Director: Edward Ludwig
As Hollywood is wont to do, the first response to the great success of Them! was to milk a new genre of Big Bug creature features, ignoring all that made Gordon Douglas’ masterpiece a classic and instead assuming it was merely the spectacle giant insects that made the film connect so thoroughly with audiences. The Black Scorpion isn’t the worst of imitations—as with Them!, it spends an admirable amount of time creating an atmospheric, mysterious tone before the monsters appear, and once they do they are animations supervised by the great Willis O’Brien. When, in the climax, a giant scorpion repeatedly pulls helicopters from the sky and stings them with its tail, the action has an incredible sense of weight and force to it, thanks in large part to how the scorpion’s body nearly folds in on itself during the movement. Fans of stop motion will also be delighted to see several other creatures that were leftovers from King Kong over two decades previous—one, a trapdoor spider, terrorizes a young boy. But The Black Scorpion proves the old adage that sometimes less is more. By the time the scorpions finally appear, they occupy nearly every frame of the picture. Even the most impressive creature won’t maintain viewer interest when it is meant to be gawked at for an hour straight. Similarly, the politics aren’t as rich as Them! (although the film does indeed champion the need for cooperation between disparate groups), and a romantic subplot is dead in the water.
Director: Edward Ludwig
In 1937, Edward G. Robinson had just resigned with Warner Brothers and was at a point in his career where he was growing tired of playing the gangster. It came as some surprise to see him take on yet another picture where he played the Al Capone type, only this time not for his home studio but rather for MGM. The resulting minor masterpiece The Last Gangster gave him one of his very best roles–a hard-nosed crime lord with a sentimental side. Early in the film, he is convicted for tax evasion and sent to prison for ten years, coincidentally on the day that his boy is born. His wife Talya (Rose Stradner) leaves him when she reads of his misdeeds in the paper, and while he rots in Alcatraz she gets together with a moral news reporter (James Stewart) who raises the son as his own. Robinson’s release sees him anxious to reclaim the boy at any cost. This dynamic–between the transgressive hero and the child he is separated from–is akin to a fallen woman melodrama, giving Robinson even more to work with than the expected opportunity to humanize the gangster. While many of his characters are tragic and are rendered with a level of complexity, here his patriarchal anxiety adds a new layer. His desire to be a father stems from not only his own feelings of impotence (he proudly boasts of his son’s weight to the prison guards) but from what increasingly seems like genuine love. Director Edward Ludwig contributes a number of atmospheric sequences, including the frightening trip to Alcatraz wherein a group of prisoners speculate their ultimate destination. Stewart, in one of his first leading roles, isn’t given a whole lot to do, but it does provide some amusement to see him sport a mustache.
Director: Edward Ludwig
In the year of her breakout role in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Jean Arthur was paired for the second time with Joel McCrea in Columbia Pictures’ Adventure in Manhattan. It might be plausible to suggest that the pairing was intended to be the studio’s answer to Nick and Nora Charles, however the screenplay lacks the witticisms and flirtatious banter that would elevate The Thin Man series above other similar genre pictures. McCrea plays a famously successful criminologist – so renowned, in fact, that his colleagues mean to spite him by orchestrating an elaborate hoax for the purposes of embarrassing the detective when he comes to the realization that he’s been duped. Beyond the charade, however, is a real heist in the developing stages, head by Reginald Owen, a stage producer who plans to complete his final masterstroke during the opening night of his new play. The picture is breezy and not in a hurry to trample towards its humdrum climax despite its short running time. Its best moments, in fact, are the quiet periods of time in which the characters must wait for the next move to be made by their opposing faction. Beyond a few moody set pieces of this variety, the screwball aspects are never pronounced enough to incite much more than a chuckle, and the central heist is certainly not as interesting as the relationship that develops between McCrea and Arthur, which is unfortunately put on the back burner in the second half of the picture.
For Reel 