Last night's movie was "The Intruder"(1933), a weird little murder mystery that begins aboard a ship, pitching and yawing in a stormy soundstage water tank. The passengers are unable to sleep, and the captain is summoned from the bridge because a dead body has been discovered in one of the cabins. Then a detective bursts in, flashing his badge and taking charge of the investigation. A gal who knows the deceased informs him that the dead man's diamonds have been stolen. "Alright," says the detective. "Nobody leaves this room." And just when you think it's gonna be Ten Little Indians at Sea, the boat lists to one side and starts sinking. "Abandon ship!" cries the captain, and even the belligerent detective can't argue with that one. But he isn't about to let his suspects get away, so he orders them into a single lifeboat, which is tossed during the night while he holds the passengers at gunpoint. "One of you is the murderer," he tells them. In the morning they run aground on an island. No, not that Island, just some jungly joint in the middle of nowhere.
But it ain't uninhabited. No sooner do passengers "Daisy" and "Connie" (Lila and Gwen Lee, no relation) climb the cliffside, than they run into a Wild Man and his ape. The gals run into a cave to escape him, and find themselves crouching next to a skeleton, check that - two skeletons! The Wild Man (Mischa Auer) enters the cave, with grunting ape, and points at the bony ones, identifying them in Wild-speak: "Her, Mary, him, Joe." Ape grunts in agreement. Daisy and Gwen decide they don't wanna end up like Mary and Joe, so Gwen gets Wild Man in a half-nelson and throws him to the cave floor, allowing them to make another escape.
Back at what the captain has formed as the jungle base camp, the detective is still trying to nail down a murder suspect from the boat. And if you can follow the plot from this point onward, you are a master of strategery. Besides Daisy and Gwen, rounding out the suspect list are a drunk guy, the ship steward and a dude in an ill-fitting suit who looks like Carl Panzram. He has a gun that he uses to escape from the camp and when he hides in the jungle, he becomes the obvious murder suspect. But then, a French rescue team arrives on the island by rowboat, and finds the whole group (except Panzram) at the base camp. They speak English, but confer among themselves in French. We get the gist that they, too, have a murder suspect, but it isn't Carl Panzram, and it isn't anyone else you might be thinking of. I sure didn't guess it! On the one hand, when it was over I was thinking "who the hell would write such a movie?" Then I considered the release year, 1933, and the box-office indicators that were appealed to: King Kong and the Titanic. Someone was hoping to put butts in seats, and they may have done so out of sheer lunacy, despite the budget of 2253 dollars and 67 cents. You'll be wondering what the producers were smokin', which is why "The Intruder" gets Two Big Thumbs Up and is highly recommended. The picture is slightly soft. ////
The previous night we had an excellent, if again very low budget, train mystery from Monogram entitled "Midnight Limited"(1940), in which a phantom robber is targeting railroad passengers carrying jewels and large sums of money. Nobody knows how or where he boards, or how he knows who is loaded. His latest victim is "Joan Marshall" (Marjorie King), who's been robbed of 34,000 dollars in diamonds, but she's the first to get a glimpse of the phantom's face, which is always shadowed by a wide-brimmed hat. Joan saw him in profile, and when railroad detective "Val Lennon" (John "Dusty" King) interviews her, she swears she could identify him in a lineup.
This leads to her involvement in the investigation, and with Detective Lennon as well. Joan falls for him during a dinner date at a spaghetti parlor, when Lennon sits at the piano and croons a romantic song. John "Dusty" King was a singer as well as an actor (and a top Western star) whose mellifluous voice, speaking or singing, would win anyone over.
Because the phantom train robber is so elusive, the head detective - Lennon's boss "Captain Harrigan" (Edward Keane) - figures the only way to catch him is to go back to square one. "Check everything: passenger lists, who boarded where, which crew was on which trains, connect the dots!" When they do this, they discover two things - that a drunk has been on two consecutive trains that were robbed, and that both jobs were pulled in the bunk next to the baggage car.
They track down the drunk, a park-bench type but erudite with continental elocution (the kind of guy who addresses authorities with "Good sir, do you realise?.....yada ex infin.) The guy turns out to be a skilled vagabond who knows how to live like a Park Avenue hobo. Detective Lennon ascertains that someone has been paying him to be a lookout on the trains that were robbed, but he can't get the drunk guy to confess. So, he and Captain Harrigan set up a ruse in which Lennon poses as a passenger carrying 60 grand in cash. As a law enforcement agent, he can handle himself, so the danger is on Joan, who has to be aboard the train also to pre-identify the phantom and prepare the agents for his attack.
Though the sets are nothing special, just room shots and a bargain basement train interior, the money they spent for the script was worth it, because it's about as layered as you'll see in an hour long mystery. There's a subplot involving a hotel manager, his bellhop, and the baggage handler at the nearby railroad station, and also a diversion in which a porter is suspected of covering for the phantom because of his reluctance to testify. The director makes good use of short, 20 second scenes to fill in details and give the story dimension. This is how you layer, in brief bursts between screenwriter and editor. The ending is a shootout, involving a coffin in the baggage car. Two Big Thumbs Up for "Midnight Limited." The IMDB reviewers agree, it's very highly recommended. The picture is very good. ////
And that's all for tonight. I'm listening to "Warzawa", a live album by Porcupine Tree (hooked on them at the moment), late-night is "Parsifal" by Wagner. I just got some books from the Libe, including the brand new one from Stephen King, called "Fairy Tale" (just in time for Halloween, oh boy!) and also another Elvis book called "Revelations from the Memphis Mafia", and finally a novel (yes a novel) about the early life of John Lennon called "Shoulda Been There" by a lady named Jude Southerland Kessler. Google her, she's a Beatle historian with an interesting bio. I hope your week is going well, and I send you Tons of Love as always! xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
No comments:
Post a Comment