Bulldog Drummond's Secret Police (1939)

This sprightly slice of complete hokum sums up exactly what I love about the pulp detective film genre of the thirties and forties. It's complete nonsense, of course, but it tells its formula story with such a joie de vivre that it's impossible not to enjoy it. This is my fourth Bulldog Drummond movie, all of which were based on the long running series of books by Sapper, and I think this is my favourite so far. It has to do with Drummond moving into the main house of his large estate just as people discover that there's a large amount of treasure hidden away inside the secret passages, a treasure that people are willing to kill for.

The rest of it fits the formula to a tee and that formula is a good one. Captain Hugh 'Bulldog' Drummond is always about to marry his long suffering fiancee, Phyllis Clavering, but as the date approaches so inevitably does something else to cause yet another postponement. That something is invariably adventurous, dynamic, dashing, insert your favourite movie adjective here, and Drummond can't help but get involved. Many of the cast stayed remarkably consistent, at least as far as I've seen so far. Ray Milland played Drummond once, but John Howard has taken the role every other time. He's a good choice, being at once lively yet traditional and dynamic yet grounded.

The rest of the cast are as good if not even better. Heather Angel portrays his fiancee as very feminine yet somewhat capable in a tight spot for thirties movies. His idiot friend Algy, who is usually getting himself into trouble through sheer ineptitude, is played by Reginald Denny, who does it so well that we get quickly tired of his character while enjoying the way he's played. There's also the excellent E E Clive as Tenny, Drummond's 'gentleman's gentleman', always there to back him up in whatever he's doing, and H B Warner as Colonel Nielson of Scotland Yard.

I'm noticing Warner more and more lately and it's becoming very obvious that he was a wonderful actor. I've seen his legendary turn as Jesus Christ in Cecil B De Mille's silent King of Kings and firmly believe it to be the best take on the role I've seen yet. I didn't notice him the next few times out because he tended to play distinguished character parts that didn't get a lot of screen time, but recently I've enjoyed him immensely as Mr Gower, the drugstore owner who becomes a bum in the alternate Bedford Falls in It's a Wonderful Life; as the stubborn and righteous bishop in the wartime American propaganda movie, Hitler's Children; and as Chen Tsu, almost the only decent thing about The Adventures of Marco Polo. He doesn't get a huge amount to do in the Bulldog Drummond movies bu he's certainly a welcome addition.

Now for the other two Bulldog Drummonds in the Treeline Mystery Classics box set and I can go out and look to see how many others were made.

In This Our Life (1942)

John Huston made some of the best American films of the last century, including The Maltese Falcon which is one of the few perfect ones. Even his lesser works, at least those I've seen so far, are still seriously good movies and I'm always happy to watch a new one. Here he gets to play with women's melodrama, with Bette Davis and Olivia de Havilland in the leads rather than the dynamically male stars he usually cast. Then again they're called Stanley and Roy respectively, so maybe this was really an daring early attempt to challenge the boundaries of gender, sexuality and the institution of marriage. Well, maybe not.

But this is a daring movie, for 1942, that's for sure. We start off with a lot of masculine bluster between rich businessman Charles Coburn and whoever else happens to be there at the time, but it soon becomes very clear that this is a woman's picture and none of them can stand up to Bette Davis. Then again, who ever could? When she tells her man that he only has one job and that's her, we believe every word of it. There's plenty more she says that we don't believe in the slightest, but then this is Bette Davis playing a character who always has to get her own way and she revels in it.

She kicks this one off engaged to one man but in very short shrift steals away with her sister's husband anyway and the film follows the consequences. De Havilland's character, Roy, is naturally hurt but takes it reasonably well as she insisted early on in her marriage that their should be no strings. Davis's fiance Craig, played by George Brent, almost hits the skids though and it takes Roy to pull him out. A generation up and there's a whole mess of chaos being shaken up by these events. Stan and Roy's father is the one being screwed out of his company by his wife's brother, but this wife's brother has long been wrapped round Stan's little finger. She has the sheer audacity to spend his large wedding present cheque on a phonograph to enjoy with her new beau, and then to write to ask for her car to be sent down. And later...

There aren't many actresses who could get away with this sort of thing, even today when women are actually allowed to act in roles of substance. Bette Davis is of course still top of the list and this film undoubtedly belongs to her every second of the way, even with so many people doing excellent work behind her. Olivia de Havilland is superb and Coburn not far behind. George Brent and Frank Craven as Stan and Roy's father are far more subtle but just as good. There's Billie Burke as their mother and she's long been a favourite of mine, even before I discovered she'd married an even more famous husband. There's also a young gentleman called Ernest Anderson, who I've never previously heard of. He plays a young black man trying to make his way as a lawyer but who, like everyone else, runs afoul of Stan. He appears in many ways like a coloured version of Peter Lorre, which is an intriguing concept but one that works. That his mother is played by Hattie McDaniel, a heavyweight actress in more ways than one, only helps. From what I can tell, she's never given a bad performance in her life.

There are times here when Bette is as happy as a lark and looks under eighteen, like a coquettish schoolgirl, but there are also others where she looks fifty and as dangerous as any film noir villain. Nobody could dance electricity in her eyes quite like Bette and she gets plenty of opportunity here to rage, breaking up marriages, driving people to suicide, killing people in accidents, setting people up for the fall. She's what's going to be most memorable about this film and while it was apparently a critical and commercial flop, it's yet another one for John Huston to have been proud of.

The American West of John Ford (1971)

While this isn't as comprehensive or serious as Peter Bogdanovich's Directed By John Ford, made the same year, it's less dry and much higher on the reminiscence quota. It's a TV documentary but you wouldn't guess that from the people running the show. There are three distinct thirds to the film, each presented and narrated by a major name indeed: John Wayne, James Stewart and Henry Fonda. They each look back at John Ford and his work and reminisce with him about the westerns they made together, and that's what this is all about: it's almost an hour of tripping off down memory lane.

There is substance in here but not a huge amount, certainly compared to Directed By John Ford, from which many scenes and comments have stayed with me about the artistry and meaning of his achievements: the placing of the horizon, the persistence of ritual, the sweep of history throughout his body of work. In the absence of that insight it's the sentiment here that matters, a glimpse inside a more open Ford that was notably absent in Bogdanovich's more ambitious documentary.

As if to point out just how hard his job was, Bogdanovich opened his film with a sequence of intelligent and searching questions to which Ford either provided one word answers or shrugged off entirely. He may well be the journalist Ford laughs off here with the line, 'I didn't tell him anything'. Yet each of these three stars get him to open up a little and even manage to bring out a few jokes and asides to back up their assertions that Ford was as much an actor as a director, projecting his crotchety old bastard persona onto anyone around but who was at heart just an old sentimentalist. That's priceless.

Invisible Invaders (1959)

Atom supremacy is the name of the game in 1959 apparently, and every day mankind is rushing headlong towards destruction by building bigger and more outrageously powerful weapons. John Carradine gets blown up in an atomic explosion in his lab literally within about two seconds of us first seeing him, but of course that's not it for big bad John. He has to come back as a resurrected corpse controlled by an alien being to tell these evil scientists that if we carry on destroying each other they'll do it for us. The Carradine zombie is necessary because these aliens, who have been occupying our moon for 20,000 years, are invisible.

There's a conspicuous lack of explanation of how they managed to raise the body of a man who was very recently at the centre of a nuclear blast, but then this is 1959 and we're dealing with aliens resurrecting the dead to stop us harnessing powers that might threaten the universe. Sound familiar? Could someone really have ripped off Plan 9 from Outer Space in the same year it came out? Certainly the rest of the plot suggests a sheer ineptitude to match that of Ed Wood but without his insane inspiration and his unparalleled cast of characters.

Tor Johnson couldn't act but at least he looked like Tor Johnson; Bela Lugosi may have been dead but at least that's him in the archive footage; Vampira and Criswell and Bunny Breckinridge and all the rest of them are fun to watch through virtue of just being themselves. Beyond a couple of minutes of a wooden John Carradine, this one has a lot of stock footage of natural disasters, a bunch of nameless zombies and what looks like the trails of a couple of arthritic gophers. This film is so cheap that people had to strangle themselves to get out of it.

Well a quick check suggests that this film came out on 15 May 1959 and Plan 9 didn't see release until July, but of course it had been shot in 1956 but saw a three year delay in finding a distributor who would touch the thing. The only other date that may have importance is 28 Jan 1959, which is when one of the key actors, Philip Tonge died at the age of 61. Presumably he didn't want to live to see this turkey released. And talking of turkeys, the Golden Turkey Awards may have famously labelled Plan 9 from Outer Space as the worst film ever made, but right now I'm not even convinced it's the worst film of 1959.

B-movie mavens have plenty to look out for at least. What seem like the only three people left get driven around by a major played by John Agar who was a regular in films this bad and was the nominal lead here. Leading lady Jean Byron had a well regarded TV career in series like The Patty Duke Show, but her few film credits show that she'd graduated to this from movies like Jungle Moon Men, The Magnetic Monster and her debut, Voodoo Tiger, opposite Johnny Weissmuller. Director Edward L Cahn was also responsible for another 123 movies, from Our Gang comedies in the forties to terrible scifi movies like It! The Terror from Beyond Space and Invasion of the Saucermen in the fifties and on out to westerns in the sixties.

Red Planet Mars (1952)

Red Planet Mars starts off pretending to be serious, like Destination Moon, with professors in observatories talking about elliptical curves and perihelions (perihelia?). They're looking at photos of the planet Mars and it looks very likely that someone has been melting the polar ice caps and using them to irrigate the planet. A very young Peter Graves, a full fifteen years before Mission: Impossible, is the optimistic scientist Chris Cronyn who has been communicating with the planet but can't understand any of it yet. Andrea King is his pessimistic assistant (and wife) who seemingly believes that every scientific advance mankind has ever had has just brought us one step closer to oblivion. Quite why she works in science I don't know.

However on the other side, the Russians are trying the same thing. They have a hydrogen valve too along with the Nazi scientist played by Herbert Berghof who came up with the thing in the first place and so they can hear the same signals. So when Graves breaks through by signalling pi, at the suggestion of his bright young son, the Russians are keeping tabs on the whole thing. Unfortunately Cronyn's wife's predictions are coming true. When the Martians point out their achievements, successive industries go under. Martians live for three hundred years, so the life insurance companies quit working; the Martians can feed thousands off a single acre, so the farmers go into recession; the Martians use cosmic energy, so the mines and oil companies collapse. I don't buy all that but it's fun to watch the world's infrastructure collapse.

Needless to say Peter Graves isn't too happy about what he's brought about, though he should have been happy with where his career was going. This may be a scifi B-movie but at least he finally has the lead and the quality is pretty high when compared to most of its competitors. A year later he'd be in a Billy Wilder film and in the IMDb Top 250 with Stalag 17. Admittedly he didn't get too much higher than that in the movies but it was a heck of a start. Andrea King I know from great Peter Lorre movies from before this like Hotel Berlin and The Beast with Five Fingers, but she ended up in the downward spiral to bad sixties horror movies like so many American actors: House of the Black Death and Blackenstein are not great credits on a filmography.

This one, however, isn't a bad one at all. From its scientific formulae it veers into religious territory, from despair to hope. The fact that the whole message is complete unashamed American propaganda doesn't decrease the interest, in fact it increases it. What I find most interesting though is how that propaganda affects the treatment of the Nazi scientist. There are whole paragraphs I want to write about him but therein would lie some serious spoilers. Watch for yourself and see how you'd have constructed the ending.

Hell Town (1937)

John Wayne continues his slow march towards decent roles in decent westerns. This one sees some versatility in his role and some real acting. He's swaggering around just like you'd expect the Duke to, but didn't throughout his 16 Lone Star westerns only a few years earlier. Those films had very simple plots and not a lot else. The acting was pretty poor throughout, as you can quickly tell by seeing the name Yakima Canutt on so many of those credit lists: Canutt was one of the biggest legends in the stunt business but he really couldn't act. Most of the cast were the same throughout, as were the sets, and they averaged only fifty some minutes in length. They really felt more like episodes of a television series than movies.

The quality went up noticeably when Lone Star merged with Mascot Pictures to form Republic and Winds of the Wasteland proved to be better than any of the films that went before. Here there's even more budget and the film is shot on a much more optimistic scale, opening with large cattle runs through beautiful countryside. Of course there are bad guys trying to steal the cattle and so a gunfight ensues. In comes Wayne and his partner who have run out of card games to play in Montana and are heading west to Wyoming. They pick the wrong side to help out but get bailed out by Wayne's brother Tom who happens to be the local head of the cattlemen's association.

He's going to take a hundred bucks to move straight on out to Idaho until he sees his brother's girl who he promptly proceeds to propose to on a daily basis. He starts working for his brother as a cook but soon moves up to running cattle drives. The catch is that he's an inveterate gambler who believes he's better than he really is and Tom has only given him such responsibility so that he can steal all the money and show himself up, thus removing him from his girlfriend's affections.

There are cattle and gunfights and gambling and everything you'd expect from a western, which is hardly surprising as it's based on a novel by western pulp legend Zane Grey, but there really isn't much more substance here than there was back in the Lone Star days. This one's perfectly passable but nothing more, except for the fascinating progression over many films of the star into the John Wayne we know today.

Here's a link to my John Wayne ratings page.

The Man from Planet X (1951)

Of all the low budget directors of the forties and fifties, Moravian born Edgar G Ulmer was one of the best at successfully hiding his lack of money with whatever tricks he could think of, up to and including using an actual plot. One of the finest films noir I've seen thus far was Detour, made six years before this one, which Ulmer made in less than a week for a mere $30,000. Here he had a whole $50,000 to play with, along with the sets from the Ingrid Bergman picture Joan of Arc, which he frequently hid with a decent amount of artificially created fog, always a useful prop for a low budget director.

The story has to do with a planet, arbritarily named Planet X, which seems to be coming closer on a daily basis. The astronomer watching it is Professor Elliot, from an old tower in Scotland. Elliot invites John Lawrence, a journalist friend of his to cover the story, but the pair of them, along with Elliot's daughter Enid and a mysterious former student (and convicted criminal) called Dr Mears, find far more of a story than they ever expected.

As could be expected in a low budget movie, none of the actors are name stars, though Enid Elliot is played by Sally Field's mother Margaret. She's the one who first meets the Man from Planet X, after her car breaks down and she's forced to brave the fog swept moors on foot. He's a curiously immobile creature with a papier mache face and a spinning top of a spaceship, but he also has an arsenal of useful if highly convenient weapons. In fact convenience is the order of the day as a whole slew of facts are obviously set up not to suit logic and reality but the constraints of the budget.

Ulmer proves his worth as a low budget filmmaker yet again, but this time he doesn't have much to work with. The Man from Planet X is nothing compared to Detour, and it doesn't even compare to other worthy if hardly groundbreaking Ulmer movies like The Black Cat, made for Universal in 1934 with both Lugosi and Karloff, and 1960's The Amazing Transparent Man, which deserves a much higher rating than the pathetic 2.7 it currently holds at IMDb. This one starts as a halfway decent B-movie scifi yarn but ends up as nothing more than a bad alien zombie flick with no depth whatsoever. Boy, the ending sucks and so does the movie.

Destination Moon (1950)

It's 1950 and Hollywood was about to go nuts with scifi B-movies, which were often as completely stupid and unrealistic as they were fun to watch. However producer George Pal, who would go on to direct The Time Machine and 7 Faces of Dr Lao, wanted something a little more realistic. So he made a science fiction film rather than a scifi movie, and yes there's a serious difference.

He started off on the right foot by basing the script on a novel by legendary sf writer Robert A Heinlein and even to hire him to contribute to the screenplay. Rocketship Galileo is not one of his best but Heinlein's worst roughly equates to the best most other writer's could come up with, even now. Beyond Heinlein, he even hired people with titles like 'Technical Advisor of Astronomical Art'. You won't see things like that on any other fifties movies, that's for sure, and I'm pretty sure that you won't see Woody Woodpecker anywhere else giving us a lesson in ballistics. That cartoon section was done so well that even NASA took it on and updated it so they could educate the public.

The film is in technicolor and starts off with a rocket launch that goes bad, potentially through sabotage rather than bad engineering. The crusaders behind it know what they're doing and so decide to avoid issues with ongoing military funding and hit the private sector. In comes Jim Barnes to take charge and unite key industry leaders into doing their part, which is why we get to see Woody Woodpecker. With the sheer optimism of a lot of early American science fiction, all this works out fine and off they head to the moon.

To be fair the reason that so much of the golden era of science fiction turned out so overly optimistic is far more the fault of the people who failed to put much of it into action than those who came up with the concepts in the first place. There's a lot more obvious Heinlein here too, from the realistic dialogue, both political and technical, to the avoiding of red tape. Barnes realises that their take off is going to get blocked because of public concerns about atomic energy, so he applies the logic that as nobody had ever done it before there can't be a law against it, and so takes off that night just before the court order arrives to prohibit it.

I really appreciated the realism which was more than a little refreshing. The whole sequence of scenes when they first take off was wonderful: the four astronauts being pushed into their bunks by the takeoff, coping with zero gravity when they go into free orbit, awkwardness taking pills or manoeuvering around in magnetic boots, drinking from pouches... all wonderful. Admittedly much of it is explained a little clumsily, through the device of a non-technical last minute replacement crew member, so as to be followable by everyone watching, but that's easily forgiveable. The spacewalk accident doesn't fall far of Flash Gordon territory though, the lunar landscape is a painting (though admittedly a damn fine one) and that extra crew member gets to be rather annoying. He reminded me very much of the idiot crew member in the title segments of Amazon Women on the Moon, though thankfully he doesn't have a pet monkey.

Incidentally there are actors in here, such as John Archer, Warner Anderson, Tom Powers, Dick Wesson and Erin O'Brien-Moore, and they do a perfectly acceptable job. They're just not really that important in the great scheme of things. It's the story that matters and how it was done. The biggest flaw is that the film just isn't long enough to cover everything it wanted to cover, and I'm not complaining about that.

A Night in Casablanca (1946)

I caught up with almost all the Marx Brothers movies long ago and I've had plenty of opportunity to do it again since. TCM runs Marx Brothers marathons a couple of times a year, it seems. However they only show the first eleven, that were released between 1929 and 1941, leaving me two later movies to search for in vain. These are A Night in Casablanca from 1946 and Love Happy from 1949. Well, at least I'm now down to only one to find.

It doesn't seem like a Marx Brothers movie for a while because they don't seem to be in it. There's what seems like a reasonably in depth plot about a hotel in post-war Casablanca, where the managers keep dropping dead. An American pilot has some sort of story about Nazi treasure that was lost when he deliberately crashed his plane to avoid taking it to South America at the forced bidding of the Third Reich, but the Chief of Police doesn't believe a word of it. There's plenty of substance here but what there aren't are Marx Brothers, which seems more than a little strange. They turn up soon enough, of course, but given that if you took the brothers out of any of their previous movies there really wouldn't be anything left, it's a surprise that they should change their tack here.

Harpo is the steward of some evil high up Nazi who is staying at the hotel and he gets most of the early laughs, Chico runs the Yellow Camel cab company outside and Groucho of course gets the biggest role as Ronald Kornblow, the newest manager of the hotel. He's exactly how you'd expect Groucho to be, only less so. I presume that's why the film didn't succeed too well, being much higher on plot and much lower on wisecracks, but for all that this could just be my favourite. Then again it could be because the brothers financed this one themselves in a hope to gain more control over their film careers, and hey, look where that got most people!

Rating System

I use a seven point rating system for this site because it seemed to make more sense than some of the other systems I've seen. It uses 4 (OK) as a pivot and ranges up to 7 (Classic) and down to 1 (Abysmal). Here's how it works in a little more detail.

1 - Abysmal | 2 - Bad | 3 - Poor | 4 - OK | 5 - Good | 6 - Excellent | 7 - Classic

4 - OK

4 is the pivot and it simply means OK. OK films are those that may keep our attention from beginning to end but they hold absolutely nothing else for us. There's nothing particularly bad to say but there's nothing particularly good to say either. Also, on occasion an otherwise Good film may have a flaw large enough to warrant a lowering of the rating, or an otherwise Poor film has something notable enough to warrant it raised.

For example, films like Rock 'n' Roll High School (1979), Spencer Tracy's Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde (1941) or Mortal Kombat Annihilation (1997) are just there. They just exist and there's nothing much to say about them.

5 - Good

This is the first step up the ratings ladder. Good films should have something positive to them to make them something more than just OK. This could be a great acting performance or an interesting plot, or just something that sticks happily in the mind. But good doesn't mean great, and these films are missing much that could have made them great.

For example, average films like Road to Singapore (1940) or The Company of Wolves (1984) raise themselves up through their sheer energy or by particular distinctive performances. Others like The Oklahoma Kid (1939) or Dollar for the Dead (1998) might rate higher if only I could buy into James Cagney or Emilio Estevez as cowboys.

6 - Excellent

These are highly enjoyable films that are well worth watching, but they have something to keep them down from a Classic rating. There might be obvious flaws or just some sense that something is missing. Maybe there's a major plot hole or one performance just let the side down.

For example, Gone with the Wind (1939) and All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) are superb films that nonetheless contain what to me are unforgiveable flaws. Others, like Russ Meyer's highly distinctive Faster Pussycat, Kill! Kill! (1966) and Mudhoney (1966) are wonderful movies that I somehow couldn't bring myself to give a Classic rating to.

7 - Classic

These films are the best of the best, the ones that people should still be talking about years from now. Classics should have either no flaws or at very least only forgiveable ones. They should be the best of their genres, command respect or admiration and contain masterclass direction, acting or cinematography. They should be the sort of films to want to see again, and should bear up or be at least likely to bear up under repeated viewings. All films in the IMDb Top 250 list ought to be Classics, but to my mind many aren't. Keep your eyes peeled for my stroll through the whole list over the course of 2010 to see which.

For example, The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) and Casablanca (1942) are essentially perfect films with no discernable flaws. The Abominable Dr Phibes (1971) is certainly not perfect but it outdoes itself by bringing a noticeably unique sense of style to its genre and so its flaws are entirely forgiveable.

3 - Poor

This is the first step down from OK. Poor means that there is something actively bad about a film. It may have redeeming features but these don't outweigh the negative. There could be a performance that's too bad to forgive or maybe an OK film just fell apart partway through. Alternatively Poor films could be Bad films with a single saving grace.

For example, films like Mars Needs Women (1967) or Terror of Mechagodzilla (1975) have much to be ashamed of but somehow they're still guilty pleasures. Others are watchable only for one thing, such as Black Dragons (1942) or Murder By Television (1935) which are bearable only because of the presence of Bela Lugosi.

2 - Bad

A Bad film has much to apologise for. However it should have at least something that is positive. Maybe one actor shone above all the rest, or the script was too good for bad actors to do justice to. Perhaps the film is great at one thing, such as action or kung fu sequences or cinematography, but there's nothing else going for it at all.

For example, Maniac (1932) and Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2002) are frankly terrible but the former contains fascinating sequences and ideas that were unheard of in its era and the latter at least has some superb action scenes. On the other hand, some of the principal characters in Simon Sez (1999) were so intensely annoying that they really spoiled what little the film had to start with.

1 - Abysmal

Abysmal films are the worst of the worst. These films usually have no redeemable features at all and could only be appreciated with overdubs from MST3K. On occasion they might have something to say for themselves but have features that are so truly awful that they wipe out everything else.

For instance, films like Reptilicus! (1962) or Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (1964) contain no positive features whatsoever. Other films like Strange Interlude (1932) or Battlefield Earth (2000) have something going for them but whatever that is gets trumped by a single overriding failure. The gimmick of the former backfires so spectacularly that even Clark Gable can't salvage the film, and everything the latter stands for is so entirely ludicrous that I just threw up my hands in despair.

Translating to IMDb Ratings

While this seven point rating system works for me, it isn't a common one. The IMDb uses a ten point system, from one to ten, and I can translate mine across to it easily enough.

My 7-Classic would equal a 9 or 10 at IMDb. The Passion of Joan of Arc would be a 10 but The Abominable Dr Phibes would only be a 9.

My 6-Excellent would become either a 7 or an 8 at IMDb. All Quiet on the Western Front would be an 8 but Faster Pussycat, Kill! Kill! only a 7.

My mid rankings translate easily. A 5-Good would be a 6 at IMDb, a 4-OK would become a 5 and a 3-Poor would equal an IMDb 4.

My 2-Bad would also be a 2 at IMDb but some would reach a 3. Maniac would be a 2 but Simon Sez would be a 3.

Finally, my 1-Abysmal would translate simply to a 1 at IMDb.