Film Rolls, Round 2: Steel and Lace, Havana Widows, and I've Got Your Number

When we last left this silly experiment, Mookie: was leading Bruce, 8 ½ stars to 5 ½ stars as both landed on box sets. I have not actually abandoned it, but the writing has gone kind of slow. But let us continue!

Your roll, Mookie!

5! Just enough to jump to the next part of the board and Steal and Lace

And how does Bruce respond?

That 8 helps catch up a little, hitting a DVD double feature from the Warner Archive Sale.

And how are the movies?

Steel and Lace

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 4 March 2022 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)

Grading on a curve? Maybe. The thing about a movie like Steel and Lace is that at least a few parts of it are better than they have any right to be, given that this thing was shot for video and is clearly built around what the practical effects team can do, and the hints of a little unexpected ambition make it better than expected. It's not really a good movie, but one can see the good movie trapped inside it and wonder what would happen if there was a little more studio support or money or someone with more talent at the helm.

It's pretty simple high-concept stuff - talented pianist Gaily Morton (Clare Wren) is raped by Daniel Emerson (Michael Cerveris), and after he's acquitted, she commits suicide but appears to return from the dead, targeting Emerson and the four hangers-on that alibied him. In fact, her engineer brother Albert (Bruce Davison) has built an android in her image and pointed it at those he blames for her death, leaving a trail of bodies for a detective (David Naughton) and his crime photographer ex-girlfriend (Stacy Haiduk) to follow. Pretty basic rape-revenge stuff, with a sci-fi angle that lets director Ernest Farino and writers Joseph Dougherty & Dave Edison go big.

And go big they do - this may be nasty exploitation whose courtroom scene look like they were filmed in a hotel conference room, but the kills are impressively splattery, all the more satisfying for how they are by and large visited upon those who deserve it. Farino had a long career in visual effects before this movie (his directorial debut) and it's been much of his work since, and he knows both what he can get away with at this budget and how to handle things on set to get that done quickly and have a little more time all around. The action is by and large not complicated, but built for impact.

And somewhere underneath, there's something not half-bad going on with the story. The dialogue is terrible and none of the cast really manages to sell it, but Clare Wren does fairly well articulating a quietly growing sense of self and discomfort with the idea of extending her targets beyond those responsible for Gaily's death, and the writers are quite aware of just where Albert is not entirely different from Emerson et al; his android isn't a real recreation of his sister, but a simulation that makes him feel comfortable. It's messy, and you wonder what someone capable of really good trash would make of it, but it's not awful.

Havana Widows

* * * (out of four)
Seen 5 March 2022 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, DVD)

It's kind of fun to imagine how you might remake Havana Widows today, because while so many of the details feel like they might change (and not just because Havana isn't exactly a playground for zany New Yorkers any more), it's the sort of farce that is able to get the audience on its wavelength quickly - it's barely an hour long, after all - and zip through a bunch of goofy scenarios without feeling particularly rushed.

It has a couple of sassy blonde dancers, Mae (Joan Blondell) and Sadie (Glenda Farrell) getting stiffed on their pay but inspired by a former colleague who has come back from Havana with a rich new husband. They just need some stake money to get there, which comes via Herman (Allen Jenkins), an on-again/off-again boyfriend of Sadie's, who himself has taken it from his gangster boss. Once there, they target a rich-looking fellow (Guy Kibbee) for blackmail, except that Mae becomes genuinely fond of his ne'er-do-well son (Lyle Talbot). Can they do it before the hotel evicts these girls posing as rich widows who are behind on their rent, or Herman and his boss come looking for their money?

Maybe the Depression setting makes the gold-digging more palatable, especially considering that Sadie and Mae seem so much brighter and more deserving of the comfort money can bring than the various men they encounter and woo. In any event, director Ray Enright and writer Earl Baldwin make light farce out of what could be a nest of vipers, with everybody just likable enough that one enjoys seeing them stay about a step ahead of trouble that they probably deserve. One thing leads to another in rapid-fire fashion without feeling particularly rushed, with Joan Blondell and Glenda Farrell making a fun pair - pretty, sassy, sharp without being really mean, seeming to fall into their complementary roles with ease, playing off each other and the various folks around them with style. It's full of fun bits and supporting characters who maybe have one joke apiece but can milk it for all it's worth.

For some reason, it's second-billed on the Warner Archive DVD - maybe the shorter length makes it more the B movie than the A picture in a 1930s double feature - but it's a fun little trifle that holds up, and it might be fun to see some of today's funny ladies take a run at this sort of thing.

I've Got Your Number

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 5 March 2022 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, DVD)

The 69-minute bit-of-everything movie is a lost art for a lot of reasons, although it seems like the sort of thing that streamers might find a reason to bring back, because they've got a lot of the same incentives to crank out a lot of movies that don't need to be big enough to justify a special trip out (or can be part of a double feature), maybe putting folks under contract to do three or four light popcorn flicks a year. They haven't though, even though they could probably use a catalog full of movies like I've Got Your Number that aren't exactly special but which are enjoyable and good for a night's entertainment for a nickel (or a buck, or whatever the pro-rated cost of your Prime subscription is).

For being so short, it's got a fair amount going on, with telephone line workers Terry (Pat O'Brien) and Johnny (Allen Jenkins) responding to service calls, crossing paths with hotel switchboard operator Marie (Joan Blondell), who loses her job because an ex is in the mob, and then helping her get a new job where said ex has an idea how to use her as a dupe, but fortunately the smitten Terry has an idea of how to use his skills to prove her innocence. It is, by twenty-first century standards, not exactly legal, but it's at least novel for 1934.

Director Rey Enright and screenwriters Warren Duff & Sidney Sutherland compact all that well enough that there's room for all of that to happen, for scenes showing enough about the phone company's operations that the last-act hijinks make sense, and to introduce enjoyable (if stock) supporting characters like Eugene Pallette's boss, frustrated at Terry's antics in a way typically reserved for police captains and newspaper editors, and Glenda Farrell's fake medium. Pat O'Brien is probably the lead in terms of driving the story, but it's not hard to see why Joan Blondell is top-billed; she sort of pushes her way to the front with her confident New York accent while still being enough of the good girl to be taken advantage of and accept a little help. It's the sort of movie that doesn't have a lot of memorable moments, but it sure gets the job done while it's going and never wears out its welcome.

… So, where do we stand after Round 2?

Mookie: 10 ¾ stars - respectable, except…

Bruce: 11 stars - a decent double feature is a good way to make up ground.

Now we take the viewed movies out, reshuffle the movies, and here we are:

Moving everything after the double feature back one pulls Mookie back into the first box, but both ready to jump ahead fifty years with a good roll.

The Brasher Doubloon

There. No-one can say I haven't reviewed all four Philip Marlowe movies made in the 1940s despite how I've occasionally mentioned how weird it is that four different studios did one, each with a different lead actor, in such a short span of time. I have finished something during the pandemic!

I've put this off in part do to format snobbery; as a relatively early adopter of Blu-ray (thought that came after my HD-DVD player) and then excited fan of 4K presentations who has been fortunate enough to live near theaters that often show this sort of thing on 35mm film for the past twenty-odd years, it's been pretty easy to look at this film only being available on DVD-R and figure I'd wait for something better. It's not even necessarily a deliberate decision; I just don't pay attention to the DVD-only section of release lists and always had enough reasons to go out or enough coming in that I didn't need to go looking for more. Occasionally I'd do something like follow links on IMDB from something else, be reminded this exists, and hope I had a chance to see it in something better than standard-definition.

I finally pulled the trigger on it a couple months ago, and it was a pretty good impulse. I don't recall consciously thinking that Disney would probably pull the plug on the Cinema Archives manufacture-on-demand line if they hadn't already, or that it would be harder for the Brattle or Harvard Film Archive to book this one for a theoretical Chandler and/or Marlowe series (note to anyone reading: A Chandler/Marlowe series would be fantastic), but that's probably the case, right? I'm not sure how much they've been letting deep Twentieth Century Fox catalog titles show up in other places (from TCM to KinoLorber Studio Classics) despite not really having a place for them in-house. Stuff like this doesn't really fit on Disney+ and Hulu is still sort of inching its way toward being "the Fox/Touchstone things that don't fit on Disney+" (which is also what I presume Star is going to be outside the States), but as a result of the merger, Disney has a whole massive library of cinema that stretches back to the silent age that they're really not positioned to exploit. Although, I suppose, now that they've more or less reverted the brand to "Twentieth Century" - thanks, Murdoch, for making the Fox name that toxic! - they'd be in pretty good position to launch classic-film/TV service by that name that includes both the TCF catalog and the less-beloved parts of the Disney library.

Anyway, for what it was, the disc didn't look bad on my TV at all. I don't know how much of that is a really nice transfer/encode and how much that is my UHD player doing a really nice job of upscaling, but the end result was that after an FBI warning screen that did not scale well at all, but it was good enough for me to maybe start paying a bit more attention to what sort of catalog stuff is available on DVD, because that format still owns a huge chunk of what's left of the home-video market, and with the folks who own most of the movies seeing streaming as the future but not necessarily seeing catalog titles as worth the effort to have at the ready, that may be the only way you can both see some of these movies now and be able to recommend them to a friend next week. Heck, this one's just barely available at Amazon and doesn't show up on JustWatch at all, so if you're curious, grab it now.

The Brasher Doubloon

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 2 February 2021 in Jay's Living Room (off-the-shelf, DVD)

There was a period in the mid-1940s when four different studios adapted four of Raymond Chandler's novels featuring private eye Philip Marlowe in as many years with as many actors, which from a modern perspective seems absolutely bizarre. Even more so, two were remakes of a sort, as the studios had purchased Chandler's novels when they were thought of as mere pulps to use their plots in B-movie series, making new versions when Chandler became more famous and respectable. That's the case with The Brasher Doubloon; Fox's second adaptation of The High Window isn't quite a half-hearted cash-in, but even as an okay B-movie it's certainly the least interesting of the four Marlowe movies.

It opens with Marlowe (George Montgomery) being called to Pasadena; secretary Merle Davis (Nancy Guild) pulled his name from the phone book to recover a coin stolen from the collection of her employer Elizabeth Murdock (Florence Bates), although Florence's son Leslie (Conrad Janis) assures him that it's not necessary. He's already on the case, though, so he starts following what leads there are - and finds his first corpse on his second stop.

The plots were never the most important pieces of a Marlowe story, and this one in particular is a scavenger hunt that Marlowe never has to work terribly hard to figure out. It's got the usual pieces - the thing hidden in a locker, the apartments and offices conveniently left unlocked after their occupant has been murdered, Marlowe just pocketing any gun he finds and creating a real chain-of-custody mess for the district attorney to deal with later. Fortunately, one can still at least see some of what made Chandler's stories stand out (aside from the delightful language) - the hard shell over a soft and gallant night, the way the city grinds some people to a paste but doesn't make them stop hustling, the nastiness hidden behind privilege. That it doesn't always hold together is not a big deal, because concentrating on the details would mean losing sight of the bigger picture.

Unfortunately, the studio isn't throwing its A list at this movie the way Warner did with The Big Sleep, and while George Montgomery shouldn't necessarily be trying to imitate Bogart's Marlowe, he never seems to get the character on more than a surface level, making for a clean-cut detective whose corner-cutting and cynicism often comes across as bullying rather than a shield for how he cares too much. A little comes out in narration, but though Montgomery is capable enough, it doesn't do much to deepen his character. He's also got to do a fair amount of the heavy lifting for his co-star, describing how Merle is supposed to be timid or shy because Nancy Guild doesn't really get that across (except, ironically, in a scene where she's supposed to be trying to play the femme fatale). Neither of them really sink their teeth into their roles the way that the side characters do - Florence Bates gives Elizabeth Murdock a meanness that could easily give rise to the sneer with which Conrad Janis plays Leslie, while Houseley Stevenson and Jack Overman are memorably disreputable in small parts.

It's capably-enough made, at least, with relatively little fat in its 72-minute running time, keeping things moving at a nice pace that allows a viewer to marinate in Chandler's seedy Los Angeles without feeling like one is mired there. The simple, low-budget staging plays into that, even if it does sometimes look a bit generic. It's got a bit of studio polish, just not a lot of flair.

Of the four 1940s Marlowes, The Brasher Doubloon is justifiably the most obscure and will likely stay that way, as the 70-odd years of studio and library consolidation since has left it in a different place than the other three. It's just good enough that curious fans of the character won't be too disappointed, even if it's not terribly interesting on its own.

Also at eFilmCritic

Week one of "A Hundred Years of Sherlock Holmes On-Screen": The Early Years

A few weeks ago on the eFilmCritic/Hollywood Bitch-slap Derby board (where the site's writers communicate with each other), I mentioned that I had reviewed three different versions of Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher, and had anyone done four of the same movie. Someone else mentioned that they were working on a couple of Sherlock Holmes movies in anticipation of the new movie with Robert Downey Jr., I figured that expanding on this might be fun, and suggested that it might be a fun and hit-inducing project to review a different Sherlock Holmes movie every day in December, in chronological order. There was some initial enthusiasm, then people got busy...

Well, I've filled my Amazon shopping cart with a bunch of different Sherlock films, and I'm having a grand time watching them. We'll soon see whether I can keep up the pace with just one other fellow definitely signed up to contribute; I've scaled the size of the project down a bit, with reviews going up on weekdays and features planned for the weekend.

In addition to the reviews below, I've written two features for the site so far. The first, "Why Sherlock Holmes?, provides a rambling overview of why this character is still having movies produced a century after the first (and a hundred twenty years after he first appeared); the second is a review of "Sherlock Holmes: The Archive Collection", the nifty collection of rarities that included The Sleeping Cardinal, reviewed below.

One thing I've rediscovered while doing this: I am a big ol' nerd where Holmes is concerned. This is not a huge surprise, as I'm a big ol' nerd in many areas, but I doubt many other reviewers looking at these films would spend so much time on how they corresponded to the original stories. Being a lover of old movies, the stuff I've looked up to fill in these things may make these some of the dorkiest things I've ever written.

Anyway, click through to HBS for the full Holmes nerdiness, as this series was conceived for them.

Sherlock Holmes (1922)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 November 2009 in Jay's Living Room (upcoverted Kino DVD)

This silent film from 1922 is not the first appearance of Sherlock Holmes on the silver screen; it is not even the first adaptation of William Gillette's famed stage play (Gillette himself had performed the role on screen six years earlier). It's one of the earliest feature-length Sherlock Holmes movies that we can piece together, though, and it mostly holds up. And as a bonus, it does feature a pair of impressive debuts in the cast.

We start not with Holmes, but with Moriarty (Gustav von Seyffertitz), the untouchable master of the London Underworld literally controlling his operations from an underground lair. His influence extends far from the city; at Cambridge, for instance, young Prince Alexis of Harlstein (Reginald Denny) is framed for a theft and threatened with deportation. He laments the twenty-four hour deadline to return the money to his friend Watson (Roland Young), who suggests that there is a man in his year with unusual skill in solving this kind of puzzle, one Sherlock Holmes (John Barrymore). He quickly deduces that the actual thief was one Foreman Wells (William Powell), but the point soon becomes moot - a tragedy recalls Alexis to Harlstein. Years later, on the eve of Alexis's marriage to a princess, he returns to London to hire Holmes - one Alice Faulkner (Carol Dempster) is in possession of letters that Alexis wrote to her sister which could cause a scandal. Moriarty also desires these letters, thus giving Holmes the opportunity to finally capture his nemesis, as well as save the girl who captured his heart back in school...

Wait, what? Fans of the great detective know that there was only one woman for him, and Alice Faulkner isn't quite Irene Adler, although a fair amount of the plot is taken from the story in which Adler appeared, "A Scandal in Bohemia". Of course, fans will also recall that Holmes and Watson were not schoolmates, either. Moriarty also only appeared in one story, despite being implied as an influence on others. Gillette's play is, suffice it to say, a rather liberal adaptation of the Holmes canon, and screenwriters Earle Browne and Marion Fairfax take further liberties. Despite being somewhat removed from the stories as Doyle wrote them, it does give the film a certain amount of shape and scope for a movie designed as a one-off encompassing Holmes's career, casting it as a struggle against Moriarty, rather than as the start of a franchise. It's still got its flaws - too much Moriarty, not enough Watson, and they appear to have a hard time adapting a talky play into a silent production - but the story itself is good, incorporating familiar bits from several Holmes stories, and finding a good balance between deduction and action.

Full review at HBS.

The Sign of Four (1932)

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 22 November 2009 in Jay's Living Room (upcoverted DVD)

Before Basil Rathbone made the role of Sherlock Holmes his own in the late thirties and forties, a number of different actors had the role - in at least one case, with two different series existing in competition with each other (at least in the United States, things went into the public domain much more quickly back then)! During the 1930s, the most prolific Holmes was Arthur Wontner; he did five films. Of those, The Missing Rembrandt is lost, and The Sleeping Cardinal is extremely rare. The other three vary wildly in quality, sometimes within the same film, as is the case with this version of The Sign of Four.

Many years ago, convict Johnathan Small (Graham Soutten) lets his jailors in on a secret - the location of a hoard of treasure. Though the group agrees to split it, double-crosses abound - one kills another, and Small is left in prison. Years later, Small and his cellmate (Roy Emerton) escape, an event that frightens the elderly Maj. Sholto (Herbert Lomas) to death - but not before confesses to his sons (Miles Malleson and Kynaston Reeves), and encourages them to make amends to Mary (Isla Bevan), the daughter of Maj. Marston. They do so anonymously, but when another note bearing the "sign of four" accompanies the ransacking of her West End flower shop, she turns to Sherlock Holmes (Wontner) and his friend Watson (Ian Hunter).

The film actually adheres fairly closely to the events of Arthur Conan Doyle's novel, but rearranges the presentation into chronological order, which means that we don't see Holmes and Watson until nearly twenty minutes into a movie that doesn't quite make an hour and a quarter all told. There's good and bad to that approach; the bad is that Holmes's deductions are a little less amazing when he's arriving at conclusions we already know, although it does counter the feeling that the author and/or filmmakers are cheating by having the detective base those deductions on facts that we are not privy to. There is still rather too much of that, and there are bits in the screenplay that feel flat out like holes - for example, based upon just what we see in the film, it seems that "The Sign of Three" would be a more logical title.

Full review at HBS.

The Sleeping Cardinal (aka Sherlock Holmes' Fatal Hour)

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 27 November 2009 in Jay's Living Room (upcoverted DVD)

When one hears about lost films, one tends to romanticize them. We think of movies from the start of the twentieth century as wonderful, since the bad ones seldom play TCM, repertory theaters, or show up in very prominent locations at the video store. In truth, most of them are far more likely to resemble The Sleeping Cardinal. Not so much because it's the bad ones that got lost, but because previous years had no more masterpieces per hundred films made than today.

In the dark of night, a bank guard is killed. But before we learn that nothing appears to have been taken, we cut to a game of high-stakes bridge, where diplomatic service employee Ronald Adair (Leslie Perrins) is once again winning. His sister Kathleen (Jane Welsh) is starting to worry - after all, no-one wins every time - and asks old friend Doctor John Watson (Ian Fleming) if he might have his friend Sherlock Holmes (Arthur Wontner). Holmes agrees, though he is more interested in convincing Inspector Lestrade (Philip Hewland) that the bank robbery was more than it appears, and that Professor Moriarty was responsible.

The Sleeping Cardinal is also known as "Sherlock Holmes' Fatal Hour" (dodgy punctuation and all), and that's the title printed on the version available on DVD. It comes by that by being an adaptation of the stories "The Final Problem" and "The Empty House", although the writers have rearranged parts of the two stories and invented other bits to fill it out. In some ways, that is to the film's benefit: One of the weaknesses of "The Final Problem" as a story is that we seem to come in toward the end, with Holmes ready to smash Moriarty's organization; here we get to see Holmes tracking the Professor down, while the villain pulls his strings.

Full review at HBS.

A Study in Scarlet (1933)

* * (out of four)
Seen 1 December 2009 in Jay's Living Room (upcoverted DVD)

One would imagine A Study in Scarlet to be one of the most frequently adapted Sherlock Holmes stories. It's novel-length, the first one written by Arthur Conan Doyle, and the one where Holmes first made the acquaintance of Dr. John H. Watson. Adaptations are rare, though; even the very faithful television series starring Jeremy Brett skipped over it. And, of course, there's an argument to be made that even this 1933 film doesn't actually have much to do with it.

We start in London's Victoria Station; the sleeping compartment of a train is locked up tight, and when the conductor breaks in, he finds the body of a man who apparently hanged himself. Later, across town, Miss Eileen Forrester (June Clyde) arrives with her fiancé for a meeting of the secret society to which the dead man and her own late father belonged. The group's leader, Merrydew (Alan Dinehart) declares that the dead man's share of the group's wealth will be divided among the seven remaining members. This doesn't sit so well with the widow, who takes the matter to Sherlock Holmes (Reginald Owen) and Dr. Watson (Warburton Gamble). It may soon have to be divided in even fewer shares, and the widow of the next man to fall, Mrs. Pyke (Anna May Wong), seems rather cool to the interest of Holmes and the police.

It has been some time since I've read the original novel, but I remember it well enough to note that all of its more famous elements are missing: We do not see Holmes and Watson meet and take up residence at 221B Baker Street (the movie gives their address as 221A, for that matter), the German word for "revenge" is not scrawled upon the wall in blood, and the solution of the crime is not interrupted for a long flashback. KBS Productions apparently only secured the rights to the title "A Study in Scarlet", as opposed to the actual story.

Full review at HBS.