Verdugo de Si Mesmo

Well, this film has a cast that is alright but it is not clear where the focus of the story is and you eventually realize it is about gang boss Akim Tamiroff (Recka) fancying Gail Patrick (Margaret). It takes a long time for this to develop into the film's main thrust. There are some gangster things going on and you just wait for the next seemingly random thing to happen. The ending makes no sense at all.

Tamiroff is a gangster musician who gets transported into his happy place whenever he hears certain classical pieces by famous composers. He even likes Procol Harum's "Whiter Shade of Pale" which he obsessively listens to at the beginning of the film. His lady assistant Anna May Wong (Lan Ying) has a strange role and because she looks Chinese, she is given some peculiar Chinese/Japanese sense of honour and code of behaviour that she follows through with. Why and why? She is wasted in this film.

I kept seeing ex-British Prime Minister Tony Blair's face in Harvey Stephens (Easton) who plays the eager goody-goody bond salesman who is Patrick's boyfriend. This may have tainted my assessment of him as a grinning idiot.