Last night, in "Appointment with a Shadow"(1957), alcoholic reporter "Paul Baxter (George Nader) has such a bad case of the DTs that it looks like his career is at an end. He's been fired from his job at the Times. When we first see him, he's passed out in a bar. A man comes in, slaps him awake, drags him out and drives him home.
It turns out that the man is a cop, "Lt. Spencer" (Brian Keith), whose sister "Penny" (Joanna Moore) is Paul's girlfriend. Lt. Spencer can't stand Paul. He wants Penny to dump him, but she's devoted: "He needs me, and I won't leave him." The lieutenant, a cynical hard guy, puts his foot down. "Okay Penny, I don't share your faith in this bum, but because you're my sister, one more chance and that's it. Sorry, but I know the type. I deal with them all the time. They sober up for a few days, maybe a week, then it's right back to the bottle. The same thing will happen with Paul, but don't take my word for it. Give him another chance and find out."
Penny believes in Paul, and sets him up with a potential blockbuster of a news story, ironically leaked by her brother. A notorious hoodlum is about to be set up for a fall by his stripper girlfriend (Virginia Field). She's arranged for the cops to take him down like The Woman in the Red Dress did to John Dillinger. The cops have been looking for this dude for a while, but he's had plastic surgery to change his face. They no longer know what he looks like. The press have no idea this bust is going down, so Penny, through her brother the lieutenant, has given Paul an exclusive that will resurrect his career. What's more, it promises to be a sensation, because the hood has famously sworn never to be taken alive, so a shootout is a high probability. If Paul can stay sober, he'll have the scoop of a lifetime.
But therein lies the rub, because we now spend fifteen very unpleasant minutes watching him try to go cold turkey. I could've done with ten minutes less of this torment, and you'll say "We get it already!" as he white-knuckles his way through a day of pure hell, fighting off the shakes, hallucinations and worse, as he tries to hold onto consciousness long enough to make the 8 pm meeting at the restaurant where the takedown is gonna happen.
The process of sobering up is excruciating, but Paul somehow manages to resist every temptation, and he's on site to witness the stakeout, which does indeed end in a police shooting as expected. But Paul sees someone on the balcony he's using as an observation point. I can't tell you who it is, but it makes his scoop exponentially more sensational. The only problem is that no one believes who he saw, because they all think he's a strung-out drunk. "Typical Baxter. He's seeing things again."
Now Paul is on his own, to prove his case and and save his life, which is in danger from the man on the balcony. He tries to enlist the help of Lt. Spencer, but not only won't he help, he's pulled Penny away also, because of Paul's "wild" assertion. Two Big Thumbs Up and a very high recommendation for this excellent, if grueling, noir. The picture is uploaded from a VHS tape, and is not great. Much of it is darker on the grey scale, but overall it's about a 6/10 quality and watchable, and this is a very solid flick once you get past the alcohol withdrawal stuff, which was big in the '40s and '50s as a taboo breaker. ("Not 'Tab who?' Gilligan, taboo!" - The Skipper). Call it a man-on-his-own redemption flick. You know the drill: it ends in a high place, as required by motion-picture law. ////
Now then, you can usually count on The Butcher Brothers; they always give you value for your money, providing good location photography, decent direction, sometimes very good acting, and most often solid crime plots. In those ways, they're similar to Lippert Pictures, if lower budgeted. But this time, with "You Pay Your Money"(1957), they've made a slight misfire. Hugh McDermott stars, once again using his region-free American accent. He's not talking out of the roof of his mouth this time, thank goodness, but he's still yakking up a storm as he is prone to do, and I guess it's to make up for the fact that the film has no discernible plot until about the 42 minute mark of its 63 minute running time, when what does emerge is fairly interesting and makes you wonder why the screenwriter waited all that time to divulge it.
McDermott plays "Bob Westlake", who seems to be the security chief for a wealthy art collector, whose house seems to be a resort of some type. "Seems to be" is the key phrase throughout the first three-fourths of the movie, because nothing, and I mean nothing, is explained. All we know for sure, is that a woman named "Mrs. Delgado" (Jane Hylton) is a guest at the wealthy man's mansion (I'd give you the character's name but I don't know it). Mrs. Delgado assists a burglar as the movie opens, then she tries to pretend she doesn't know him, though the valet suspects she's faking it. That's when Bob Westlake is brought in. The IMDB synopsis says he's a professional smuggler. I saw zero evidence of that. Though it's not explained in any way, shape, or form, we intuit he's a security man for the millionaire, because he sets out to investigate the burglary. His wife (Honor Blackman of James Bond fame, oh no, there's Sean Connery again) gets involved when she's chased out of the millionaire's pool by an Arabic man who's trying to shoot her husband Bob. This scene serves - and is photographed - to deliberately accentuate Blackman in a bathing suit, and while I'm not complaining, a little plot sense thrown in as an extra would've been nice.
From this point, which is about fifteen minutes in, you're on your own for the next half hour, as names, addresses, and Arabic baddies are bandied about, with Hugh McDermott talking a blue streak until you stop paying attention. People get into cars and drive from one place to another. One or two Distinguished Older Gentleman appear, but you have no idea if they own the mansion or are only associated with it because they both look alike. You couldn't do a worse job of directing from a continuity standpoint. This is a technical criticism along the same lines as making sure an editor knows how to cut action so that the eyes and brain are led in the same direction. When a director just abdicates all understanding of who's who, the viewer starts looking at his watch, and as noted it may have been the writer's fault, because at 45 minutes, exposition kicks in and we finally start rolling.
A note on exposition, because we talk about it a lot: it should be used sparingly, and never to explain an entire plot all at once toward the end of a film. But many writers were, and are, lazy or untalented, or maybe on some films they don't care cause it's just a paycheck. So here, at the 42 minute mark, we finally learn that a crate of rare 16th century books, owned by the wealthy art-collecting millionaire, are the target. The books are original volumes of Arabic poems, fables, and Mohammedan prophesies, that - if stolen and redistributed to leaders in the Middle East, will bring about jihad, and the conquering of the Western infidel.
This is 1957, and the words "jihad" and "infidel" wouldn't become widely heard until the '90s and Iraq, or maybe 1979 and the Ayatollah Khomeni. But here they are used decades earlier, so the writer had a great idea, and he even throws some Indiana Jones into the mix, saying that the smuggled books were originally stolen out of Italy by the Nazis. All at once, there's lots of good stuff, which leaves you wondering why they waited until 3/4s of the movie is over to reveal it.
But they make sure you are well aware of Honor Blackman's figure over and over again. Okay fine, but that's not what the movie is about. All in all, it's kind of a mess from The Butchers. As for Hugh McDermott, we really want to like him, just because he's trying so hard to do an American accent, but as always, it's really bad. We'll still give the film Two Bigs for the rare book stuff, even though you'll be looking at your watch until the 42 minute mark, when Honor gets kidnapped by the bad guys. The picture is very good. ////
And that's all for tonight. I can't believe I'm still wearing a heavy-duty sweatshirt at night on my walks. I've heard of June Gloom but this is ridiculous. My blogging music is Traffic's "Shootout at the Fantasy Factory" and my late night is Handel's Julius Caesar in Egypt Opera. I hope your week is off to a good start and I send you Tons of Love, as always. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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