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Reviews
The Gay Falcon (1941)
Enter the Playboy Criminologist
This witty whodunnit outclasses most of its pot-boiler sequels. The jewel-theft and dead body set-up is conventional but the way it works out is stylishly paced and full of entertaining sidelights. The Falcon's volatile fiancée is hilarious, and unfazed when he approaches her for the price of a meal dressed as a tramp. I like his byline in a newspaper story: "FALCON EVADES POLICE - Playboy Criminologist Sought in Mystery Slaying".
Wendy Barrie as his stand-in Doctor Watson (while "Goldie" Locke is unavoidably detained by crooks) is more sceptical about his personal qualities than starry-eyed: she knows she's the other woman. It adds up to a sophisticated and playful take on a routine B-film formula, which has some of the élan and sparkle you get in early 1930s genre films.
The Falcon Takes Over (1942)
Archetypal story reworked
The plot of Chandler's "Farewell My Lovely" gets garbled enough to remind you of "The Big Sleep" four years later (where Chandler himself helped confuse things). More so from being compressed into B-film one hour running time, but surprisingly it works on its own terms. The Falcon, foregoing his customary evening dress after the opening scene to pose as a private eye, cannot be a real private-eye, with the British accent, good manners, a butler and a comic sidekick, but there is a surrogate investigator added to the plot in the form of a girl reporter (perky Lynn Bari), and Helen Gilbert contrasts her well as Veronica Lake-style femme-fatale Velma. Moose Molloy the ex-convict doesn't employ the detective, he remains an ominous background figure, emerging from the curtains in the psychic's consulting-room with real menace, and substitutes himself as driver (that old trick) to appear at the pay-off. The plot rehash overdoes the comic business with Chief O'Hara and Falcon's sidekick "Goldie" Locke, but it does work and is an interesting genre hybrid.
I Married a Witch (1942)
Black Magic with a Wink
Delightfully off-the-wall comedy that whips up a bit of supernatural contrivance to skate fairly near the Hayes Code boundaries of the day. No wonder portraits of strait-laced puritans keep falling (literally) off the wall. Frederick March is a rising politician with no noticeable moral qualities on the verge of his wedding (to classy Susan Hayward) and an election, who is caught up in a series of increasingly compromising situations with a witch come back to take revenge on his ancestor, in the form of Veronica Lake.
She subverts the melodrama of him rescuing her from a burning hotel with seductive come-ons. We know it's a set-up, in the papers it looks like a publicity stunt, and he himself suspects it's a frame-up by his political rivals. But the joke is he resists rather feebly. People don't just fall in love, he tells her. "Hmmm, guess this'll take longer than I planned" she muses. She spins the clock round several hours having got herself into his bed and his pyjamas, and dawn finds him still reasoning with her at the bedside. The Hayes Code kept him off the bed of course. But his heroic rescue has made the front pages, and when his PA says "What a break - you don't know what this young woman can do for you." he replies "Oh I've got a pretty good idea" with a glance up at the bedroom.
Today's films can't do this stuff, we've lost the moralistic conventions to subvert, and the art of the knowing wink to the audience. But the plot skates along to the stuffy wedding, where we know something's gotta give, complicated by the fact that her love-potion has backfired and she's drunk it herself. Her roguish wizard father (Cecil Kellaway) materialises to keep the bedevilment going (as carried over into the 1960s TV spin off "Bewitched") and open scandal requires a bit of magic to conjure a light and fluffy ending out of the hat.
It's the moral ambiguity of March's character in the subtext and the delightful send-up of the femme-fatale that give a sardonic noir edge to this felicitous comedy.
Looper (2012)
Loopin the Loop
What's the all-purpose standby time-travel plot? Yeah - guys getting sent back from the future to assassinate someone and alter future history. "Looper" comes up with an alternative: guys from the future getting sent back to be assassinated by regular schmoes in the present. Brilliant, only maybe they didn't quite think it through, and half way (I'm not spoiling anything here am I?) they revert to plan A - one of the guys from the future who's evaded his assassin (it's his younger self so he remembers it's gonna work) decides to bump off some kid who's going to grow up to be Mr Nasty in the future. Not a heartwarming little angel kid of course, that wouldn't be right, not even one of those cynical wise-ass sort of kids either, people love them too. What other sorts of kids are there? Oh yes, malevolent psycho kids with satanic powers - that's our plot! Remember the first time you saw Star Wars? It'll be like that, only more confusing. And probably less sequels.
The Long Memory (1953)
An outsider film with bags of atmosphere
John Mills tracks down the real culprit of the murder he was sent to jail for in this tense British drama of exile and return. The real murderer is now a comfortable businessman, and the visual contrasts between his dubious offices in the London docks and Mills' derelict boat far out on the river estuary gives a resonance to the film it would be hard to find in a modern setting. Freed from jail but still imprisoned by the past, Mills' character spurns the touching companionship of another refugee on the Kent marshes (Eva Bergh) about whose past we know nothing, but it seems to be destiny that has brought them together. This is one of the few films that resolves a labyrinthine revenge-story without the plot becoming mechanical, and the bleak monochrome visuals are part of its emotional power.