O Santo em Nova York

The Saint In New York is the first of the Saint movies and of the ones I've seen, one of the best.

In this one, The Saint is sent to New York to investigate gangsters in the underworld there. There are plenty of shootings and killings and he gets involved in some quite dangerous situations. He is after one particular gangster known as The Big Fellow who is the leader of a gang. He also falls in love.

The cast features Louis Haywood as the Saint, Kay Sutton and Jonathan Hale.

The Saint In New York is worth watching if you get the chance. A treat.

Rating: 3 stars out of 5.

Hayward does cut a dashing figure with an easy smile, a penchant for poetical one-liners, and a snap-brim fedora. His version of the Saint is also more interesting than the standard sleuth of the period since he's not above breaking the law when it serves justice or following his own code of integrity. Too bad this kind of character complexity didn't survive the many sequels.

The story itself is pretty routine: cleaning up the city by getting the mysterious Big Fellow. Not much excitement or suspense as the one-man-army sort of bounces back and forth between bad guys, snapping off occasional nifty one-liners. Then there's the sexy Kay Sutton to ease the eyes after all the ugly bad guys. And though her delivery sometimes sounds a flat note, she and Hayward manage to make their boilerplate romance surprisingly wistful.

Anyway, I've got to say this about someone, and I think it's director Ben Holmes. How many of these programmers have you seen where somebody gets shot in one scene, yet turns up miraculously made whole in the next. Not here. The Saint gets wounded in one scene and, by golly, he favors that shoulder for the rest of the film. So an unofficial Oscar for Attention to Neglected Detail to Ben Holmes by default since such matters are usually the job of the director. Then too, on a slightly different note, I hope cable comes up with Holmes' intriguingly titled Cutie on Duty (1943) sometime real soon.

The first film in RKO's series (continued, successfully, with George Sanders, and unsuccessfully, with Hugh Sinclair), this features tiny, white-suited Louis Hayward, as the dangerous psychotic Simon Templar, law-enforcer of a kind (mainly by shooting people), on a mission to find the 'big fellow', head of a crime gang. Hayward is excellent in this, having just the right amount of repartee and daring (without making the role comedic as Sanders did or boring as Sinclair did), as is his love interest, Kay Sutton, who seemed to do very little in films despite her good looks and strong voice. One gripe about the film would be that the print currently available on video is poor as regards picture and sound - I understand this entry in the series was lost for a while and it really does cry out for restoration. Still, this aside it has many compensations. Hayward went on to be the man in the iron mask, the son of Monte Cristo, and the snipey son Oliver in My Son My Son. Jonathan Hale, introduced here as the Saint's cop foil, went on to other Saint entries and eventually committed suicide.

The first Saint movie was a very good effort, true to the spirit of the book albeit made on the cheap by RKO. I grew up thinking that Roger Moore was the Saint and no-one could top him, but have to admit that Louis Haywood was just right in the title role with the right amount of debonair, imperturbable devil-may-care attitude. I hadn't seen this for over 10 years until off UK cable TV tonight, but there was a small but significant chunk of action which for some reason was cut out of the print shown. I hope the full version is still out there somewhere!

The Saint is "hired" by the NYPD to flush out and deal with a group of gangsters strangling the city. In his role as unpaid mercenary Prince he has to deal in his own inimitable fashion with 7 metaphorical dwarf hoodlums before moving on to the shadowy "Big Fellow" whilst falling in love with an alluring raven-haired femme fatale. This is Snow White for adults!

A real pity Haywood only played the Saint this glorious once in Hollywood - I don't count his 50's British attempt - although Sanders was very funny in his 5 films didn't really hit the right note. My favourite Haywood film came much later, Fritz Lang's "House by the river", an overlooked suspense gem from 1950.

This by my lights is a splendid and very good story about Leslie Charteris's enigmatic character, Simon Templar, "the Saint"; it was the first of a series of films which starred several actors inn the role. Louis Hayward is fascinating inn the part, occasionally a bit stodgy but intelligent, and compelling. The film was directed by Ben Holmes, and also stars Kay Sutton as an enigmatic bad girl, Sig Ruman, Jonathan Hale, Jack Carson and many others in small but effective parts. The storyline is what set\s this ethical masterpiece apart. Templar is tracked down in foreign parts by an honest man representing a group in New York who want to bring down the mysterious crime boss who is poisoning the city with his influence. Templar, for his own reasons--the challenge, the chance to accomplish something worthwhile--agrees to risk his life; not for altruism but for his own code of values, his own desire to use his talents to the full. He starts pushing, commits some questionable break-ins and more,, all the time making himself more dangerous and getting closer to finding out who the big fella" is. I will not reveal the climax or the ending, except to say Templar has fallen in love with Kay--but she can never be his after what happens. Roy Webb wrote the music; the production values of this B/W gem are subtle and a little above average. But what drives it is the script, written from Charteris's novel,; it is the best of an interesting series because it is fast-paced, original, clever in dialogue and clear in its contexted ethical purposiveness; the group who hired him and the viewers finally come to know that they picked the right man, whatever doubts they may originally have had about the famous and notorious Simon Templar. Sutton is very good; Carson and several others are very competent also. Highly recommended.