What Films did You Watch Last Week (18/03 - 24/03) CLOSED

I have been watching a lot of noir and B-crime films from the '40s and '50s since discovering Noir Alley on TCM about a year ago. I love "Gun Crazy" and have your other two on my (very long) watch list.

The Case Of The Lucky Legs / Archie Mayo (1935). The third of six “B” movies featuring Perry Mason, the lawyer-detective created by Erle Stanley Gardner. Warren Williams plays an alcoholic but happy-go-lucky, wise-cracking Mason, a different approach from the books and from the popular TV series from the 1960s. The suspects are all the victims of a con man who organizes beauty contests (the “Lucky Legs” competition) and then absconds with the proceeds. When he turns up murdered, suspects abound. The only one we can be sure is innocent is the one Perry Mason is defending. “Lucky Legs” is one of the best of the ‘30s Masons.



Porter Hall, Genevieve Tobin, Warren William



The Whistler / William Castle (1944). Columbia. “I am The Whistler. I know many things for I walk by night. I know many strange tales, many secrets in the hearts of men and women who have stepped into the shadows. Yes, I know the nameless terrors of which they dare not speak” So says The Whistler at the start of each film. It has been said that the 8-feature “Whistler” series is one of the least known but one of the best of the 1940s movie crime series. If the first two films are typical of the rest then this saying is true. “The Whistler” is an anthology series. Each story is a stand-alone. There are no continuing characters. Silent and early sound star Richard Dix leads the cast in all but the last episode. The Whistler is never seen, only heard in voice-over narration. In the first story, Earl Conrad (Dix) is a business man whose wife was recently killed in a boating accident. He feels that his friends all think he murdered her. Too afraid to do it himself, he tries to die by hiring a hit man through an intermediary. The intermediary is himself shot dead by police right after contacting the assassin. When Conrad hears that his wife might still be alive, he desperately tries to call off the hit. J. Carrol Naish plays the hired killer and Gloria Stuart (“Titanic”) plays Conrad’s right-hand at work who is secretly in love with him. Also, in an uncredited role is one of my favorite unknown character actors, Joan Woodbury. Dark, edgy, and unsettling.



J. Carrol Naish, Richard Dix, and Gloria Stuart in a posed publicity photo



The Mark Of The Whistler / William Castle (1944). Columbia. Lee Nugent (Richard Dix) is a down-on-his-luck Knight of the Road. In a strange city, he sees in a newspaper that a bank is looking for heirs of unclaimed accounts. One of the heirs is a Lee Nugent – someone with the same name. Nugent decides to see if he can claim the money by convincing people that he is the other Lee Nugent. By doing so, he stirs trouble out of the past of that other man who he doesn’t know. Janis Carter, Porter Hall, and Paul Guilfoyle co-star in this terrific tale based on a Cornell Woolrich short story which has an O. Henry-ish ending. The films are based on a long running radio program.




Song Of The South / Wilfred Jackson (animation) and Harve Foster (live action) (1946). The print I watched began with a “WARNING: The film you are watching is a product of fan editors and is distributed for free over the Internet. If you have purchased this film, through Ebay or similar sites, you have been ripped-off. If you are selling copies of this film you are committing a criminal offense and taking credit for others’ hard work.” I am surprised that this “fan edit” is up. Disney is usually very vigilant about protecting its property rights. Based on the Uncle Remus tales of the white southern writer Joel Chandler Harris (1848-1908), who collected folk tales from the antebellum slave culture of the American deep south. The movie contains, in animation, only three of the folk stories (about 20 minutes total) while telling a live action coming of age of a young boy (Bobby Driscoll) who comes with his mother to live on a Georgia plantation during the Reconstruction Era. He finds a comforting father figure in Uncle Remus, a former slave who stills lives nearby. Remus is played by first-time movie actor James Baskett who gives such a deep convincing performance that Walt Disney campaigned for a special Oscar for Baskett who received it at the 20th Academy Awards (Films of ’47). From the first moment the movie was announced it became a subject of controversy and protest from the African-American community (which gives the lie to right-wingers who claim that modern “political correctness” is keeping a DVD from being issued in the U.S.). Uncle Walt, who has been described as reactionary almost approaching fascism, at first tried to please both African-Americans and southern whites (as well as supporting Baskett) but eventually fell into delusions that Dirty Commies were inciting the African-American news media against him. Anyway, when Br’er (brother) Rabbit and friends are not on screen, the movie is a bit on the dull side. Baskett is great and Driscoll (10-years-old at the time of filming) is a natural talent so we have good acting to carry us through, but I wish there had been at least twice as much of Br’er Rabbit, Br’er Fox, and Br’er Bear.




Union Station / Rudolph Maté (1950). Paramount. This was a big year for William Holden and Nancy Olson. They first appeared together in Billy Wilder’s “Sunset Blvd.” then, two weeks after close of production, they reteamed for “Union Station” at the same studio. The two films opened about a month apart in August and September. William Holden had been kicking around the studio for years. Holden was considered a solid professional who took the roles they gave him but who had never quite connected with audiences. “Sunset Blvd.” changed all that and “Union Station” became one of the last of his “contract” pictures as his career started to grow. But I believe that Nancy Olson is the true lead in this picture. It is she who realizes that a crime is occurring on the train and that someone she knows has been kidnapped. She also stays with the investigation as a person who can identify the criminals and even follows one to identify another. She makes deductions and observations that the professionals miss. I loved that. Holden plays the top cop in charge of security at the major railroad station. He works with the city cops lead by vet Barry Fitzgerald. Even though there is a romance sub-plot between Holden and Olson, the main couple chemistry is between Holden and Fitzgerald. The story begins as a police procedural but as it develops, a lot of noir elements sneak in. “Union Station” is action packed. I liked it a lot. In supporting, Lyle Bettger is the main baddie, Jan Sterling is great as Bettger’s moll who is having second thoughts, and Allene Roberts is the kidnap victim.



Nancy Olson pesters the conductor (Harry Hayden) until he reports a man with a gun on the train



Quo Vadis / Mervyn LeRoy (1951). MGM. By the early 1950s, movie studios were growing more and more desperate over the loss of audiences to that new-fangled thing called television. The solution most of them chose (in this case MGM head of production Dore Schary) was spectacle that small black and white TV screens could not deliver. Schary was partial to musicals but green-lighted this historical extravaganza to be shot in Italy with a cast of thousands (literally, in the pre-CGI era), a run-time of just under three hours, and Technicolor (if Schary had waited a couple of years he could have had wide screen, too) – all layered over with a sentimental, simplistic, and pandering Christianity that rarely rises above a children’s Sunday school class lesson. In fact, Jesus, himself, has the movie’s last line. The last quarter of the film has the tension and danger up to a level that attention must be paid but I would never have made it that far had it not been for one thing – Peter Ustinov’s outstanding performance as Emperor Nero. At first I wondered if he was overacting or exaggerating for comic effect but finally came to see that it was a well thought out and executed accomplishment. Brilliant, to be precise. “Quo Vadis” was the box office hit that MGM had hoped for so the historical and Biblical epics kept coming for the rest of the decade.