The Man in the Mask of Silver strikes back.

 You can think of some movies as neglected primitives and some as expressions of misunderstood cultures but there's now doubt about Mexico's Santo, the Man in the Mask of Silver. His vehicles are trash made by people of basic competence but no imagination for the audience looking for juvenilia - or pornography or both.

Despite this, I keep on finding find myself watching them across a range of situations - researching their monster content for "The Seal of Dracula" my exploitation movie book, seeing them in European Fantastic Film Festivals or in the New York Hispanic cinemas and Paris Art Houses where they are equally at home. I once baled up Oliver Stone, who said he'd concealed the Mexican location shooting of Salvador, by pointing out a prominently displayed Santo poster. I got a much better interview after that. 

Even with an inherited swag of Santo movies on DVD I keep on coming back for more, this week in the Spanish Film Festival where Santo & Blue Demon Contra el Dr. Frankenstein was served up with some good natured live local masked luchadores as a warm up act - at standard prices.

Rodolfo Guzmán Huerta was born in 1917 and took an interest in sports as he grew, settling on Luche Libre, the Mexican version of wrestling which was brought across the American border in the mid thirties. Like all pro-wrestling this was more theatre than athletics, despite the fitness required of participants. Jules Dassin's 1950 English Night & the City has this at its center.

Rudolfo became possibly the most famous participant, always appearing in his silver mask in the Santo character, variously rendered as Superman, Samson and The Saint, in the dubbed versions that would circulate through late night US TV and in Spanish diaspora screening. His popularity was enhanced when comic book artist Jose Guadalupe Cruz circulated his exploits  over a thirty five year period and, after an initial resistance, Santo went into the movies in the early sixties, filming in pre-Castro Cuba with phenomenal and enduring success which critics, particularly English language ones, never chose to recognise.

The man in the mask of silver Santo contra el doctor Muerte 

The tone and  style of the Santo movies varied and became more conservative when moving to Eastman color pushed the budgets up. Our hero was to be seen in the company of mad scientists, Martians, little boys, vampires, the Wolf Man, naked women and the descendants of Frankenstein along with fellow luchadores including Blue Demon, Mil Mascaras and other and lesser mat masters.

Though other wrestlers rushed to the Mexican screen, Santo remained their star performer. Blue Demon was put out when, after having done such a good job overcoming the Mummies of Guanajuato, the characters and their writers felt it necessary to summon the Silver Masked Hero for the big finale.

In the festival show was Miguel M. Delgado's Santo y Blue Demon contra el doctor Muerte, a quite sedate Santo adventure with strip 'toon exploits delivered straight faced with routine competence by Delgado and his team but with a minimum of the dotty flamboyance that enlivens the best of these.

The plot was derived from Rene Cardona’s 1964 Las luchadoras contra el médico asesino / Rock  'N Roll Wrestling Women vs. the Aztec Ape. The later version opens with Lina Michel fresh from wardobe & make up (everyone looks like they come from the same department store catalogue as the furniture) being followed down the foggy street by kidnappers (close up of a black man’s eyes) who deliver her to Dr. Jorge Russek (in a couple of Peckinpah movies) the hundred year old grandson of the original Dr. Frankenstein. He seems to have taken on board Yeux sans visages or maybe Abbot & Costello Meet the Ghosts, switching the brains of the girl victims (“trepidation”) to perfect the operation which will restore his wife now in suspended animation and who we promptly forget about. The failed subjects of his operation go home and murder their intimates, who have reported them missing to the police commissioner, who in turn calls in Blue Demon and Santo, flat-sharing when not tag wrestling.

The staged matches with their stunt throws and an energetic commentary are the only part of this film that are clever.

The doctor has a master plan. His black strong man Golem already has the power of twenty and is controlled by a transistor inserted in his brain, but he lacks Santo’s intelligence, agility and skill, so what more logical than to steal the brain of the man in the mask of silver? His associate has recruited a couple of brain surgeons who Russeck rejuvenates to assist him. This is getting very La piel que habito / The Skin I Live In.

His ruffians make off with Santo's squeeze Sasha Montenegro. She goes on double dates where the Man in the Mask of Silver and Blue wear their masks and two piece suits to the up market restaurant surrounded by unsurprised diners.

With a match where Blue discovers Russek in a red mask, directing Golem via a microphone from the sidelines, our heroes pursue them using their lock picks to enter the doctor’s secret lab which looks like a TV quiz show set set doing double duty. They sort out the henchmen, Golem and medicos already in their scrubs and Russeck reverts to his true age - one dissolve to a made-up close up. Happy end. 

Outside the lucha libre, the only fun is to see the leads going about their business among locals un-fazed by their masks. It’s good for a laugh but no fair trade for the monsters and space men that enliven these.

We’re told it is a classic of Mexican cinema and has accordingly been subject to the OK restoration we are seeing.

    The Mummies of Guanajuato

 

Barrie Pattison - 2022

Cinémathèque, Serial and Victor Jasset.

Le cinémathèque Française' Henri site has reorganised so that you can see everything they are offering. It's only a sheet of thumbnails, a minute fraction of their huge holdings, but there's enough there to keep a serious enthusiast busy for a month - include the entire Ivan Mozjoukine serial of which one one complete hour episode is a punch-up between him and Charles Vanel that demolishes the room, Michael Curtiz' first surviving film, titles by Ukraine's leading director, a couple of Alan Dwan westerns, Jacques Feyder's remarkable Les nouveaux monsieurs and Protéa, a 1913 film by Victor Jasset.

Victor Jasset

The Eclair company's Victorin-Hippolyte Jasset’s name is one that only seems to occur in the early sections of books about film history, the bits you skip over to get to Film Noir and Ingmar Bergman, but it turns out that, in the nineteen tens when he was a major player, Jasset was bridging the gap between Georges Meliés and Louis Feuillade, still using the stage magician devices of the former but an accomplished exponent of the episode thriller material of the latter in items like Jasset's Zigomar serials. 

 

Jasset’s 1913 Protéa even fields lead Josette Andriot in black tights, making her an early entry in the cycle that runs though Musidora in Feuillade’s Les Vampyrs, Judith Magré in  Franju’s Judex and Maggie Chen in Olivier Assayas’ Irma Vip. As an added bonus the film is a surprisingly entertaining hour’s viewing for it's day and age. Though largely staged in one take one scene wide shots it features several of the innovations which were shaping cinema to come. 

The plot has fictional European country Messine sign a secret treaty which threatens the interests of equally non-existent Celtie, so their Chief of Police phones the country’s number one secret agent Protéa / Andriot. In silence the image cuts between the two sides of the call and gives us a good look at the chief’s imposing candle stick ‘phone set up.

Andriot agrees on condition that her wing man The Eel / Lucien Bataille be released from prison and, once they get the cuffs off him he escapes the police guard, showing up like Tom Cruise’s Jack Reacher, where they think they’ve lost him. From this point, the film offers non-stop action melodrama.

 Going into business, the pair get diplomat Viscount Osthansen, who holds the document, arrested by planting contraband in his valise. They emerge from the furniture in the the Messine Foreign Office, and are only thwarted by the night watchman (already parallel action). Further exploits offer Protéa concealed in the pillar present from the Viceroy of Numidia. She chloroforms the minister, replaces him with a lookalike dummy and goes on to present herself as the leader of an all-girl gypsy orchestra at a Messine Foreign office ball. Though the Viscount recognises her, the intrepid duo still manage to set the place on fire making their escape.

 

Now ace detective Inspector Max heads up the chase, raiding their apartment, where the pair use the disguises ready in their bed/wardrobe, and flee through a secret trap door to acquire a traveling zoo, with the Eel taking on the man-monkey character. (Don't ask!) At a stop-over at an inn near the border, Inn Keeper Mévisto sees through their new identities. Protéa assures the safety of the stolen treaty by placing it in the cage of lioness Sadie and pulls a convenient lever dropping the pursuers through the floor. Action continues with an early car chase and the equally destructive police set fire to the one timber bridge across the border (there can’t be much traffic) to thwart the couple’s escape but the leads go on in peasant disguises using stolen bicycles and as mounted soldiers, finally delivering the incriminating treaty to Celtie authorities.

The non stop scheming and switching identities holds attention even when plausibility suffers. The piece is quite elaborately staged with plenty of costumed extras and constant changes of setting. The circus material is particularly striking with the stars themselves working a small caged lion. 

Mlle Andriot is kind of chunky for modern taste but she carries the part with authority. Playing is reasonably restrained though they do slap papers they hold and point to them in anger. No one presses the back of their hand to their forehead. 

We can spot Jacques Feyder and Joseph Von Sternberg's mentor Emile Chautard in the support cast. The technical work was state of the art and then some. Even the opening titles, where they vignette the lead in her different characters spaced by repeating the image of a mask, were already quite a big ask for 1913 technology meaning a dozen passes through the camera for the negative. 

 

Title art.

Photographer Lucien N. Andriot even attempts to follow the action with the camera at one stage. He would have a long and occasionally distinguished career, shifting to Hollywood and Lewis Milestone’s Halleluya I’m a Bum along with a couple of René Clair's American films, in with a stream of B pictures. However note some of the effects, like shedding the Eel’s first disguise, were done with simple jump cuts and substitution in the style of Meliés.

 Protéa is more fun than its similar Italian contemporary Il Giglio Nero / The Sign of the Black Lilly which has surfaced and we've got to wonder what else the pre-WW1 fantastic action film had to offer. You must remember this is all happening before Fantômas, before The Perils of Pauline, before Dr. Mabuse. The adventure serials for which Louis Feuillade is conventionally given originator credit were already a vigorous line in film making. Me, I want to see Victor Jasset's Zigomar vs. Nick Carter. 

 The Henri copy of Protéa is sharp and detailed if marginally dupey. It has been attractively tinted and missing sections are represented by new title cards. The captions are in French.

 

Barrie Pattison 2022

Barrie Pattison 2022.

Tarantino & Corbucci

 Currently tucked away on Netflix is one of the largest pieces of the movie history jigsaw, Italian TV documentary maker Luca Rea’s 2022 Django & Django - Sergio Corbucci Unchained. It is basically a monologue by Quentin Tarantino about his idol, Italian director Corbucci.

The way it’s presented is pretty scattered. There’s the nice opening, where Tarantino sits in an auditorium and we go to his voice-over on drawings with limited animation, showing a characteristically never happened meeting between Corbucci and Rick Dalton, the fictional fading cowboy TV star lead of Tarantino’s 2019 Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. It's taking place in an Italian restaurant where the yank visitor keeps on putting his foot in it, confusing the host with Sergio Leone and knocking his Navajo Joe. (“Burt Reynolds in a black wig that makes him look like Natalie Wood”) Cartoon Corbucci saves the day by rejecting that one’s English dubbed version himself.

The European (Italian-Spanish-Yugoslav) action films, that followed the success of Steve Reeves as Hercules and invaded the world's Drive-Ins and grind houses from the fifties,  were polyglot, European, American or Israeli actors speaking their own language in the same scene. The French version of Corbucci's 1966 Django, which was filmed in Italian, has a play-out song in English. Corbucci never shot direct sound, meaning the final tracks were in the hands of dubbing crews of varying talent though, when the director became more prominent and the American market more important, his cast was likely to all speak English, a language in which Franco Nero, his Italian star was fluent.

Apart from being slyly entertaining and providing several savers, this opening to Django & Django sets out the agenda establishing Corbucci as an ignored pacesetter of the European popular cinema of the day. The convincingly faked Italian Rick Dalton movie promotion material shown in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, gets another airing here. Rea’s movie then settles in for the extended Tarantino monologue with well reproduced clips, on-set 16mm. shooting with frame lines visible and archival footage of the real Corbucci, along with new interviews with Franco Nero, now eighty years old and having fifteen films listed as in production, and Ruggero Deodato, assistant on thirteen Corbucci films, who claims to have come up with the distinctive red hoods the  KKK modeled heavies wear in Django. Rea's work assembles great material efficiently.

Though I felt like standing up and cheering for Tarantino bringing attention to my long time hero, I found myself at odds with his assessment. He correctly places the westerns and particularly “the Mexican Revolution trilogy” Django, Il Mercenario (“He sells death to the highest bidder. Buy or die”) and Compañeros as the centre piece of Corbucci’s career but enthuses over his flat footed Massacre at Grand Canyon, Minnesota Clay and The Specialist and appears to be unaware of the flamboyant Il Bianco, il giallo, il nero and Johnny Oro / Ringo & His Golden Pistol. He deals with Corbucci’s gladiator movies but ignores his later collaboration with Adriano Celantano which produced among others Er più: storia d'amore e di coltello, one of his best films. I’m also guiltily attached to Il figli del Leopardo a Franco Franchi and Ciccio Ingrassia burlesque of the Visconti film, where Corbucci’s familiar split screen has Cicc. playing both the Burt Lancaster and Claudia Cardinale characters simultaneously.

Indeed I’m not happy with Tarantino’s assessment of Corbucci as inferior to the ponderous Sergio Leone. (“It's not a dogfight in Italy. Number two is fucking Corbucci.”) This echoes the interview that Burt Reynolds gave after Navajo Joe, about working with “the wrong Sergio.”

However I come at this, it remains fascinating. I’d homed in on Corbucci’s 1966 Ringo & His Golden Pistol when it showed up at the Sydney Capitol in one of those polished English language versions (“Smile at me Ringo, for I am death!”) MGM produced at that stage. I did a screening here on a copy that was specially made for the event and, when I got back to Europe, Django was one of the nine films banned in Australia that I saw in my first week. It rocked me back on my heels. Though I didn’t realise it at the time, I'd plugged into what would become a dominant movie tradition.

The movies that Tarantino grooved on in his video store days are the ones I used to schedule trips to Europe to catch on their first runs there, knowing they weren’t going to surface in Britain (or Australia) where they were despised or banned for their violence, an aspect Django & Django lovingly annotates, complete with the hapless Northerner’s ear being cut off in Django. The 1968 Il grande silenzio / The Great Silence followed a particularly revealing arc getting a Paris first release two weeks of wide showing and disappearing to re-surface in one art theater where it ran for months, after star Jean Louis Trintignant got his Cannes Grand Prix. Trintignant out maneuvered dodgy dubbing by playing his character as a mute and Django & Django has a nice clip of a press conference where he mimes his responses.

Compañeros - Thomas Milian & Corbucci

A whole feature documentary devoted to the film maker who riveted my attention half a century back is going to be like Xmas under any circumstances but this one has the added attraction of prompting me that what I noticed was not just a run of ferociously entertaining movies but also the birth of what is now a shift in the dominant mind set. The clue is in the film’s clip where Corbucci explains that his inspiration was in the comic books of the day, in which he found his man with the coffin, who he even smuggled into his Toto movies.

Corbucci was not the only one to absorb this. Glauber Rocha and Antonio des Mortes and George Miller and Mad Max, with its Heavy Metal comix imagery, were coming out of the same door.  The bandes dessinés, the graphic novels which blossomed in the sixties, are a major input into these but the films also belonged to the era of May ‘68 and European “political” cinema.

Django & Django goes into Corbucci’s background, growing up during WW2 in a fascist home, even singing in a choir that welcomed Hitler to Rome.  As an adult, not only did he reject the Right but he had minimal sympathy with the New Left. Il Mercenario was originally to have been made by the highly politicised Gillo Pontecorvo and Corbucci turned its content into a comic confrontation between the two outlooks. Compare this to the then contemporary issues films of Elio Petri (Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto / Invesitigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion) or Damio Damiani (L'istruttoria è chiusa: dimentichi / We Are All on Provisional Release), key contributors to the Italian cinema. Damiani also did a handsome spaghetti western.

Being handled by the same international distributors, the Seventies Hong Kong cinema absorbed the Italian model. For starters, Giulio Petroni's Da uomo a uomo / Death Rides a horse of 1967 is a martial arts sensei and student-fighter piece with John Philip Law and Lee Van Cleef acting out the plot we will see ten years later with Jackie Chan and Siu-Tin Yuen in the prototypical Zui quan / Drunken Master.

All this totally baffled the critical establishment, partly because the materials never reached the festivals and press shows which were their frame of reference. The Euro Westerns found their home in exploitation outlets, if they weren’t just banned outright for their violent content. Some of them are still prohibited on paper, never having been re-submitted, though that proved a permeable barrier with alternative titles and VHS and DVD distribution, often furtive - not to mention the foreign language circuits of happy memory. The European writers I discussed the cycle with wouldn’t have a bar of them, clinging to the John Ford western model with its nineteenth century origins in Bret Harte, Peter B. Kyne and Frederick Remington. I remember arguing about this with Bertrand Tavernier who had decided Sergio Leone was an auteur, which made him all right.

Tarantino - Sukiyaki Western Django

Tarantino on the other hand was fascinated with the Django phenomenon, though (like me!) he never got round to his planned book on Corbucci.  Vincent Jourdan’s “Voyage Dans le Cinema de Sergio Corbucci” now fills that gap. Tarantino appeared in Takashi Miike’s 2007 Sukiyaki Western Django and made his own Django Unchained with a sequel, Django / Zorro now in the pipeline, and placed Corbucci as an (off screen) character in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

The Django character appears to arrive copyright free and the name was even post-produced onto the leads in Euro westerns which were shot with a different protagonist. He doesn't come on with a dog like Hondo or The Westerner's Dave Blassingame. Nero doesn't even have a horse when we first see him dragging the coffin by foot. It is difficult to give individual traits to the character when it contaminated so many other spaghetti western heroes though, as with Sartana, it does still conger up certain expectations -  solemnity, ultra-violence, not much of a sex life and an ability to mow down squads of extras. 

Corbucci had settled into burlesques and rip offs - a 1961 Toto La dolce vita, Toto and Vittorio de Sica in I due marescialli (also 1961) from La traversée de Paris, the all star Il giorno più corto (1963) from The Longest Day and the later Er più from Fellini Roma. By 1966 he'd already done those few early Euro westerns and even scripted Mario Mattoli's Per qualche dollaro in meno / For a Few Dollars Less that year, so it was logical to wheel him in to counterfeit A Fistful of Dollars. Young Franco Nero had a support role in Corbucci's Gli uomini dal passo pesante /The Tramplers and scored his first lead in Django. The result, while it had zero impact on English language commentators, was huge in the world of Spaghetti cowboys.

Rather than reduce Corbucci's status, Django's origins in the dollars films places him in the company of celebrity directors who did their best work improving on established material - Rouben Mamoulian channeling Ernst Lubitsch with Love Me Tonight and his Tyrone Power versions of The Mark of Zorro and Blood and Sand or John Sturges spinning The Walking Hills off The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Bad Day at Black Rock off High Noon and Magnificent Seven off the Kurosawa original.

Now in the wake of Tarantino's efforts, sixty years after his triumphs and thirty years after Corbucci's death, the Paris Cinémathèque has done a major retrospective and people who heaped scorn on his work when he was alive now lecture about it. Along with the Vincent Jourdan book and Django & Django, there’s Gioia Magrini & Roberto Meddi’s 2015 one hour documentary Sergio Corbucci: L'uomo che ride.

Films trading in sixties art cinema's jump cuts, improvisations, available light photography and montages of wall paper have receded, shrunk into badly attended day time sessions at film festivals, while the Mighty Marching Marvel Super Heroes, Mad Max, The Batman and Tarantino’s films are filling auditoria in what may be the twilight of theatrical exhibition. Like it or not, it is Sergio Corbucci's strip cartoon aesthetic that has flourished. That's not the first wrong guess from the critical consensus.

It's worth thinking about that.

Django - Franco Nero, the man with the coffin.

Barrie Pattison 2022
    

Raoul Walsh and Joan Bennett.

Raoul Walsh was a hot ticket there for a while. He was canonized for directing The Roaring Twenties and White Heat  along with the silent What Price Glory or The Fairbanks Thief of Baghdad, to which you could add his early Regeneration - without undue consideration for the films that spaced these. His musicals didn't seem to exist - Artists and Models or Glory Alley anyone? There were attempts to fill the gaps. I remember a piece explaining the thought content of Jane Russell's The Revolt of Mamie Stover, complete with explanatory diagram - which struck me as desperation. 

 In the seventies, I caught retrospectives at Edinburgh and Marly-le-Roi outside Paris, where the U.N. conference stagiaires sharing the accommodation were invited to be guests at  the evening movies as a treat for all their serious work. I talked to one of them who was puzzled. He could see why Ida Lupino in The Man I Love and Robert Mitchum in Pursued were crowd pleasers but Band of Angels!  It was nice to get my own reaction reflected back from an uncontaminated source.

More recently, I managed to find disks on a couple of pacey programmers with Joan Bennett that are buried in Walsh's occasionally dispiriting filmography.

1932's Me and My Gal is a crude but still agreeable early-sound Walsh comedy-melodrama. Spencer Tracy and particularly a gum chewing, blonde Bennett manage to be endearing and the support is good, complete with Birth of  Nation's Little Colonel, Henry B. Walthall, doing a paralyzed ex-navy man who can only communicate by blinking in Morse code, like Herbert Marshall in Jack Smight's The Third Day.

 The film starts with a close up of Spence on the pier he’s patrolling, brushing his policeman hat. A destitute man is about to drown the dog Spence adopts. Soon our hero’s sassing cafe cashier Bennet “It’s very beautiful hair. Where did you get it?” Turns out that, though Bennett’s sister Marion Burns is marrying George Chandler, she is the old flame of gangster George Walsh. Mob leader Noel Madison wants her to provide the list of strong box numbers from her job at the bank.

At the wedding, dad J. Farrell McDonald is drunk enough to throw the radiogram out the second story window but, when Spence is called, he gets on with chatting Joan on the landing outside the beery celebration, where groom Chandler has passed out. 

Spence starts calling on Joan (“I hear flat feet”) and we even get a “Strange Interlude” voice over scene on the couch -  dissolves from the leads sparking to the gang working on Burns  or from the apartment stairs to those in the Prison Walsh escapes from strapped under a car, a nice piece of Gordon Wiles decor, with the sliding wire mesh gates.

The heavies intimidate the upstairs immigrant family with “a revolver” (actually an automatic) and cut through their floor into the safe deposit box vault. The dog signals the intruder hidden upstairs and Walthall has spotted Burns in the mirror, smuggling in the fugitive, but can only communicate by blinking. Spence figures the Morse Code angle but has to get Joan to transcribe the message on her order pad, this coming after he's been given the dead or alive briefing by Capt. Emmet Corrigan. 

Nice shoot out in the attic. Wedding happy ending, Spence in a top hat.

Walsh, Bennett & Tracy.

 Walsh's  weak comedy routines, inserted at regular intervals don’t get laughs & slow things down -  the hat jokes, the repeating of Tracy’s words by the sidekick detective told to model himself on Spence, the comics arguing about what kind of fish drunk Will Stanton hit them with. Rather better is the street language “I never knew how much I liked you till the other night when you gave me the air.” and the the grim Depression humor. “Bank robbery - who did they rob this time?”  Phillip Dunne and Charles Vidor are among those credited on the script.

The spitting bar fly is a recognisable Walsh character. McDonald stepping into close up to speak to the camera anticipates the opening of Gentleman Jim. There’s even a Bronx cheer.

George Lipschultz'  score is OK. Timing is generally good for the day and there are striking shots like the radio crashing to the  path, the mobster’s pistol edge of frame as Tracy comes up the attic stairs or the gang seen looking up through the hole they have cut in the bank ceiling. Wiles' studio built decors are particularly an asset - the working class tenement flats and the busy pier recalling Regeneration. 

Raoul Walsh was in his element with these undemanding street-smart pieces and it's a pity that Zanuck-era Fox let them go out of circulation, changing our perception of star and director. 

 

Separated from his long standing association with Fox, artificiality is creeping into the director's work by the time we get to Paramount's 1936 Big Brown Eyes. It's quite zippy for him at this period, working with his own script and having old Fox associate Bennett along, still a blonde. It's not clear who has the Big Brown Eyes referred to in the original story by Hondo's James Edward Grant.

The piece is framed by sessions in the crowded hotel barbershop where Bennett is a popular manicurist and mobsters come in for a spruce up or a pineapple soda, which Snowflake Tunes is quite willing to finish, when they get taken away to the station house. The chatter in the salon is about the jewel robberies where the gems seem to always end up back with owners like hotel resident Marjorie Gateson. She has eyes for both recovery specialist Walter Pidgeon and investigating cop Gary Grant, who is sparking Bennett. Joan takes a dim view of finding him coat removed (Gateson poodle’s spilled tea on it) in Gateson’s apartment. So much for the exposition.

Grant, Jewell & Bennett.

Joan, with an ear for the gossip, is hired on by Joe Sawyer (what happens to him?) as a news reporter and Walter proves to be the criminal mastermind who cleans up on the insurance pay-offs for jewellery recovery. While he’s negotiating with nasties Alan Baxter and Henry Brandon, Walter’s henchman Lloyd Nolan manages to shoot a baby in a pram. Hired-in gunman Francis McDonald, drawing attention to the pistol in his overcoat, intimidates witness Isabel Jewell, who goes to jelly at the line up. However reporter Joan uses a fake headline and a few rounds from Cary’s piece to psych hood Douglas Fowley, clean shaven here, into ratting out the mob - nice piece of acted jitters. The film is more focused on Nolan’s delight in getting off than bereaved mother Helen Brown’s grief.

Outraged, Cary quits the force. The film’s one style coup is a shift from knockabout to serious as it looks like Cary’s vigilante tactics have gone wrong.

It’s nice to see the leads together. Nearly all of their scenes are played in two shots so we can watch them react to one another. Grant has already found his character, though it's not an exact match for a police hero. His unfunny ventriloquist act is clearly dubbed. The film’s attempt at innovation in carrying the exposition in close-ups of the gossip in the barber shop doesn’t really play and the wise cracks in the script aren’t as clever as they clearly think “Somebody’s likely to find their hat floating in the river.” “He doesn’t deserve a chair. They should fry him standing up.”

Producer Walter Wanger has given this one a distracting, expensive finish to make it a vehicle for his wife Bennett. The film curiously anticipates more substantial work - Baxter and Brandon’s re-appearance foreshadows the one given Charles McGraw and William Conrad in The Killers and there’s a bit of Dirty Harry Callaghan in Grant’s disillusioned cop. However you have only to compare this one with His Girl Friday, which Big Brown Eyes intermittently resembles, to see the difference between serious film and schedule filling.

Barrie Pattison 2022