THE MAGIC CARPET (1951)
Article #1376 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 12-20-2004
Posting Date: 5-19-2005
Directed by Lew Landers
Featuring Lucille Ball, John Agar, Patricia Medina

When a caliph is assassinated and a usurper takes his place at the throne, the original heir to the throne is spirited away on a flying carpet. Years later, the heir becomes a hero known as The Scarlet Falcon intent on removing the usurper from the throne.

This Arabian Nights epic never really gels; it either takes itself too seriously or not seriously enough; it depends on whether you consider the darker scenes (the torture sequence, the murder of the caliph and his family) or the lighter scenes (the hiccups sequence in particular) to be the ones that don’t belong. At any rate, there wouldn’t be much of interest to this one if it weren’t for the cast, but even the cast is a problem. John Agar does all right with the action scenes (and he seems to be having fun with them) but in the scenes where he’s supposed to be charming and sexy (such as the scene where the women of the harem flirt with him), he’s humorously wooden. And whatever her reputation as one of the greatest of television’s comedic actresses, Lucille Ball is so unconvincing as an Arabian Princess that she’s a major distraction; at least if she had been given the Patricia Medina role, she might have had a little comic shtick to do. I just read a piece of trivia that said that this movie was designed as a punishment to Lucille Ball for complaining about the quality of the roles she was getting, and I find this quite believable. Still, any movie in which Lucille Ball flirts with both John Agar and Raymond Burr is one that’s hard to ignore.

THE MAD MAGICIAN (1954)
Article #1375 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 12-19-2004
Posting Date: 5-18-2005
Directed by John Brahm
Featuring Vincent Price, Mary Murphy, Eva Gabor

A magician begins disposing of people who get in his way.

This movie was made as a follow-up to HOUSE OF WAX; like the earlier movie, it was made in 3D, featured Vincent Price, took place in a period setting, and featured set-pieces to show off the 3D effects (a yo-yo spinner, a hawker with a fake extendable hand, a magician who throws cards out at the audience and sprinkles them with water). Unfortunately, the story feels cobbled together (though certain individual scenes work well enough), and it lacks the mood and ambiance of the earlier movie. It also has a few distractions; whatever Price’s talents were, he wasn’t a master mimic, and every time he goes into disguise as someone else the dubbing is painfully obvious. It’s also hard to believe that Eva Gabor (Price’s scheming amoral ex-wife) was ever “innocent” as described by Price, but that may have been the magician’s own innocence shining through. One scene of the movie features Price disguised as his first murder victim while disposing of that same victim’s body, which is a clever idea. Unfortunately, the method of disposal (the body is disguised as a dummy and placed publicly on a huge pile of wood for a bonfire) had my deja vu bells going off, and when I noticed that the director was John Brahm, I knew where I had seen this method before; in Brahm’s earlier movie with Laird Cregar HANGOVER SQUARE.

M (1951)
Article #1373 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 12-17-2004
Posting Date: 5-16-2005
Directed by Joseph Losey
Featuring David Wayne, Howard Da Silva, Martin Gabel

A child killer is loose in the streets of L.A., and the police seem unable to catch him. When they try to compensate for this failure by making constant raids on the criminal underworld, one of the bigwigs of the latter decides to catch the murderer himself.

You remake a great movie at your own risk. It can also be a catch-22 situation; if you stray from the original story you’ll be criticized, but if you stick to it closely, you’ll be constantly reminding people of the earlier movie and inviting direct comparison. This being said, I feel that this is a good remake of the movie. It does a strong job of updating the time and place to contemporary L.A.. David Wayne does a fine job at playing the child murderer. The movie is also efficiently told in 88 minutes, somewhat shorter than the original.

However, it sticks too closely to the original movie for its own good. This version may be good, but the original was brilliant. Joseph Losey and David Wayne have their strengths, but they’re not Fritz Lang and Peter Lorre. None of the secondary characters here are as memorable as the ones in the original. And most of all, the wit and humor that permeated the original movie are mostly gone here, and what elements of it that do remain are copied from the original movie. There are a few changes to the story here; the killer has an obsession with shoes, when he is trapped inside the building he has a child with him, he’s more blatantly crazy, and the movie develops a relationship between the head criminal and the drunken lawyer that leads to a slightly different (and slightly less satisfying) ending. But ultimately, this version never quite takes on a life of its own, and it makes me wish I was watching the brilliant original movie instead. In short, the remake feels unnecessary. But that’s the risk of doing a remake in the first place.

MILLION DOLLAR LEGS (1932)
Article #1316 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 10-21-2004
Posting Date: 3-20-2005
Directed by Edward F. Cline
Featuring Jack Oakie, W.C. Fields, Andy Clyde

The president of Klopstokia tries to fill the empty treasury by competing in the Olympics.

Fantastic content: The country of Klopstokia is fictional, and some of the athletes have powers that are superhuman.

Nowadays when they talk about making wild, outrageous comedies, they usually just mean they’re loading it up with lots of sex and violence. Back in the thirties, this is the type of movie that would pass for wild and outrageous, and I for one prefer the high-energy conceptual weirdness of this early movie. Klopstokia is a country inhabited by goats and nuts, the strongest man gets to be president (in this case it’s W.C. Fields), all the men are named George and all the women are named Angela, and I’ll give you one guess as to where the major-domo is told that he should seek out the privy counselor. Along with Jack Oakie and W. C. Fields, we have Hugh Herbert as the Secretary of State, Billy Gilbert as the sneezing Secretary of the Interior, Dickie Moore as a little boy who shoots arrows (only some of which are poisonous), Ben Turpin as a mysterious spy keeping his eyes open, and if you keep your eyes open, you’ll spot Bruce Bennett and Syd Saylor. Is there a plot? I’m not sure. But I’ll take it hands down over almost any comedy released nowadays. Don’t confuse this with the Betty Grable of the movie the same name. And unless the title refers to the legs of the super-fast major-domo, I have no idea what it means.

THE MASTER KEY (1945)
(Serial)
Article #1301 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 10-6-2004
Posting Date: 3-5-2005
Directed by Lewis D. Collins and Ray Taylor
Featuring Milburn Stone, Jan Wiley, Dennis Moore

Federal Agent Tom Brant must contend with a Nazi conspiracy to gain the secret of a machine that will extract gold from seawater.

Each episode of this serial opens with a curious disclaimer, to the effect that the events in this serial never happened and could never happen, but that doesn’t make the serial any less fun, and that we should imagine ourselves in the year 1938. I found this disclaimer curious to say the least, and I didn’t really figure out why until after I finished watching it, and then noticed that the serial was released in 1945. In fact, it was released on April 25th, 1945 (according to IMDB), just a few days before Hitler took his own life. I’m willing to bet that the serial was originally planned to take place in the present, and the disclaimer was only added after Hitler’s suicide took away the timeliness of the story.

This one is by Universal, and the credits sequence makes it look like it’s going to be another GANGBUSTERS. Such is not the case; it’s not bad, but it doesn’t capture the atmosphere of the credits and remains fairly tame. It’s also a lot talkier (and with less action) than either the Republic or the Columbia serials, so this may be for the more patient serial fans out there. The most interesting touch is that the reporter uses a gang of kids that hang out in an abandoned theater to help find the Nazis, though I hear much of this footage is from Dead End Kids/Little Tough Guys movies. The fantastic aspect is the gold-sifting machine called the Orotran. Milburn Stone would later go on to play Doc on “Gunsmoke”.

MIDNIGHT AT MADAME TUSSAUD’S (1936)
Article #1273 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 9-8-2004
Posting Date: 2-5-2005
Directed by George Pearson
Featuring Lucille Lisle, James Carew, Charles Oliver

An adventurer takes a bet that he can spend the night in the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum.

To start off with, I like the premise of this movie. Having to spend a night alone in the horror section of a wax museum would be a deliciously scary experience, if for no other reason that the thought that some of these wax figures might be actually moving would automatically make you a little nervous. And the sequence in which the man spends the night in the Chamber of Horrors is very good indeed, and gives this movie its horror atmosphere. Unfortunately, the movie doesn’t reach this point until a good eighty percent of its running time has passed, and that first part of the movie is largely concerned with a down-on-his-luck gambler trying to marry the adventurer’s daughter for cash and the antics of two reporters trying to unravel the whole story. Yes, this storyline does set up certain details for the last part of the movie, but it’s overelaborate and quite dull; you spend most of the movie just waiting for the wax museum sequence. In short, it has a nice ending, but it really isn’t worth sitting through the whole thing to reach it.

MAN ALIVE (1945)
Article #1264 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 8-30-2004
Posting Date: 1-27-2005
Directed by Ray Enright
Featuring Pat O’Brien, Adolphe Menjou, Ellen Drew

Due to a series of circumstances brought on by a night of drunkenness, a car salesman is believed dead after the body of a con-man is found wearing his ring and his clothes. The salesman uses this oppotunity to pose as his own ghost in order to prevent his wife from running off with an old flame of hers.

Back when I covered RAINBOW ISLAND, I questioned that whether a man posing as a native god might be enough to throw a movie into the realm of fantastic cinema. The question arises again here in a slightly different form; we know from the beginning there is no real ghost, but we do have a character posing as one and certain other characters believing the pose. We also have two other aspects of the movie that skirt the fantastic genres; when the salesman first recovers from his accident, he looks through a window and sees a throng of singing angels. Thinking he is in heaven, he walks through a door, and is then dismayed to find the devil shoveling coal into a furnace; they are all actors aboard a showboat. We also have a sequence with a phony medium who gets his comeuppance when he thinks he’s found a real ghost. I’d say there’s enough here for this movie to qualify as marginalia. On it’s own terms, it starts off a little slow, but it picks up speed as it progresses as the salesman has to contend with the complications that arise from his actions. One major problem I have with this one is the Adolphe Menjou character; I’m never quite satisfied as to the explanation he tenders for attaching himself to the salesman and screwing up his life. Still, this is a rather amusing comedy.

THE MALPAS MYSTERY (1960)
Article #1243 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 8-9-2004
Posting Date: 1-6-2005
Directed by Sidney Hayers
Featuring Maureen Swanson, Allan Cuthbertson, Geoffrey Keen

A woman just released from prison (for a crime she didn’t commit) becomes involved with a mysterious recluse known as Malpas.

From the style of the beginning and ending credits of this movie, as well as its length (my print runs a mere 53 minutes), I’m guessing that this mystery-thriller based on an Edgar Wallace novel actually was from a TV production, but I can’t really find much information to confirm or deny this. Though not a horror movie per se, its horror elements are quite striking; the mysterious Malpas wears a mask to disguise his features, and he sits alone in a dark room and controls the doors and lights in his house by remote control. These elements give an eerie sense of dread to the proceedings that really catches your attention. This is good, because as a whole, the movie feels confused and rushed; I suspect that 53 minutes is just not long enough to effectively tell this tale. I also felt somewhat disappointed by the revelation of Malpas’s identity, not so much for who it is (which turns out to be extremely logical), but for its timing; it lets the cat out of the bag, but then continues for several more minutes acting as if his identity is still a mystery, and this left me feeling a little frustrated. It’s not bad overall, but it doesn’t quite hit the mark.

MISS PINKERTON (1932)
Article #1234 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 7-31-2004
Postind Date: 12-28-2004
Directed by Lloyd Bacon
Featuring Joan Blondell, George Brent, Ruth Hall

A nurse tired of her routine duties at the hospital is sent out on an assignment of caring for an old woman who fainted when she discovered the dead body of her nephew. She becomes involved in the investigation of the death.

Is the death the result of suicide? Or is it murder faked to look like suicide? Or is it a suicide faked to look like a murder that was faked to look like a suicide? (There’s insurance involved.) Or is it a murder faked to look like a suicide that was being faked to look like a murder being faked as a suicide? Believe it or not, the investigation actually starts digging this deep. Between that and the fact that practically everyone is acting fairly suspicious and also given that we are thrust into the proceedings without really being properly introduced to all the characters involved, you might understand why I found this particular mystery to be somewhat confusing. Still, it is entertaining in its own muddled way, and it does have a black-cloaked figure with a clutching hand to add some horror touches to the proceedings. The ending did leave me feeling vaguely dissatisfied, though. And just for fun, see if you can figure out what Mrs. Mitchell was planning to reveal in her final legal statement.

THE MYSTERIANS (1957)
(a.k.a. CHIKYU BOEIGUN)
Article #1214 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 7-11-2004
Posting Date: 12-8-2004
Directed by Ishiro Honda
Featuring Kenji Sahara, Yumi Shirakawa, Momoko Kochi

Aliens from the lost planet of Mysteroid attempt to invade the Earth.

This space opera moves into the action so quickly that you barely get a chance to meet the main characters. This is perhaps the reason I’ve generally found the movie quite confusing the previous times I watched it; if you lose track of the character played by Akihiko Hirata, some of the later plot developments seem arbitrary. It also doesn’t help that the English script is poorly translated from the Japanese (a star and an asteroid are two entirely different things, for example). Still, if you’re into non-stop eye candy action, you won’t be disappointed by this one, and it even fits in some messages about international cooperation and touches upon the nature of propaganda during the proceedings. For me, the most jarring problem with the movie is that its most striking setpiece is near the beginning of the movie rather than towards the end; the giant space robot is the most memorable thing in the movie, and it’s out of the action after the first thirty minutes. Still, once again, I’m amazed at how some of the characters believe the robot is a living being rather than a robot when it looks more like a robot than anything else.