Devil's Cargo

The Falcon returns...sort of. Not really. Two years after the RKO Falcon series ended, Poverty Row studio Film Classics began their own series. There's not much this has in common with the George Sanders/Tom Conway films. The Falcon, now played by John Calvert, has a new name: Michael Watling. Gone is the comic relief sidekick. Here the Falcon has a dog he talks to. Also gone are charm, wit, adventure, and everything else that worked in the previous series. This is just a generic detective tale, made on cheap sets with a forgettable lead backed up by a cast of actors who had seen better days. The RKO series was great. Even if the plots weren't always riveting, you could always rely on Sanders and Conway to deliver and the production values were usually very nice. This is just a big nothing burger. Sadly there are two more 'fake Falcon' films after this.

This is the first of the three low budget Falcon mysteries after RKO had ditched the character. Here he comes in a different guise played by the career magician John Calvert. He has a cute dog called Brains Trust. The funniest Brains Trust moment is when the docile dog has been tied to a chair by an intruder to the Falcon's apartment.

Other bizarre moments include a skull ornament that chatters. Obviously the Falcon has learned magic skills to operate the skull to do this. I like the poster for this film that shows the skull wearing a magician's top hat. It's an attractive piece of film poster art that helped to attract my attention to this movie in the first place.

The mystery begins when a character named Delgado visits the Falcon for help to get him off on a crime of passion crime-alleviation charge with the police. He says he has killed a man for fooling with his wife. But is he being straight? The plot becomes more involved as suspicion passes from one character to another.

I reckon that this is a well disguised whodunit. Only a twist at the very end causes the real murderer to be revealed.

They probably should have stopped making Falcon movies when George Sanders and Tom Conway had finished their runs with the franchise. Hard to watch the Falcon become a shell of his old self. Spending more time with his dog than the ladies, and driving a Studebaker. The script may be okay, but it has a low-budget B Movie feel to it.

A man called 'Lucky' is murdered, proving that nicknames are often misleading. Paul Marion visits John Calvert, who's playing the Falcon in this flick, gives him $500 and a key to give to his lawyer if he's not found not guilty of murdering Lucky, before he turns himself in for killing him. Complications ensue.

It starts out looking like a 1930s movie, with performers like Rochelle Hudson, Tom Kennedy, Lyle Talbot, Theodore von Eltz and Roscoe Karns in the supporting cast. Calvert plays the Falcon with a pencil-thin mustache, a Ronald Colman imitation that comes and goes, and sleight of hand magic tricks. He entered the movies as a magician, doing hand doubles for actors like Gable, and here was his shot at a lead, albeit in an independent movie.

The script is a pretty good one, but Calvert demonstrates that it takes more than a pencil-thin mustache to be a movie star. He made two more Falcon movies within a year, then a couple more supporting roles. By 1956, he was gone from the movies, back to being a stage magician.

If Calvert's career in the movies didn't last, Calvert himself did. He died in 2013 at the age of 102.

The handsome and urbane John Calvert gives a tough yet breezy performance as Hollywood private eye Michael Waring - code named "The Falcon" . Although Calvert possessed a polished and charismatic screen presence and appeared in nearly thirty films for RKO and Columbia his first love remained the art of magic through which he became an international variety star.

This is a real bargain basement production and there's one particularly curious quirk that's worth listening for. Whenever any of the supporting cast refer to the last name of Calvert's character it's obvious that changes have been made in the post production process. Specifically, it seems that the name "Waring" has been cut out on each occasion and substituted with "Watling". The obvious question is .. why ? Possibly some kind of copyright issue ?