Dojo Classics - RKO's Dick Tracy!

I just finished watching all four of RKO's Dick Tracy movies. These are solid little movies, with stlyish noir details and brisk compelling plots. I frankly was surprised how good they were.

Dick Tracy, Detective stars Morgan Conway as the eponymous detective and he's terrific. Conway has a deep voice and a presence that really sell the notion he's a tough as nails detective; when he leans into a baddie you buy it. And while he might not necessarily look like the classic Tracy we know today, I think he resembles the original Tracy in the earliest strips quite a bit. The first movie involves a villain named Splitface who at first appears to be a wild serial slasher, but with investigation it turns out there is a method to his murders. There is a slick balance between the investigations on the shadowy streets and an oddly warm home life for Dick and Tess Trueheart played by Anne Jeffreys. There's even a sub-plot with Junior who is just on screen long enough to not get annoying. Lyle Latell is Pat Patton. Mike Mazurki as Splitface is outstanding, and he offers up a really frightening and merciless killer. The balance between humor and suspense is nearly perfect in this one.


Dick Tracey Vs. Cueball again stars Morgan Conway as Tracy, and Jeffreys plays Tess again. Cueball is played by Dick Wessel and he's a strangler involved with diamond thieves. His murderous tendencies run afoul of the plot the others wish to pursue to glean profit from the theft, but he doesn't seem to care. This is not quite as tight as the first movie, but it's still got plenty of noirish action to satisfy those cravings. Ian Keith turns up as Vitamin Flintheart and he's outstanding in the role. Lyle Latell is back as Pat Patton and he's pretty entertaining. The characters are a bit broader in this one, more in the style of the comic strip, but mildly less effective on the big screen.


Dick Tracy's Dilemma sees Ralph Byrd take on the lead role, one he was familiar with from the serials. He is a handsome enough fellow and looks the role well enough but alas he is too affable to be as effective as Conway. The story involves fur thieves and a rough customer named The Claw played by Jack Lambert who uses his hook hand to commit his murders. There are a lot of twists in this one, and again a bit more humor. Junior who had been the previous two movies is absent from this one and the next. Kay Christopher is Tess and she's lovely. Ian Keith as Vitamin Flintheart plays a big role in this one, and there's a charming character called Sightless. Lyle Latell returns as Pat Patton and his set pieces of comedy seem to be larger and more frequent. The action in this is shootouts and missing is the car chase which was a key set piece of each of the previous two movies.


Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome is doubtless the most famous of these movies, and that's because of Boris Karloff who plays the murderous Gruesome a thug just out of prison who immediately is looking for action and finds it with his pal Melody using suspended animation gas to rob banks. Ralph Byrd is back as well as Ian Keith and Lyle Latell. Anne Gwynne takes on the Tess role. The plot is wilder than any of the previous movies and the noir details while visually present are undercut a bit by the quasi-science fiction feel of the story. The movie is pretty interested in maximizing the star power of Karloff, even referencing his name at one point. But a number of scenes reminded me of the classic Frankenstein, especially with Gruesome rising from the dead in the morgue and the climax where he is chasing Tracy around a car. The humor is much bigger in this one and centers around Lyle Latell as Pat Patton, and while it's still an entertaining movie for sure, not really the suspense thriller the first few were.

Overall, these are terrific little movies, helped immensely by running times of just over an hour. The stories are brisk and the action is pretty darn good. My wife who walked in on one showing commented on the speed of the dialogue and that's another detail that helps keep these movies running along neatly.

When Ian Keith pops those vitamins into his mouth he's right out of the comic strip.

Dandy entertainment!

UPDATE: Still have a high regard for these flicks. They are wonderful little pulp adventures with some nifty atmosphere and more than a mote of adventure. These are widely available and highly recommended.

Rip Off

March Movie Madness!

March has long been associated with "Madness", but that's of a sports nature. My madness has nothing to do with dribbling (at least not that kind) and has much more to do with my yen to see most every movie ever made that has a whisper of adventure or mystery or monstrosity in it. And over the last long many winter days and nights I've watched a kaboodle of them. Many I have already reviewed but many more await. In March look for a cavalacade of movie reviews and cinematic reflections.

First will be a long look at James Bond, in particular those earliest Bonds (the best ones) with Sean Connery. I rank the classic Bonds and that will begin tomorrow with my all-time favorite Bond movie. Afterwards I turn my sights on spy movies not starring a guy named Bond and that's a lot of those. Also on hand look for some two-fisted crime-fighting as Dick Tracy has been taking up a good deal of my time lately. Tarzan of the Apes might well make an appearance or three before it's all done.

So all month look for movies and cartoons as the madness well and truly sets in. There are far worse ways to be mad.

Rip Off

A Flight Of Falcons!

I've caught a few of the vintage RKO Falcon movies on Turner Classic Movies from time to time over the years, but recently they ran most of them back-to-back and I recorded them. Like many things, reading or watching, seeing a bunch in succession is revealing. The Falcon is a detective of sorts with a fuzzy literary genesis and a screen presence derived more from The Saint than anything else. What we have in the first movie titled The Gay Falcon is George Sanders as the debonair and smooth-talking man-about-town who appears suspicious to the police and who seems to be attempting to strike out in legitimate business to accommodate his fiance.

We quickly see he has little interest in his Wall Street career and quixotic interest in his fiance. The most striking trait of Gay Lawrence  is his compulsive need to hit on every pretty face he stumbles across. We're supposed to get the idea he's irresistible to women. There's a distinct screwball quality to the love relationships and comedy is no small feature of these frothy mysteries. The mysteries themselves often make little sense.  In the debut he's attempting to bust up a jewel robbery scheme. Despite being engaged to another woman, he spends most of the movie with Helen Reed (Wendy Barrie) and there's way more chemistry there.

So much so that in the second Falcon movie, A Date with The Falcon  Helen has moved in as the new fiance. This one is about synthetic diamonds and the genius who concocts them. The mystery again fails to work really and most of the movie is spent on romantic hijinks.

In The Falcon Takes Over things improve mightily on the mystery front. This movie adapts Farewell My Lovely by Raymond Chandler and for the first time mystery takes the forefront in a Falcon movie. It's a marked improvement and it's interesting to see this film's variation on the familiar Chandler story adapted to film many times since. Ward Bond is particularly effective as the dim but amazing strong and dangerous Moose Malloy. In all three of the first Falcon movies Allen Jenkins plays Dr. Goldie Locke, the Falcon's assistant and for film purpose increasing humor relief. He's fun, but gets replaced.

In The Falcon's Brother we meet Tom Lawrence, who is as advertised the brother of Gay Lawrence. Gay thinks his brother is dead, then learns different and works to uncover a scheme to undermine the U.S. war effort.

Then Gay is incapacitated and Tom takes over the case and the ending results in Tom taking over the role of the Falcon full time. This switch is singular and makes this movie memorable. The fact that the lead role is handed off between real life brothers George Sanders and Tom Conway makes the switch even more fascinating.

After that Tom Conway settles in to solve mysteries with gusto and chase dames as they offer themselves up for that game. He fights to save the republic by putting down spies in The Falcon Fights Back.

And he chases down the answer to mysterious empty planes in The Falcon In Danger. The emphasis in the stories shifts more to murder and adventure and less to romp and romance, though none of it disappears. Sanders was more convincing as the lascivious lover and Conway is much more convincing as a quasi-noir detective.

One way they sharpen the storytelling is the change the settings. In The Falcon and the Co-Eds we find our hero at a swanky girl's finishing school on the east coast. Here he investigates murder with hints of the supernatural. It's surprisingly one of the better mysteries despite an atrocious title.

Then our hero heads west in The Falcon Goes West with a mystery in Texas which falls apart a bit but features a surprising amount of cowboy action on horseback. Then the story shifts south of the border in The Falcon In Mexico where our hero finds the deep secret of a long-dead artist who keeps painting from the grave. This one features some really dandy side characters though the show seems more interested in the scenery than the story.

After that it's off to tinsel town in The Falcon in Hollywood. This one shows Lawrence tumbling around a studio finding bodies and then losing them again. The mystery is okay and the side characters are pretty dandy. A female taxi cab driver in particular adds some spice to a tale which could easily fall apart if the pace slowed down at all.

And finally in The Falcon in San Francisco we have the toughest Falcon story yet. This one has some real noir characteristics with the Falcon finding himself in the clutches of some smugglers. There's a cute kid you want to see less of, and Goldy Locke (Edward Brophy) is back in fine fettle, but when the Falcon gets actually beat up by thugs it's surprisingly graphic for this series which often has its violence happen off screen. There are a couple more of these in the series - The Falcon's Alibi and The Falcon's Adventure - and I'll have to keep my eye out to catch these vintage entertainments.

It's nifty to see the same actors show up in different movies in different roles. It points to the nature of movie making at this time, an efficient industrial style and it allows one to see actors across a range of different character types. It was also most curious to watch these flicks at the same time as sexual harassment scandals tear across the media. The Falcon's behavior around women is terrible, he seems to treat them like samples on a snack tray. His eyes wander up and down without shame and his hands find their way onto shoulders and around hips with abandon. Sometimes he's rebuffed but most often his stolen kisses are treated with an embarrassed glee. We're supposed to be having fun with him as he tumbles from girl to girl with little regard to feelings, but frankly he's a cad pure and simple and an exceedingly selfish one at that.

Rip Off

Dead End Kids!

I have been familiar with the "Dead End Kids" (perhaps more famously known as the "Bowery Boys") for many years, but I had never seen Dead End, the 1937 movie by director William Wyler which launched their careers. Now I have, and I can report it's a pretty interesting and even at times compelling flick.

The movie adapts a Broadway play which featured these chaps who are only part, albeit an exceedingly memorable part of a narrative which focuses on the toils and travails of people who live cheek to jowl in the tenements of the poor and terraces of the rich at the end of a New York City street. It's a morality play about the value of human beings regardless of their environment and how that environment can lay foundations for complete lives.

We follow Tommy and his sister Drina (Sylvia Sydney), two siblings who are trying to do the right thing by one another despite painful poverty. Tommy is part of a gang of boys who have little to do aside from swimming in the river and causing trouble with each other and others youngsters on the street. Adults wander in and out of this setting, some rich who sniff at the poverty they usually are able to ignore, some poor who live alongside and within the poverty, and some who have escaped and have returned. The latter is found in the form of Baby Face Martin (Humphrey Bogart), a gangster who wants to see his Mother (Marjorie Main) and his old flame (Claire Trevor). He finds that his romantic notions have given way to grim and harsh reality and his response is violence. Violence too marks the life of Tommy and we see two individuals at the two ends of a life turned to crime. What happens is the stuff of the tale.

It's a classy production with a stellar set and functions very much like a filmed play. The static setting is livened by clever camera angles and occasional scenes set inside the tenements, though we never set foot inside the swank apartments of the well-to-do. The story here is about the rough and tumble of the Great Depression and the swelter of the immigrants who found themselves bundled together in situations which demand the most of them and which demand often more than they can deliver.

Highly recommended.

Rip Off

Calling Doctor Watson!

I'm a sucker for Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles. When I'm asked what my favorite novel is I usually give out the title of Doyle's mystery on the moors. The blend of classic detection and murder with a whisper of the supernatural is a delightful brew that any fan of Scooby-Doo can appreciate. It has been adapted to the small and large screens many times and I try to ferret them all out to see who has grokked the essence of the tale.

The Hound of the Baskervilles starring Matt Frewer (Max Headroom himself) as Sherlock Holmes has more than a few virtues. This version is a 2000 television version from the great land of Canada. Frewer played the great detective four times, of which this is the first. I cannot judge the others since I have not seen them, but this portrayal is not all that good. He seems to be playing at Sherlock rather than inhabiting the character; filling the role with affectations and limited understanding. The virtue of The Hound of the Baskervilles is that Sherlock Holmes is actually not present for much of the story and that is certainly the case here, where with some changes we see even less of him than in the original story.

That leaves room for the true protagonist of the novel -- Dr. Watson. And the Watson here is quite good as played by veteran actor Kenneth Welsh. Welsh is one those myriad actors whose name is likely unknown but whose face is ubiquitous for veteran televison watchers.  He is easily the best actor in this movie and he gives his Watson a perfect blend of the necessary incompetence and empathy which the character demands. He's no fool this Watson by any means.

The other actors in the piece are okay, with Robin Wilcock as Stapleton doing an above average job. The role of Henry Baskerville was played by Jason London and frankly he was fine but seemed a bit too young in the face for my tastes. Emma Campbell as Beryl Stapleton was a right beauty. Arthur Holden and Leni Parker as the Barrymores are quite good.

And then there's the eponymous "Hound", which in point of fact is not even a hound as far as I can tell. I'm no student of dog species by any means so I cannot detect the breed but this dog was far from spectral and not even all that big. He was shown in the daytime and seen much too often to be considered a ghost. It was all rather a botch.

The setting is lovely and does steal a scene or two from the sometimes merely capable acting, but it doesn't seem to have the bleakness one associates with the desolate moors of Doyle's story. It's crucial that the isolation of the Baskervilles be communicated as that's key to the threat to Henry.

This is a perfectly harmless adaptation, but whatever virtues it has go to the actors, especially Welsh who wring out whatever they can from a meager outing. And as for Sherlock Holmes, it's probably not a good thing when in a Holmes story you want even less of the title character.

Rip Off

The Harry Palmer File!

I don't remember when I first happened to see The IPCRESS File, but I do know I thoroughly enjoyed it. The 1965 movie is an adaptation of a novel by the same name by Len Deighton and is espionage with a bit more reality and tooth than was perhaps found in the on-screen adventures of James Bond, Derek Flint and other super-spies. Harry Palmer is no "super-spy", that's for sure. As played by Michael Caine, Harry Palmer (a named derived apparently as sounding like the least impressive possible) is very much a near-sighted man with feet of clay who chases women and seems constantly to be trying to find ways to slip out of his responsibilities at work. He's a guy who was a minor criminal in the army who serves in MI-5 as opposed to going to jail. He is, to put it mildly, a small-time scoundrel.

The story of this movie concerns missing scientists who seem to be part of a foreign scheme to drain the smarts out of the West. Palmer gets involved in a small outfit looking into the latest disappearance and using some techniques not quite approved by his immediate superiors makes surprising headway. There is death and some small-time mayhem in this sometimes gritty adventure, but by and large we have a low-key smart little glimpse of spies and spying and the common dreariness which just might be a significant part of the whole shebang.

The first Harry Palmer movie was pretty successful and the next year of 1966 was followed by a sequel title Funeral in Berlin. In this one Harry is dispatched to the divided city of Berlin to help in the defection of a Soviet official. This story quickly (to my eye) becomes mildly incoherent as the action (such as it is) tumbles onto the screen. Even when the sundry behaviors were sort of explained at the end, I'm not sure I understood it. I need to see it again perhaps, but it was so dull the first time, I rather doubt that will happen.

By the time of the third Michael Caine in 1967 the hard-bitten core of the debut was all but gone in a spy romp that abandons the minor tropes which made Palmer so compelling, even his signature glasses seem to go missing for extended periods of time. Billion Dollar Brain is a movie which could've been populated by pretty much any super spy of the era and for all its bombast falls flat fairly quickly. It makes more sense than its immediate predecessor but is much less satisfying as a film experience.

I always wondered why The IPCRESS File played TV so often (relatively speaking) while the sequels never did. Now I know, they sorta' suck.

Rip Off

Copping Out!

Spent a lazy afternoon recently enjoying some classic movies, which much to my surprise had some exceedingly similar themes, police corruption. Much is discussed in the media today as we yet again find ourselves as citizens called upon to choose between the police and the folks they are hired to protect and serve. All too often abuse by police is swept away, hidden in plain sight, as the majority of folks go on about their daily doings. When crisis points are struck, the choice is often suggested that you either support your local sheriff or you side with the barbarians who want to reduce civilization to rubble. It's a false choice, designed to evade tough questions and hard bargains. We usually as a society want order, we generally tend to need law, but we will always have a tension with those we hire specifically to bring us to account, especially if there is evidence in some quarters that those so selected are sometimes dangers to that order we originally desired.

Serpico is a 1973 flick which follows the travails of a New York City police of that name (Al Pacino) who begins as a raw recruit in the early 60's and becomes over the next decade a dedicated and iconoclastic detective who rankles his comrades because he refuses to take bribes. We presented in this movie with a culture of law enforcement in which bribery is a normal order of things and the relationship between the law and the lawbreakers seems to be one of mutual financial reward. The graft is so ingrained in the culture that many of the cops don't even seem aware of the conflict of interest to their duties that it presents. From small favors of free meals to large bribes of thousands of dollars from drug interests, the gamut of corruption is on display as Frank Serpico tries to find a precinct in which he can just do his job and not fall under the suspicions of his fellow officers for being honest. While Serpico is presented as a sometimes emotional fellow with significant failings he is clearly a guy who just wants to do his work and his bosses are shown quite often to be deaf to his complaints. There are some, but by and large the film is an indictment of a large system which tolerates corruption, so much so that it fails to see that it is corruption any longer.

The Beast of the City from 1932 has ironically enough pretty much the same theme, though with a much more direct and moralistic approach. This is a pretty rough and tough shoot 'em up movie with some surprisingly brisk car chases and a finale which is violent by any era's standard.

The movie stars Walter Huston as "Fightin' Jim Fitzpatrick, a police man who wants to take a hard approach to crime in general and the local mob boss Sam Belmonte in particular. He's presented as a man of standard family values who loves his wife and dotes on his kids but who marches without qualm into the dens of crime which seem to percolate across the unnamed city. His brother Ed (Wallace Ford) is a man of less stern character who falls under the sway of the vivacious moll played by the totally sexy Jean Harlow. We see the system try to fight back against crime but see also that society becomes squishy when that enforcement begins to hit home. We all want cops when we need them, but rarely do we like cops in our business when we don't feel threatened. It's the nature of the role sadly, but human nature is what it is. This flick ends with a rather strange statement on the nature of man and society when it is shown that law fails and the vigilante is needed to quell the threat of crime.

In a strange way 1973's Serpico paints a less bleak picture of society than does the seemingly more moralistic 1932 The Beast of the City. At least in Serpico, despite the fact that he himself withdraws from his job as a cop the reforms he fights for do seem to find purchase. In the Walter Huston movie, the system seems unable to cope with the challenge it is confronted with. Both films though suggest that it is less about systems and more about individual integrity and that those traits are what will in the final analysis win the day, despite the costs.

Rip Off

The Parallax View!

The Parallax View is a movie I've heard of but never seen. I caught it the other day and was in the mood for some offbeat mystery (even if it did have Warren Beatty in it) so I lingered and ended up watching it through. This political thriller is about a reporter who uncovers a company which appears to train assassins ready for political attacks across the globe. As part of their training they are subjected to psychological conditioning which was represented in the movie by a wide assortment of images associated with particular words like "Mother", "Father", "Country" etc. The aim as I far as I could tell (and this is a movie that doesn't overly explain for sure) is to changed the individuals presented with the programming to make them more amenable to their tasks.

What startled me was the sudden inclusion of the image above by Jack Kirby and Vince Colletta used as part of the conditioning.

The image was taken of course from this 1966 issue of Thor showing the Asgardian facing off against an array of alien weaponry. The image appears several times in the montage sequence used to represent the conditioning.

Used only a single time (as far as I remember) was this image of the Man-Beast, also by Kirby and Colletta.

This one comes of course from a slightly later 1966 issue of the Thor comic.

What these images are supposed to represent is a mystery to me. The other images show mundane things alongside somewhat racy material, but these are the only images of comic art represented. I don't really understand it, but take a look. Caution though since some of the images feature some nudity.


I assume Thor is supposed to be a variation of the classic power fantasy associated with the Aryan mythology promoted by Hitler among others. I'm just guessing. Maybe someone can explain. Is my love of Kirby really an expression of my subliminal desire to off politicians?

Rip Off

The Thirteenth Chair!

I don't know why I picked this creaky old movie to record, but I'm glad I did. The Thirteenth Chair is a 1929 mystery movie which adapts what was apparently a very popular stage play by the same name. That popularity is difficult to understand given this production, but then those were long ago times. The reason I'm glad I caught this flick is simply that it showcased the first teaming of director Tod Browning and actor Bela Lugosi, the duo who would in a couple more years in 1931 bring us Dracula. The weird thing is that Lugosi doesn't even rate a billing in this movie, not on the poster and not even in the TCM blurb which accompanied the movie. But he's the best thing about this clunky old programmer for sure.

The story is a pretty simple one. A man we never meet has been murdered by stabbing and his friend concocts a seance to smoke out the guilty party, a woman he is certain. But the medium he hires to make his scheme work has a conflict of interest and things go awry when another murder is committed right at the seance itself. That's where Lugosi shows up as a detective to get to the bottom of the locked house mystery.

Lugosi dominates the last half of the movie, almost all of which takes place in the same house and in a few rooms. The rest of the cast are worthy enough actors portraying the biggest pack of braying British snobs you'll ever find with a few left out for something more interesting.

Bela on the case.

The success of this story must have been a fascination with seances and mediums which get some attention, because the story itself is pretty ramshackle, as alas is some of the film making. Early on we get an odd glimpse of a critical clue which I mistook at the time for a technical error and it might have been for all I know. And at least one scene for sure was a few seconds of a room full of actors waiting for a cue to all talk at once in a simulated hubbub. The editing in this one was pretty terrible. Two large portions of the movie take place in the absolute dark. The funniest part is when an actor will walk across a room and leave one scene to show up across the same room several seconds later in another scene. The time differential between the scenes suggests a far greater distance than is actually crossed. Sloppy but funny.

I'm glad I saw this relic, which was apparently also released as a silent movie. It's a real valuable bit of movie lore to see Browing and Lugosi working together pre-Dracula, but that's about all this one has.

I recommend it on that basis alone. 

Rip Off

Murder, My Sweet!

One of my local public television stations presented Murder, My Sweet, 1944 film noir effort a few weeks ago and I snapped up the chance to see an adaptation of Raymond Chandler I'd never gotten to before. It adapts Farewell, My Lovely the first Chandler novel I read many years ago now. A few months ago I reviewed a gaggle of Marlowe movie adaptations and now at long last I can say I've seen the first movie to bring the smart-mouthed detective to the big screen. 

Powell as Marlowe

Phillip Marlowe (Dick Powell), a glib and down-on-his-luck detective is contracted by a mountainous thug (Mike Mazurki) to track down his girlfriend from eight years before when he was sent to prison. This triggers a wild cascade of activity which takes nearly the whole story to come into focus as Marlowe encounters beautiful dames, gun-toting thugs, smooth villains, and assorted diligent but noisome cops. He is contracted by another man to ride shotgun on a strange trade in a distant country lane and murder ensues, which embroils the fundamentally honest Marlowe in a scheme which challenges him right down to his core.

Marlowe Meets Mazurki

The plot of the story is a lot of what goes on here and just as in the novel, we often have no real clue as to what is really happening. Marlowe doesn't seem to figure out much before the very end but keeps moving forward for reasons which seem vague. That's the weakest part of this story, the motivations for Marlowe to keep involved seem meager, too meager for him to keep risking his life. I guess we're supposed to think he's doing it for the dames, but that doesn't seem to track with the guy presented here.

Mander, Shirley, and Powell

Dick Powell's Marlowe is a wiseacre for sure and his patter is ongoing and incessant as the story rolls on. I was astonished how much plot had unfolded at the thirty minute mark of this yarn, so there's a lot to hang onto. Great character actors populate this slick film noir effort like Mike Mazurki as the dim but giant and powerful thug, Otto Kruger slithers in as a smooth con-man psychologist, and Miles Mander as an old rich goof is dandy.

Femme Fatale Indeed

 Claire Trevor is the femme fatale and she's good at it as well as Anne Shirley as the seemingly less threatening dutiful daughter.

This one is recommended but hand onto your hat, it's a wild ride.

Rip Off