Sensation Hunters

Grim and sour, this well made Monogram noir from 1945 is almost their answer to PRC's bleak hit DETOUR. The three main women in this film are exceptionally beautiful, especially Constance Worth. Lead actress Doris Merrick is the sweet factory worker with the most hideous family who falls for the worst guy in town. She ends up in Club Paradise, which is sort of a casino nightclub brothel, and a crooked pathway to doom. What a sad tale of hard boiled despair. Even her charming and likable trumpeter pal Ray gets jailed for a month, in which she has enough time to go wrong. The sets and costumes are very good, as is the music score. There is an astonishing epileptic set of clumsy tap dance routines, so unexpected and badly presented, it is as if they were shoehorned in to flesh out the running time. They are genuinely 5 star terrible and do not even match the music on the soundtrack. There is undertones of DOUBLE INDEMNITY and well crafted occasional spookiness. The opening is a zinger. However the original title SENSATION HUNTERS is ridiculous. CLUB PARADISE is far better and more tawdry in an appropriate Monogram style. It's pretty good all round, and I would love to see an uncut DVD: the one available has terrible TV commercial hack marks with large bits of some scenes missing.

Unpredictable little character drama from Monogram. Doris (Merrick) is an innocent young woman from a mean-spirited family, so we begin by rooting for her and her situation. Looking to get away from family, she meets handsome Danny (Lowery). He's an apparent rover with a mysterious past and no apparent job. Trouble is she's beguiled by him even though he comes and goes like the wind. So she takes a job at a shady nightclub he frequents hoping he'll return. Meanwhile, she puts off her old bandleader boyfriend Ray (Quillan), and the more rooted life he offers. Thus, what will happen to her now that she's entered a new, darker world with unknown connections.

The story's told in flashback from an abruptly mysterious opening, while the ending is also abrupt casting a cloud over the conventional happy ending. A distinctive difference in the narrative is the threads we're left to fill in-- such as the relationship between shady Lou (Paiva) and Danny, or even how Danny supports himself. I think this realistic murk tells much of the story from Doris's limited pov rather than sloppy scripting or editing.

Actress Merrick's excellent in her sympathetic role without getting sappy, while Lowery certainly looks the slickster part even if he more or less walks through his role. I did, however, get the several blondes mixed up at times. And get a load of the 40's fashions with their gunboat hats. Still, I wish the nightclub dancing had included some lively jitterbug instead of the stately ballroom stuff. Note too, that no mention is made of the war even though its 1945 and no servicemen are seen among the eligible guys.

Anyway, in my little book, the 60-minute flick is almost a sleeper with a number of unusual touches. And, oh yes, if you're invited to Doris's bilious family for dinner, Don't Go!

In 1933 Monogram made an excellent film called "Sensation Hunters," a beautiful proto-noir with vivid direction by Charles Vidor (13 years before he made a major noir, "Gilda") and an overall atmosphere of gloom and doom. Too bad that when they made this one all they took from the original "Sensation Hunters" was the title (and even that got changed later for TV purposes to "Club Paradise"). It's one of those movies in which the put-upon heroine has to choose between two boyfriends, one of whom is annoying and the other is crooked. The script reads like the writers were on cliché autopilot and the actors (except for Isabel Jewell, who's marvelous in her usual characterization as a hard-bitten woman of the world) seem to be saying their lines, hitting their marks and little more. The ending doesn't work because nothing we've seen in the film before seems to be leading up to it. The reviewers who compared it to Edgar G. Ulmer's magnificent "Detour" seem totally off base to me. The guy who said it would have been a good vehicle for Tyrone Power is closer in that Power actually DID make this movie -- or something close to it -- in 1939: it was called "Rose of Washington Square" and that wasn't a great movie but it was at least entertaining and had some depth missing from this one.

Doris Merrick lives at home and has a job at a defense plant. She wants more, and falls for Robert Lowery. He looks like a big roller at a local club and she falls hard. When he disappears, she goes out with trumpeter Eddie Quillan who tries to impress her. They wind up in jail. Her father bails her out, gives her a suitcase with her clothes and tells her not to come back. She goes to work at the club, and various hard-up relatives come by for money -- she has a lot of crumpled-up $5 bills.

It's a cheap, tawdry Monogram picture, but director Christy Cabanne makes that work in this story of the downfall of a girl, who wanted more and settled for cash. I've been looking at a lot of Japanese movies set in the same, tawdry world, shomin-gekki about poor people in a tough world, and it fits right into that sort of genre. The difference is that in Japan, it was an A genre, with major stars; in the US, with minor actors and actresses, it's set in a world where the big movies are all film noir. Here, it's a cheap and tawdry genre with the directors fallen from once-haughty levels.... and it all works.

In "The Bad and the Beautiful," Kirk Douglas plays a successful producer who fires his director (clearly based on Fritz Lang) because that director isn't goosing up a certain scene. On his way out, the director warns that you can't use the same tone all the way through: you have to build a film with ups and downs, with rhythm and song.

The producer takes over and ends up with a movie that he shelves. It had passion in every scene but no life.

This movie could be that one. Superficially, it has a lot: sexy girls, musical numbers that aren't bad (at least compared to the norm), more or less competent actors (again, compared) and a pretty good setup.

The story revolves around the Paradise Club, where our heroine — a good girl with oafs for father and brother — ends up as a "dancer." A good half of the movie is spent getting us there and introducing the characters.

She is loved by a beginning bandmaster who makes good (in another club) by the end of the movie. But she loves a gigolo who has already been through the club's owner, a strong, sexy blond. He is completely without redeeming value, but all the girls love him. During the story, he hits up his old loves for money until he ditches our heroine, then comes to her for money to leave town with her best friend.

This could have been a noir "Moulin Rouge" where the performance and life overlapped, and you can see that writer had something like that in mind, even highlighting that the second half of the movie could be a dream.

But it has no variation in tone at all. Things start at 35 miles per hour and stay there forever. That has killed this movie, so dead that it is all but unavailable, and I'm the first commenter.

Now that's dead. Kirk would understand.

(This movie is in the public domain.)

Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.