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bill-barstad
Reviews
Discarded Lovers (1932)
A good, light whodunit
Fickle screen star Irma Gladden has a former husband, an estranged husband, both still in love with her, and two lovers, one current. All but the former husband are involved in making her latest movie. She just canned her chauffeur for cause, and the losing lover's wife has confronted her. You know what's coming. A reporter called in by the police chief to help with the case eventually suggests bringing all of the suspects together for a screening of the movie made thus far, thinking there're clues in it. Enough is revealed by implication to cause the murderer to confess, very dramatically.
The movie is an early talkie with lots of dead air, and no music. It could have been a bore, but the dialog is very good as is the acting of J. Farrell MacDonald as Police Chief Summers, Natalie Moorehead as doomed Irma Gladden, and Barbara Weeks as Gladden's secretary. The comedy relief is provided by a police sergeant. Fred Kelsey is good in the role.
Cat-Women of the Moon (1953)
Cat And Mouse Game
Arrogant space lesbians, confident of their superiority, subvert humanity's first mission to the Moon, and lay in wait with their plan for world domination. Lured into the trap by the mission's only woman, three of the four male crew members are wined, dined, and corrupted, revealing all the cat-women need to know to fly the spaceship. One astronaut is killed after revealing what he knows. The one man who has been wary throughout ruthlessly digs out the plot. Yet another has the plot revealed to him out of love. Ah, love. These two then inform the captain. After the cat-women are killed, the crew return to Earth.
On their way to the moon, the ship is struck by a whistling meteor, which looks much more like a comet. It damages the atom chamber, spilling nitric acid. Would you find nitric acid anywhere in an atomic reactor? No. A fire extinguisher is used during the emergency, but there are no flames. Let that pass. The mission apparently hadn't been planned with a landing site chosen, so the cat-women's proxy convinces the captain, her main squeeze, to land on the dark side, though he's concerned that it's too cold there. The temperature on the dark side is the same as on the light side, which is the temperature of space itself. To make his point, after leaving the ship the captain drops a cigarette onto the light side, where it bursts into flame. Since there's no oxygen on the Moon, the Sun's heat couldn't have ignited it. Oh well, on with the show! The crew are lured into exploring a nearby cave. They discover an oxygen atmosphere, and are attacked by giant spider puppets. What's preventing the atmosphere from disappearing out of cave opening into the hard vacuum of space? We never learn. While the rest are distracted, a cat-women touches the female astronaut, leaving a moon mark on her left hand and making her one with the cat-women. Or so they think. When Victor Jory's caveman-like character confronts her, he embraces her and grabs that hand, breaking the hold the cat-women have on her, at least temporarily. She reveals her love for him while spilling the beans on the cat-women. He does this again later, but caught by the captain, fights with him over her affections. The captain gives up easily, though. No great love there. The cat-women do a mildly sensual dance, with musical accompaniment from some mysterious source, once they have the information they want. Preparation, celebration, pandering, or padding, you decide. The driving force behind the cat-women's desire to leave the moon is the continual loss of atmosphere there, which they say has lead to the necessity of a slow genocide over the centuries. There are only a handful of cat-women left. Adding the fact that only cat-women and giant spiders are still living on the moon, one can guess the gruesome method by which the population has been winnowed.
I'm thankful for the lack of exposition on the extremely implausible and impossible in this movie. It often was and still is a real problem with scriptwriting. Not that this movie had a good script. Best to just let those things slide, and keep moving. Enjoy the corny dialog on the way to the moon. Revel in the anachronistic attitudes. Ponder the cat-women's nonsensical plot for world domination. Some would call this movie campy or kitschy. I just call it a lot of fun. Enjoy!
The Phantom Planet (1961)
Hey, Solarites!
Ah, middling sci-fi. There's so much of it. This one features Richard Weber in a minor role as the hero's copilot delivering this stultifying line in the first act: "You know, every year I become more and more convinced that it's wisest and best to focus on the good and the beautiful." In the only other movie in which I've seen him act, 12 to the Moon, and in a much larger role, he again gets to deliver bad lines, but that movie is packed with bad lines. I don't think any other actor could have made Weber's lines come across as anything but idiotic, but being such a bad actor, they made his scenes memorable howlers in both movies.
Otherwise, the acting in good enough. The movie has a wild and stupid story, cute young women, a fight over one such woman, and goofy-looking aliens, all seen in a number of films from the era. I think it all started with "Cat-Women of the Moon". I like it because of the women, it doesn't bore, nostalgia, and the inadvertent humor.
If you can't see that sometimes what's bad in movies is funny, you have my pity as you'll never be able to fully appreciate what they have to offer. These things were funny to audiences at the time, and still are.
Frankenstein's Daughter (1958)
A Laugh Riot!
Take a screenplay written with every monster movie cliché imaginable and from any other genre that came in handy, an unimaginative director, $60,000, and you'll get a movie like Frankenstein's Daughter. Really, the actors, several of which I recognize from TV shows of the time, gave performances as good as any others could have done with the material given them. There isn't a believable situation in this lovable, laughable turkey. This one had me smiling, laughing under my breath, or laughing out load throughout.
Oliver Frank is quite a piece of work. He pushes his boss, Prof. Morton, around, and patronizes him. When he isn't hitting hard on Morton's granddaughter, Trudy (played by Sandra Knight, who can also be seen in "The Terror"), he's dosing her with a drug that makes her horrible looking. Everyone patronizes her. Frank's also carrying on the Frankenstein tradition in Morton's laboratory. He runs down a girl who brushes his high school masher moves off, takes her brain, and puts it into his monster. The monster moves spastically, like a battery operated robot I had as a kid, though mine tipped over all the time. The monster's only victims had to help by standing still or cornering themselves. As per formula (Teens to the rescue!), Trudy's boyfriend (played by John Ashley, who costarred in the equally funny "The Eye Creatures") destroys the monster, and Frank dies in the hilarious climatic scene in the laboratory.
I downloaded a copy from The Internet Archive. It's full-frame (4:3) rather than at the original aspect ratio. I looked around for a copy for sale at the original aspect ratio without luck.
Waterfront (1944)
Not Bad
If you don't pay attention too closely, this is a fairly entertaining film. J. Carrol Naish is fine as the Nazi spymaster. John Carradine just wasn't sinister or psychotic enough to make his character believable, but was better than most of the rest of the cast, though John Bleifer stood out as the slimy, double-dealing blackmailer. I thought it was pretty well directed, too.
I can see why the police arrested the male romantic lead, but if the FBI had really done their job he would have been quickly released, since he had no gun and none was recovered at the scene, had no gunfire residue on his hands (The paraffin test had been mentioned in movies of the 1930s.), and had a legitimate reason for being at the murder scene. Yet he went to trial for the murder. I don't know much about guns, but I recognized the iconic Luger pistol used by the murderer. The FBI identified the murder weapon as a Mauser. A pretty clumsy portrayal of the FBI for this marginally propagandistic spy drama.
I watched a copy downloaded from The Internet Archive. The print from which the file was made had seen better days.
The Drums of Jeopardy (1931)
A Very Enjoyable 65 Minutes
The movie starts very melodramatically, with a young woman in bed, tended by her mother, apparently dying. The reason for her deterioration is never stated, though it has to do with her relationship with some man. The acting here is poor. Her father (get this, his name is Boris Karlov, played by Warner Oland, acting like an evil Charlie Chan) enters, and demands the name of the man responsible, but his daughter refuses. A necklace, The Drums of Jeopardy, falls from under the bed covers, which he recognizes as belonging to the Petrovs, and vows revenge.
The movie and acting get better in the second act as the Petrovs come to America, fleeing the Bolshevik revolution. Karlov, working for the Bolsheviks, is in America already, and waiting for them. The Petrov sons escape Karlov twice, and flee to a country mansion on a dark and stormy night. Karlov and his goons are right behind.
This is an very 1930s movie with plot elements, and plot holes, typical of the period. The escaping Petrovs meet and are aided by a rich New York family. Karlov has a bullet-proof vest that defies Newton's third law of motion.
Clara Blandick, playing the matron of the New York family, shines while providing some humor.
Murder Is News (1937)
Middling Mystery
Reporter solves murder! Yeah, it's another one of those.
Unlikable, rich, businessman Edgar Drake is murdered at his townhouse the night his wife, who plans to divorce him and marry Drake's high-powered lawyer, is to meet there with her son, who is worried what Drake might do now that her plans were just aired on a radio program.
I picked my suspect, stuck with him, and I was right. It's not a hard one to solve, though. The third act is pretty much standard fare with all the suspects gathered together by the reporter. A series of plot conveniences, clumsily scripted, are then used to hold it together and make it work. Production values aren't high. The story moves along briskly. The dialog isn't as bright as it is in other movies of this type like 'A Shriek in the Night' or 'Murder by Invitation', but I was never bored. The acting is mostly good, aside from Iris Meredith who is sometimes laughably bad.
John Hamilton, who plays the lawyer in the love triangle, is the Daily Planet reporter's chief suspect. Later in life Hamilton would play Perry White, the editor of another newspaper called the Daily Planet, in the 'Adventures of Superman' TV series.
I watched a copy I downloaded from The Internet Archive. It was of decent quality.