Sep 261945
May 061945
Count Dracula (John Carradine) and Larry Talbot, aka: The Wolf Man (Lon Chaney) both seek out the great scientist, Dr. Edelman (Onslow Stevens), in order to be cured of their respective curses. Talbot and Edelman find Frankenstein’s Monster (Glenn Strange), which they bring back to Edelman’s laboratory. With three monsters, in the house it is only a matter of time before the fighting begins and villagers are killed.
As soon as I hear that old, Universal Pictures monster music, I’m in another place. There’s something about those melodies, reused many times by 1944, that creates a kick-back-and-have-some-fun world of cool creatures. Of course, by the time House of Dracula came out, that world and the creatures in it were getting pretty shabby. There was still a bit of style left, particularly noticeable in the high-contrast camera work, and Lon Cheney (this time with an out-of-place mustache) could play the guilt-ridden Talbot in his sleep, but the rest had seen much better days.
The plot of this final monster-mash flick (before the era of Abbott and Costello) is cobbled together from previous movies, and there is nothing of interest or emotion to be found in it. The Frankenstein’s Monster is only in the film for a few minutes, and Dracula is no longer the fierce and foreign creature of the night that Lugosi made of him, but an effeminate Southern gentleman. For a film with the three greatest monsters of cinema running about, it has almost no carnage. Only the scientist, who is the film’s good guy, manages to kill anyone. (Frankenstein’s Monster does hit a villager, but the outcome is unclear.)
House of Dracula is the seventh film in Universal’s Frankenstein series, and the fourth in its Wolf Man series, though it ignores a good deal of the previous films. While the title would point to this being a continuation of the Dracula “legend,” there is no connection to the earlier Dracula films, although Carradine did play the Count once before. It is an unnecessary entry if your interest is in the continuing storylines of the monsters (although it’s unfair to make that a criticism of this film as most of the sequels were unnecessary). Only Talbot/The Wolf Man has anything significant happen to him. Strangely, I’m not counting dying as being significant as The Monster had died six times before without any ill effect.
While the three monsters get the billing, the film belongs to the only-slightly-mad scientist. He gets most of the screen time. Onslow Stevens is more than up to the challenge, but with so many storylines, he doesn’t get enough to do. And the less said about his magical, bone-softening mold (that can cure lycanthropy by taking pressure off the brain…), the better.
Fans of the classic monster movies will enjoy House of Dracula, but only because it is a reminder of better films that came before it.
The other films in the Frankenstein series are Frankenstein (1931), Bride of Frankenstein (1935), Son of Frankenstein (1939), Ghost of Frankenstein (1942), Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man (1943), and House of Frankenstein (1944).
The earlier Wolf Man films are: The Wolf Man (1941), Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man, and House of Frankenstein.
Mar 081945
Magazine publisher Alexander Yardley (Sydney Greenstreet) arranges for a war hero to stay at his food columnist’s farm in Connecticut during Christmas. The problem is that the columnist, Elizabeth Lane (Barbara Stanwyck), doesn’t have a farm, or know how to cook.
Quick Review: A combination farce and romance with a little wartime patriotism, Christmas in Connecticut works on every level. While the writing is good (and the directing is superb; the film whips along without a dull moment), it is the cast that makes this a holiday classic. Barbara Stanwyck is at her best, pulling off strong and silly simultaneously. Christmas in Connecticut is blessed with some of the great character actors, including Sydney Greenstreet (The Maltese Falcon), S.Z. Sakall (Casablanca), and Una O’Connor (The Adventures of Robin Hood). With those three, you don’t need anything more than a room for them to speak in.
Mar 021945
Sherlock Holmes (Basil Rathbone) and Dr. Watson (Nigel Bruce) are sent to Drearcliff manner, situated on a coastal cliff in ever-misty Scotland. There, two member of the “Good Comrades” club have died after receiving an envelop filled with orange pits. The members all live together in an aged house, looked after by housekeeper Mrs. Monteith, and each had taken out an insurance policy naming the surviving members as joint beneficiaries, so it seems likely that one of them is the killer. The bodies have been mutilated according to a curse on the house that those who die will not go to their graves whole.
Whenever I review a film that is primarily seen as a mystery, I feel the need to justify doing so. After all, I don’t review mysteries, but I do review horror. The House of Fear fits into that category, more precisely in the Old Dark House horror category. Pivotally, the setting is an old dark house, with twisting stairs, multiple rooms, large windows, and plenty of ornate objects to cast long shadows. It also has a secret passageway. Then there is a storm, a curse, illegal digging in a graveyard, and a sinister housekeeper who announces who is to die next.
This was a Universal picture, the kings of horror. They’d taken over the franchise from Fox after the first two Holmes Rathbone films, and while their first forays were WWII propaganda spy films—and were the weakest of the series—they eventually found their feet, putting Holmes into several gothic tales. It was an area Universal excelled in. They knew how to set an eerie tone. The literary Holmes stories might be all about logic, but Universal made this one about fog and rain, and as the title says, fear. If their intentions weren’t clear enough, they released it on a double bill with The Mummy’s Curse.
This is my favorite of the 12 Universal films. The mystery is solid, giving viewers enough information to solve it, but making it complicated enough that they probably won’t; it’s claimed to be based on Doyle’s “The Five Orange Pips,” but only in a very general way. The atmosphere is even better, with a nicely creepy vibe through most of it, and a wonderful nightmare-like scene where Watson runs in and out of the house as the storm is raging, frightened that killers are all around him. The sets are beautiful if inexpensive, with the house borrowed from Sherlock Holmes Faces Death (1943) and the town and graveyard reused from Universal’s Classic Monster films.
Rathbone might not have been at his peek (this was his tenth time in the part and he was tiring of it, though he was very fond of the Universal team and director Roy Neill), but all he needed to do to control a scene was stand there with that profile and speak with his slicing but lyrical voice. It might not be his best performance in the part, but it’s still better than anyone else has managed. The rest of the cast are solid. It has a hole here or there and can’t match the Fox Holmes duo, but for a rainy day film, The House of Fear is perfect.
Jan 151945
Joe Brady (Gene Kelly) is a wolfish sailor on leave, anxious to hook up with a girl he knows. Clarence Doolittle (Frank Sinatra) is his inexperienced friend who wants Joe to find him a girl. They are dragged in by the police to help deal with a lost child who is running away to join the navy. The kid leads them to his guardian, Susan Abbottt (Kathryn Grayson), who wants to be a singer but can’t meet the right people. Both Joe and Clarence fall for her, and silliness ensues.
What’s with Gene Kelly being a service man with a few wild days in the city? He kept doing this. Well, Anchors Aweigh isn’t On the Town. I just wanted their leave to be over and for them to sail away. Sinatra’s wimpy hick act (who thought this was a good film persona for Sinatra, yet he used it in multiple pictures) is always annoying, but here it’s ghastly. “Oh gosh and golly, I don’t know anything about them women-folk.” Ah! I didn’t want him to get the girl. Or to continue breathing. Kelly’s “good bad boy” bit isn’t a favorite either, but it doesn’t lead me to want to murder him, so that’s something.
The film is unbalanced. Kelly is a show-tunes and jazz-ballet guy. Grayson’s voice is operatic. The styles don’t mix. And the filmmakers don’t try. Grayson does her songs off by herself, and Kelly and Sinatra do theirs, with Kelly more often dancing alone since Sinatra’s footwork is…not Kelly’s. Since Grayson doesn’t dance, there’s no partnering there. They belong in different films, and it feels that way. The romance(s) are dead on arrival as well, and the added propaganda moments are cringe worthy (yes, I get why they wanted people to join the navy in 1945). And I choked on the sugary sweet mush involving the child. Pauline Kael called it “stupidly wholesome.”
Kelly has some nice dances, and the cinematography is good, with vibrant colors galore, but there’s really only one thing that’s worth the films overlong length (2 hours and twenty minutes!): the famous dance pairing of Kelly and Jerry the mouse. And that dance, like several of Kelly’s, is irrelevant to the story. It’s a short film stuck in the middle of a too long one, and could have been plucked out and dropped into any other Kelly musical, or just released on its own. It is a classic, but is it enough to force you to sit through the other 2+ hours? Well, times have changed and we’ve got home video with fast-forward, which would do wonders for this film. But there’s no reason to even go there. MGM took it and La Cumparsita, another fine dance that doesn’t need to be in the picture, and put them both into their Best-of feature, That’s Entertainment! And that’s the final nail in Anchors Aweigh’s coffin.
My other reviews of Gene Kelly films: Cover Girl (1944), Ziegfeld Follies (1946), The Pirate (1948), Words and Music (1948), On the Town (1949), Summer Stock (1950), An American in Paris (1951), Brigadoon (1954), It’s Always Fair Weather (1955), Les Girls (1957), The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967).
Dec 211944
A middle aged professor (Edward G. Robinson) runs into a beautiful call girl (Joan Bennett) while admiring her portrait and they go back to her apartment. A jealous client bursts in and attacks the professor and they kill him in self defense. Fearful of their reputations, and that they won’t be believed, they decide to hide the body. The client turns out to have been an important man so the police dive in—with the professor getting a play-by-play of the hunt for himself over drinks with his good friend, the District Attorney (Raymond Massey). Things get worse when a blackmailer shows up (Dan Duryea).
It’s an old truism that films come in twos (notice animated bug movies and Hercules movies in a single year), so why not just go for it? So in 1944 and 1945 director Fritz Lang and actors Edward G. Robinson, Joan Bennett, and Dan Duryea made a pair of Film Noirs about a middle-aged man happening upon a beautiful prostitute that leads to murder. The second was Scarlett Street and this is the first.
The Woman in the Window starts as the better of the two. Both the professor and the call girl (it’s never specified that is her job due to the censors, but it is obvious) are likable and understandable, so when they are tense, so is the viewer. I wanted them to escape. And this is a brighter Noir world than Scarlett Street, so it seems almost as if they could. Everyone isn’t petty or evil. Both our leads are nice enough, the professor’s vacationing wife is loving, his friends are pleasant, and the police seem reasonable. Only the dead man and the blackmailer are evil. So the world isn’t bad and corruption isn’t inevitable; the pair is just stuck in a bad situation with no good way out.
There are a few minor failing along the way. Our professor makes a few too many stupid slips—not the sort one would expect from nerves, but more the sort you find with a screenwriter trying to be cute. He keeps saying things to the district attorney about the murder before he’s been told (that the missing person was murdered, that there was barbed wire at the scene, that the body was dumped at night). And I’m skeptical about multiple things dealing with the murder scene, but that’s all easy to overlook.
The Girl in the Corner is a superior Noir for 132 minutes, and then it all falls apart in the last 7. This is damns bursting and bridges collapsing kind of falling apart. First we have a ridiculous coincidence that would be enough to take a star away from its rating, but that’s before something far, far worse. I’ll leave you to discover it if you are so inclined and only say that it is the worst possible ending they could have tacked on—Superman swooping in to save the day, everyone breaking into a song and dance, or the professor revealing himself to be a mob boss in hiding and machine-gunning everyone would all have been preferable. So choose one of those and stop the film early.
Oct 081944
The 3rd film in the Kharis series. In Mapleton, Massachusetts, the mummy Kharis (Lon Chaney Jr.) is animated once again by tana leaves. Joined by an Egyptian priest (John Carradine), he searches for the body of Princess Ananka to take it back to Egypt. But her spirit has been reincarnated into the body of a college girl.
How many times can you tell the same story? Kharis is a one trick pony and that pony was tired and lame to begin with. Kharis wants Ananka back. Gee, I guess the two previous films (The Mummy’s Hand, and The Mummy’s Tomb) didn’t cover that. There’s yet another Egyptian cult priest to aid him, just like before. There is nothing, absolutely nothing new, different, or interesting going on.
The Mummy moves like those bandages are for multiple fractures. You can laugh at the victims who don’t run away (or walk away, or even crawl away), but you won’t be terrified, or even believe it could happen. A single monster this slow is never frightening. Nor is one in an obvious rubber mask.
The college setting and characters add nothing. The girl/princess has too little story to make her sympathetic (or even noticeable). The useless boyfriend has “generic” stamped on his head. The police, while immediately accepting that there is a mummy running around (shouldn’t you then call in scientists and the army?), are too incompetent to follow him, even when he drags his leg while traipsing through mud. But these are cops who don’t notice a monster climbing down a tall ladder right behind them, so I shouldn’t expect them to be able to track anything.
John Carradine manages to give some personality to his Egyptian priest, but it is a thankless role. Are religious fanatics normally so easily distracted by a pretty girl? Aren’t there any cute chicks in Egypt who won’t think he’s evil?
The beauty of the cinematography of the early Universal films is missing. Instead of the high contrast, innovative look of Frankenstein or even The Wolf Man, The Mummy’s Ghost has the look of ’50’s drive-in fare. The supposed night scenes are particularly painful.
Considering the re-tread story and characters, the ending is surprising. Director Reginald Le Borg had to argue for the unusual finale—not what I would have expected from him considering his failings in all other aspects of directing.
My 
rating is being generous.
The Kharis series end with The Mummy’s Curse, which was also released in 1944.
Oct 081944
The 4th film in the Kharis series. Workers in a Louisiana swamp uncover the body of the mummy Kharis (Lon Chaney Jr.). Again, a priest animates him with tana leaves, and they search for the now arisen Princess Ananka.
Somehow, the New England swamp (there are swamps in New England?) from The Mummy’s Ghost has been transported to the Louisiana Bayou. Hmmm. But should I expect any better continuity from the people who set this film twenty-five years after the last, but both are in the 1940s? At least the setting allows some racial variation from the normally pale, Universal monster movie cast. However, when that brings us Goobie, the black stereotype who actually utters the phrase, “Aaa d’nm know M’sta Walsh,” I think the normal all-Caucasian world is less offensive.
As a parody, this might have been a quality movie, and it looked like they were going that way for a time. In the previous films (The Mummy’s Hand, The Mummy’s Tomb, and The Mummy’s Ghost), people just stood there waiting for the Mummy to finally kill them, but here, he pops up behind a couple standing by their car. They never notice him, step out of his grasp when he reaches out, and eventually get into their car and drive off with the mummy standing by, frustrated. There is a monastery on a hill in the middle of the swamp and the amnesiac girl is given a job as a research assistant. This is pretty funny stuff. Ah, but it is played straight.
The story is the same as in the previous three films so there’s nothing of interest in that. Again, a long clip from The Mummy’s Hand (which is slightly altered footage from 1932’s The Mummy) is used to pad the overly short movie.
So why watch this flick? There’s no overwhelming reason, but the amnesiac Princess Ananka is actually interesting, and has more personality than the previous, collegiate princess (which is hardly an impressive statement). The rebirth of Ananka, rising out of the swamp and gazing at the sun, is a great scene—the sort of thing Universal monster films are remembered for. Nothing else in The Mummy’s Curse is worth a second look.
Oct 061944
In 1918, Lady Jane Ainsley (Frieda Inescort) assists in the staking of the vampire, Armand Tesla (Bela Lugosi), which frees his werewolf slave, Andreas (Matt Willis). Twenty-three years later, a German bomb opens Tesla’s grave and the stake is removed, returning him to un-life. He quickly puts Andreas under his thrall, and sets out to revenge himself on Ainsley by attacking her son and his fiancée.
Here is Bela Lugosi as a vampire, that is for all practical purposes, Dracula. Sounds like another Universal classic. But it isn’t. This was Columbia Pictures’ attempt at playing in Universal’s yard, and while it is far weaker than Dracula or The Wolf Man, Universal itself wasn’t putting out anything better in 1944.
That Columbia wasn’t quite up to the task is apparent in the first frames as it’s easy to see we’re looking at a model, not an actual house. The entire project has a cheap, stage-bound look about it. Excess fog is used to cover the corners of the set, with little success.
The plot, what little of it there is, consists of Tesla, popping up far too seldomly, carrying out his rather timid revenge on the family of those who staked him twenty-three years earlier. At the same time, Lady Jane, one of the “stakers,” repeatedly tells Scotland Yard about a vampire while a stuffy Scotland Yard detective, quite rightly, says “pish-posh” to that. The story feels so slight that you may find yourself looking for the prequel or sequel where events unfold and characters are developed.
But this is still Lugosi as a vampire, and that’s a sight to see. At sixty-two, Lugosi’s a bit old for the part, though he looks better than you might imagine. He controls any scene he’s in, and his voice and eyes are as remarkable as ever.
Return of the Vampire (not a sequel by the way—the vampire is returning after being staked at the beginning of the film) brought monster films into the “modern” era, acknowledging WWII and the threat of German attack (a war strangely lacking from the later Universal releases set in the early ’40s). More revolutionary, it presented a strong, intelligent female, not as the victim, but as the primary foe of the vampire.
The best and worst of the film is wrapped up in the character of Andreas. Matt Willis believably portrays the pain of an enslaved man, unable to control his own mind. He also is one of the better evil servants of the classic era. But it is hard to get past his makeup, that makes him look not like a werewolf, but some kind of werehound or weremutt. He’s expressing his anguish, and all I want to do is toss him a Scooby Snack.
If you’re not a fan of classic monster movies, skip Return of the Vampire. But for those of us who think of Lon Chaney, Boris Karloff, and Bela Lugosi first when we hear the word “horror,” here is a pleasant reminder of a type of film no longer made.
Oct 061944
Danny McGuire (Gene Kelly) runs a small club where he performs with his girl Rusty (Rita Hayworth) and best friend Genius (Phil Silvers), as well as six chorus girls. He’s a firm believer that the only way to “make it big” is slowly, through hard work, and he also likes to keep Rusty close at hand. When the publisher of a fashion magazine (Otto Kruger) spots her, and notices her resemblance to a past love (also played by Hayworth in flashbacks), he puts her on the cover of his magazine, making her an instant star and creating tension between her and Danny. That tension is increased by the publisher’s desire to give her the life the earlier woman rejected, and he pushes to get her into a big show. You don’t have to be a brain surgeon to see where the story goes from there.
Cover Girl made stars of Kelly and Hayworth, and rightly so. It’s a far better movie than the synopsis above would lead you to believe, with beautiful songs and one of the most astonishing dance numbers ever filmed. The humor is hit or miss, but generally works, and the romance, while a bit pale, benefits from strong chemistry.
Kelly was a second stringer at MGM, so they had no problem loaning him to Columbia, who gave him what he’d never had before: control. He put it to good use, constructing innovative and amusing group numbers, and then stretched the boarders of cinema with Alter-Ego Dance, where his partner was a ghostly version of himself. The precision necessary to pull this off boggles the mind. It stands as one of Kelly’s best routines, and assured him the last word in his choreography from then on. If the movie had nothing else, Alter-Ego Dance is enough to earn it multiple viewings from any musical fan.
But it does have more. Hayworth is delightful, and holds her own in the footwork department with her heavy weight co-star. Her singing was dubbed, so I’ll have to say that Rusty’s voice was pleasant (instead of giving the complement to Hayworth). And, of course, with her blazing red hair, she was a beauty.
Silvers isn’t bad comic relief, though I was tired of his over-the-top antics by the halfway mark. Eve Arden on the other hand, shines throughout, and steals every scene she’s in. She plays the take-no-prisoners sarcastic sidekick (as she always did) to the magazine publisher. I could have used her onscreen twice as often. She is helped by excellent dialog. It is a strange script, that follows such a hackneyed plot, but does it with so many good lines.
The music is by Jerome Kern and Ira Gershwin, and is never weak. Most of it isn’t outstanding, but catchy. The exception, in a good way, is the ballad Long Ago and Far Away, which is moving and stays with you long after the film is over. When you hear someone say, “They don’t make songs like that any more,” this is the song they are referring to.
The melodramatic shenanigans between Danny and Rusty is the blemish on the picture. It’s hard to come up with any reason for Danny to object to Rusty getting a break in an in-town show, or to be unhappy with her new found fame. Saying that, “It’s the 1940s, and things were different,” as so many critics do, is no excuse. It wasn’t like that in the 1940s, except for jerks with severe ego problems, and making Danny a jerk isn’t good for the story. Worse, the serious, angst-filled scenes are the wrong tone for a movie which is mainly light fluff.
The story is silly, and some of the character interaction is unpleasant, but there’s a lot to like in Cover Girl. Its flaws take it out of the running to be a great movie musical, but it is certainly a good one.
My other reviews of Gene Kelly films: Anchors Aweigh (1945), Ziegfeld Follies (1946), The Pirate (1948), Words and Music (1948), On the Town (1949), Summer Stock (1950), An American in Paris (1951), Brigadoon (1954), It’s Always Fair Weather (1955), Les Girls (1957), The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967).
Oct 041944
While onboard a ship traveling to America, Sylvester the Great (Bob Hope), the worst actor in the world, meets Princess Margaret (Virginia Mayo), who is masquerading as a commoner to avoid an unwanted marriage. When the ship is attacked by the pirate The Hook (Victor McLaglen), Sylvester disguises himself as a woman to survive. With the help of Featherhead (Walter Brennan), an insane pirate, he escapes with the princess only to be captured by corrupt Governor La Roche (Walter Slezak). Now he must escape from them both.
In the ’40s and early ’50s, Bob Hope starred in a series of genre spoofs, playing essentially the same character. It didn’t matter if it was a spy film, a western, or a French costume drama, he played a very modern (for the ’40s), fast-talking coward. The tone was always the same; only the scenery changed (studio logic: if one is a success, why change the formula?). But this was in that faraway time when Hope was funny. It’s easy to forget that such a time existed, considering his movies and specials in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, which often unintentionally parodied his earlier work.
The Princess and the Pirate was Hope’s most lavish flick, costing three times the norm for a comedy, and filmed in Technicolor. Constructed as a traditional pirate movie, the sword fights are passable, and the sets and ship battles would have been suitable for a swashbuckling epic. If they’d rewritten the lead for Stewart Granger or Tyrone Power, and made a few other adjustments, it could have ended up as a colorful action picture.
Of course it isn’t an action picture, but a Hope vehicle, and that says just about everything. He’s in top form here, rattling off one-liners without taking a breath and mugging for the camera. If you like his shtick, you’ll have lots to enjoy here. If not, all the adventure, captured in vivid blues and reds, won’t change your mind.
He’s supported by a better than average cast. The hulking McLaglen and portly Slezak are excellent villains, playing it straight, but with a twinkle. I’m sure Slezak must have portrayed something other than a sleazy official in his career, but he does it so well I can’t think of him as anything else. Mayo is pretty enough, which is all she needs. She isn’t given much to do except stand beside Hope and occasionally squeeze in a line between his jokes.
The Princess and the Pirate is a good time, but doesn’t stand out from other Hope outings such as Monsieur Beaucaire, My Favorite Brunette, and The Paleface. They are pretty much all the same, and the jokes get old after seeing one or two. The exception is the 1951 Christmas classic, The Lemon Drop Kid, where the script takes precedence over the adlibs.
Oct 041944
Insurance salesman, Albert Tuttle (Jack Haley), shows up at an old mansion only to find his client-to-be is already dead. The eccentric man’s beneficiaries have gathered in the house for a reading of the will, and mistake Tuttle for a detective who has been hired to watch the body. It seems that the will has some odd provisions, which makes it in the best interests of some for the body to stay where it is, while others will want to steal it.
In Old-Dark-House mysteries, a group of people are secluded in a haunted house with all the trimmings: candles, secret passageways, constant thunderstorms. There is a murder or three, but the killer turns out to be mortal and all supernatural activity has a rational explanation. Normally, the chills are balanced with comedy. This sub-genre, mainly popular in the ’30s and ’40s, tends to produce pleasant, if uninspired films.
One Body Too Many is a standard Old-Dark-House mystery. The dialog is snappy, the acting is competent, but nothing is memorable. The house guests have gathered to fulfill the requirements of a will. The particulars don’t matter. Each character is made unpleasant enough to be a murderer, except for the one good-girl who is there to be the object of affection for the hero. Jack Haley (the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz) plays the cowardly lead, doing his best imitation of Bob Hope. None of the jokes are laugh-out-loud funny, though they all tend to be mildly amusing. Similarly, none of the falling bodies, screams, or thunderclaps are frightening, but they set an enjoyable mood.
One Body Too Many benefits from the appearance of Bela Lugosi in the small role of the butler. He has the best running gag, attempting to serve possibly poisoned coffee to people who just don’t want coffee. Lugosi’s comic abilities were rarely used and it’s nice to see him playing for laughs.