In last night's "Park Plaza 605"(1953), it's best to go with the flow, rather than burst precious brain cells trying to concentrate on an increasingly opaque plot. In any Tom Conway picture it's more about suaveness than story anyhow, and this time, though there actually is a plot, it's so convoluted, half-explained and left for you to figure out on your own, that you're better off not bothering, and instead just allowing the ambiguity and madcap humor to lead you to it's illogical conclusion. Conway stars as "Norman Conquest", haha - get it? That's also the alternate title of the movie. Conquest (the other characters love to say his last name) has no discernible profession. He lives in a building bearing his name, Conquest Towers, a deluxe high rise. He's rich, that's all we know for sure, and he likes to play detective as a hobby, which he gets a chance to do when, shortly after the movie opens, he's golfing with his secretary "Pixie" (Joy Shelton), and his drive hits a bird and kills it. Wouldn't you know it, the bird just happens to be a carrier pigeon with a note tied to it's leg, which reads, "You are to meet us at Park Plaza 605 at 8 pm tonight to arrange the transfer. Be on time."
Not one to pass up an intrigue, Conquest keeps the appointment, even though it isn't meant for him. He figures the intended recipient never got the message anyway, because the pigeon died, so he's going in that person's place. Keep in mind that we know little about Conquest at this point, ten minutes in. All we've seen is that he's a suave golfer. When he gets to 605 Park Plaza, he's early for the 8 pm appointment, so he breaks in and is surprised by another interloper, femme fatale "Nadina Rodin" (Eva Bartok), wearing a form-fitting ball gown and blonde wig. She points a gun at him that shoots knockout power instead of bullets. Conquest breathes the stuff in and passes out. While he's lying on the floor, Nadina meets with some male comrades of East European or Russian extraction, her gang of crooks. A knock comes on the door and it's Anton Diffring as "Gregor", a government agent from their country, come to arrest them. Nadina conks him with a brass statuette, knocking him out. The gang escapes, and Gregor later awakens to trail them, but he's really after their leader, a former Nazi war criminal named "Baron Von Henschel" (Robert Adair), who soon suprises Gregor and strangles him, thus we lose Anton Diffring very early in the movie. Why hire a great actor for such a minimal role?
At about 17 minutes in, the British cops get involved. "Inspector Bill Williams" (Sid James) comes to #605, where Gregor's strangled body has been thrown out the windum. Williams, an irritable sort who yells his dialogue, wants to blame the murder on Norman Conquest, whom he doesn't like because Conquest is always playing the Rich Guy Detective, interrupting his cases, and Conquest was in the room unconcho when the murder occurred. But the Inspector can't pin it on him because Conquest was passed out from the powder gun. This is called "too much to follow" for the viewer. That's why you take a cue from Frank Booth and focus instead on the suaveness. Soon, Eva Bartok will take your mind off what turns out to be an international jewel schmuggling plot with a Nazi as it's figurehead.
There's a scene at about the 52 minute mark that I'm gonna let you discover for yourself. To say it would never be allowed today is to state the obvious, but in 1950, given that there was no ratings system at the time, you'd think they'd omit it for being too kinky for a family audience.
It must also be reiterated that the Brits sure do love that Grill Shot, that "police car, Rolls or Bentley, driving hell-for-leather down curving roads, POV on the car's mean-spirited, threatening brass grill" shot. Youknow which one I mean, camera very slightly tilted, the message being "You can't outrun the Grill, it's coming to get you!" Man do they love that shot, and they use it umpteen times in this movie, which gets Two Big Thumbs Up. If you ignore the plot, it's quite entertaining and Eva Bartok is a good screwball comedienne. The picture is razor sharp. ////
The previous night, I was excited to get a recommendation for a movie called "The Flying Saucer"(1950), billed by the uploader as "classic science fiction". I thought I'd seen all the 1950s flying saucer flicks: "Earth vs. the Flying Saucers", "Invasion of the Saucermen," "This Island Earth," "The Thing from Another World," etc., but I apparently had missed one, so I pushed play, thinking it could be a real find, though the question: "Why haven't I heard of it?" did occur to me. I found out why, after about a half hour in. The plot follows a government agent, likely OSS or CIA (it isn't specified), who is sent up to Alaska after citizen and military reports of a flying saucer over the West Coast. The agent, whose name is "Trent" (Mikael Conrad), doesn't believe in flying saucers and begs off this assignment until his boss tells him he'll be undercover as a playboy millionaire, suffering from a nervous breakdown and requiring a nurse, who happens to be a beautiful fellow agent. Now Trent agrees to go, but he still thinks flying saucers are ridiculous.
Alaska is the choice of locale because the CIA think the Russians, and not Martians, are behind the saucer, if indeed there is one. They think the Russkies will be using it to deliver atomic bombs across America. Alaska is thus the logical vantage point for Russian spies in the U.S., but when Trent gets up there with his "nurse", the movie turns into a National Geographic special, with endless shots of admittedly wondrous (though remote) Alaskan scenery. A romance is attempted between Trent and his nurse, who is actually overseeing him for the Agency. Watching them, in turn, is "Hans" (Hantz von Teuffen), their house man at the Agency's lodge. They don't know he's a spy, and it's never explained how a foreign agent has taken over from the legit CIA houseboy. Hans listens in on the conversations of Trent and his nurse, and later, he tries but fails to kill the nurse in the forest.
Trent gets frustrated in the wilderness because there's no flying saucer action happening, so without telling the nurse (because she's his overlord), he commandeers a boat and goes to Juneau, where he grew up, to look for "Matt Mitchell" (Frank Darien), a legendary Old Hand who would know the local gossip about any flying saucer.
In Juneau, the Russian agents, with perfect American accents (much better than Hugh McDermottt's), stake Trent out in a bar. Man, the bar scene in Juneau must rival the ones in New York and Tokyo for neon and proliferation. The joint is Bar City. Much time is spent there as Trent gets hammered, wanting to quit the investigation, but when Matt Mitchell shows up, he does indeed know of a flying saucer, manufactured by a mad scientist whose lab lies "beyond the ice cap". I hadn't heard of the Alaskan ice cap, but it's a foreboding thing, like a mountainous, mini-North Pole. Mitchell tells Trent, "It's too dangerous to fly over," but Trent tries anyway, his plane nearly stalling several times. He finally finds the one-man flying saucer operation in a wooden building on the side of a mountain. The Russians are right behind him, however. Punchouts ensue, followed by a bizarre, extended shot in which Hans tries to choke Trent while forcing his head into the airplane's spinning propeller.
If this sounds like a lot of action, it's not. As mentioned, the movie is mostly an advertisement for the beauty of the Alaskan frontier. The romance between Trent and his nurse goes nowhere. The running time, 69 minutes) is fifteen minutes too long, and the direction is flaccid, but believe it or not, it's still a good flick, just because of the saucer itself, a single-seat job about 15 feet in diameter. It looks pretty cool, kind of like the Canadian Avrocar saucer of the early '50s. As shown, it looks like it could indeed deliver nuclear weapons, a pretty original (and spooky) concept for 1950, when most flying saucer films were about Green Men from Mars. If you go in expecting an Alaska travelogue instead of a full-on sci-fi movie, you'll do alright, so Two Bigs. The picture is soft but watchable. ////
And that's all for tonight. My blogging music is "Still Life" by Van Der Graaf Generator and "Magnification" by Yes, their last (and highly underrated) album with Jon Anderson. My late night is Handel's Julius Caesar in Egypt Opera. I wish you an awesome weekend and I send you Tons of Love as always. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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