The Cyclops (1957)

Director: Bert I Gordon
Stars: James Craig, Gloria Talbott, Lon Chaney and Tom Drake

Back in the fifties, if you wanted giants you watched movies by Bert I Gordon, whose initials were tellingly BIG. He started off big with prehistoric monsters in 1955's King Dinosaur, then followed up with giant grasshoppers in Beginning of the End in 1957. The Cyclops was when he first used a giant human being, the title character who is 25 feet tall, but it really underlined his career, as his second of six films in two years, which also included The Amazing Colossal Man and War of the Colossal Beast. He'd return to giants often in his films, whether human or not, with pictures like Earth vs The Spider, Village of the Giants and The Food of the Gods. Only occasionally would he go the other way, shrinking characters in Attack of the Puppet People, but rarest of all were attempts to leave everybody the size they should be. It's almost like Mr BIG, as Forrest Ackerman called him, just didn't want to see anyone normal sized.

The Cyclops is fun even during the opening credits, as each page is hammered onto the screen with its own crescendo. When the music dies down, we find ourselves in the Mexican town of Guayjorm, where an American lady, Susan Winter, is still looking for her fiancé, Bruce Barton, after his plane crashed three years earlier. She's played by Gloria Talbott, who initially looks a little unfortunately like Roddy McDowall playing a nun. Later she's more reminiscent of Audrey Hepburn, which is never a bad comparison to make for an actress. Her trip is hindered by the governor, who doesn't want adventurers exploring the local mountains, and that's who he sees in her party of four. None of the rest believe that Barton could still be alive, even his friend Russ Bradford, a toxicologist played by James Craig. He got top billing, though he's trying a little too hard to be a cheap Clark Gable in Clark Kent glasses. He likes Susan too, big time.

The others in the party are Lee Brand, the pilot, and Marty Melville, who's exploring for uranium deposits. Tom Drake is solid as Brand, who seems good at his job, though he's a little fond of the bottle and he apparently can't get a job anywhere else, having already failed in the oil business in Texas. After all this was 1957: four decades or so later and he could have become president. Melville's the real live wire, in the form of Lon Chaney Jr, appearing again without the Jr. He's a selfish and arrogant man, quick with his fists but a coward at heart. He's dumb enough to knock the pilot out during their flight, so down they go, conveniently in a location where Melville finds his uranium, but unfortunately in an area populated by giant creatures whose cells divide every 22 seconds thus stimulating constant growth. You won't be surprised to find that, having been stuck here for three years, Bruce Barton has become the 25 foot tall cyclops.

At least the first monsters we see are composited well, a giant lizard crawling behind a rock and a giant hawk catching a giant rat. That won't last. When our newcomers discover the inevitable monster battle, the combatants, a giant iguana and a giant gila monster, are half transparent, utterly ridiculous. While the cyclops may look a little ridiculous, not a real cyclops but a giant with a deformed face that has left only one eye visible, he's added into the frame well. However by this point we're at the caves in Bronson Canyon, a popular spot to shoot Hollywood films since the silent days, but one that bad movie fans can't help but recognise as Ro-Man's HQ in Robot Monster. However many movies use that very same cave entrance, which in 1957 alone also included Attack of the Crab Monsters and The Brain from Planet Arous, I never fail to see Ro-Man's bubble machine and that doesn't help the credibility of the picture I'm watching.

Duncan Parkin gets a thankless job as Barton, the Cyclops of the title. It's not the mask he has to wear, as cheap as it is, because it's actually quite memorable. It's the fact that he's stuck playing the character like a retarded kid without the power of speech, mumbling unintelligibly, no better than Tor Johnson in The Beast of Yucca Flats. He's a walking, talking monster, except the walking and talking are problematic. He does get to wrestle a giant snake at one point, but as we can see the tape wrapped round its mouth to make it less dangerous, the suspense is utterly lost. Parkin only ever worked for Gordon, starting out as a stagehand in Beginning of the End, progressing to the monster role in both The Cyclops and War of the Colossal Beast, the latter under the name Dean Parkin. I wonder if he ever wanted a part where he could talk and actually interact with the characters outside of the magic of special effects. We may never know.

Fortunately his fiancée from his normal sized life, Susan Winter, is a sassy lead, one who mounts this expedition to find him and runs it capably. Sure, she gets a few scream scenes but she's far from the usual born victim that women tended to be in films like this. Gloria Talbott wasn't used to horror and science fiction, but she proved willing and able to return to them, first for Daughter of Dr Jekyll, which ran with The Cyclops as a double bill, and then for I Married a Monster from Outer Space a year later. While James Craig gets the manly lead role and the top credit, he isn't really in charge at any point. He always defers to the lady, which is somewhat refreshing to see in what was often a sexist genre, even back in the fifties, where women showed up only to be either victims, eye candy or both. Seeing this soon after The Black Scorpion assured me that it wasn't always the case. Sometime women could be strong and capable, but still scream.

Tarantula (1955)

Director: Jack Arnold
Stars: John Agar, Mara Corday and Leo G Carroll

Having Jack Arnold's name on a creature feature in the fifties meant that it was going to be a cut above the rest. He'd made It Came fom Outer Space in 1953, which was an above average alien movie for the time, followed it up with Creature from the Black Lagoon and its first sequel, and then, if any doubt still remained as to his credentials, hammered the point home with Tarantula and The Incredible Shrinking Man. Just as you think he'd be stuck in monster movies, he proved a versatility to be admired by making notable film noir with Man in the Shadow, comedy with The Mouse That Roared and even bad seed material like High School Confidential! It would seem that he could do no wrong, but he did that too with Monster on the Campus. Even the best had a bad day once in a while, but with the record he had he could have made a dozen flops and still be a legendary director of pictures that looked bigger and more expensive than they were.

We begin with a man staggering out of the desert in striped pyjamas and what looks like an ape mask to die in front of the camera. It's either the sort of reality show I might actually watch or it's a fifties sci-fi B movie. He made it near enough to the highway for folks to find him. He might be biologist Eric Jacobs but he's not quite recognisable, so Sheriff Jack Andrews wants Doc Hastings to take a look at him to see. Hastings says it isn't. Prof Gerald Deemer disagrees, explaining that it's the disease Hastings thinks it is, but also that it ran its course in days instead of years, unlike any other known case in history. The doc doesn't buy it and so we're set for our story. Well, that and the animals we see in Deemer's lab. He's been injecting them with Nutrient Type 3Y which is making them grow: he has a guinea pig the size of a large dog and a tarantula that's larger still. He also has a deformed assistant who attacks him and inadvertently sets the creature free.

Well, what more do you need to know? We have a mad scientist with a pet monkey who thinks it might be a bright idea to turn tarantulas into giant monsters. He's already lost his assistant to a mysterious disease. A second man with the same disease tries to murder him and manages to wreck half the lab in the process, injecting him with his own formula too. With its tank smashed, the giant spider moseys on out into the Arizona desert to terrorise the local community, or what little of it there is: Deemer's lab is twenty miles out into nowhere for a reason. To save the day we have a clean cut small town doc and a beautiful biologist who arrives a little late to be the lab assistant of Dr Jacobs, late himself in a different sense of the word. There's a sheriff and a small town reporter. All the usual ingredients are here, but this is a Universal picture, the studio that invented the monster movie. They knew their formula well.

They cast their movie well too. Leo G Carroll lends a capable air to his mad scientist, making Prof Deemer less clichéd and less mad than expected. He has a valid aim, to head off food shortages he sees as imminent given the growing population of the planet. There are two billion already, he tells us, and that's going to climb, all the way to three and a half by the year 2000. It's scary when a mad scientist in a fifties B movie makes predictions that hindsight shows were notably underestimated. There were two billion people in 1920, reaching six by the turn of the century. Carroll was a major character actor for decades before he made this film and he'd go on to further successes, both in film and on television, such as The Man from UNCLE, which is where I first saw him. Whether you know him best as Alexander Waverly or for his roles in six Hitchcock films, this is certainly a change of pace for him. He gets some cool facial make up too.

As Dr Matt Hastings, John Agar is the epitome of the clean cut heroic lead of the fifties, following on from his lead role in Jack Arnold's Revenge of the Creature, earlier the same year, which set him on a firm career path. When this film was made, leading men needed to be level headed in every situation, calm and polite beyond all recognition, the imaginary sort who you would allow to take your daughter to the drive in and trust not to misbehave. Agar looks the part, sounds the part and that's why he ended up playing such characters for years. Unfortunately once Arnold wasn't helming his films, their quality sank quickly: 1956 saw him in The Mole People, 1957 in The Brain from Planet Arous, 1958 in Attack of the Puppet People. Perhaps his worst was 1959's Invisible Invaders, but there are quite a few to fight out that battle. This thankfully sits at the other end of his filmography, with the John Ford westerns he started out in.

Leading lady Mara Corday doesn't get much to do here except look pretty, which was hardly a stretch for her, a Playboy Playmate of the Month. She was a busy girl in the fifties, appearing in no less than 27 pictures in a mere eight years, but she'd retire in 1958 to raise a family. While Agar was emphasising his career path here, Corday was finding hers. Having been tormented by a giant tarantula, she would go on to face other huge creatures in The Giant Claw and The Black Scorpion, though the humungous flying turkey puppet in The Giant Claw can't remotely compare with the real tarantula Arnold put to use here. She returned to the screen decades later to play small roles in Clint Eastwood movies, just as he had played a small part in one of hers, this one. Here he leads a squadron of jets from Sands Air Force Base loaded up with rockets and napalm. Does he fire six rockets or only five? Let's just say he literally gets the last word.

Tarantula is a solid B movie throughout, simple but definitive, helping to establish a template for the hundreds more that followed in its wake over the next few years as a new wave of monster movies took the industry by storm. There's little to complain about, beyond the size of the role Mara Corday is given, but then this was 1955, when a woman's place was emphatically in the home, so she did well to be a capable and professional scientist. Prof Deemer doesn't protest the way a similar boss did three years later in The Strange World of Planet X. Of course the biggest star is the tarantula itself, not just in size but in presence, realistic because it was a real spider, guided over the landscape with air jets and shot with trick photography, effects that hold their own against similar creature features of the day. To see a better use of a giant spider, you could only go to The Incredible Shrinking Man, another Jack Arnold picture. He was that definitive.

Stage Fright (1950)

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Stars: Jane Wyman, Marlene Dietrich, Michael Wilding, Richard Todd and Alistair Sim

When I started watching Alfred Hitchcock seriously, I hit his filmography hard and quickly racked up forty of his pictures. It quickly got to the point where there were precious few left to discover except the very earliest ones. From The Man Who Knew Too Much in 1934, I missed precisely 3 of 38, and I've found myself stuck there for years. Now, courtesy of TCM, I'm about to cross two of those off my list: 1950's Stage Fright and 1953's I Confess, leaving only Under Capricorn still to find. Why I Confess is so obscure I have no idea, but the others are the two films Hitch made back in the UK, long after his move to the US to make Rebecca. Consequently Stage Fright stars many of the great English scene stealers of the time: Alistair Sim, Sybil Thorndike, André Morell, Miles Malleson, Joyce Grenfell, Irene Handl, even Kay Walsh, who had divorced David Lean the previous year. Lionel Jeffries is omitted from that list only as this was his big screen debut.

Only the two leads are international: a rather strange combination of Jane Wyman and Marlene Dietrich. It's the latter we see first, opening the story in true Hitchcock style as Charlotte Inwood by stumbling into her boyfriend's house covered in blood and swearing that he's dead, 'he' being her husband, David. These opening scenes, which unfold in flashback as the boyfriend, Jonathan Cooper, tells all to his friend (and wannabe girlfriend), Eve Gill, are Hitchcockian in more than content and style, but I can't explain why without providing a spoiler. If you want to find out why, you'll need to track down the film too, but suffice it to say that he played a trick on his audience, who were not particularly happy to be tricked back in 1950. That may be another reason why Stage Fright is hard to come by today but modern audiences are likely to take it in stride. This little trick set the stage, pun not intended, for many more such cinematic tricks in the future.

What it all boils down to is that Jonathan Cooper is in a very dubious position. Charlotte Inwood is obviously already in trouble, as befits the blood on her dress and the corpse in her front room, but Jonathan goes to sort it all out, just as she expects him to, by staging a break in, that sort of thing. Unfortunately the maid shows up at just the wrong moment and he runs. He's succeeded only in shifting suspicion away from Charlotte onto himself, something he promptly underlines in no uncertain terms by running away from the police when they arrive to question him. Then again, he does have her blood stained dress in his pocket. So all he can do is have Eve Gill hide him, just as he expects her to, while she investigates Charlotte's apparent guilt. That's a lot of assumption to build a plot but such is the power of love and, sure enough, Jonathan does what Charlotte expects and Eve does what Jonathan expects, and that's where our story comes from.

What's patently obvious here is that the title of the film doesn't just refer to the fact that the lead characters are performers. Sure, Jonathan locates Eve at RADA, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where both are students, and Charlotte Inwood is a professional performer, but none of the characters stop acting when they leave the stage. That's most obvious as Eve goes undercover as Charlotte's maid, but it's a constant throughout. Jonathan acts for Eve's benefit, Eve acts for Charlotte, Charlotte acts for the police. It's all as if the whole is a play but we're watching actors not characters who haven't been let in on the script yet. In fact, it could be that Commodore Gill, Eve's father, is the playwright who remains a step ahead of the rest of us all along. He's played by Alistair Sim, who steals his first scene effortlessly with the aid of an accordion, and continues to do so throughout. He deconstructs everything, a sort of writer/critic/actor hybrid.

Late in the film Dietrich and Wyman walk down a hallway together backstage and the impression is totally that Dietrich is the woman and Wyman is the girl. Wyman had plenty of experience, in life and on screen, given that she'd already divorced third husband Ronald Reagan and had won an Oscar the previous year for Johnny Belinda. Yet she was still only 33 and looked it, making it hard to see Eve Gill as anything but a naive young girl in love, rather than a naive young girl in love who can move mountains to save the man she's in love with. For her part, Dietrich was 49 and costumed exclusively in Christian Dior, as she demanded. As Dietrich often did, she looked like she'd been everywhere and done everything, but was still young enough to look great. Dior demanded a screen credit. Paramount demanded a 25% discount. Everyone got exactly what they wanted and the result is that Wyman has difficulty registering when Dietrich is on screen.

Dietrich is very noticeable, though her part is much smaller than those of her fellow leads, with Wyman racking up most screen time by far. Dietrich said that, 'She looks too much like a victim to play a heroine, and God knows she couldn't play a woman of mystery: that was my part. Miss Wyman looks like a mystery nobody has bothered to solve.' Certainly Eve Gill is a transparent character who merely thinks that she has mystique, while Charlotte Inwood is mystique without ever having to try. She's set up as the villain of the piece from the very first scene but it's never quite that simple. Dietrich capably keeps us on the hook as to whether she's guilty, innocent or somewhere in between. Wyman does everything apparently right, but just doesn't engage well. A strange choice to play an English actress, she succeeds well as the innocent but dedicated girl but is much less convincing as the actress taking on roles as circumstances require.

Similarly, Michael Wilding, as the real leading man, private detective Wilfred 'Ordinary' Smith, is just as capable but bland, even though whatever he did in Under Capricorn a year earlier must have impressed Hitch enough to cast him again. The man caught up in the intrigue of the story, Jonathan Cooper, is nothing much to write home about either, even though he's played by solid leading man Richard Todd, also riding high after The Hasty Heart the previous year, which saw him receive his sole Oscar nomination. Instead of the leads, this film belongs to the character actors, of which there are many. After all, when your father is played by Alastair Sim and your mother by Sybil Thorndike, you have to do a heck of a lot to make yourself remotely visible and Wyman doesn't seem to want to do that. Sim and Thorndike are both very watchable indeed, as are Kay Walsh as a mercenary maid and Joyce Grenfell outrageously running a shooting gallery.

Quite why Stage Fright is forgotten today, I have no idea. American audiences didn't enjoy the trick Hitchcock played on them, but the French critics of the time, who had a particular fondness for Hitch, didn't have a problem with what he did. Given that Rashomon was released to huge acclaim the same year, emphatically for the trickery of its plot, it's hard to believe too much in that as the cause. It was made in England with predominantly English actors, but America has never had much of a problem with that. It came right before the beginning of his greatest period, which began the following year with Strangers on a Train, but it doesn't disappoint. Historically, it has note, as the debut of his daughter Patricia, but she doesn't do much more than Hitch in his traditional cameo. For me, the biggest problem was the lack of prominence from the leads. It's a film about character and that's all in the supporting players. I don't mind that. Maybe others do.

The Valley of Gwangi (1969)

Director: Jim O'Connolly
Stars: James Franciscus, Gila Golan and Richard Carlson

'He who takes from Gwangi, the evil one, is cursed.' So says the blind woman in black as the pirate gypsy dude takes the struggling sack from the dying man. That's our setup as we reach the opening credits and it's a pretty good one, painted in Technicolor and filmed in Dynamation. The Valley of Gwangi has a history, one three and a half decades old by the time it was finished. Originally a project of Willis H O'Brien, the original master of stop motion animation, it was finally brought to life by his most prominent protégé, Ray Harryhausen. O'Brien saw it as a follow up to his masterpiece, King Kong, following the same formula but transplanting it to a different setting, with cowboys taking on dinosaurs. Some footage was shot and ended up in the original version of Mighty Joe Young, but it took 36 years to finally reach the screen, at this point set 'somewhere south of the Rio Grande at the turn of the century.' To make it authentic they shot it in Spain.

It all looks good, as the Breckenridge Wild West Show parades through town. We get to see it in action too, in an awesome arena, complete with an Indian attack on a covered wagon, with guns and corpses galore. They even set the wagon on fire. T J Breckenridge has the finalé: she rides a gorgeous horse called Omar up a long set of winding steps and has it leap into a flaming vat of green water. These guys put on a show, but the locals don't care. They stay away in droves, so when Tuck Kirby, T J's former fiancé, shows up to buy the horse, he almost has a chance, even if he bailed on her years earlier. His horse looks even better than Omar, even though it's acquired for him by a local kid called Lope, bizarrely providing an English child actor with the opportunity to make his only big screen appearance as a Mexican. If Willis O'Brien had lived long enough to make his The Valley of Gwangi, it may not have looked better.

The acting is capable too. James Franciscus making a suitably sleazy cowboy, the earliest I've ever seen him, just before Marooned and Beneath the Planet of the Apes. T J, on the other hand, is fiery and continental in the form of Gila Golan. She was born in German-occupied Poland, was adopted by a Roman Catholic couple and sent to school in France, only to emigrate to Israel and become Miss Israel in 1960. She'd changed her name already from Zusia Sobetzcki to Miriam Goldberg but changed it again to compete. She's very pleasing to the eyes, with a sort of Diana Rigg look and a continental flair. She was dubbed here because of the strength of her accent. In the hands of Ray Harryhausen, the stop motion work is solid too, even if it takes a while to arrive and isn't his best work. One glaring problem that may not be his fault is that the colour keeps on changing: his creatures go from grey to flesh coloured to bright blue, depending on the scene.

How do we go from a Wild West show in Mexico to the sort of story that requires the talents of Ray Harryhausen? Well, by means of a hidden valley, of course, one that the locals believe is a cursed land and the creatures are corralled into by high mountains. The first such creature we see is a miniature one, a tiny prehistoric horse called an eohippus that escaped from the valley through a tiny passageway within the rocks. It's the eohippus that brings most of our characters together. T J, who has it, calls it El Diablo and has trained it to dance on horseback. She plans to use it to bring back the customers to her show. English paleontologist Prof Bromley is out in the desert with its footprints in a fossilised human bone, hoping to validate his theory of humanoids and push the dawn of man back millions of years. Tia Zorina, the local blind gypsy leader, only aims to return it to the valley to keep her land and people from being cursed.

It's when El Diablo brings the various characters together that the story really begins, in the Forbidden Valley with a host of stop motion dinosaurs. As they find their way in, they're attacked by a pterodactyl, chase an ornithomimus, which is killed by an allosaurus, which then attacks them. They run away but the Prof stays behind, to be saved by a styracosaurus. After a long wait to see one animated monster, we're suddenly presented with a barrage of them. The allosaurus, of course, is Gwangi, which means 'lizard' in Spanish, and it's Gwangi who gets most attention and screen time, from his initial appearance to a grand finalé inside a vast Catholic cathedral. In between, there are a number of scenes, including a complicated roping, which proved to be one of Harryhausen's most ambitious and time consuming; and an exhibition and escape, which saw this allosaurus fight an elephant. Of course there's glorious chaos. That's why we're here.

The premise is a solid one, rooted in the stop motion adventure stories of the past and presaging a good deal of the modern interest in the weird west, but it doesn't spark too often. The highlight is certainly Harryhausen's animation, as everyone else takes a back seat the moment they have to share the screen with monsters. Unfortunately beyond the excellent initial concept, spawned from the Prof Challenger stories of Arthur Conan Doyle and filtered through the imagination of Willis O'Brien, it becomes derivative quickly. The back story with Tuck and T J is mild and poorly explored, the subplot with the gypsies is mostly ignored and Prof Bromley loses purpose quickly as his theory is shot. Pretty much everything else is ruthlessly stolen from the best stop motion movie of them all, King Kong. What's left is the dinosaurs, Harryhausen's last work with them. On that front this is always worth a watch, because even lesser Harryhausen is still Harryhausen.

Dinosaurus! (1960)

Director: Irvin S Yeaworth Jr
Stars: Ward Ramsey, Paul Lukather, Kristina Hanson and Alan Roberts

Irvin S Yeaworth Jr has an interesting filmography. Almost entirely remembered today for making The Blob with Steve McQueen in 1958, he directed six films all told, though his first wasn't really his, as he was responsible only for the new footage that expanded a 1945 church backed scare movie called Twice Convicted into a new 1956 picture with the seemingly cut short title of The Flaming Teenage. Then it was The Blob, a huge success which paved the way for more B movies: 4D Man and Dinosaurus! Finally he returned to Christian scare movies, releasing a pair of them in 1967: The Gospel Blimp and Way Out. The former deals with spreading the message of Jesus by blimp, complete with bible drops; while the latter deals with heroin addiction, told from the point of view of an addict. Both the first and last of his films are available today from Something Weird Video, which provides a pretty good idea of the sort of material they contain.

This one opens like an ambitious B movie, shot in colour and in CinemaScope, on location on the 'tropical paradise' of St Croix in the Virgin Islands, which we first see in widescreen underwater footage. Unfortunately that's all the CinemaScope that TCM screened, so I'm stuck with pan and scan. It was also apparently intended to star Steve McQueen, but he had been difficult to work with on The Blob so Yeaworth didn't even bother to hire him. What it turns out to be is a film for kids, less comparable to The Blob and more to Son of Godzilla. The star is nominally Ward Ramsey, a new actor to film who appears somewhat like a cheap B movie Cary Grant. However, given the tone the story takes, the audience who would find this film most magnetic are young enough to focus instead on Alan Roberts, certainly the most watchable actor in the film but one who would be about to turn twelve when Dinosaurus! premiered. He retired in 1962 at fourteen.

As befits a story pitched at kids, it's a pretty threadbare outline of a plot that could easily have been a Saturday morning cartoon. Bart Thompson, cast from the standard hero mould, gets to blow things up for a living. If I understood things right, he's expanding the harbour on an exotic island by setting off underwater explosions off the coast. He's good at his job, of course, but he's not too good at putting up the required warning signs, so his girlfriend Betty Piper, cut from the cloth of the cute and sassy but non-working perpetual victim, heads to shore in her speedboat in a gap between explosions. We can see why she's popular: as soon as Bart gets to her boat to tell her to get out of the blast zone, she strips down to a bathing suit and dives into the water. She's aiming to retrieve the cooler that the last blast knocked into the water, but she faints in shock at the sight of an underwater monster instead. Of course she looks good in wet hair and a towel.

Given the title of the film, technically meaningless but probably the best thing about the picture, you'll surely be shocked to discover that the underwater monster is a dinosaur, frozen solid in unnaturally cold water. Actually there are two dinosaurs, a tyrannosaurus and a brontosaurus, or at least that's what I think they were aiming at. 'Boy, this is terrific!' cries young Julio, as Bart's men bring the frozen monsters up to the surface. Julio is the endearing local boy who serves as the link between all the characters. He constantly hangs out with the working party, especially Dumpy, the big jovial bulldozer driver who is trying so hard to be Alan Hale that it hurts. His guardian is the villain of the piece, Mike Hacker, a surprising name for a foreign villain who looks rather like a sophisticated Torgo with a white suit and two stupid henchmen. What's more, and here's where the tone is totally betrayed, Julio befriends the brontosaurus and the neanderthal.

Yes, there's a neanderthal too. Hacker finds him first, washed up on the beach in the wake of the dinosaurs, because of another of Thompson's mistakes. He makes a lot of those. He tells Betty that he wouldn't trust Hacker as far as he could throw him, immediately after entrusting him with a message to the Smithsonian about the creatures he's found. Then he brings the beasts up onto shore before the Smithsonian can send anyone down to do it properly (even if the message had got through). He takes Betty out for dinner instead of watching his new prizes thaw out. He even tasks T J O'Leary, your run of the mill drunken Irishman, with guarding them. This enables Hacker to wander around unnoticed, and find then stash the frozen neanderthal. It also means that the drunkard is the only one around when the dinosaurs get hit by lightning in the inevitable storm, wake up and wander off. Amazingly T J gets carried off instead of eaten, but let's not nitpick.

There are precisely no surprises in this movie and every plot detail is telegraphed, but in a way that would be gloriously suspenseful to kids young enough to believe everything they see. How young they would need to be to buy into some of the events that unfold here I really don't know, but it's pretty young. This is the sort of movie where the heroine can trip over a tree root, get picked up by a tyrannosaurus and be rescued by a caveman who whacks its foot with an axe and sticks his hands out to catch her. It's the sort of movie where Julio can join a fight between a brontosaurus and a T Rex by throwing rocks at the latter. The brontosaurus is his friend, you see, who gives him rides. Yes, the caveman rescues him too. The ending presages the iconic battle at the end of Aliens, so there is imagination at play here, though not much. This isn't The Land That Time Forgot. This is the Saturday morning cartoon version, remember.

In fact some of the writing demonstrates an acute lack of imagination. For instance, Hacker is blackmailing the local barmaid, because that's what villains do to cute island señoritas, but this one is sensitively named Chica. Names aren't this film's strong point: she works at the island cantina, which is called, you guessed it, Island Cantina. Perhaps the most clever moment is when O'Leary, the drunken Irish guard, falls asleep on watch while reading a Rip Van Winkle comic book. The only moment of true honesty is when Hacker breaks a bottle on the bar to prepare to fight Bart, only to cut himself. It's something that should happen almost every time such a scene crops up but somehow never does. That's what I'm going to remember this film for, that and the antics of Gregg Martell as the neanderthal. He looks pretty believable in the role, somewhat like a midget Lou Ferrigno, but his antics are too wild to be mere fantasy.

Martell plays it deadpan throughout, as do the rest of the cast. It's the sincerity of actors like him and Alan Roberts that make this picture joyous instead of awful. The highlight of the entire film for me is without doubt when Julio first encounters the living brontosaurus. 'Remember, you're a friendly vegetarian like it says on the cereal box,' he tells it. The dialogue is jaw droppingly bad but young Roberts delivers it with such sincerity that it's both touching and hilarious all at once. Martell gets a few scenes that come close too, stealing routines from the Marx Brothers. It's the scenes with both of them that go the furthest down this road though. Julio finds the caveman in Betty's mother's kitchen and, taking the whole thing in stride, shows him where the food is, then teaches him how to eat with a fork. 'No, caveman! It's not right to kill!' he shouts as the bad guys show up. So he uses a pie. No, I'm not kidding. Even Alan Roberts can't avoid laughing at points.

We have to look for this sort of magic because the traditional sort just isn't here. The stop motion animation is capable, hardly Harryhausen quality but worth watching nonetheless. The dinosaurs are far cuter than they deserve to be though: a T Rex is not supposed to grin. The rear projection work is terrible though, down at the level of the writing. Fortunately the acting is capable and, as I mentioned, sincere. Ward Ramsey, the star, debuted in this film, then made thirteen more, but he was only credited in two of the last nine. Maybe by then he took the hint and retired. Leading lady Kristina Hanson was appearing in her first movie too, building on an episode of Bachelor Father the year before. She only made one more film though, no less than nineteen years later, called Over the Edge, instead going back to her day job as a sixth grade teacher. The romance is best explained by highlighting that she gets more screentime with the caveman than her lead.

Fred Engelberg, who plays the villainous Hacker, was on his last film, though he only made four. Wayne C Treadway, a chubbier Alan Hale as Dumpy, was on his last film too, though it was his first credit in fourteen movies. He's capable but without Hale's character. Luci Blaine, who plays Chica, is perhaps better than any of them, but this was the only picture she made. Only two of the cast were really experienced. Paul Lukather, who plays Bart's sidekick Chuck, was a mainstay in film and television for decades, becoming a notable voice actor in the eighties and expanding successfully into video games in the nineties. Gregg Martell was a veteran extra by this point, in over fifty movies thus far, a dozen of which I've seen. I didn't recognise him though because he mostly landed uncredited bit parts. These are perhaps the sort of people you'd expect to be in a kids' film masquerading as a B movie to sell tickets. Be warned: watch it before you turn seven.

The Catered Affair (1956)

Director: Richard Brooks
Stars: Bette Davis, Ernest Borgnine, Debbie Reynolds and Barry Fitzgerald

Sometimes the stars align and all the names come out at the same time. The Catered Affair is a film I hadn't even heard of, but it's a gem and it has a major list of names behind it. It's directed by Richard Brooks, a year after he made Blackboard Jungle. The story is by Paddy Chayefsky, a writer's writer who won his first of an eventual three Oscars for the previous year's Marty; and it was adapted by Gore Vidal, his first script for the big screen. It's glorious writing, that came from a surprising source: originally it was a play, not on stage but for television, broadcast as an entry in the Philco Television Playhouse. As I was growing up, 'TV movie' was a euphemism for second rate, a cheap reminder of the real thing with names that used to be important. That often wasn't the case in the fifties, when the only thing not to compare favourably with the big screen was the budgets. Even a film as important as 12 Angry Men started out as a live teleplay on Studio One.

The story, which uses a snap wedding to magnificently build a host of characters, is brought to life by a stellar cast. Cabby Tom Hurley is Ernest Borgnine, who had just won his own Oscar for Marty, a character not far removed from this one socially. He's a reliable but unimaginative man and while I've always got the impression that Borgnine is highly intelligent, he's always so good at playing stolid. Bette Davis is a more surprising choice as his dowdy wife Agnes, fresh from a part as Queen Elizabeth I in The Virgin Queen. I knew little about most of her fifties films before seeing them but they trump her earlier work for sheer versatility. Going from a historic queen of England to a working class Bronx housewife is rare and admirable, but before Elizabeth she was the washed up Hollywood actress Margaret Elliott trying to rekindle her career in The Star and after Aggie she would be a librarian fighting censorship in Storm Center. She was versatility.

It's Aggie that calls for the catered affair of the title, but not for a while and it isn't her wedding. It's Tom and Aggie's daughter Jane who's getting married, but she springs the news on them at breakfast and that's the first point Bette's Bronx accent slips. Up to then it doesn't even seem to be Bette Davis, more like someone trying to be Bette Davis, because she plays it so well. Jane doesn't just spring the wedding, she springs the date too: next Tuesday, because they want to take advantage of the loan of a car to go on honeymoon, one reason why Jane and her fiancé, Ralph Halloran, only want a plain, simple ceremony, no wedding reception, no nothing. Tom's on board, especially as he needs $4,000 of the $4,400 he's saved over the years to finally buy his own cab. He and a partner have been waiting for a decade for a medallion to come up because there are so few available. Aggie's on board too, but if she really was, there wouldn't be a movie.

What's so great here is that the film really isn't about Jane and Ralph, as they're just the trigger for Aggie to realise through her daughter just what she's done with her life. It doesn't take much gentle pressure, from Ralph's parents or her brother Jack, to bring into prominence a whole host of regrets, and so she decides to give Jane what she didn't give herself: the catered affair of the title, a big wedding with all the trimmings that she can remember when the bad days come. That phrase is repeated like a mantra: 'when the bad days come', suggesting that that's where Aggie is at this point in time and she's only just acknowledged it. The picture is really about Tom and Aggie coming to some strong realisations and acting on them, taking their marriage off pause and defining their future together. You know, the sort of thing that newlyweds should but rarely do, because at that point it's all love and roses and blissful improvisation.

Debbie Reynolds was surprisingly the only actor to win an award for this film, from the National Board of Review as Best Supporting Actress. It's surprising because the story drives her rather than the other way around. Perhaps it's because her character is life in a microcosm: she knows what she wants, but she quickly gives in to the pressures around her just to make everyone else happy, only to regret the decision and put her foot down in the end. Her subplot is a subtle one about growing up. Certainly Reynolds and Rod Taylor, who plays her fiancé, are overshadowed throughout. That's hardly surprising. Not only are her parents played by Borgnine and Davis, but Uncle Jack lives with them and he's played by Barry Fitzgerald, perhaps the most effortless scene stealer of them all. Yet again he gives a performance that would have stolen the show in any other company, twisting the truth outrageously, doing nothing but taking credit for everything.

Fitzgerald knew all the tricks at this point, close to the end of his career. He made two further pictures before dying of a heart attack, back home in Dublin, at the ripe old age of 73. He only made 44 films, and he was certainly stealing scenes from the best in the earliest I've seen: from Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn in 1938's Bringing Up Baby. By this point in his career, he'd stolen them from pretty much everyone else in Hollywood too, perhaps most notably from John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara in The Quiet Man and from Bing Crosby in Going My Way, so neatly that he received Oscar nominations both for Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor for the same role, a feat that prompted the Academy to change their rules to avoid a reoccurence. He's a joy here, yet another Irish rogue with a glint in his eye who equates 'wedding' with 'party' and who plays the age old game of emotional blackmail like a champion.

It took Bette Davis to successfully counter Fitzgerald's scene stealing, though it took work. Aggie is perhaps the busiest character I've ever seen Bette play. She's busy all the time, as befits the sort of character that doesn't often get covered in classic Hollywood. The Hurleys aren't rich, but they're not mired in poverty either. We're used to seeing the perfect wife manage the house with a maid and a housekeeper and we're used to seeing the working class wife struggle and fail to get by without enough to manage. Aggie is closer to the latter than the former but she does fine through strength of character and hard work. Her husband works, her daughter works and her son is about to join the army. She works as hard as any of them, without even thinking about it, so hard that the scene where she has to sit still and listen to Ralph's parents is uncomfortable and somehow unnatural. It's like watching a kid with ADHD try not to move.

There's so much to praise here that it's difficult to focus, though the quality of the writing shines through above everything else. It's the ground on which everything else here is built, from the deep characterisations of all the main cast and many of the smaller roles, all the way down to Jane's friend Alice Scanlon, who can't afford to be her matron of honour. Davis is stunning, but Borgnine, Fitzgerald and Reynolds are excellent too, with nobody else being less than solid. The cinematography is subtle, doing nothing flash but doing a great job at contrasting spaces: from the vast ballroom Aggie wants to rent for Jane's wedding breakfast to their claustrophobic home that would be cosy just for two but sleeps five. Cinematographer John Alton is known primarily for his films noir, but made five varied movies for Richard Brooks late in his career. Here he's yet another of the stars who aligned to make this gem, which deserves to be better remembered.

The Strange World of Planet X (1958)

Director: Gilbert Gunn
Stars: Forrest Tucker and Gaby André

I think my favourite hobby is listening to Robert Osborne introduce monster movies on TCM. It may be that he secretly loves the things but I don't think so. I think he feels embarrassed every time they come up, but he's a professional and he does his job well with just a hint of a smile at the realisation of what sort of material he's introducing. Then again this one begins as a pretty intelligent monster movie as such things go, made in the UK by Anglo-Scottish Pictures, sourced from a story by René Ray. Sure, the introduction is more than a little melodramatic ('Man goes forward into the unknown but how does the unknown react?'), but it settles down quickly into a thoughtful movie. It's actually hilarious to hear such rationality about science juxtaposed with a rampant sexism. 'A woman?' cries Dr Laird when he's told that his new computer operator is a member of the fairer sex. 'This is preposterous! This is highly skilled work!'

Laird is a scientist working in pure research who is eating up government money on the basis that his work may provide major benefits to the military. It has something to do with altering the molecular structure of metals through use of electro-magnetic energy. It uses a lot of power and it may well be interfering with the local TV signals. Brigadier Cartwright wants to shut the whole thing down, but after seeing a successful experiment and the more positive side effects only he knows about, he changes his mind. The force that Laird is wielding continues on when the power is cut and it proves able to make changes at a distance, offering possibilities of taking down enemy aircraft with some sort of beam. Of course there are other possible side effects too: weird weather and flying saucers, so many that the papers talk about an invasion from Planet X, hence the film's original title. I watched it under a fresh title of The Cosmic Monsters.

It's half an hour in that we find out where the film is going. Laird proves to be a mad scientist, a single minded genius who ignores the mere possibility of risks or side effects. 'I never consider anything which might interfere with my research,' he tells his assistant, Gil Graham. 'If I always stopped to calculate the risks there would be no research.' He wants to carry on regardless, even escalate his research. While Graham warns Laird, Smith warns Graham. He's a strange character who we first encounter in Briley Woods, near Laird's lab, strange not just because of his 'funny whiskers' but because he looks off into the distance when he's talking to people. He's come from a long way off, he says, where people ride giant dragonflies. He has a cool raygun too, so surely he's from the strange world of Planet X, whatever it's real name is. He can't talk to the police so he talks to Graham instead at the Crown and Mitre over a pint. Civilisation, you see.

The film is a bizarre combination of approaches. From one angle, it's a well thought out science fiction story, talky but engaging and defined. From another, it's a monster movie without a single capable effect at any point. Unfortunately the latter can't arrive without mangling the former, so scenes of civilised science and solid logic abruptly collapse into ludicrous ramblings at the blink of an eye. Similarly, the logical first half sees Michele Dupont, the Frenchwoman who is sent to be Laird's new computer operator, promptly turn rampant sexism on its head by demonstrating how intelligent and capable women can be, but the monster half turns her into a clichéd victim, a princess in need of rescue. That's how far the film devolves and it's painful to watch it happen. Imagine if halfway through The Day the Earth Stood Still, perhaps the most obvious comparison, a nuclear bomb floods Washington, DC with giant mutated insects. It wouldn't work there either.

Both on the good side and the bad side, it's the script that dominates. René Ray wrote the story as a six part TV series in 1956, and never wrote again, though she had a three decade career as an actress. For some reason she didn't adapt her own work, the screenplay being by Paul Ryder, who wrote a few other films in the surrounding years. I wonder how much of this script is Ryder's and how much Ray's. It's hard to know where to place the praise and the blame, but I presume that each deserves one but not the other. Behind the script, the effects stand out but not in any positive light. They're pretty dismal, shots of real insects combined with shots of actors in a poor attempt to suggest they're in the same scene. There are some capable framing shots but almost everything on the effects side is awful. Only one instance bears mention and that's a surprisingly gratuitous shot of a giant insect munching through the cheek of a corpse.

At least the giant insects are worthy of note, albeit an entirely negative one. It's hard to attempt to comment on the acting because it's so utterly routine. Alec Mango (yes, that's his real name) is a rare sort of mad scientist, one who avoids acting madly. Forrest Tucker is a strange choice for his assistant, the token American in the cast and the most famous name, beginning a year that would end with Auntie Mame, though he made four more movies in between. French actress Gaby André is a strange choice for a new assistant too, though I'm sure she's only there to act as a love interest as well as torment the chauvinists. She's badly dubbed at points. As the alien visitor, Martin Benson is the best of the bunch, but he can't generate any of the charisma that ought to be there. The most memorable actor is young Susan Redway, who plays Jane Hale, a precocious child with a perpetual grin and a surety that rivals Dr Laird's.

It's not that these actors are bad, because they're not, it's just that they can't seem to find a way to make themselves noticed with the material they're given. Not one of them shines and they all fade into the background so far that they almost get upstaged by the pint of bitter Smith doesn't recognise at the Crown and Mitre. In fact they're all so down to earth and routine that it's hard not to focus on the social aspect of the film and watch it as a slice of life from the fifties, not just the chauvinism but the pub culture, post-war lodging and the way young Jane spends almost all her screen time talking to strangers, just as her mother advised her not to. I'd like to remember the science fiction, but the lunacy it finds spoils it. This could have been a warning about climate change, far ahead of its time, speaking to man's destruction of our planet's protective layers, but it just uses it as an excuse for cosmic rays to mutate grasshoppers into monsters. Sigh.

Sirocco (1951)

Director: Curtis Bernhardt
Stars: Humphrey Bogart, Marta Toren and Lee J Cobb

I've successfully worked my way through most of Humphrey Bogart's career, not that hard a task as he's very well represented on TCM and on DVD. However I've found myself surprised to find that it isn't just his earliest films that are hard to find, from 1928 to 1931, before he was even a supporting star at Warner Brothers, but also his most recent. I've seen every film he made in the forties, for instance, and I'm only missing two from the thirties, at least from 1932 onwards. Yet I'm missing a full third of his output in the fifties, his last decade in film. At least Sirocco knocks it down to four to go. Made by Bogie's own production company, Santana Pictures, and distributed by Columbia, it's resonant because it's set during the Syrian fight for independence from the French. Emir Hassan tells English and American journalists that God and justice is on his side and we're supposed to be there too. Today, independent Syria still fights for freedom from itself.

Cinematically, Sirocco is immediately reminiscent of Casablanca, one of Bogie's biggest hits, if not the very biggest of them all. In that picture, he was a cynical American running a gambling house in Casablanca, at the western end of the Mediterranean during World War II. This time out, he's a cynical American running a gambling house in Damascus, at the eastern end of the Med, a couple of decades earlier in 1925. Instead of being caught up with a beautiful visitor played by Ingrid Bergman, he gets caught up with a beautiful visitor played by Marta Toren, promoted as the 'next Ingrid Bergman'. In many ways it sounds like the same film, but the difference between the two makes itself very aware as these two meet in a café: Sirocco has a much darker tone to it than Casablanca. We don't just see the likeable old jasmine seller plant a bomb underneath a table, we see the bloody aftermath too and it's far from pretty.

The characters are cut from the same cloth. Bogie is Harry Smith, as hard boiled and cynical as Rick Blaine. The rebels, to whom he runs guns, think he's an oddity, an American in Syria without morals or political convictions. 'I've had them,' he says. 'I had a belly full of them. I left them in the States with my first wife.' Toren is Violette, a mysterious foreign lady with a history, to whom he immediately forges a romantic connection. 'You have so much to learn,' she tells him and the banter works. She's already taken though, by Col Feroud, the Capt Renault of this film, who is at once the villain of the picture, as the head of military intelligence for the occupying French, and the anti-hero, because he's apparently a calm, fair and honourable man. The more obvious bad guy is his superior officer, Gen LaSalle, who doesn't see his enemy as human and proclaims the execution of five Arabs for each dead French soldier, until Feroud politely returns him to sanity.

Feroud is Lee J Cobb, who is a quiet but powerful presence in the film, in between his two Oscar nominations for On the Waterfront and The Brothers Karamazov. He keeps calm everywhere and under the greatest pressure, except when it comes to Violette, who has a habit of driving him nuts. It doesn't help when she leaves him, of course, and it really doesn't help when she throws out the name of Harry Smith, the man who helped her at the café. Toren is good at being both independent and dependent at the same time, but her career didn't take off in Hollywood. This may have been her biggest film, though she made higher rated ones. After a few European films, she went home to Sweden in 1957 and died of a cerebral haemmorrhage at the slight age of thirty. Already long established, Everett Sloane plays Gen LaSalle, though after dominating the early scenes, he disappears for a long while. His bitterness is welcome when it returns.

The tone is dark throughout, Harry Smith being a lot less in control of his destiny here than Rick Blaine ever was. Sirocco could even be seen as a vague prequel to Casablanca, not just because of the timeframes involved, but because the experiences Smith goes through are easily the sort of experiences that could have shaped Blaine. The only catch to that theory is that Bogart made Sirocco in 1951, a decade after Casablanca, and the years between only etched the weight of the world further into his iconic face. There's little romance to counter the pressure, the lighter sides coming from lesser characters. Zero Mostel and Nick Dennis are only a slight reminder of Sidney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre, but they offer much the same touch. Mostel is delightfully obtuse as Balukjiaan, an Arab trader. 'Look at me, I'm an honest businessman,' he protests. Dennis is part Andrew Sachs and part Mischa Auer, dancing around even when he isn't dancing.

While the Casablanca comparisons are obvious and early, Sirocco doesn't fare too well. It does keep us involved and it grows late after indications that it wouldn't. Perhaps two thirds of the way in, as we start to believe that the characters are set in stone, change begins and it unfolds OK, the last fifteen minutes giving Bogart and Cobb in particular some good scenes. There are some neat lines, Cobb getting the humanitarian ones and Bogart the cynical ones. 'What do you care whose gun it is,' he tells one man, 'as long as it isn't aimed at you?' Mostly though it runs on without impressing too much, an excellent example of how even poor material in the hands of those involved can be worth watching. No, it isn't Casablanca, but few films are. It isn't even a great entry in Bogie's distinguished filmography, but it's still worth a look to see how he tried to continually darken his characters yet retain some semblance of sympathy.

Hell Below (1933)

Director: Jack Conway
Stars: Robert Montgomery, Walter Huston, Madge Evans, Jimmy Durante, Eugene Pallette and Robert Young

Of all the classic films I've watched lately, Hell Below would appear to be the most unashamedly schizophrenic. Produced in collaboration with the US Navy and dedicated to the men who serve in its submarines, it's at once a war movie, a romance, a drama, an action picture, a comedy and even, most surprisingly for 1933, an effects film. Mostly based around Taranto in Italy, an allied naval base in the Mediterranean, in 1918, we discover a barrage of rear projection and a wealth of model shots the moment we get there. When an enemy air raid attacks the town, we're treated to some strange but somehow intriguing effects to accompany the damage to buildings, somewhat like tar oozing down the camera to signify light loss. As this is a precode, there's little hesitation in showing us people killed or wounded and the blood effects are notably ahead of their time, bullets making suitably bloody wounds and survivors having missing limbs.

Given how much the film scoots around, it's hard to decide what to focus on. The tone keeps on changing, and while that may be appropriate for wartime it's difficult for the viewer to keep up with the intentions of the filmmakers. Perhaps they're trying to tell us that while war is hell, and we should never forget that, it has its light moments too, even if we have to search for them, ever conscious that the dark side is always waiting to reassert itself when we least want it to. Certainly there's never a dull moment and the tension is capably held, however much the rear projection work reminds us how real this isn't. As befits a precode, it doesn't attempt to sugar coat a nasty reality, if anything relishing in throwing some really tough choices at its characters and lingering on the decisions they make. It reinforces that while there's often a right answer, it still may not be a good one. Choose well or choose badly, there are still ramifications.

Playing the lead, Lt Thomas Knowlton, is Robert Montgomery, who shows how he got credited above someone as talented as Walter Huston when he changes tone on the back of a dime. He has to do this often and he does it admirably. He's a hero and a villain all at once, a rogue and a sincere romantic lead, a selfish fool and a generous saviour. The best example of this comes at a street carnival, to which he whisks his commander's daughter, blatantly aiming to seduce this married woman. Caught halfway up a ferris wheel when an air raid arrives, he springs to action and saves the day. Once he has her to safety, they return to the frivolity of life until we realise that they're now at his place and the kiss he steals is very real. It must be difficult for an actor to transform from light hearted to serious to light hearted to serious without losing depth, but Montgomery manages it magnificently here and he rides a rollercoaster of an ethical story arc.

Huston is Lt Cmdr T J 'Deadpan' Toler, an experienced commander who takes over Knowlton's sub as the film begins and they arrive back in Taranto for long awaited leave. Huston is unfairly neglected today, his son John's notable work as a director being far more remembered. Yet the elder Huston was a real star back in the day, one of the few who managed to combine the role of character actor and leading man successfully. While his acting career ran until 1950, a little past his Oscar winning supporting turn in his son's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, it was during the precode era that he shone brightest in my eyes. 1932's American Madness and The Beast of the City are two of the most underrated precode dramas in my eyes, and Kongo ranks behind only Freaks as the most gloriously outre film classic Hollywood ever made. He began 1933 with yet another precode gem, Gabriel Over the White House, and then followed up with this.

The conflict between Toler and Knowlton is an interesting one. It runs consistently throughout the story, but our perception of it changes over time. Initially Knowlton is the human face and Toler is the by the book stickler for detail, but gradually we see that our judgement was unfair. Toler is human too, but with enough experience to be able to see the big picture and frame his decisions accordingly. Knowlton has nowhere near the experience so his human decisionmaking is flawed and dangerous. Watch the death scene of Seaman Jenks once and you won't forget just how flawed. Of course, that makes Knowlton a character to watch and Toler one to respect. Once we learn enough to get past first impressions, we'd want to serve under Toler but go out on the town with Knowlton. What's so surprising about this conflict is that it never descends to the level of good guy/bad guy, remaining admirably and steadfastly in shades of grey.

Initially Knowlton has a sidekick, Lt Brick Walters, played by Robert Young and until I saw them share scene after scene I hadn't realised how much Roberts Montgomery and Young look alike. They bounce off each other capably too. On their first night of leave, both are ordered to a dance tasked with entertaining the wives of the high brass and both fall for Joan Standish, in the lovely form of Madge Evans. Knowlton wins out and prompts the romantic subplot of this film, if you can use that term when she's married to a serviceman injured in the line of duty who can't walk. The romance is as much a prop to build the character of Lt Knowlton as an actual romance, but it's there and Evans does a fair job. More watchable are the double act of Eugene Pallette and Jimmy Durante (yes, you read that right), one which is joyous from its first appearance and only becomes more so with time, all the way to a fight with a kangaroo (yes, you read that right too).

Durante is Ptomaine, the ship's cook, who's studying mail order to be a dentist, while Pallette is MacDougal, the chief torpedo man, who enjoys nothing more than a good fight. They are utterly and refreshingly down to earth, hilarious without having to crack jokes, exactly the sort of men who would make the claustrophobic life on a sub an experience to remember. Both are worthy, more character based and realistic than either of them usually played. I have no idea how much of the boxing match Durante has with the kangaroo was actually shot with him, but it certainly looks like most of it was. Sure, there are cuts and clever angles, but it still seems real. The only downside to this double act is how they keep getting caught up in the stereotypes, which are everywhere here and as bad as the accents. Yet there are counters. For every buck toothed Brit sergeant played by an Irishman, there's a solid example of honourable British stiff upper lip.

It's this inconsistency that stands out most. This film is very good at getting us to invest interest in a scene only to steal it away from under us. As Knowlton romances Joan, off he's called to the boat. As he's about to get information out of the captain, we're thrust into a battle. And on we go: one minute booming guns, the next chirping birds; one minute we're at an illegal fight, the next a convalescent home. There's frequently romance and heartache in the very same scenes. This inconsistency of tone makes the film very choppy and that's backed up by some abrasive cuts between scenes. That may be less the fault of the film and more its preservation, but there is a considerable difference of opinion in how long the picture even runs. Contemporary reviews reported variance between 78 and 155 minutes, which is a pretty serious difference. The version I watched was 101 minutes long. I wonder what was chopped out.

What this leaves is a film that deserves vast amounts of praise in its details but less as a picture. The detail work holds up remarkably well and feels very right. We're drawn to the conflict, which is always believable and never polarised: there are no good guys and bad guys here, merely real guys making good or bad decisions under the stress of war. The Germans speak German and are only the obvious enemy, the real enemy being within bad decisions. The casting is clever, down to the convalescent home scene being populated by actors with missing limbs. There's attention to historical detail: when the story calls for the scuttling of a World War I destroyer, they actually scuttle a World War I destroyer, the USS Moody, which was being decommissioned at the time. Even the use of the ship's cat is subtle and appropriate. And yet as a whole, it doesn't hold up as well as it's hard to even see this as one film. It's half a dozen pictures all at once, maybe more.

Fast and Loose (1939)

Director: Edwin L Marin
Stars: Robert Montgomery and Rosalind Russell

Even in Hollywood's so-called greatest year, they were still getting up to the same shenanigans they do today. Fast and Loose features William Powell and Myrna Loy as Nick and Nora Charles yet again, as they did many times after the success of The Thin Man in 1934. No, wait a minute, that's not true. Contrary to every expectation we have from the moment the film begins, with a note to the milkman asking for him to 'please leave one quart of aspirin tablets', Fast and Loose is an unashamed knock-off, the middle of three movies featuring Joel and Garda Sloane, who are Nick and Nora in everything but name. Sure, the cast is missing a wirehaired terrier and for this couple incessant partying mean that they have trouble making ends meet, but that's why they have to work for a living. Joel Sloane is a rare book dealer with a sideline in helping insurance companies investigate the theft of such things. In such ways are knock-offs born.

While the first of the three Joel and Garda films, the previous year's Fast Company, had Melvyn Douglas and Florence Rice in the lead roles, this second instalment saw Robert Montgomery and Rosalind Russell take over. The stellar supporting cast from the first film isn't quite as stellar this time out, but it does include Reginald Owen, Etienne Girardot and Ian Wolfe, though surprisingly none of them seem to really get their teeth into their roles. It's rare for any of them to disappoint and they're all watchable here but they should have been better and I couldn't help but wonder why. Perhaps Edwin L Marin shot it as fast and loose as the title suggests. What's most surprising is that Montgomery and Russell breeze along well with the material, but were promptly replaced for the third film, Fast and Furious, made the same year, by Franchot Tone and Ann Sothern. When MGM can't keep the same leads over three films in two years, something is wrong.

Fortunately in 1939 even a film with problems is pretty palatable. The writer was Harry Kurnitz, a former journalist who, under the pseudonym of Marco Page, wrote the script for Fast Company and the source novel it was adapted from. He also wrote original screenplays for both the follow ups and obviously impressed someone because he was soon moved up to the series he knocked off. He wrote the screenplay for the fourth instalment in that series, Shadow of the Thin Man, one of the best sequels ever written, and co-wrote the story for the fifth, The Thin Man Goes Home. Kurnitz certainly understands what made Nick and Nora great, though he plays with the formula just a little and he's more blatant with Joel and Garda than he would be with Nick and Nora. His story here is roughshod in places but it speeds along nicely with an appropriate combination of complexities and plentiful helpings of clues, action and humorous dialogue.

Beyond Joel Sloane, who has convenient connections to almost everyone in the story, it revolves around a scrap of a William Shakespeare manuscript. It's owned by Nick Torrent, a rich collector who has found himself in financial trouble, for mysterious reasons. Another collector, the absent minded Christopher Oates, wants to buy the manuscript and he wants Sloane to handle the sale. When Sloane tries to find a way into the Torrent household, he finds that Dave Hilliard, Torrent's insurer, wants him in too. He hands him a first edition of Paradise Lost, apparently lost or stolen from Torrent's library but mysteriously without a claim. Already inside both Torrent's house and confidence is Phil Sergeant, something akin to Sloane's protégé, though mysteriously unhelpful. The mysteries add up, as do the corpses, though the most mysterious may be how the role of Torrent's son, the rich living Gerald, was given to someone with the name of Tom Collins.

Detailing much more of the story would spoil it, as this mystery isn't just about whodunit. There are a whole host of red herrings, so many that Harry Kurnitz was presumably experimenting with the things. Compared to your average TV show nowadays, in which my wife can invariably tell you whodunit within five minutes of the opening credits, Kurnitz piles twists on top of mysteries on top of complexities, but manages to keep a relatively slick story. We aren't confused at any point, though the armchair detectives in us are certainly kept busy. My wish was simply that the first red herring, Mr Wilkes, would have had more of a part. He's played by Ian Wolfe, a name not well remembered today, but who owned a face that every classic film fan would recognise, as he played many short but memorable parts from 1934 to 1990. I've enjoyed his work from as early as 1935's Mad Love and as late as 1990's Dick Tracy, his last film. He gets very little to do here.

Another perennial scene stealer is Etienne Girardot, perhaps best known to most as Dr Doremus, the coroner in a trio of Philo Vance movies in the mid-thirties. He's the absent-minded, perhaps senile, Christopher Oates, so really should have stolen every scene he's in with his fondness for sayings but inability to remember the last word of any of them. However like Wolfe, he can't get his teeth into the part for some reason and so becomes mildly amusing background. The Torrent family are background, as are their butler and business manager. Even Lucky Nolan, a local hood who runs a gambling palace and has his hooks into the Torrent household, is background, only Joan Marsh managing to elevate herself as Nolan's moll, Bobby Neville. At the ripe old age of 26, she wasn't too far off retirement, with over fifty films behind her and only seven more to go. She may have had the smallest feet in Hollywood, but she's pretty notable here.

For the most part it's difficult to focus much on anything except the intricacies of the plot and the charisma of the two leads. Robert Montgomery is a real go getter as Joel Sloane, more active than William Powell ever was as Nick Charles, but with just as dry a sense of humour. He drives much of this story, as much by his actions as by his character's connections to so many of the others. Rosalind Russell is a little more active than Myrna Loy's Nora Charles too. Though she tries and mostly succeeds in preserving Loy's unflappable calm, she does get a scream queen moment here that feels more than a little out of place. There's also a jealousy that goes beyond Nora's laconic wit and suggests at a little more than perhaps it should. Regardless of the quality of this pair of knock-off characters though, they're eminently watchable. No, they're not Nick and Nora, but they're watchable nonetheless and I should find the bookends to the trilogy.