Reviews

Joe Penner was amongst the stellar personalities of 1930s American radio, but so were Ben Bernie, Gabriel Heatter, or Phil Baker. Fame is fleeting, and often leaves none but the slightest traces for the future to uncover.

Penner's vaudeville beginnings brought him to radio and movies, at first doing Vitaphone acts, and quickly moving into secondary parts and then leads in B-grade feature comedies. In short, he followed the standard trajectory of American entertainment careers of the time.

The thing about Penner is that he had a very shallow bag of tricks, a few catchphrases that were exploited far more than they were worth, like "YUH WANNA BUY A DUCK?" and "YEEW NASTY MANN!" It would seem not to bother his uncritical fan base, and RKO just put him on the movie conveyer belt and they put out this collection of retreaded college football clichés.

He's given the ridiculous name of Doodle Bugs, a dim witted son of a big business man who is obsessed with his college football playing days.

Doodle only wants to lead his crummy swing band, playing in an empty restaurant his father bankrolls until he decides Doodle must instead follow in his cleated footsteps.

He's obviously in no shape for any sort of athletics, and though Penner was only 34 here, he could pass for ten years older. Doesn't matter, as everything and every body in it are one dimensional, uninteresting props. A strange lack of energy goes throughout, and nothing needs much of an explanation or backstory, like Joe suddenly going into a Ruth St. Denis routine every time he hears "Pop Goes The Weasel", which ends in a big kick. And outside of such a gimmick being right out of one of the Three Stooges' best films, you'd have to be a houseplant not to see that a big game will be saved by the timely appearance of the provocative ditty sometime soon in the film.

Joe could be funny, and a few good laughs were had by myself from some of the Vitaphone shorts, but By 1938 it seems like he doesn't have anything but to do as the scenes are required to and talk in a his weird, fluctuating outbursts.

So it's not a great film, but not terrible. If you want terrible, Penner's next, and final starring picture, "Millionaire Playboy" (1940) is very much that.

This story would have seemed to have fascinating potential, and still is compelling, but it seems like the spark couldn't generate a flame. It's about reincarnation, but we get there rather at random. I can see that possibly a back story might have been present at one time, but we have none in the film's present state.

A girl burglar robs a rich man's house. He catches her but seems incredibly forgiving, lets her go and just hands her his money. For his trouble, he's held up by her two male companions outside, but then, he just collapses. Why? Then for no apparent reason, she falls to a dead faint, too! What gives? The two are raced to a hospital, as the very real possibility of Sleeping Sickness was present a century ago. Nothing works. Now silly as it may seem, they decide to call in a Hindu mystic, famed for his hypnotic powers. He does his stuff and gets from the victims a story that in the murky past, in some weird India/Egypt/Babylon someplace, (going by the mishmash of costumes and art) the rich man in his earlier incarnation is on the slave market block, a prize because even then, he was a white man. He's bought by a wealthy guy with a turban and a palace, and a collection of wives. The big taboo is for a slave to get too chummy with said wives, but our hero falls for one of them, who's the ante-carnation of the little burglarette.

This all comes out and the two are sentenced to be killed and entombed together, and are. Then they snap out of it back 1914, the Hindu spilling the whole story, and everyone's happy to just let the couple hug in private, the last shot superimposes their long ago mummified bodies back in the tomb over their embrace.

This really should have been fleshed out a bit more. It would seem the random chance that in all time and space, these two carriers of long lost souls would come together then and there, all right. But what's with the strange paralyzing comas all of a sudden? Why was hypnotism the way out? In fact, just how would Hypnotism work? Who knows? It's just all spooky stuff that comes to miraculous aid in incomprehensible phantasy situations.

Noting the date of this film, surely the men who produced the 1932 film The Mummy could have seen it, and might've given a more serious thought to what would happen to ancient star-crossed lovers returning to the world in the Twentieth Century, and maybe not so seriously, in a lighter vein in Professor Beware (1938).

The story involves a poor little rich boy, a victim of an extremely over mothering mother that, though he's in his thirties she treats him like a sick 6 foot tall baby. That he has gone along with it until now says something about his character, but he joins in a plot to appear that he's kidnapped, and hide out at a boxing retreat to train him to be a he-man. A sub plot involving a cover for the plot with the "kidnappers" demanding a stock price manipulation of Father's railroad seems unnecessary and only believable to those who don't understand how stock markets work.

Blackwell has a face somewhat like Ray Milland, but a rather thin, small body.

With the petty embarrassments, fights and small heroics, this whole story would seem like an extended Harold Lloyd short, but lacking the slick editing and slapstick gags. Nevertheless, some good fun.

The Saint went through many iterations over the years, and those familiar with them will have their favorite actor or series, for instance, author Leslie Charteris said the 1960s TV version with Roger Moore was his. But Nobody's will be Hugh Sinclair.

George Sanders was a cool-tempered, urbane, public school Englishman, always a charming rogue, with just a hint of menace. Sinclair looks like a stand-in for Anthony Eden, and maybe more dried out than dry wit.

The story would be easily applied to the Saint character, but this one, made in Britain, seems to have ideas that the Saint as we knew him from the RKO Sanders series wasn't good enough, and had to be recast as Bulldog Drummond. Drummond, as we would be familiar with him in 1941, had standard elements of all detective series, but Drummond notably had a girl, usually his Fiancée, and a stupid/scared Bertie Wooster-type comedy relief hanging on to him through all the action.

Why the Saint should take up this formula is up to question. Did the British think the Drummond treatment was an improvement over the Saint's usual, more self-reliant performances? Obviously, something must have been imperfect about the Sanders entries; why else would RKO kick a series over to their UK studio if it was a big success in Hollywood?

This strategy apparently did nothing for the Saint, and the Brits made one further entry with Sinclair, ditching the goofy sidekick, and making more of a regular set-up in "The Saint Meets the Tiger", but it's handled in a dull way, and RKO didn't even want to take a chance with releasing it in America, so two years later, it was sold to Republic, who did, and, nobody much cared. An inglorious, but only temporary, end of the Saint.

Miss Kellerman was a huge draw in the 1910s, her films were sold on her aquatic adventures, wearing very little over a flesh toned body stocking. I don't know if there's much of her films of that time, I haven't seen any, but now, in the mid 1920s, she was no longer new and exciting, or able to pull in big crowds.

So she's in what can only be described, charitably, as a "B" picture, made by the insignificant "Lee-Bradford" company.

Her looks are no help; she has an odd face, her body is far from a "Venus", when seen in a tight, one piece bathing costume, she looks more lumpy than curvaceous.

The plot includes a phantasy segment where she tells a group of children a submerged fairy story in which She plays parts in. If I'm not mistaken, this is a call back to some of the Earlier Fox Studios' Kellerman features. But this one is confusing and ineptly filmed, leaving one more bewildered than charmed.

The casting is bad, too, everyone seems too young, that is, except for Annette, who's apparently trying to portray a teenager. The bad guy, piratical sea captain looks like he'd fall down in a stiff breeze. The make-up on some of the men has to be seen to be believed.

The story has pretty broad believability problems, including a small pouch of pearls being thrown overboard in middle of the ocean, being able to be retrieved by Annette, without any equipment, diving to the bottom of the sea!

This was her last film, I guess it must not have been worth doing more. It's a kid's film, it would seem, but not a good one.

The best part of this series is the interviews with actual participants and witnesses of that fateful day in Dallas, though by this time, so distant from those events, most seem somewhat dispassionate, and their stories, retold probably hundreds of times, sometimes take on the suggestion of a melodramatic script. Completely understandable, of course. How many docs have they been in? The constant, slow, morbid funeral home dirge in the background is laughably heavy handed.

You'd think there's nothing left to say about this subject; no new information to offer, and no new footage to be seen. But what this series has done is reprehensible. They've taken lots of the now-exhausted familiar footage of that day and falsified it with colorization. Yes, even videotape material has been infected with this falsification that has been used to attack any number of black and white films and still photographs that can be seen on the internet and other cable TV offerings.

So if every frame of a scene has been tampered with, how much trust is deserved? They also did an extremely cowardly act; the pivot point of the whole real-life incident; the Zapruder film is shown, everybody's seen it a thousand times, so we know what the fatal shot looks like. BUT HERE, IT'S BEEN REMOVED. I guess with CGI or something, so it runs smooth, but terrible or not, it's vital to show it. The audience is being protected. It's being infantalized. There are many, better documentaries on this event all ready made.

This series is famous for exploring the limits of just how maudlin a story can get before it becomes parody. In this episode we've breached the limit. The bathetic depths of melodrama are eagerly scraped by Loretta, portraying a hospital bed-bound, over the top patient. Her husband is a pathetic, too nice guy who years ago in his prime was a boxer, the role assayed unlikely enough by Eddie Albert. He needs dough for Loretta's medical bills, so he and his manager decide that he should have a bout with the champ to secure it. One might think it would be an impossible thing to arrange, but, magically, it takes almost no plot investment to accomplish.

Another stunning bit of phantasy follows- So Loretta won't worry, a reporter is asked that any reportage of this match be broadcast when Loretta is asleep, and that the newspaper should print special one-off editions without any references to it, just for Loretta. They comply!

After tearful bursts of agony and grim prognostications by the doctor, we come to the night of the big fight, and Loretta has her radio tuned in to it. The amazingly well informed announcer not only spills the beans about the trick newspapers, but tells us that Eddie's poor wife is hopelessly at death's door, which Loretta, through all her scenery-chewing, was supposedly unaware of.

At the close, we find that Loretta has somehow become lively and full of happy tears for her brave little fool, and he reciprocates with happy tears for her. A happy ending comes through for everyone...except the viewer.

Lee Tracy was a unique performer, the fast-talking, low brow urban type with a permanent chip on his shoulder, ready to dare any man he sees as consciously superior to him. His natural forte being newspaper or racetrack types, here he's given the part of a young man that's about to be drafted into World War One. But he's not about to try to get any audience sympathy; -he hasn't any use for the army or the sudden wave of patriotism sweeping the country as we enter the war. He claims to not understand such things, as he tries devious way to get out of serving. They have to come arrest him for it.

When he's in uniform, and over there, he's a private but he tries to assume privileges he's not entitled to, and often defying his sergeant. He's put in the guard house and then put on KP potato peeling duty. All which gives him more cause to spout off about how unfair life is to him, making enemies of everyone else.

At length, he and the sergeant are captured, and Jones can't wait to spill everything he knows to become a nice safe POW fast enough. He even starts a fight with the sergeant in front of the Germans who caught them. They aren't Quirt and Flagg; Jones has a real full on hate for the sarge and everything their uniforms mean to him. With hardly any reason, Jones will save the sergeant's life and puts himself at deadly risk to do so. Then we see him later, still doing KP duty, but now with a medal for his heroism.

So how are we supposed to take this? That all real men will rise to the challenges of war eventually? Is patriotism even part of men who try to deny it? Obviously by 1933, a more cynical attitude to the war was overtaking the blind approval we showed in 1917, but in this film, only Tracy shows any disagreement, and obviously because of his singular, unchecked personality, not for any interest in a debate about geopolitics or the conduct of war aims. It's just about him.

A newspaper ad (Greenfield, (Mass.)) Daily Recorder-Gazette, 14 June 1933) reads that Jones is "The cockiest, Funniest, most lovable soldier on the western front." He's anything but. I can only imagine audiences didn't much like this character either.

There is a strange other version of this film, this time it ends with Jones actually dying, I guess to satisfy those who might have had their fill of him, but It would probably be intended to show that he finally "got it" and died for his country and/or comrades, thereby redeeming his earlier jerk behavior. Both versions went out to different cities, even abroad.

This series always seems strange, but so does Mickey Rooney. We can see him back to his starring slapstick kid comedies, which made him, technically the last living silent film leading man. He became a well loved top star, and an incredibly long career. But this series is typical of his work. He must have stored in him every bit of comic business and story situation he ever saw, but there's something hollow about it. In this episode, typically, he can be bumbling and stupid, but we know he's not. He and other characters can have basic uncomprehension of obvious circumstances, like children, at any time, yet we know they aren't like that because they usually aren't.

Call it a lack of logical consistency; In the world of filmed sitcoms, No matter how ridiculously preposterous the situations get, such as in "I Married Joan" or how crazy "My Little Margie" and her schemes went, they retained their own rationale, their own fantasy world, where people will always behave in a certain illogical way that preserves the fantasy.

Mickey's show seems like they just toss everything in. In this episode, for instance, He gets a call from his boss asking where a certain bottle of ink has gone down at the office. Mick says it's in his desk drawer. Boss finds just the bottle's cap. Mick instructs him to look in another drawer, where he finds it, spilled all over his hand and presumably, everything in the drawer. Boss really blows up and Mickey's in trouble again.... hey, wait, that made no sense. But it's not pressed at all- why the cap and bottle are separated -in different parts of the boss's desk. We've been given junk. At another point, Mickey encounters a vacuum cleaner. He clumsily lets it vacuum his face and makes a mess of the parlor. Absolutely flat stuff that might amuse a baby.

A family vote is taken, with scrap paper ballots drawn out of a hat. BUT THERE'S ONLY THREE PEOPLE INVOLVED. That makes no sense, and nobody would do such a thing, anywhere. We're being thrown more junk.

When Mickey takes over his father's barbershop quartet singing with his pals in their home, to deliver a bop version of "The Old Mill Stream", the huge blast of canned applause that follows is stunning.

This is Mickey's problem, as the TV Guide critic said at the time, there was a lack of Heart in it. It's more than that. It would seem Mickey's famed ego made him think all he had to do was be there, and it would be good enough. Perhaps the writers, like Blake Edwards, just thought so little of the audience's intelligence that they didn't have to be better than this.

In this entry, as Jamie hogs down the entire contents of a girl's picnic basket, she comments on the strength of one of the men in camp. Jamie remarks on one stronger-and we segue into a time just before the Wagon train left civilization; a fat, very dimwitted boy named Billy leading two horses tells of how he bought them for just ten dollars from some men down the road. Soon it's revealed the real owner is found, barely breathing, but the boy's put in jail for murder nevertheless. At one point in the jail, Billy demonstrates he can bend the cell bars, the one and only reference to tie the "strength" story premise. Doctor McPheeters locates a charlatan for a defense lawyer, only to find in the local crooked sheriff/judge's kangaroo court, the man can be prosecuting attorney in the same case, at the same time.

Meanwhile, Billy is just too startlingly stupid to not comprehend his fix, and the horse owner describes the real perps to the Doctor and Kissel, who must find them before Billy's strung up as the finale of the terrible Judge's town food-and-fun filled outdoor party. (Hence the title.) The three bad guys include Murrel and Baggot from previous episodes. They have a fight and scram out, leaving the third man to be captured and save Billy from a neck stretching.

There's something slapped together about this story. The sitcom like characters that treat the incoherent trial proceedings like petulant kids playing a game, the celebratory crowd that's come to see a perfect stranger die in front of them, the boy's still stunning ignorance of his surroundings, happily stuffing his face with food, sitting at a table about twenty feet from the gallows. Then there's a piece with Coulter the wagon master who was killed off several weeks ago, in footage reused from an earlier episode. Charles Bronson, his replacement, is in the opening credits, but nowhere in the actual show.

Since this is very nearly the last episode, it can be assumed the cast and crew knew it, so no reason to give more than the minimum.

Maybe the only one left from this ("Rainbow") series. A rarity also in being a Universal comedy with an attractive budget, a large cast and lots of great sight gags. Dunham and Monberg run a Hotel barbershop near a beach. A jealous man finds some bathing suit photos of his wife at their shop (actually taken by her girl fiends). The chase is on, and the boys get mixed up with a group of Bomb throwers and a valise full of money. Everything blows up in the end. (Plot details can get a little sketchy with Czech intertitles.) Crashing through walls, the crazy automatic shoe shine machine, (easily turned into a torture device!), the outrageously talented "wonder dog"(!) and of course, all the cute girls in their bathing suits, make this a very funny comedy, on the order of the Fox Sunshines. (Cole Johnson)

The story is about an apparently super successful authoress, inexplicably being victimised by assassination attempts on her book tour promoting her latest opus, a self-help work for women's libbers.

From the start, one can guess where this will go, it's going to go the safest route possible; we're going to see the new age political point of view as a decent, righteous one, despite any degree of controversy in the real, non-tv scripted world.

It's a choice bit of unsubtle, unreal propaganda. The Authoress, played by onetime top MGM star Myrna Loy, who. Ex post facto, in an effort to stay relevant, famously became a supporter of all sorts of liberal causes. They make her character a cartoonish concept of what a rich, famous feminist ideal should be like. She's somehow been in the Spanish Civil War, in China, hung out with Ernest Hemingway, and done free spirited stunts like nude horseback riding. But she's not a madcap devil-may-care Auntie Mame, but a hard, frosty know-all that speaks in commands and disparages just about anything a male says. Perhaps this is supposed to match Ironside's gruff persona, some sort of unlikely equality. She's a literary genius, and writes things like a proverb: "A Man's Word is Like A Woman's Honour; Once Given It's Seldom Missed." Are you impressed?

The parallel sub-story is an object lesson in the qualification for Women's lib-a husband who is a laughably over-the-top ogre, the facial contortions of this guy alone is worth watching for. Emil Jannings would be proud. Though he yells a lot, and says down-pat, mean male chauvinist pig clichés, there's only so deep such a character can be. In 1973, you couldn't get too violent, so after getting into a rage about his wife taking up macramé (!), he only THREATENS to tear up a book. He thinks his feeble spouse has been brainwashed by the book, works up into another rage, and shoots THE DRIVEWAY in front of the authoress.(Myrna).

There's another, very thin plot element, about the real assassin, and how he's caught. This episode is an example lazy writers who found an easy way to look avant-garde and virtuous.

This is an example of an inexpensive programmer made in the days when one could scrape together a few hundred dollars and become a producer. It was supposed to be the first offering of the "Character Pictures Corporation," released by small-time Rialto Productions. The star was Paul Gilmore, a stage actor who had done some films here and there over the years, supposedly back to the 1890s. Well, that may be so, but in 1920, he had'nt become a superstar.

The story has him selling his Philippine ranch, which he has worked very hard for many years on, and now he's selling out so he can take his fiancée to New York where they will settle down. She has a friend, a guy who has never worked and has lots of smooth blather of "the best things in life are free" sort. When Gilmore and his lady leave for home, the wandering free soul goes with them. Their ship burns and sinks en route, (the closest stock footage "Character" could find for a long shots actually show ships being torpedoed), and the survivors wash up on a scrubby island, the girl with the idler, Gilmore with his precious money, but he needs to be rescued, and promises all the dough if the fellow who disdains it saves him. He does, to teach him a lesson. Gilmore, ever the workaholic, does the hunting, builds huts and forts, etc, to be paid his own money back. Despite the AFI synopsis above, the men don't battle for the love or the lucre, but have a rather mild relationship, acting rather dull and civilized throughout. The muddled moral is that woman's love and irresponsibility is good, and that hard work, determination and a pile of cash is bad.

Gilmore has a face like Gene Lockhart, and seems a bit old for an action adventure, and this would be his last movie role. The Girl, Hazel Hudson, was apparently in some musical comedies, but she's not much of a movie actress, and this is her single credit. Frank Williams, as the interloper is equally as wooden. Nobody seems to have any feel for emoting at all. The camera hangs long on static shots, and titles break up conversations to pad it up when they didn't have to. It all seems like an amateur effort. Isle of Destiny would be the one and only "Character Pictures" release.

This was an interesting film, flawed but still fun. In 1915 private telephones were becoming an everyday, common fixture, and it certainly figured prominently in films as a way to transfer to second point of story action while saving the first. But for all the competent-to-well done direction, there's some murky story elements that nobody bothers to explain.

The first one hinges on an error made by the Telephone girl, at the crucial moment in a call by the poisoned old lady, giving the police the killer's name. For no apparent reason, the operator disconnects, then reconnects in the wrong place, the call, unexplained, to purposefully make a wrong number.

Second, to catch the murderess, Police use the sister of the man now convicted of the crime as a trap for the REAL killer, by dressing her up as the dead woman, and scaring the wits out of the suspect. Did it sound like a clever ruse in some other story? I don't see how it makes any sense, but, it apparently worked out for the characters in this one.

It could have used a lot more narration titles.

Tom is a small time something-or-other, with a cheap blonde. They get into a Mexican bar and acquire a bandito in full regalia named Pancho. A dark little latin girl joins them and they all go to Pancho's lair, or hideout, or safe house. There, Pancho flirts with Tom's gal and Tom with Pancho's. After some clumsey attempts at making a pass, including promising some pearls, Pancho is rebuffed. Tom's making more progress with the Mexican girl, and show's Pancho his caveman technique. Pancho again tries it on the American girl, this time she (offscreen) throws furniture around. Pancho allows his new pals to walk around and enjoy the unelaborate hacienda. Then, two American "Kidnap Kings" try to abduct Pancho, but he soon, with help from his men, and some bumbling by Tom, outwits them. Tom and the girls leave Pancho quite amiably, the girls revealing that they stole the pearls and other jewels to Tom as they leave, certainly within Pancho's sight, but he doesn't really care. The end.

What a pointless, dull waste of time. It's no wonder that Educational got a bad reputation, with weak minutes of nothing like this.

In 1929, when Pathé had ceased releasing the Roach and Sennett shorts, they hired George LeMaire to produce/direct a series of talking comedies. LeMaire was a stage personality and sometime recording star, and supposedly was a comic genius. This one, late in the series, gives cause to dispute that status.

The patter is loaded with cringingly obvious setups. When first is mentioned, in a room where wallpaper is being hung, that one of the difficulties will be to "Hang the Border", instantly, you know that someone's going to hear it as "Hang the Boarder". And the phrase is so funny, it's said many times. The slapstick is painfully slow and has no surprises. When, viz a viz, a Bridge game has a fat gal express hope for "a grand slam", of course, she will get some sort of assault. It comes in the form of flying wallpaper paste. There's tons of it being thrown on people and things with graceless, break-up filled camera work. Incompetent paper hanger stories had been done for a long time, and nothing new happens here, perhaps this might be the first talkie version, but I don't know. The pointless inclusion of a gross female impersonator makes for a strange time.

LeMaire might have gotten better, but he died young, at 45, and in fact this film was released the day he died.

T would seem they didn't really know what to do with Miss Pons, she, being a vivacious, scatterbrain French girl with a look and manner that would make her a character actress, sort of a shorter version of Fifi D'Orsay, except she's a trained opera star. Her fame came from grand opera and radio performances. So what to do with her? She has to be the star of the film, but how many french musicals have been done? How much American box office milage does grand opera promise?

So here, they get her out of France as fast as possible, and remove her from a stuffy high-brow opera-class environment, too, landing her amidst the all-American, low-brow milieu of a four man night club band featuring Jack Oakie. It's a remake of "Street Girl", which was the first Radio pictures production. Oakie more or less reprises his role here.

This affords Lily an oppurtunity to sing supposed jazz/swing music in the nightclub, with such numbers as a tricked up version of "The Blue Danube". And later, she gets a show at the Metropolitain Opera, and sings one of those sopranic arias that only snobs and foriegners want to hear. So there's something to not like for everyone.

But the worst part of this is the Gene Raymond character. He's the love focus for her, but throughout, he's a cold fish, with far more sarcastic remarks for her than tender ones. One never gets any romantic heat from them. He has to be literally bound and gagged to get him married to her. He's still protesting this at the strange fade out.

This is probably as basic a boxing story as was ever filmed. A highly unembellished tale of a young pugilist, who is honey-trapped by a high stakes gambler on the eve of his most important title match. The film has a complete entourage of stock melodramatic characters proscribed for this genré. It is relentlessly ordinary. The dialogue is predictable, the acting is uninspired, save for some hammyness. No surprises here.

It's been my experience in vieweing the first year or so of Radio pictures output, that they all have a cheap, soft focus, a usually dark look to them, mostly quiet tracks with no background music, though all have a more or less constant, faint, odd humming sound like the whirr of a camera. Their story picks are almost all low action, predictable, happy ending little time spenders like this one. The casting is imperfect, Miss Pringle's overmodulated speech makes her sound like Margaret Dumont, and maybe she's a bit too old for her part; Dorothy Gulliver, just out of her Universal contract, though cute, doesn't have the voice or acting talent for talkies. The title and promotion for it reflect maybe a lack of confidence.

The title is meaningless. The adverts are downright misleading, with lines like "R-K-O Sensational Pagent of Life and Love. Roaring Boasts of Broadway And Her Whispered Secrets!" There's nothing at all about Broadway in this film. Nothing, maybe save a strange, nonspeaking, quick cameo by stage star Ann Penington. I guess the hottest films of 1929 were "Gold Diggers of Broadway", The Broadway Melody" and "Broadway", so they lied and said this had something to do with it too.

This is a good, easily enjoyed undercover police story, with a bit of the "Big Heist" caper film the British practically made a national genré of. But it is not any sort of a classic, it's not what one could say was action-packed, it concentrates more on suspense.

The problem with it is mainly in its being sold to us as a Bulldog Drummond story. First, Walter Pidgeon might be a versitile actor, and he does this film with his expected competency, and if his character were named John Smith it would be just fine, but he's not right to be Bulldog Drummond. He's a bit too formal, serious, and old to play him, especially after we have seen someone like John Howard fill the role so well. What about the other characters? Algy is now a serious, and colorless, far secondary figure, Tenny isn't in it at all, nor is Mrs. Drummond.

If nothing else, it would seem they just took a cops and robbers story and decided it would sell better on the back of a well known character that had gone dormant, so, without any more consideration than that, they made a Bulldog Drummond movie.

The plot is a tale of nieghbors on a upscale residential city street, where in one house we see a young couple named Kirkwood and their boy, the wife being our star, May Allison. The other house has a middle aged childless couple, the Gannells. The two families apparently don't socialize, and seem to be unaware of each other. What ties them is a young man who tends their furnaces when the husbands are away. With May, he's strictly business, but next door, he's having an affair with Mrs. Gannell.

One day, Mr. Gannell discovers it, and follows his wife's lover into Kirkwood's cellar and creases his skull with an axe found there. He dumps the body and axe out in the woods, then manages to get some of Kirkwood's personalized cigarettes, plants them with the body too, so when it's found, it looks bad for Kirkwood, who's soon in a jail cell, indicted for the bloody deed. In the mean time, Gannel, who happens to be a lawyer, manages to defend Kirkwood at his trial, and as you'd expect, he does a pitiful job of it. Mrs. Kirkwood (May) suspects something about their incompetent attorney, and she sets up a psychological trap to get him to confess, that works brilliantly.

Throughout, the story is filmed well enough, nothing fancy, just necessary, well composed shots. The action carries one's interest along, and the actors are also well recieved. The distance of a century leaves them all unfamiliar faces, but none are overly hammy. The only real disappointment is in the scene where May exposes the evil lawyer. She lays out perfectly how her plot should work out beforehand. And it works out just as she said it would. This cuts the suspense down rather considerably, it's a letdown if there's no conflict. There's not enough time between the moment he confesses and he's arrested by one detective. No fuss, no muss, no action.

But the film has many interesting moments, and still it's recomended.

In this story, Professor LeBlanc is cracking up because of his inability to teach Jack Benny to play the violin. A psychiatrist explains this to Jack, who demonstates that it hasn't been a waste of time and effort, by playing an intricate piece beautifully, and snapping LeBlanc out of his mood,showing he is a success after all.

When he leaves, Jack explains to the doctor that he's been able to play well all along, but just doing off-key performances for comedy on his programmes, and asks him to keep it a secret.

Serious logic questions arise: So if it's all a gag, why is LeBlanc having a breakdown, is'nt he himself just a gag, played by Mel Blanc? So then, what plain of reality are we on, where real life and fantasy happen at the same time? They shouldn't. Also, why did they sacrifice a pretence we in the audience have invested years of acceptence in, for a fleeting, unworthy punchline?

Accepting that the viewer considers himself part of "Real Life", and what we see in a broad farce comedy series like Jack's is strictly make believe, it seems to be saying something about rising above the well-loved, but silly tropes of Jack's created world, that he is really a serious occupant of "Real Life" too. On these terms, it breaks down the division. If he's forsaking the fantasy acting world, than has just been putting some kind hoax over on us?

This documentary fails throughout. A story so shocking, of the mosterous H. H. Holmes and his "Murder Castle", is one of the most gruesome crime stories in world history, yet being so far in the past, it's no where near as well known as more recent ones, with film, video and forensics.

But this documentary makes no effort to examine what is known about Holmes, or to use his real name, Herman Webster Mudgett, or where he came from, or what, other than being a con man, was in his life before the crimes began.

Somehow, amongst the nebulous, politically charged, taking-head expert nobodies, comes a story about how police in Chicago, or maybe in general, only came about to protect those dirty rich citizens from the poor. The Holmes story (some of it? All of it?) was, or might've been a conspiracy to make the police look good, and newspapers snapped up the gory details. And why are we focused on the New York World newspaper's coverage? It is a Chicago story. But hunting down more pertinent sources was not a high priority.

This is accompanied by not only the ubiquitous hallmark of dirt cheap TV production: weakly acted and dressed "Re-enactments," but all the photos to illustrate the world of the 1890s and some of the participants, are slathered in reality-obscuring gobs of thick colorization.

In the end, an oppurtunity to make a fascinating story come to life is instead, a confusing, dull waste of time.

Mild comedy, with a few small laughs here and there, but overall a well-made mediocrity at best. A problem is with Milligan himself. I realise he yet has many fans everywhere, but that loyalty stems from being one of the "Goons" and other works. Here, he has been given no personality at all, bar a general good-natured, polite naiveté. This seems to be a kind of standard British comic star character, Norman Wisdom or Frankie Howerd might've done this, and better, too. Milligan just doesn't have any spark; he's just doing and saying what's scripted for him, with no personal touches.

It's a very well made film, lots of camera set ups, interesting location shots, quickly paced.But the story is a let down. It involves a potential mail robbery (This before the definitive real life "Train Robbery" attack on the GPO in 1963) and a criminal gang, yet they are all such comic bunglers,they aren't scary, so there is no tension, and if you can't care about the focus of the story, the big heist, there's no suspense. Milligan's utterly antiseptic relationship with the love interest makes him seem like a tall prepubescent boy.

Then again, maybe that's the intended audience. I don't think this was released in the U.S...It's a very unimportant film. Still, it didn't hurt Spike Milligan any.

This is one amongst a sub-genre of films of the depression era. Though only a very short time removed from silent pictures, (in this case, only five years) they are treated as relics from a distant eon, as strange and ridiculously quaint as powdered wigs. Though there are a few of these short subjects that have an idea that the recent past had some great moments to offer, such as the Paramount "Movie Milestones" series of 1934-5, mainly that past is shown as worthy of nothing but contempt. This film is typical of that sentiment, films of then ten or fifteen years ago are mercilessly mocked by an unfunny narrator/heckler. The witless jabs are not up to the worst "Mystery Science theatre" scripts. To make the aging flicker "funnier" they are manipulated to repeat action back and forth. The "titles" are written to make them even stupider, as here where a film about Indians is used, they're introduced with Hebrew names (like "Chief Potch in the Punim") and the dialogue supplied by the narrator gives them Jewish dialects. (the comic idea that the Red Indians were the lost tribe was a wheezy vaudeville thread by this time.) The worst offender in this genre was Pete Smith over at MGM, whose "Goofey Movies" sometimes incoherently tied pieces of several old films together and added animation as well. I can't see where this general contempt for their own products by movie men came from. Did audiences feel this way, or were they being bullied into this mindeset, to better appreciate the new offerings by the men, often the very same men, that had made the items on view here?

In this, the first episode of Season four, the usually, wise, thoughtful father of the Douglas clan has a character crisis. Steve consents to join his family on a teenage song competition recording of a composition Robbie wrote, a novelty ditty titled "Ugga-Bugga." I guess it's a reflection on the taste of kids, but Robbie's entrant is a finalist in the contest. But a problem arises for Steve, as the singers in the entered recordings must now perform the number on live television. This is where the problem lies, Steve fairly panics at the thought he'll be seen singing the silly song, and being humiliated by such a loss of dignity. He goes along with the boys and Bub to the station, but doesn't stop whining and offering pathetic reasons why he should be let out. When the actual on-camera performance starts, he's nervously trying to hide behind Robbie and Mike, and even putting on a trick store plastic nose-mustache-glasses disguise, which are snatched off his face from offscreen stage hands. This seems to be a careless lapse in the consistancy of the character, more befitting William Bendix in THE LIFE OF RILEY.