen; in fact, he might have ended up with more dialogue than Lugosi did.

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From Russia With Love (1963)

FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE (1963)
Article 1856 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 4-14-2006
Posting Date: 9-11-2006
Directed by Terence Young
Featuring Sean Connery, Daniela Bianchi, Pedro Armendariz

James Bond goes to Istanbul, and, fully aware that he is falling into a trap of some sort, hooks up with a beautiful Russian agent in the hopes of getting his hands on a decoding device known as Lektor.

I’m not a big fan of the James Bond series, but if you ever felt the need to talk me into being one, this would be your starting point. For me, this is the best of the ones I’ve seen to date; it has an air of seriousness about the proceedings, it’s gritty and suspenseful, it has some truly great villains, and it avoids some of the pandering of other movies in the series as it spends more time telling the story than filling up the running time with his love conquests and cute action sequences. Oddly enough, though, the gritty seriousness of this one also takes it more out of the realm of science fiction to which most of the other entries of the series belong to at least marginally, as the reliance on gadgets is deemphasized here; the booby-trapped suitcase doesn’t quite qualify to me as a science fiction device, though the decoding device may. At any rate, this one has some memorable set pieces, especially a harrowing confrontation between Bond (Sean Connery) and the assassin who has been tailing him throughout the movie (Robert Shaw). Lotte Lenye also makes for one of the most memorable of Bond’s adversaries. I will always regret that the rest of the series didn’t keep going in the same direction as this one.

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Francis Goes to West Point (1952)

FRANCIS GOES TO WEST POINT (1952)
Article 1855 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 4-13-2006
Posting Date: 9-10-2006
Directed by Arthur Lubin
Featuring Donald O’Connor, Lori Nelson, Alice Kelley

After saving a military plant from sabotage (with the help of Francis the talking mule), Peter Stirling is sent to West Point where it is believed he will be of help to the military. Francis also goes to West Point as a mascot and begins tutoring Stirling while giving tips to the coach of the football team. Hilarity ensues.

I think my main problem with the “Francis, the Talking Mule” series is that it got pretty lazy with its concept. Of the four I’ve seen so far, this is the third with a military setting, and I suspect that the reason the series kept going back to that milieu was so that it would be easier to recycle the same gags from the first movie in the series. The series was also pretty mild; given the wild premise of a talking mule, the movies remained almost aggressively tame, never really trying for big laughs but only for small chuckles. The movies didn’t stink, but they remained harmless and rather forgettable. Of more interest than the plot here is the list of supporting players, which included Gregg Palmer, Les Tremayne, David Janssen, James Best, Lori Nelson and Leonard Nimoy (he’s one of the football players). The best part of the movie is the beginning when the sabotage effort is foiled; the movie actually develops a little suspense and atmosphere at this point.

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Dressed to Kill (1946)

DRESSED TO KILL (1946)
Article 1854 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 4-12-2006
Posting Date: 9-9-2006
Directed by Roy William Neill
Featuring Basil Rathbone, Nigel Bruce, Patricia Morison

Sherlock Holmes investigates the murder of a music box collector and the theft of a seemingly worthless music box. He soon discovers that the music box is part of a set of three, and that somehow they are tied with the theft of duplicate five-pound plates from the Bank of England.

The Harris Lentz guide that I use as one of the sources for this series includes all of Rathbone’s Sherlock Holmes movies despite the fact that not all of them have fantastic elements. I’m not sure whether this one has or not; at one point in the proceedings, an attempt is made to kill Holmes with a device that releases poisoned gas when attached to an automobile, and this device might possibly nudge the movie into the realm of science fiction. If it doesn’t, there’s really nothing of fantastic content in this one.

This is a fairly entertaining one in the series, largely because the puzzle of the music box is a good one, and the movie makes good use of it. Patricia Morison’s villainness makes a good match for Holmes, as she too uses disguises and even pulls the same trick on Watson that Holmes had used on Irene Adler in “A Scandal in Bohemia”, which is mentioned on occasion in this entry. Still, one can tell that Rathbone was getting a little tired of the series by this point; he’s good, but lacking a bit of the spark he had in some of the earlier entries. Still, it provides a dignified farewell for the series.

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Down to Earth (1947)

DOWN TO EARTH (1947)
Article 1853 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 4-11-2006
Posting Date: 9-8-2006
Directed by Alexander Hall
Featuring Rita Hayworth, Larry Parks, Mark Platt

Angry about the production of a play that paints her as a trollop, Terpsichore comes down to earth from Parnassus (with the help of Mr. Jordan) and attempts to force the writer of the play to make it more accurate.

How I wish this movie wasn’t connected in any way with the sublime HERE COMES MR. JORDAN ; maybe I’d be able to judge it a little nicer on its own rather fluffy terms. I’d also be spared from the embarassment of seeing some of my favorite characters misused, paritcularly that of Max Corkle. James Gleason was truly hilarious in that role in the original film; here he tries desperately to play up the humor in some truly bad comic dialogue, and rather than laughing, I find myself just feeling sorry for him. The movie occasionally has a moment that works for me; the opening musical number is so intentionally awful (the character of Terpsichore sings “I put the ants in the pants of the dancers”) that I fully understand why Terpsichore would want to deep-six the production. Still, the whole plot is so devoid of real soul that I found myself not caring one whit about any of the characters or their fates, and this becomes a major problem when the movie tries to get all dark and serious in the second half (with a subplot involving gambling debts, suicide notes and gangsters). The presence of some of my favorite comic actors (Gleason and Edward Everett Horton) fails to appease me at all due to the lameness of their bits, and George Macready is wasted in a role that shouldn’t even be in the story. Sure, Rita Hayworth is lovely, and its rating of 6.2 on IMDB does indicate that the movie does have its advocates, but as far as I’m concerned, the only positive thing I can say about this one is that it didn’t besmirch the career of Claude Rains, thanks to his not reprising his role of Mr. Jordan here.

Amazingly enough, this movie was remade in 1980 as XANADU, with Olivia Newton-John, roller-skating and disco added to the mix. I gather that these elements were supposed to improve the movie. Still, gathering from how I feel about the original version here, maybe they did. I’ll know when I see it.

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Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (1944)

ALI BABA AND THE FORTY THIEVES (1944)
Article 1852 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 4-10-2006
Posting Date: 9-7-2006
Directed by Arthur Lubin
Featuring Maria Montez, Jon Hall, Turhan Bey

When the son of the Kalif of Baghdad sees his father destroyed in a trap by Cassim (who betrays him to the Mongols), he encounters a band of thieves and recruits them to help him fight the Mongol threat.

It’s a Jon Hall – Maria Montez – Arabian Nights – Technicolor – epic. It’s not bad, I suppose, but quite frankly, I find little of interest here. I’ve just seen too many of them to get excited by them anymore (and by them, take your pick as to whether I mean Hall / Montez movies or Arabian Nights epics), and given that the fantastic nature is pretty light in this one (outside of the magical rock door that opens to “Open, O Sesame”, there’s nothing), my interest level flags pretty quickly. What pleasure I do get from them is usually tied to the character actors that fill out the edges, so I enjoy seeing Andy Devine, Turhan Bey and a quick cameo by Angelo Rossitto. Outside of that, it’s the usual scimitar-waving routine.

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The Vengeance of She (1968)

THE VENGEANCE OF SHE (1968)
Article 1851 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 4-9-2006
Posting Date: 9-6-2006
Directed by Cliff Owen
Featuring John Richardson, Olga Schoberova, Edward Judd

A woman finds himself being called to the lost city of Kuma. She is under the power of a high-priest who is using her resemblance to Ayesha to trick the leader Killikrates into giving him immortal life.

Olga Schoberova is stunningly beautiful and the sets and scenery are quite lovely. Still, these aspects of the movie add up to little more than eye candy, and given that Schoberova wasn’t much of an actress, that the movie is noticeably short of the star power that helped the original (no Ursula Andress, no Peter Cushing, no Christopher Lee), that the script is largely just a retread of the original with a few details changed and moved around, and that the script is a bore, you really have to be an eye candy fan to make this one fly. Most of the soundtrack is built around a saxophone riff that is actually quite nice until the movie repeats it for the umpty-ninth time. Oddly enough, the movie got a ‘G” rating despite the amount of skin that Schoberova puts on display throughout the movie.

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Tomb of Torture (1963)

TOMB OF TORTURE (1963)
aka Metempsycho
Article 1850 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 4-8-2006
Posting Date: 9-5-2006
Directed by Antonio Boccaci
Featuring Annie Alberti, Adriano Micantoni, Marco Mariani

A woman who may be the reincarnation of a dead countess is plagued by bad dreams that recount the death of her previous incarnation. Her father takes her to the village near the castle of the countess to try to cure her. There she meets a reporter who is there to investigate the deaths of two young women who were murdered by a monstrous creature inside the castle.

I’m not quite sure what to make of this bizarre little Eurohorror. As a horror movie, it’s a little too obvious to be really effective; it’s one of those movies that tries to get its scares in by having women scream at everything. It certainly doesn’t help that the monster is both overused and has a goofy laugh; it would have worked a lot better if they had kept his face hidden until the final reels and if we only heard him breathing. The movie also seems at least partially a comedy, and the primary comic relief character is our reporter-hero; just as a rule, don’t put too much hope on how effectual your hero will be if his musical theme prominently features an oboe. Overall, the movie is rather clumsy and crude, but it somehow remains rather watchable all the same; just don’t think about it too much. This would be Antonio Boccaci’s sole directorial effort.

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The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1968)

THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE (1968)
aka Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Article 1849 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 4-7-2006
Posting Date: 9-4-2006
Directed by Charles Jarrott
Featuring Jack Palance, Denholm Elliott, Leo Genn

A doctor experiments with a potion to separate the good and evil parts of man, and ends up creating a monstrous villain.

Without straining I can think of eight versions of this story that I’ve already seen for this series, and so I can say with some confidence that when I watch a new version, I don’t really expect to be surprised. And, true enough, this version doesn’t really surprise me; however, it doesn’t bore me in the least and holds my attention throughout. I’ve heard it said that it’s more faithful than any of the other adaptations, though I’d have to compare it to the Stevenson story (which I haven’t read) as well as to THE TESTAMENT OF DR. CORDELIER (which I suspect is also very true to the story) to say for sure. I do know this; the differences between this version and the other versions I’ve seen help to give the movie a freshness that made it quite enjoyable. You can thank the strong production by Dan Curtis, the tight direction of Charles Jarrott, and the excellent performance by Jack Palance as well. The rest of the cast is also first-rate, including Denholm Elliott as George Devlin and Oscar Homolka as Stryker. Still, it’s Palance who really impresses me here; he does such a fine job in both of the roles that he once again confounds my expectations of what a typical Jack Palance role would be like; I think he was an incredibly versatile performer. My only problem with this one is that the script occasionally overplays its hand; in particular, the opening scene where Dr. Jekyll faces off with a sneering panel of physicians is a little too cliched to really be effective, and having most of the dialogue reprised during the final confrontation scene is the one down side to what is otherwise an extraordinarily effective scene. But these are really minor quibbles; the movie works very well indeed, and I look forward to seeing some of Curtis’s other TV horror movies from the same era.

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Grizzly (1976)

GRIZZLY (1976)
Article 1848 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 4-6-2006
Posting Date: 9-3-2006
Directed by William Girdler
Featuring Christopher George, Andrew Prine, Richard Jaeckel

A killer grizzly is on the loose at a state park, and it is a park ranger’s job to apprehend it.

Director William Girdler is perhaps best known for ABBY, a rip-off of THE EXORCIST that was blatant enough to bring down the wrath of Warner Brothers, who sued American-International over the movie and kept it out of circulation for years. Who better to film this one, a rip-off of JAWS with a killer bear instead of a killer shark. Not that the movie is particularly good; the acting is quite uneven, the dialogue is embarrassing at times, and the music is a far cry from the classic John Williams score for JAWS. Still, it’s watchable enough, largely due to the appeal of the three leads, who manage to be likable and interesting even when struggling with some very bad dialogue. Nonetheless, the movie doesn’t really end up being very convincing. The worst problem is that we never get a good comparison shot between the bear and the humans; most of the good shots of the bear are of him alone, and his scenes with the humans usually only feature his claw or a close-up of his furry hide. As a result, we never get the sense of real danger, and the generous amounts of gore don’t quite compensate for it. Still, the movie is efficient, and has a few scares; for this sort of thing, it could have been a lot worse.

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