Murder, He Says
Directed by George Marshall
Written by Lou Breslow and Jack Moffitt
1945/US
Paramount Pictures
IMDb Page
First viewing/Criterion Channel

Pete Marshall: It’s like looking for a needle in a… a slaughter house.

I think the golden years of Screwball ended in 1944.

Pete Marshall is a pollster. He goes deep into the Ozarks to investigate the disappearance of his colleague. He runs into the Fleagle family. The family is currently on a search for the $70,000 cousin Bonnie Fleagle (Barbara Pepper) stole in a bank robbery. Pete also learns that the hillbilly family is armed and ready to shoot outsiders who interfere.

Eventually Claire Matthews (Helen Marker), daughter of a man who has been falsely accused of the robbery, turns up to clear her father’s name. Now Pete has an ally and love interest. With Marjorie Main and Porter Hall as the heads of the clan.

This one has a plot similar to “Spider Baby” or “The Hills Have Eyes” only it’s supposed to be a madcap comedy. It wasn’t for me. For one thing, Marjorie Main’s “Ma Kettle” loud voice grates on me and she is in this a LOT. Watchable but not much more than that.

Cornered
Directed by Edward Dmytryk
Written by John Paxton from a story by John Wesley
1945/USA
RKO Radio Pictures
First viewing/Warner Film Noir Classic Collection

[box] Perchon, German Banker: The gun is unnecessary, this is a friendly meeting.

Laurence Gerard: Just want to be sure I’m chairman.[/box]

Dick Powell is at his grimmest in this post-war noir which takes his character deep into a Nazi enclave in Argentina.

Canadian flyer Laurence Gerard (Powell) has just been released from a POW camp.  He is deeply traumatized and his one remaining aim in life is vengeance on the people who murdered his French wife of 20 days.  He returns to France to confront her father and pump him for information on the murderers.  The father, reluctantly out of concern for Gerard’s sanity and safety, says that Vichy official Marcel Jarnac was to blame.

But the father also has papers stating that Jarnac is dead, his life insurance having been paid to wife Madeleine. The father believes the files fell into his hands too conveniently and tells Gerard that he might learn more from Jarnac’s Vichy associate.  Of course, at the exact moment Gerard arrives to confront the man, he finds his office in a smoldering heap. The associate burned all his papers before committing suicide.  But, of course, within about two minutes Gerard finds an unscathed page which is the cover sheet of a dossier the man was keeping on Jarnac. For some reason, Gerard takes this as proof that Jarnac is alive.  He decides to follow the trail of Jarnac’s “widow”.  It takes him to Switzerland and thence to Argentina.

Melchior Incza (Walter Slezak) meets Gerard on arrival.  Incza seems to know way too much about Gerard and offers him his services.  Failing to rid himself of Incza, Gerard finally accepts his offer to attend a party where the widow may be present.  The remainder of the story follows Gerard’s pursuit of Jarnac to its bloody conclusion

I have related perhaps twenty minutes of the more coherent portions of the exceptionally convoluted and improbable plot.  The film keeps playing with the audience’s perception of the true identities of the many players and I still was not quite sure of some of them by the end.  The confusion made the film seem longer than its 110 minute length.  The dialog, on the other hand, is pretty great and certainly the performances cannot be faulted.  Both Powell and Slezak shine.

Trailer

The House on 92nd Street
Directed by Henry Hathaway
Written by Barré Lyndon, Charles G. Booth, and John Monks Jr.
1945/USA
Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation
First viewing/YouTube

[box] Agent George A. Briggs: We know all about you, Roper. We’ve traced you to the day you were born. We even know the approximate day you will die.[/box]

Although billed as a film noir in The Film Noir Guide, this is a pretty straight forward police-procedural with few nighttime shots.

The film was sanctioned by none other than J. Edgar Hoover and is more-or-less a puff piece lauding the FBI’s success in rooting out domestic espionage.  First we get a long, narrated prelude outlining the FBI’s unpublicized work against foreign agents before the war.

Then the film gets down to the specifics of a case in which a young engineering graduate is recruited by the Nazi’s and set up by the FBI as a mole.  After training in Heidelberg, he returns to the States with FBI-doctored credentials allowing him unfettered access to German agents.  His U.S. controllers are skeptical but have nothing against him and he has at his disposal both the money to pay informants and the means of broadcasting secrets back to Germany.  In reality, all his communications go direct to the FBI which plants disinformation before forwarding them.

The FBI’s big break comes when he is given crucial atomic bomb secrets to relay.  Can the FBI find the spy within the atomic bomb lab and foil the plot before their mole’s identity is discovered?   With Lloyd Nolan as the FBI agent and Wiliam Eythe as the mole.

There is nothing too inspiring here.  It plays as a well-made TV episode.

Charles G. Booth won the Oscar for Best Writing, Original Story for this film.

Clip – opening

Pride of the Marines
Directed by Delmer Daves
Written by Albert Malz and Marvin Borowsky from a novel by Roger Butterfield
1945/USA
Warner Bros.
First viewing/YouTube

[box] Al Schmid: Just for luck, maybe the ship’ll come in tomorrow with some mail on it.

Lee Diamond: Why is it that everything good is always gonna happen tomorrow?[/box]

This didn’t quite measure up to my expectations after seeing Garfield top-billed but it’s not bad by any means.  It’s mostly a coming home story but the one combat sequence is really the highlight.

Al Schmid (Garfield) is an ordinary Joe and factory worker.  He’s also a confirmed bachelor and ever wary of his landlady’s efforts to matchmake.  So he is deeply suspicious when the lady invites her friend, an alleged great bowler, to her birthday dinner.  Even though the friend turns out to be Ruth Hartley, a woman as beautiful as Eleanor Parker who plays her, Al treats her pretty shamefully.  But one thing leads to another and Ruth proves herself to be a ready companion for hunting and fishing, Al’s two passions, and they fall in love.

Then Pearl Harbor is attacked.  Al enlists in the Marines.  Before setting off for boot camp he attempts to set Ruth free but thinks better of it at the last minute.  After he is on Guadalcanal one of his great regrets will be not marrying her.

But Guadalcanal does not give Al much opportunity to ponder such things.  He is a machine gun operator stuck in a fox hole with two buddies and a horde of Japanese calling out “Marine, tonight you die” through the darkness.  When they attack, the Marines are clearly scared out of their wits.  One gets killed quickly and another, Al’s buddy Lee (Dane Clark), is badly wounded.  Somehow the three stave off the attack.  But everything culminates in a well-aimed grenade which robs Al of his sight.

Back in the States, Al refuses to write to Ruth until he can have the operation that he is convinced will restore his sight.  When the operation is not successful, Al becomes despondent, refuses to participate in his rehabilitation, and wants to break it off with Ruth. The rest of the story deals with Al’s extremely reluctant adjustment to the very real possibility that he will be totally blind.

This is an OK movie.  I thought the sequence on Guadalcanal was extremely effective.  It seems to me nighttime combat scenes work particularly well for some reason.  The heckling and shouts of Bonzai from the enemy made it seem eerily scary and real.  The melodrama is not up to the combat but was pretty good.  I could have done without the last minute of the film.

Pride of the Marines received an Oscar nomination for Best Writing, Screenplay.

Trailer

Isle of the Dead
Directed by Mark Robson
Written by Ardel Wray
1945/USA
RKO Radio Pictures
First viewing/Netflix rental

[box] Thea: Laws can be wrong, and laws can be cruel, and the people who live only by the law are both wrong and cruel.[/box]

Auteur producer Val Lewton takes this title to ask the question:  Who is the scarier, the vampire or those who believe in him?  A little too scattered to rank with the best of his work but graced by a rare fairly sympathetic role for Boris Karloff.

Gen. Nikolas Pherides is a strict taskmaster, nicknamed The Watchdog.  His first task is to execute one of his friends for a lapse by his troops.  An American journalist questions the good general’s methods but not so as to not accept an offer to visit the island graveyard of the general’s dead wife.

When they arrive, Pherides discovers all the caskets in the tomb of his wife have been emptied.  The two come upon a house where a superstitious local woman tells them the bodies were burned because one of them was evil.  This woman strongly believes in the legend of the Vorvolaka, a sort of female vampire.  Furthermore, she believes that Thea, a young woman caring for the invalid wife of the British Consul, is one.

To make matters worse, one of the guests in the house drops dead of plague and everybody is quarantined on the island.  The Watchdog runs a very tight ship.  He begins to believe in the Vorvolaka story as people continue to die.  In the meantime, we find out that the Consul’s wife is subject to cataleptic fits and is terrified of being buried alive.

This is a bit too all over the place to be really good.  I never was quite sure what exactly was meant to be happening.  I might need to listen to the commentary to find out.  The ending is also anti-climatic.  I can imagine this being made as an anti-McArthy allegory to great effect.  Karloff is great as always in a rare role where he gets to play a real human who has his faults but is not really such a bad guy.

Trailer