A gang of criminals involved in fixing horse races have murdered a police officer, and framed his superior, Inspector Fernack, by planting $50,000 in his safe. Suspended, he's determined to do whatever it takes to clear himself. Lucky for him, Simon Templar has decided to help out, with humorous results. Bodies start piling up, and Fernack naturally assumes Templar is the killer, but it gets hilarious when Simon keeps finding Fernack standing over the latest corpse, and although he obviously doesn't believe Fernack is the killer, he has too much fun at his friend's expense, saying, "Oh, HENRY!" Little do either realize that the sister of the murdered officer is the one killing the gangsters and stealing their ill-gotten gains, donating it to her brother's widow, very much in the style that Simon himself did in THE SAINT IN NEW YORK. One could say "The Saint Meets His Match", but this wasn't something the Hayes Office was going to let slide.
My favorite SAINT novel is "Angels Of Doom", in which Simon helps a woman whose police detective father was framed and wound up committing suicide. In that story, there were 3 gangsters involved, and Simon had to convince his new aqcuaintaince that they had to get a confession from one of the crooks before all of them wound up dead. The story was HORRIBLY adapted in THE SAINT STRIKES BACK, a film so AWFUL it gets my vote as the single worst SAINT movie ever made. Well, whatta ya know... just 3 movies later, they decided to take another whack at it, just as there'd been 3 different adaptations of "The Maltese Falcon" in 9 years and 2 adaptations of "Farewell My Lovely" in less time than that. Incredibly, both ...STRIKES BACK and ...TAKES OVER feature the same 3 actors in the lead roles-- George Sanders, Jonathan Hale & Wendy Barrie, but the results are so far superior I rate this as Sanders' 2ND-best SAINT film.
Even the climax, where Simon uses radio equipment to allow the police to overhear the crook's confession, is the same, though done SO much better this time.
Another returning actor in this one is Paul Guilfoyle, this time as "Pearly Gates", a nervous henchman. Suspected of a double-cross by his boss, and suspected by Fernack of being a killer, he's coerced by Templar into going straight. One of his best moments is when Simon & Pearly find Fernack standing over a corpse with a smoking gun in his hand , and Pearly says, "This guy's a mad-dog killer!", a mistaken impression Simon takes great amusement with at Fernack's expense.
The girl in "Angels" got off at the end; Hollywood censorship would not allow such a thing in ...IN NEW YORK or in ...TAKES OVER. I sometimes think it's a shame that the SAINT series wasn't being made in England, instead of America. It's kinda ridiculous when you have a character who spends most of his time in England, yet in 4 out of his 5 SAINT films, Sanders was in The States.
My favorite SAINT novel is "Angels Of Doom", in which Simon helps a woman whose police detective father was framed and wound up committing suicide. In that story, there were 3 gangsters involved, and Simon had to convince his new aqcuaintaince that they had to get a confession from one of the crooks before all of them wound up dead. The story was HORRIBLY adapted in THE SAINT STRIKES BACK, a film so AWFUL it gets my vote as the single worst SAINT movie ever made. Well, whatta ya know... just 3 movies later, they decided to take another whack at it, just as there'd been 3 different adaptations of "The Maltese Falcon" in 9 years and 2 adaptations of "Farewell My Lovely" in less time than that. Incredibly, both ...STRIKES BACK and ...TAKES OVER feature the same 3 actors in the lead roles-- George Sanders, Jonathan Hale & Wendy Barrie, but the results are so far superior I rate this as Sanders' 2ND-best SAINT film.
Even the climax, where Simon uses radio equipment to allow the police to overhear the crook's confession, is the same, though done SO much better this time.
Another returning actor in this one is Paul Guilfoyle, this time as "Pearly Gates", a nervous henchman. Suspected of a double-cross by his boss, and suspected by Fernack of being a killer, he's coerced by Templar into going straight. One of his best moments is when Simon & Pearly find Fernack standing over a corpse with a smoking gun in his hand , and Pearly says, "This guy's a mad-dog killer!", a mistaken impression Simon takes great amusement with at Fernack's expense.
The girl in "Angels" got off at the end; Hollywood censorship would not allow such a thing in ...IN NEW YORK or in ...TAKES OVER. I sometimes think it's a shame that the SAINT series wasn't being made in England, instead of America. It's kinda ridiculous when you have a character who spends most of his time in England, yet in 4 out of his 5 SAINT films, Sanders was in The States.