Above Suspicion (1943)

Directed by Richard Thorpe; produced by Victor Saville

Professor Richard Myles (Fred MacMurray) and his new bride, Frances (Joan Crawford), are about to depart on their honeymoon when they are waylaid by an old friend of Richard’s. Peter Galt (Richard Ainley) works ‘sort of’ for the Foreign Office, and asks the couple to take their honeymoon in Germany, so they can try to contact an acquaintance of Galt’s who has gone missing. Rather excited by joining what they correctly assume to be a Secret Service operation, the Myleses soon find themselves in sinister surroundings, caught up in disguises, false identities, secret formulae - and murder.

Above Suspicion has all the parts to make an enjoyable light, espionage caper film. It has highly capable actors, decent direction, a good pace. Yet, while it is certainly watchable, it is curiously uninvolving and forgettable.

The players do well. MacMurray is a good leading man and Crawford matches him. They admirably portray a couple who are caught up in what they see as the fun of an adventure, with secret meetings, hidden clues and the such, only to be confronted with rather more seriousness than they expected. If their chemistry isn’t perfect, it is good enough. Others of the cast are successful in their parts, too, including Conrad Veidt as a jovial Austrian tour guide, Basil Rathbone as an aristocratic old friend of Richard’s, and Bruce Lester as a neurotic Englishman on the verge of a breakdown.

The direction also works, though not quite as well. Thorpe doesn’t really capitalize on what should have been a fun atmosphere at the start of the film, though he makes up for it with good pacing later on. He also manages to convey the settings, which are both urban and rural.

The script and the story are the culprits, I think. From a novel by Helen Innes, the story is more convoluted that it should or need be. If one gets lost in the explanation of the mission, things probably aren’t going to be clearer later. There is a man to be located (identity unknown), who will lead the Myleses to another man (identity equally unknown), who will lead them to who they must find.

Once in Austria (by then a part of Germany), the pair is directed from one place to another through clues hidden books, maps, songs and flowers. We meet a Briton who may be part of an espionage operation, but seems bent on his own mission. And when the Myleses at last find what they were sent to retrieve, it’s an afterthought. Far too complicated, Above Suspicion’s script doesn’t make things clear for the viewer, and provides clues that no one outside of fiction would believe are meaningful. For example, three pin-prick holes in a map in the back of a book are almost immediately deduced as indicating page three in that book.

Aside from the pointlessly complex story, the script does not provide much in the way of interesting or clever dialogue, which would have helped tremendously. Though the characters MacMurray and Crawford play are likeable, they are hardly Nick and Nora Charles.

A light and inconsequential movie, Above Suspicion will entertain for its duration, but won’t be memorable enough to last long after that.

Riffraff (1947)

Directed by Ted Tetzlaff; produced by Nat Holt

An aeroplane takes off from Peru with two passengers and lands in Panama with one, who says his fellow inexplicably jumped out half-way through the flight. The survivor (Marc Krah) hires Dan Hammer (Pat O’Brien), part-time private eye, part-time bodyguard, all-time fixer, to protect him. Before Hammer can start his job, though, his client is murdered, and suddenly, several interested parties are after a map the dead man was carrying - and they all think Hammer knows where it is.

A fun, entertaining film noir in a slightly lighter-hearted vein than one such as The Big Sleep, Riffraff could very well have been a Humphrey Bogart vehicle. Instead, it’s Pat O’Brien who’s the hard-boiled hero. Though he is known today for playing Catholic priests, O’Brien took on such roles rarely, in terms of his total output, and was a tough guy more often than clergyman.

The producers may have taken a chance on O’Brien, 48 years old by this time and more than a little stocky, with a double chin. Set in the tropics, Riffraff shows Hammer in shirtsleeves quite frequently, so there’s no hiding his hefty girth. Yet such an admission of age adds to the character; more should have been made of Hammer’s obvious long experience in dangerous and shady dealings. As it is, O’Brien is both convincing and sympathetic in the part.

Other actors are equally successful. Anne Jeffreys plays the expected love interest, tough-talking but not as tough acting as some film noir dames, and provides a fresh face, despite this being her thirty-fourth film. Her road to Hollywood was unusual: trained as an opera singer, she was the lead in a number of big productions at Carnegie Hall before turning to the big screen. Percy Kilbride fills the part of side-kick and comic relief, and does a better job at both than many who have taken such parts. His interaction with O’Brien is genuinely amusing.

The writing is good, though the premise bears a resemblance to 1944’s To Have and Have Not, with the expatriate American in an exotic setting taking odd - and sometimes crooked - jobs; the older sidekick; the newly arrived girl (Jeffreys’s character, like Bacall’s in the earlier film, works as a singer in a bar); the police officer associate (George Givot as Major Rues, of the ‘Panama Secret Police’). Fortunately, Hammer’s milieu is made different from that of Bogart’s ‘Steve’ Morgan, more intimate and local. The story itself is not a mystery, nor is it very exciting, though what it lacks in tension it makes up for in entertainment.

(As regards the main character’s name, Mickey Spillane’s I, the Jury, the first Mike Hammer movie, was published the same year as Riffraff was released. Spillane’s Hammer made appearances in comic books previously, but under different names. It seems, considering the timing of both works, that neither could have influenced the other.)

The direction is very good, especially the opening scene, a knock-out of suspense and foreshadowing conducted without dialogue. The rest of the film does not live up to this scene’s standard, nor does the atmosphere created in the first ten minutes follow through to the other seventy. But Tetzlaff does very well, adding enough footage of real Panama - including views from a moving taxi-cab, that make the rest seem less like back-lot movie-making.

Tetzlaff directed a few other films, including the successful The Window (reviewed on this blog in November, 2020), but worked in cinematography on a fair number of very good films, such as The Talk of the Town, the 1936 version of My Man Godfrey, The More the Merrier and Notorious. Better in that job than in the director’s chair, Tetzlaff’s work here is nonetheless commendable.

Overall, Riffraff is an enjoyable, undeservedly overlooked winner in the film noir genre.

Paid to Kill (a.k.a. Five Days) (1954)

Directed by Montgomery Tully; produced by Anthony Hinds

James Nevill (Dane Clark), president of Amalgamated Industries, is a man who takes chances in business. His latest chance, a partnership with mercurial entrepreneur Cyrus McGowan (Howard Marion Crawford), seems to fall through, and he is faced with ruin and disgrace. In order to provide for his wife, Andrea (Thea Gregory), and escape the wreck of his reputation, Nevill blackmails an old acquaintance, Paul Kirby (Paul Carpenter) into killing him. When McGowan renews their partnership, however, Nevill’s desire to live is restored - but he can’t find Kirby to break their deal.

It seems to me that I have come across similar plots - in movies or television - before, though I can’t name the sources. It may be that Paid to Kill was one of the earliest to use the plot device of a man arranging his own death, changing his mind and having difficulty cancelling his arrangements. In any case, the movie is only partially successful.

The principal villain in the movie’s failure is the script. There are a number of questions which show carelessness in the writing. For instance, when Nevill wants to call off Kirby, he instructs his secretary (Cecile Chevreau) to contact him and inform him ‘the deal is off’, without of course telling his secretary about the ‘deal’. But to give Kirby an alibi, Nevill arranged for him to appear to be in Dublin for ten days’ medical treatment. Either the secretary should believe this and not know where or how to contact Kirby or, more likely, she should not even know who Kirby is. It isn’t until later that the arrangement is revealed to her.

The alibi Nevill prepares for Kirby is itself misplaced, since the desparate businessman appears to decide on his own murder the day McGowan backs out of the partnership. Nevill’s blackmail of Kirby seems to occur that very night, yet Nevill tells Kirby that doctors, hospital stay, x-rays, etc., will be all set for the killer’s alibi. The story gives no time for Nevill to build this façade.

And why does Nevill need to provide for his wife? They live in a mansion, with servants and spacious grounds, and she refers to ‘his’ money, implying wealth. If there are other debts rendering insurance payments necessary for a survivor’s comfortable life, these are not mentioned. For that matter, if the embarrassment Nevill would suffer due to McGowan’s desertion is financial, his own funds should be enough at least to serve as collateral for a loan.

A member of the board of Nevill’s company hates him, denigrating his methods of business. What we see of Nevill’s methods are not particularly low, nor even a little unpleasant, however risky they may be. It would have been informative to know to what specifically the board member objected. As well, there is a point at which the plot shifts a little, taking attention away from Kirby, and passing it to an unknown character. This is done too early, and gives away the game a little too easily.

An accomplice in the film’s lack of success is the acting. Though Clark handles his rôle well, as do a few other actors, some are definitely not even up to B-movie standards. Gregory and Carpenter are the primary culprits. The direction is adequate, Tully - who seems exclusively to have helmed low-budget works - does what he can with the limited production values, and creates a few good scenes.

Though armed with a decent premise, which the plot twist half-way through could have assisted if handled correctly, Paid to Kill fails to surprise or excite, and doesn’t give the viewer enough credit in its presentation of the story.

Cloudburst (1951)

Directed by Francis Searle; produced by Alexander Paal

In 1946 England, government cryptographer and war-veteran John Graham (Robert Preston) is looking forward to the birth of his son, and, with his wife, Carol (Elizabeth Sellars), watching him grow, attend Graham’s old school and play sports. These dreams are crushed when Carol is killed by a fleeing couple of murderers (Harold Lang, Sheila Burrell). Hiding evidence from the police to use for himself, Graham embarks on a hunt for the killers, to do to them what they did to his wife.

With a bit of a twist on the usual vigilante-out-for-revenge premise, Cloudburst has promise, but doesn’t really fulfill it. Much is made of Graham’s job in making and breaking codes but, except for a gimmick of a dropped clue, which is unnecessary, it merely uses up time. It doesn’t contribute to the story. If Carol had been killed in connection with her husband’s work, and breaking codes was integral to the plot, there would have been more interest to it.

The story itself tends to diminish the urgency or, perhaps, even the necessity of the plot. The murderers, already wanted for the death of a watchman, could be clearly identified by Graham. With what he sees and hears during the incident, he has information that would lead the police relatively swiftly to the culprits. He chooses to withhold what he knows in order to utilise it himself. The motivation is understandable - based on what Carol had said earlier, Graham is determined to find the killers himself - but it nonetheless makes his hunt for them almost a luxury, in terms of plot.

The script is co-written by the director and Leo Marks, who wrote the play from which the movie came. Marks was involved in the sort of intelligence and special operations work with which John Graham is involved, so the expertise is there, it’s just not well used. As well, the movie doesn’t take advantage of the dialogue: one scene features a character speaking of rage overcoming her like a cloudburst (the source of the title, no doubt); would it not have been entertaining to have the climax occur during such a meteorological event, giving both excitement and appropriateness?

The acting is fine. Preston, playing a Canadian, so that he doesn’t have to attempt an English accent, does a good job as the driven man. Sellars performs well in what is rather a small rôle, and the other actors offer the usual solid support found in British films, especially of the 1940s and ‘50s.

Francis Searle directed many films (though his last decade of productivity appears to have been given over to shorts), but none was particularly distinguished; Cloudburst was one of his more critically successful efforts. The direction seen in it, however, gives an indication of why Searle isn’t better known: there are some effective scenes, but nothing memorable. He does manage to break the story away from its stage origins.

While a moderately enjoyable film, Cloudburst leaves undone much that could have made it better, missing opportunities that would have given it characteristics different than many in its genre.

An Ungentlemanly Act (1992)

Directed by Stuart Urban; produced by Bradley Adams

On 2 April, 1982, Argentine armed forces attacked the British colony of the Falkland Islands, in order to annex what their country claimed to be Argentine territory. While the signs of such an invasion were clear, the governor of the islands, Rex Hunt (Ian Richardson), receives confirmation only on 1 April. To repel - or, realistically, to offer resistance to - the invaders, Hunt has a small force of Royal Marines (larger than usual, as the relieved garrison is still present, as is the relieving party) and a smaller force of militia. To the confusion of conflicting goals, contrasting responsibilities and intense stress are added the inevitable tragedy and comedy of a crisis.

An interesting and entertaining movie from BBC Television, An Ungentlemanly Act rises above the usual quality of tv fare to equal a small-scale but excellent cinematic production. This is due to several factors, including the acting, the direction and the script that clings closely to real-life events.

Richardson was one of the leading British stage actors, though he became famous through his screen-work, particularly as the devious politician in House of Cards (1990). British actors, unlike American (at least until recently), moved easily from stage to tv to movie to radio, considering no medium less than the others, and Richardson anchors An Ungentlemanly Act. Creating an urbane and cultured character, Richardson makes Hunt an effective official but also sympathetic; somebody whom one would like as a boss.

Equal to Richardson’s standard is Bob Peck, as the commander of the slim military forces the British initially have at their disposal. His Major Norman is, like Hunt, a good leader, tough, with a an understanding of the men under his command, though a stickler for details. Other performers include Rosemary Leach as Mrs Hunt and Ian McNiece as the colony’s chief secretary, both veteran actors. There isn’t a player who shouldn’t have been cast.

The story is a big element in the movie’s success. It starts slow, perhaps predictably, showing the various characters, especially the islanders, rather like an English village, isolated, and used to coping with their own resources. At one point, the viewer might wonder if the invasion is ever going to get under way, but when it does, we are treated to a series of encounters between opposing forces that are both realistic and exciting.

The script is superior, not so much in the lines spoken but in what they convey. In particular, the frustration that both the civil side (represented by Hunt) and the military (Norton) feel due to London’s tardiness (or reluctance) to relay information to the people on the spot is well expressed, in a restrained British manner. The conflict, such as it is, between Hunt and Norton over objectives of resistance is also clearly displayed, as is the fact that both are in the right: Norton looks at things purely militarily, while Hunt must consider political matters, along with his responsibility to the people he governs.

Individual character is not neglected. It’s interesting that Hunt initially might seem rather exaggerated in his display of ceremony, yet he knows his job and his duties, and maintains a sense of humour and sympathy in different situations. An intriguing character is played by Antonio Valero: the islanders assume he is an Argentine spy, yet like him nonetheless. His later drunken telephone call demonstrates both his feelings and which service he is in.

The story appears evenly balanced, with no good guys or bad guys. Though the British are defending their territory, the Argentine servicemen are patriotic, too. While their government at the time was a dictatorship then torturing and killing opponents, the soldiers and sailors in the assault see their actions as redressing an historical wrong. The actions of the men in combat are those of struggling to achieve goals against every obstacle, human and inanimate, not just an enemy.

The only drawback to An Ungentlemanly Act, for some viewers, may be the British accents of the islanders. I don’t know if the Falklands creates its own accent, but the people display a variety, from differs parts and classes of the British Isles, and these may, at first, cost some viewers comprehension. Apart from this, the film is a fine and compelling examination of a small incident, large to those involved, that led to something even larger.

The Proud Ones (1956)

Directed by Robert D Webb; produced by Robert L Jacks

The railway has come to a small Kansas town, prompting a boom: cattlemen are driving their herds in for shipping, hotels and saloons are opening, and gambling houses are mushrooming. Marshal Cass Silver (Robert Ryan) is probably alone in disliking the sudden growth. Especially since along with the wave of sudden prosperity comes ‘Honest John’ Barrett, an entrepreneur with a shady past and a history with Silver. Each man wants the other gone, but only Barrett will stoop to murder to have his way.

The Proud Ones is not a particularly distinguished western, despite the good cast. It has some interesting elements. That it takes place at a time of sudden and almost over-night growth in a town is different than in many westerns; it’s more usual to have a town where nothing is seen to change. The change happening here is a catalyst, not just for the plot, but for characters: most of the town is in favour of the increased business, new people and excitement. Even Silver’s girlfriend, Sally (Virginia Mayo), who runs a restaurant, likes it. For the marshal, it just means trouble.

The plot doesn’t take as much advantage of this as it could. It is shunted too strongly toward a semi-revenge story-line: young Thad Anderson (Jeffrey Hunter) thinks Silver killed his father, and just happens to be driving cattle near Silver’s town. His decision to befriend Silver is too abrupt, and even then, he seems to waver between believing Silver’s version of past events and not.

Added to the mix is Silver’s trouble with his eyesight: a blow to the head leaves him with periodic blurry vision.

Any of these elements would have been enough to build a story around. Including all of them leaves each not only incomplete but only half-heartedly contributing to the movie.

The acting is good. It’s enjoyable to see Ryan playing an unmitigated good guy, though he still gives the impression that he is the last man any troublemaker would want to annoy. Hunter does well, though I am beginning to think that he had too many early rôles as a young man with a chip on his shoulder. Mayo is under-used in her part; as well, Walter Brennan and Arthur O’Connell were at points in their careers when they should have had more to do in the film.

The direction is nothing extraordinary. This may have been Webb’s biggest effort in that regard; he alternated work as a director of mediocre films with that of a second unit director on bigger budget movies (eg. The Desert Fox) and even blockbusters (eg. Cleopatra). Despite his experience, and his family’s history in Hollywood, he creates nothing remarkable in The Proud Ones.

A fairly standard western, The Proud Ones has some interesting features that may allow it to be remembered. Nonetheless, I can’t see any viewer wanting to see it a second time.