After Midnight with Boston Blackie (1943) Lew Landers

It's been a while since I saw the first our Boston Blackie movies about Horatio Black, ex-jewellery thief and now circumstance driven detective making fools out of the police on a regular basis. Here he's brought into prominence because of a friend of his, Diamond Ed Barnaby, has been released from prison and is now being chased for three diamonds that are apparently rightfully his but very much wanted by the underworld. As Blackie was the one person he could trust she tracks him down when he mysteriously disappears. Blackie is busy delivering the Runt to Arthur Manleder's house to get married to a burlesque dancer called Dixie Rose Blossom, but can't resist the opportunity to help out and get arrested for murder in the meantime.

There's plenty of fun here, with Blackie playing with Inspector Farraday and Detective Mathews incessantly and enthusiastically. Matthews gets to be a little too stupid on occasion but he's getting better. Cy Kendall is a great villain, playing the large and dangerous Joe Herschel; Jan Buckingham looks scarily real as Dixie Rose Blossom, who has a memorable wedding day for sure; and the leading lady is Ann Savage, a couple of years before Detour and not many before she'd retire from acting for over thirty years. She gets to do almost nothing here except look good but then she's hardly the point of the film.

The story is solid and all the regular hands were getting really used to their roles by now: not just Chester Morris as Blackie, but also George E Stone as the Runt, Richard Lane as Farraday, Walter Sande as Mathews and Lloyd Corrigan as Arthur Manleder. When the only real downside to this one is the lack of believable backdrops because the budget wouldn't allow for them, we're definitely on a winning entry in the series.

Bromo and Juliet (1926) Leo McCarey

This time round Charley Chase is a young businessman, bright and ready with a good idea and quick to act in a crisis. Unfortunately when the crisis is a production of Romeo and Juliet and he knocks out the stage manager, Madge, the love of his life, persuades him to play Romeo opposite her Juliet. I think I must have blinked after that because all of a sudden this seems to change completely. Suddenly Charley ends up being mistaken for a bootlegger, gets drunk at gunpoint and ends up in no end of misadventures, all the while dressed up to the nines in stage costume.

The funniest bit was the film manipulation to approximate a drunk horse. The rest left me dry, though it didn't leave Charley dry. Walking through a row of sprinklers with sponges concealed inside his hose to approximate muscled legs brings the expected result. Unfortunately that's not a great recommendation for the film, especially coming so soon for me after the triumphant Mighty Like a Moose.

Mighty Like a Moose (1926) Leo McCarey

Charley Chase and Vivien Oakland are the unfortunately named Mr and Mrs Moose. Even more unfortunate is the fact that he has scarily protruding teeth and she has a scarily protruding nose, but that's something they can fix. They've both been saving up for a long while to do so and the results are so impressive that they don't recognise each other even when sharing a lift or sitting next to each other on the shoeshine stand. Given that it's 1926 and so this is a silent film, they can't recognise each other by voice either.

What makes the comedy great is that they both get fitted with artificial means of temporarily returning to their previous misfortune, and so they end up in the bizarre situation where they both start cheating on each other... with each other. The stage management of how they successfully avoid each other while preparing to do so is textbook stuff and there's more to come. The finale is managed just as well with Chase doing double duty as himself twice, even working a believable fight sequence as both parties involved!

The action stays wisely on the pair of them rather than involving a wider range of characters and that works a treat. Chase is better here than in any of his other films and Vivien Oakland keeps up with him very well indeed. Finally I get why he's regarded by so many as an unsung genius. He hasn't seemed it at all in the other films I've seen of his but he's just wonderful here. Even Buddy the Dog can't steal it!

Long Fliv the King (1926) Leo McCarey

Princess Helga of Thermosa is in town buying expensive dresses, but back home people are plotting against her. Her father, the king, is dead and the decree is that if she isn't married in 24 hours she loses the right to succeed. She hits on the bright idea of marrying a man on death row with only a day left to live. That way she satisfies the requirements given her without getting landed with a husband. Of course the prisoner is Charley Chase and a minute after the ceremony is over he's pardoned and chasing after his new wife.

Proving that nothing is new in Hollywood, this turns out to be a remake of an earlier Hal Roach film called His Royal Slyness, with Harold Lloyd and Mildred Davis. Now, as much as I can enjoy Charley Chase he really isn't Harold Lloyd who had the same everyman look but more character and less vaudevillian posing, and this Princess Helga, Martha Sleeper is far from being Mildred Davis. Fred Malatesta plays the evil Prime Minister of Thermosa as a cross between a court jester and and a pantomime villain, which is very tiresome.

Luckily there's Oliver Hardy on hand as the Prime Minister's assistant, and while he doesn't get a huge amount to do, he's more than fine doing it. There's also Max Davidson, who looks like a character if ever I saw one. I'd like to see him in sound pictures, which apparently I have without realising it. I wonder if his voice is as memorable as his face.

The Crime Doctor's Courage (1945) George Sherman

Movie number three for Dr Robert Ordway, the Crime Doctor, and he's on a roll so far. Both The Crime Doctor and The Crime Doctor's Strangest Case were solid and a cut above the usual B movie mystery fare. So what's the third like? Well it's not up to the standard of the last two, though it's a lot stranger a case than the Strangest Case. It's not a bad locked room mystery but it suffers from the same problem the second film did, namely that the script outstripped the ability of the actors to act it, leaving most of the deliveries wooden and artificial.

Worst of all are Stephen Crane as Gordon Carson and the unknown actress playing his second wife Evelyn, who open the film. Evelyn is a newlywed whose husband has already mysteriously lost one new wife and is busy harrassing her about whether she believes him when he tells her it was an accident. Of course he's doing the harrassing on top of a cliff and she soon ends up at the bottom the hard way. We see that this one is an accident, or at least seems to be, but we have no idea about the first one and next thing we know there's a wife number three, Kathleen. She hijacks Ordway's holiday to find out if her husband is insane.

Hillary Brooke isn't much better as Kathleen than her husband and his previous wife. Anthony Caruso and Lupita Tovar are better dancers than they are actors but they're not that great in either role. They're a pair of mysterious Spanish dancers who can apparently make themselves invisible and who are present when Gordon apparently kills himself in a locked room with barred windows. Ordway, of course, realises that it's murder and he's backed up by Jerome Cowen, who is fine as an author with quick wits also present at the time. There's also Lloyd Corrigan as the bride's father and he's also fun. I know him best as Arthur the rich but clueless friend in the Boston Blackie series.

There are bonus points for the vampire angle and for the complexity of the plot, but it loses out once again on the standard of acting. It's still up on most of its competitors but the series is starting to head downhill.

Innocent Husbands (1925) Leo McCarey

After April Fool, anything remotely resembling a plot would be welcome and this one has both that and some actual acting to boot. Charley Chase plays Melvin, a nice guy who never does anything wrong but whose jealous wife Mame suspects him of everything under the sun. Mame is Katherine Grant and she's simply superb in the role. While she heads off to a seance to discover what her husband's been up to, he ends up in a party across the hall with an ugly date who passes out in his bedroom.

Chase is fine here but it's Katherine Grant who shines, even though she only has a small part. It looks like I've seen her before, in other shorts with Charley Chase or Laurel and Hardy, but she had a short career. After becoming Miss Los Angeles in 1922 she appeared in an Our Gang short called Saturday Morning then worked her way through 48 other films by 1926. I'm definitely going to watch out for more of her in the future.

The plot is solid too, though a couple of the gags are lame. I chuckled my way through all of this, especially the seance scene towards the end. This is much better than April Fool, but then it's twice the length and has a future Oscar winning director, Leo McCarey, who made a lot of Charley Chase films. The acting is good, the slapstick gets funnier throughout and everything wraps up nicely. I've seen fifteen Chase movies now and with the exception of Sons of the Desert, a Laurel and Hardy movie that he didn't star in, this is by far the best.

April Fool (1924) Ralph Ceder

Half the Charley Chase silent shorts I've seen weren't really Charley Chase films: they were Charlie Chaplin films made in Chaplin's debut year of 1914. However the other half I've seen come from the mid twenties, when Chase signed up with Hal Roach to star in a new series of films. This is an early example of his Hal Roach shorts and if it's not sidesplittingly funny it's at least consistently amusing.

Chase's character, not that it really matters other than to set the scene, is Jimmy Jump, a reporter at a cheap newspaper. As you can imagine from the title, it's April Fool's Day and Jimmy has the unenviable task of trying to distinguish between what's prank and what's real. Naturally, given that we're dealing with comedy on the level of the Beano comic, there's a good deal of the former and only enough of the latter to keep the jokes alive.

Chase does his job well enough, as does everyone else involved, but while it might sound redundant to say this about slapstick comedy, it's really just kids stuff. There's no attempt to even wrap up the strands of plot it generates, which wouldn't have been difficult, because it's really just a string of gags wrapped up in a common theme.

The Sniper (1952) Edward Dmytryk

Films like this one tend to either succeed wonderfully or fail dismally and there's no room in between for anything else. By 'films like this one' I mean crime thrillers where we find out who did it at the very beginning of the film and to catch him the police have to understand who he was and why. Here the killer is Edward Miller, played by Arthur Franz, and he knows exactly what he is but can't stop himself. He's a former GI with a skill that he fights himself from using. With his prison psychiatrist away, he kills one, then another and leaves a note telling the police to stop him before he does it again.

The police are helpless but they persevere. The lead on the case is Adolphe Menjou, who does a very realistic job of an older police lieutenant who's stuck in the old ways but aware of the new. The police psychiatrist pushes for the application of science and logic to the case but the powers that be don't want to know. They just want the man caught and punished. The shrink, and the filmmakers, are more concerned with addressing issues before they get to this stage, so that they can save the next victims.

The thinking behind this logic is solid and well understood today, as demonstrated amply in series like Criminal Minds, but it was brand new in the fifties and usually seen as 'psychiatric mumbo jumbo', as it's described here. The powers that be see it as coddling the crooks, but that's not true. Kent, the psychiatrist, wants people like Miller put away too, but into a psychiatric ward on their first offence, so that they can be either cured and released or kept there indefinitely so as to keep them from killing again.

We know Miller is the sniper and we know it from the very beginning. We watch him wrestle with who he is and fight himself from committing these acts. The first time we see him shoot someone, his gun isn't even loaded. He even burns his hand to try to stop himself but fails. He's a killer but he's also a victim; and that doesn't excuse him from his crimes, it merely helps to explain them. The powers that be are idiots with their own agendas and the public are no different. The only people with any sense of reality here are a couple of police: Lt Kafka and Kent the psychiatrist. That's a strangely short list of good guys in a film pushing for future change in society.

Both Kafka and Kent are wonderfully played, especially Kafka who is underplayed to perfection by an elderly Adolphe Menjou. The star has to be Arthur Franz though. I've seen him before in a number of films but never really paid attention until now. He's very believable in the role, both as an angry misogynistic killer and as a sympathetic young man driven somehow beyond his means to control. It's a very impressive performance indeed and it, along with Edward Dmytryk's superb direction, to make this a success.

Bird of Paradise (1932) King Vidor

Here's about the most perfect example of complete nonsense I've ever seen in film that has the one redeeming factor of somehow still somehow entertaining for no reason that I can define. Johnny Baker, in the manly form of Joel McCrea, is travelling around the South Seas with a bunch of rich idiots, when they come upon a new island populated by what seem at first glance to be friendly natives. While the crew are busy throwing their alarm clocks into the ocean for no apparent reason, Baker gets to be active and try to catch the newly arrived shark. He gets caught up in the line instead and so takes a tumble into the water but is quickly rescued by a beautiful native girl played by Dolores del Rio, the most beautiful woman in pictures at the time.

She gets to dance around a lot and swim about a lot but not get touched by anyone because she's sacred and is to be married to a local prince. Baker is going native though very quickly indeed so that he looks and sounds far more like Tarzan than Joel McCrea and he carries her off to Paradise Island, not wondering about why the rest of his party has just sailed back off into the sunset. Luana, del Rio's character, gets to carry on looking beautiful in her immaculate native makeup, while Baker builds them a house. She is a pretty good spear fisher though, it seems, while he can climb the trees and throw down coconuts.

There's another real character in the film beyond Baker and Luana, and that's Pele the volcano god who must be fed a sacrifice in order to dissuade her from being so violent. No guesses as to who the sacrifice is supposed to be. You see, life isn't all about chasing wild pigs, wrestling turtles and catching flying fish with a tennis racket. It's about having your stolen girlfriend fed to the volcano god. There are plot holes everywhere you look here and nothing makes any sense at all, but it all looks fine and even the underwater scenes are shot very well. It's also embarrassing in the way the western civilised folks deal with the natives.

To be honest, there's so little dialogue here, and what there is makes so little sense, that it would have been much better as a silent film. That's backed up by the fact that this was the very first sound film to have a complete symphonic score. McCrea and del Rio are the only two names here, though I watched out for and failed to find Creighton Chaney, who hadn't yet become Lon Chaney Jr and was still further away from becoming just Lon Chaney to further capitalise on his father's name. He was in here somewhere, as a character called Thornton, but I couldn't find him.

The Cross of Lorraine (1943) Tay Garnett

This wartime propaganda film kicks off with a long introductory passage that appears almost like a documetary. It's fairy done too: the patriotic French are eager to sign up to fight the enemy in World War II, but two weeks later they've had their asses handed to them on a plate. France is now ruled by Marshal Petain who orders surrender because the Germans now run the show. A group of French soldiers who do precisely that think they're being transported back to Paris to carry on working, merely under German rule, but they're really being transported to Hauptbahnhof, a military prison camp.

There's a large starring cast, as there was obviously a deliberate attempt to avoid having just one. I didn't know all of the names on the title card: Jean Pierre Aumont, Gene Kelly, Sir Cedric Hardwick, Richard Whorf, Joseph Calleia, Peter Lorre and Hume Cronyn, but some do better than others. Aumont is a believable Frenchman mostly because he was a Frenchman; Kelly isn't singing and dancing so he's at least enjoyable, but he's not quite so believable as a Frenchman; Whorf isn't really believable as anything because he's overacting so badly; Calleia plays a Chilean freedom fighter and he's highly enjoyable.

Peter Lorre was born in Austria, just like Hitler, making him believable as a Nazi, but it's his acting that shines here. He may well have enjoyed the irony that saw him play a Nazi after escaping their rule and seeing himself used as 'documentary footage' in the German propaganda film, The Eternal Jew. Hume Cronyn gets the best part as a French wine merchant who speaks German and so becomes the camp translator and traitor to the cause.

The whole thing is not really a film at all, just a piece of propaganda. It's just propaganda from our side not theirs, making it a little more palatable but no more real. As a rallying cry it may well have worked well. As a film, from the perspective of sixty years after the war it rallied for has been over, it's nothing more than an opportunity for us to see Peter Lorre as a great Nazi and Hume Cronyn as a great weasel.