Michael_Linder

It opens with a newsboy shouting late edition clickbait and an early Roy Webb musical score with all of the overripe urgency and bombast of newsreels. An obliging extra holds a front page to the camera, topped by a six-column screamer - POLICE LIEUTENANT BOMBED!!. Even a single exclamation point was, and still is, verboten in print journalism, but two? Yikes!! Assuming the cop was blown up and not merely drunk, it's clear we're in for a potboiler on pep pills designed to make even the most manic popcorn glutton in the audience miss his mouth a few times in shock horror. Oh, the humanity!

Overlook the lame recording techniques with mics too far from the actors in wide shots, and a fuzzy print rescued from early TV. Ignore the clichéd "the People demand" yelps of the overly-excitable Crime Commission members as groundwork is laid for the Saint's arrival. But It gets better, quickly, thanks to Jonathan Hale's Inspector Henry Fernack who walks in carrying the world-weary weight of having seen too much criminality over two decades on the job.

Hale's acting method is far more natural, his do-the-right-thing humanity is exactly what Leslie Charteris needed to credibly establish the hybrid relationship between a cop with a conscience and the judge, jury and executioner that is Lewis Hayward's take on the Saint. Excuse my delay in getting to the point. It's Hayward, with Hale's help, that makes this movie sing, and in unexpected ways.

We watch as the Saint dispatches various thugs and lowlife types, embroidering his to-do list by adding a few freebies. But by degrees, under Ben Holmes' direction, Hayward reveals an astonishing array of nuances in his complex character beginning with expressions of slightly-worrisome, if almost scary glee, when asking Fernack about the true identity of the "Big Boy," ringleader of the targeted syndicate. It's loose-canon fodder that suggests only a possible psychotic can deal with certified misanthropes, a deliciously-troublesome trope George Sanders and Vincent Price cannot touch in Saint sequels. This Saint, by comparison, seems a mere kid at times. He's sophisticated, but youthfully flawed, and light years from the oily "sophisticates" who will later litter the role with custom cigarette ash and the middle-aged-before-their-time ennui that in real life led to Sanders' suicide.

The clincher? Hayward's "thing" with Kay Sutton's femme fatale Faye Edwards who, given Hayward's youthfulness, is played as a cougar in the Saint's first romantic screen scene. "It's very simple," says the she-predator before bending over the wounded, vulnerable, and divan-reclining Saint and kissing him, well, meaningfully. He grabs her arm, almost defensively. She's in control, he's a boy in deep water who knows it, and shows it, stunned to the point of being virtually incapable of dialogue for the rest of the scene, but all too easy when she suggests a romantic Vermont getaway.

She puts on her coat, then seals the deal. He's regained footing, but our hero's clearly conquered and fully engaged. He says he needs to change his clothes, usually a woman's line, Hers is the traditionally-male response, "Don't ever change." She kisses him again, exits. The camera follows her out the door, panning away from the star, a seriously seduced Saint. Cut. Print.

It's a moment that never again returned in The Saint saga. An unintentional prequel.

Jack Carson's understatement is powerful stuff compared to how most crooks of the era were portrayed. He seems to be in the wrong gang. And Sig Ruman as the "Big Boy's" underling? Clearly pre-war, anti-German propaganda casting that's pathetically over the top, this time without swastikas, thankfully.

Perhaps it was a cost-cutting thing - shooting most of an entire season with as few lights as possible. Dimly-lit and night-for-night vagueness dominate each episode. A budget-savng tactic requiring only minimal set dressing, smaller lighting crews, less attention to costumes, hair and makeup, and quick setups. But it also produces an overwhelming sense of gloom and depression, the kind found in sub-boreal winters where the sun skims low along the horizon for only a few precious minutes each day. Best viewed in a darkened room.

To call this amateur filmmaking would grossly insult the world's amateur filmmakers. Writer-Director Phillip Gardner's script is convoluted, unattributed and completely incoherent in spots. Misspellings riddle the subtitles. This 70-minute monstrosity is packed with B-roll that has nothing to do with the storyline; public domain silent footage of vaudeville comedy performers, for instance, supposedly posing as the story's principals. Video allegedly representing actual locations is faked - a long cable car sequence in San Francisco which has no relevance to the H. H. Holmes saga whatsoever, just to mention one. This is smoke, mirrors and a bloody melange of tacky reenactment half-dissolves posing as a documentary with poorly-recorded narration. If Holmes was a con artist who exaggerated his murderous exploits, this laughable excuse for insight goes him one better.