In short: I Love a Mystery (1945)

What caused San Francisco society man Jefferson Monk (George Macready) to lose his head in a freak accident? And whatever happened to his head? Private detectives Jack Packard (Jim Bannon) and Doc Long (Barton Yarborough) know the answer to at least one of these questions because they started working on the highly mysterious case of Mr Monk a few days earlier.

About a year before the detectives came into play, Monk, you see, was quite disturbed by a prophecy made by the high priest (Lester Matthews) of a Mysterious Oriental Cult™ saying he’d lose his head a year later. Oh, and might he be willing to sell it then, for Monk looks like the spitting image of the cult’s founder whose mummy is unfortunately starting to rot?

By the point Monk meets the detectives, he’s worked himself into quite a panic regarding the whole matter, particularly after a friendly letter from the cult leader prophecies his wife Ellen (Nina Foch) “becoming an invalid” and Ellen actually losing control of her legs just a few days later. Then there’s the fact that a mysterious guy with a peg leg carrying a valise “just the right size for a human head” keeps following Monk around. Clearly, Packard and Long have their work quite cut out for them.

I Love A Mystery is the first of three Columbia productions based on the eponymous popular radio show written by Carlton E. Morse, and going by what I’ve read about it the show – there’s horrifyingly little of it available to actually hear of it in old time radio fan circles – the film’s mixture of seemingly supernatural occurrences, preposterous yet also awesome and pretty clever plot twists and an all-around air of anything goes is quite typical of it; it’s also quite typical of things I describe as “awesome”.

And awesome Henry Levin’s film indeed is, at least if you like your mysteries weird and somewhat two-fisted, and aren’t too annoyed by the whole “Oriental Mysteries” business – though there’s a fun twist to that aspect of the film too, so we’re not talking Fu Manchu style yellow danger racism here. The film’s script is even clever enough to not annoy me despite explaining most of the potentially supernatural occurrences away. That might have something to do with the plain (and pleasantly preposterous in a good sense) weirdness of the whole tale even without prophecies and curses actually existing in its world, or with Levin’s fine sense of how to pace the telling of said tale. At the very least, there are neither dithering nor detours here, with every scene fulfilling an actually important function in the plot and at the same time also containing at least one element of clever pulpy fun.

Fun seems to have been the film’s watch word, even though the plot is, if you think about it, actually as dark as that of the darkest noir, and a very fun time I Love a Mystery turns out to be.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,mystery,pulp,henry levin,jim bannon,nina foch,george macready,barton yarborough,in short

The Alligator People (1959)

Warning: I'm pretty sure various alligators were hurt for our entertainment during the making of this movie, so if you're sensitive about these things, this might be a film to avoid. It was a borderline case for me

Under hypnosis, nurse Jane Marvin (Beverly Garland), tells her psychiatrist boss a peculiar tale about a time when she was the freshly married Joyce Webster.
The honeymoon trip with her new husband Paul (Richard Crane) was rudely interrupted by a telegraph whose content convinced Paul to jump the train and disappear out of his wife's sight. Before the wedding night. Her husband's sudden and inexplicable flight wasn't something Joyce was willing to tolerate, but her attempts at finding out where her wayward husband got to were less than successful. It's not as if Joyce had much to go on anyway. Paul never did talk about his life before he met her except for mentioning a plane crash he shouldn't have survived and his belongings are strangely devoid of any hints towards his past.

Some off-screen sleuthing eventually led Joyce to Paul's former college fraternity and from there to the place he gave as his home address - a creepy mansion deep down in the swamps of Louisiana. Of course, Joyce made her way there as soon as she was able, finding a certain Mrs Hawthorne (Frieda Inescort) living there with two black servants and hook-handed, gator-hating, alcoholic handyman Manon (Lon Chaney Jr.) in the swamps nearby. Mrs Hawthorne purported not to know anything about Paul, but Joyce easily enough understood the old lady was lying for some reason, and would not be moved until she found out what truly was going on.
One suspects our heroine didn't exactly expect the truth had something to do with a friendly mad scientist (George Macready), the pituitary glands of alligators, and a husband with a very bad case of psoriasis.

Despite pretending to be a horror movie in its marketing material, The Alligator People is a SF melodrama with a slight influence of Southern Gothic for all but the final five minutes of its running time. As expected, it's also patently ridiculous in its set-up - so Paul is absenting himself from his new wife because he might start to look ugly, despite the way his face looks anyhow? -, silly in its science - did you know the best hope against curing the unpleasant aftereffects of alligator pituitary gland serum is radioactivity, or that cobalt 60 is transported in simple wooden crates you leave standing around at a rural train station until a mad alcoholic can get them? -, and not as clever as one would like it to be - after all, the only way the film's writer Orville H. Hampton can think of to produce a meeting between scaly-faced Paul and Joyce is to have the up to that point perfectly capable and sane woman suddenly run hysterically through a swamp full of very laid-back alligators by night, during a storm, and nearly getting raped by Lon Chaney Jr. whose leering she seems completely oblivious towards.

Despite these problems, the film has its moments. Director Roy Del Ruth (a man with a long and varied filmography starting in the early 1920s and nearly ending here) manages from time to time to conquer his workmanlike tendencies and shoot an atmospheric scene or two before it all breaks down in a very badly done bit of last minute monster rampage that only seems to happen because the producers suddenly realized they were selling this as a monster movie and not the science fictionally enabled melodrama they actually had. Plus, when she's not going into uncharacteristic hysterics, The Alligator People unexpectedly gives always theoretically capable (which is to say, as much as the movies she was in allowed her) b-movie actress Beverly Garland much opportunity to shine as the sort of heroine that even comes to her melodramatic moments with honesty. When the script isn't betraying her, Garland is very convincing as the driven, capable (for a 50s genre movie) woman out to understand why the hell her jerk of a husband suddenly disappeared. She gives the character just the right amount of frailty and desperation at the edges of her strength, making her much more believable than anyone or anything else in the movie.

Unfortunately, nobody else in the cast got the memo about Garland's kind of naturalistic acting, and so Inescort, Macready, and Chaney are mugging their roles up with fierce abandon. Chaney clearly has fun with his role (and who wouldn't have - he has a hook hand and rants about the evil of alligators, after all), while Macready speaks every single one of his lines (even "good morning", if he'd ever say something quite as prosaic) with a pathos and overemphasis I can only explain with him assuming every single member of any giving movie audience to be dumb and deaf. Even though I do approve of a good bit of overacting, I don't think these performances do the film any favours at all. They sure as hell don't do Garland's performance the justice it deserves.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,sf,melodrama,roy del ruth,beverly garland,lon chaney jr,george macready,reviews

In short: The Nevadan (1950)

The Old West. Tom Tanner (Forrest Tucker) has stolen a nice amount of gold - first from a bank, and afterwards from his partner (which will not be important later on). Though he is caught, the Law is unable to find out where Tanner hid the loot.

While a marshal is transporting the bandit through Nevada, Tanner manages to escape, clearly bound for his ill gotten gains. On the way, he meets the seeming greenhorn - as demonstrated by his wearing of city clothes - Andrew Barclay (Randolph Scott). At first, Tanner steals Barclay's clothes and takes him as a sort of hostage, but soon enough, the greenhorn turns out to be quite handy with guns and horses and helps Tanner escape the interest of the men of Edward Galt (George Macready) - rancher, entrepreneur, greedy bastard - who wants Tanner's gold, too.

Clearly, there will be various changes of allegiance between Tanner, Barclay and Galt during the course of the film, and Barclay will turn out to be exactly who you'd expect from a character played by Randolph Scott. There's also a sub-plot concerning Galt's daughter Karen (Dorothy Malone), who has somehow managed not to realize that her dad is the evilest man alive and promptly falls for his enemy Barclay. If you smell a three-directional shoot-out for the film's finale, have a cookie.

Gordon Douglas's The Nevadan is situated at an interesting point in the history of the US low and mid budget western, created just before the real start of the wave of darker, more psychologically oriented films that were soon to come. The Nevadan is still beholden to the easier structures and morals of the films of the 40s, yet also shows its genre's developing interest in more complex characterization and a deeper exploration of themes the American western in general (I know, there are exceptions) had been circling around yet avoiding to confront head on for decades.

On paper, The Nevadan's plot already features exactly the sort of elements directors like Budd Boetticher or Andre de Toth would use to turn the genre's interest inward: there's the relationship between Barclay and Tanner that would be an ideal set-up to explore the similarity between the lawman and the bandit; the family relationship of the Galts, where the daughter turns out not to know her father at all, and the father uses her as an excuse to indulge in his worst impulses; Galt's brother pair of henchmen as another example of skewed and unhealthy family dynamics. In practice, The Nevadan does unfortunately shy away from doing more with these elements than just pointing them out, shrugging, and showing us a scene of people riding through the pretty landscape instead.

Though that comes as a bit of a disappointment for someone like me who is always hoping for the kind of western that made him fall in love with the 50s variant of the genre, The Nevadan is a pretty worthwhile example of the straight American no-nonsense western. There is after all quite a bit to like about the film: the acting is fine, if a bit too beholden to embodying standard archetypes instead of human beings (and everybody's cast exactly to his or her usual type, which is always a double-edged sword), the plot is merrily paced, and Gordon Douglas's direction shows the director (who'd later make one of my very favourite giant monster movies with Them!) as a man who knows how to shoot straight without shooting bland, and has a real hand for staging action scenes - the film's finale is even a bit exciting.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,western,gordon douglas,randolph scott,dorothy malone,forrest tucker,george macready,in short

Coroner Creek (1948)

A stagecoach is robbed by a group of renegade Apaches led by a mysterious white man (George Macready) who does not like witnesses a single bit. So he not only kills all the passengers, but later his gang as well.

Chris Denning (Randolph Scott), a man whose past we know nothing of and whose motives we'll learn just at the end of the movie, tries hard to track down the killer. His only clues are a spotty description and some assumptions about the habits of his prey which turn out to be exactly on the mark.

That's more than enough to keep someone with enough hatred going. After months, Denning finally finds his man. He now goes under the name of Younger Miles and has bought himself quite a position in the fine community of Coroner Creek as the owner of the biggest ranch in the area. Miles has also bought himself a trophy wife in Abbie (Barbara Reed) who is so unlucky in their marriage she has become an alcoholic and his own sheriff (Edgar Buchanan) - incidentally also Abbie's father.

Denning's not the man to just walk up to Miles and shoot him. The hatred has opened a rich vein of cruelty in a basically decent, even nice, man and he decides to first make Miles lose control before he seeks a direct confrontation. He finds a fine way to go about this without even looking for it - Della Harms (Sally Eilers), the owner of the other big ranch in Coroner Creek, and Miles are fighting a low-level war for control which Della is losing. Not surprising, since the female farm owner isn't a schemer without a conscience but a group of gunfighters like Miles.

She desperately needs a new foreman for her farm and Denning is just the man to do the job.

The path to Denning's vengeance is of course paved with the corpses of a lot of other people. Not even the love of hotel owner Kate Hardison (Margeruite Chapman, a competent, intelligent woman in a Western!) can convince Denning to just let the past and whatever Miles has done to him rest.

 

Coroner Creek is an excellent B-Western whose only real weakness lies in the direction of Ray Enright. It's not that Enright was a bad or sloppy director, he just was more of a craftsman than an artist and has to live with the comparison with someone like Budd Boetticher whose string of darkened films with Randolph Scott are some of the best the genre has to offer.

But I am a little unfair here - Enright might not have been visually inventive, yet it's obvious that he knew a good script and a good actor when he saw them and more or less kept out of their ways to let them do their thing.

And that they did. I shouldn't have to say much about Randolph Scott, seeing that the man was one of the most perfect Western actors on the face of the planet. His portrayal of Chris Denning is note perfect - he is at once a man capable of great compassion yet also capable of despicable cruelty. Scott is rather frightening in some scenes - the scene in which he breaks the trigger finger of one of Miles' goons who earlier did the same to him and the one in which he uses another one of them as a human shield against his boss (who of course shoots anyway) are moments you won't forget soon, if only for the intensity in Scott's gaze.

The rest of the actors does their job equally well putting to rest the bizarre notion of "Western equals bad acting" some people are still supposed to have. Macready's sociopath now gunning for social approval and Marguerite Chapman's woman who can take care of business (the film does not disapprove of this!) do especially fine work.

As the plot description already made clear, this is a rather less naive Western than some might be used to and quite progressive in its notion that vengeance and violence are not necessarily a good answer to violence, a film clearsighted enough to be interested in the effect justified hatred has on the person doing the hating. On the other hand, Kenneth Gamet's script isn't so cynical as to deny the existence of positive human traits as some Spaghetti Westerns would later do.

There is just the last fifteen seconds of the movie for the modern viewer to cope with, a so obvious "make the world all right again for the censor" ending that I can't help but imagine everybody behind the camera smirking cynically, rather like Clint Eastwood in Leone's Dollar trilogy.

If you are at all interested in the American Western in its (often more interesting) B-movie version, this is nearly as good a movie to start with as the films of Andre de Toth or Budd Boetticher.

 

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