Director: John Farrow
The casting of Boris Karloff is a red herring in this murder mystery, which uses the often menacing actor as a sympathetic patsy. The plot concerns a body discovered by a newly married couple (Eddie Craven and Marie Wilson) on an army base. With the brash Colonel Rogers (Cy Kendall) leading the investigation, Karloff is bullied into admitting guilt after falling under suspicion due to his wrongful incrimination in Haiti years previous. It’s a fairly standard, fast-paced Warner Brothers mystery, but the characters are cardboard cutouts and there is little sense of the escalating stakes that one would expect with a murderer on the loose. Most of the action is confined to an explosives storage building on the base, which provides for an interesting backdrop–whereas many mysteries take place in tight rooms, The Invisible Menace attempts to achieve suspense by suggesting the potential for danger lurking in the shadows around every corner. Karloff’s role is small and he does well as a misunderstood intellectual, and Marie Wilson has a couple of laughs as a Gracie Allen knockoff. Even if the honeymoon subplot feels at odds with the tone of the film, it was an admirable attempt to inject life into this stodgy whodunit.
Director: John Farrow
One of John Farrow’s first directorial assignments cast Boris Karloff as a Chinese warlord named General Fang, a role that would allow the actor the valued chance to step outside of the horror genre he made his name on. Despite being hidden behind prosthetics and make-up (it’s a fairly convincing transformation for the period), his tremendous gift for expression isn’t too restricted, allowing a fairly dynamic characterization. Perhaps taking cues from Nils Asther’s performance in The Bitter Tea of General Yen, Karloff works to give Fang a convincing sense of humanity–an aspiration far removed from his earlier excursion into yellow face as the sinister Dr. Fu Manchu (in 1932’s The Mask of Fu Manchu). What is surprising about his take is that Fang looks to be in a perpetual state of amusement, indulging in drinks and cigarettes, engaging in repartee with his colleagues, and grinning his way throughout the picture. When Fang asks his right-hand man (Richard Loo) to translate for him, there is a sense of playfulness in trying to adapt western expressions and modes of talking. Other than the central performance, there is little that sticks in West of Shanghai–it is a forgettable, utterly disposable picture, but a valuable piece to study for fans of the immensely talented Karloff.
Director: John Farrow
The protagonist played by Robert Mitchum in Where Danger Lives isn’t the typical detective or drifter that one might expect of a film noir, but rather a successful doctor who has a particular gift in dealing with children. In the opening scene, he’s reading a bedtime story to a girl in an iron lung. As is expected of the genre, however, he will soon be taken on a downward spiral, led to hell by a woman that he should have never fallen in love with in the first place (Faith Domergue). Worse than the common, devious femme fatale, Domergue plays a woman who is certifiably insane. Charles Bennett penned the screenplay, a frequent collaborator with Hitchcock who contributes a number of amusing, surreal tangents on the couple’s road trip to Mexico. In one scene, Mitchum and Domergue find themselves captives in a small town based on the simple fact that they aren’t bearded. But what really makes Where Danger Lives special is the conceit that Mitchum spends almost the entirety of the picture concussed, trudging through the action half-asleep and disoriented. It’s a perfect capitalization on the nightmarish quality of the genre, and Mitchum is just the man to give a sleepy, doomed performance.
Director: John Farrow
A prototype for the disaster dramas that would flood the marketplace in the 1970s, Five Came Back is an economically-told programmer that benefits from an irresistible premise and a quality cast. Twelve people are traveling from Los Angeles to Panama when problems strike and they find themselves stranded in a South American jungle. There’s hope of repairing the damages, but as the title would suggest, rescue isn’t in all of their fates. The early airplane scenes are shot with a terrific sense of claustrophobia. When turbulence strikes, director John Farrow stages the action in wide shots so that the audience can see every performer’s reaction and their spatial relationships with one another. The cramped setting is a radical contrast to the vast jungle they’ll soon inhabit. Beyond the adventure thrills, the film suggests that in the wild the true nature of the various personalities will come out. This is explained directly by the wise old professor played by C. Aubrey Smith, who is the first to understand that a convict (Joseph Calleia) soon to be put to death has more to him than pure evil. Similarly, Lucille Ball plays a woman of ill-repute who finds redemption. It’s an endearing, humanistic thought for a film that is saddled with a repressive bleakness starting from the very title, even if it could have been better accomplished with a more understated execution.
Director: John Farrow
Regarded as a close imitation of John Ford’s The Informer (as Frank S. Nugent of the New York Times put it, “We will admit we had rather see a producer crib his sequences from a good picture than from a poor one (…)”), Full Confession stars Victor McLaglen as a cop killer who grapples with guilt when an innocent man is convicted for the crime he committed. As would be expected, McLaglen excels at the part–he was an actor gifted with a brute’s body but an incredible sensitivity, able to convey the complexities of a flawed man who nonetheless is essentially good. Director John Farrow and cinematographer J. Roy Hunt create a haunting atmosphere as the drunken McLaglen strolls through the city streets drowned in deep shadows and fog, amplifying the moral complications through noir-like stylizations. Where things go wrong is in both the preachiness of Jerome Cody & Leo Birinski’s screenplay and especially the miscasting of Joseph Calleia as the priest who acts as McLaglen’s morale compass. He’s a personification of the guilt that McLaglen feels, robbing the morality play from the complex interior world to something that registers as Calleia harassing McLaglen. Calleia plays the priest as first too much of a blank canvas and finally too insistent–not once is he hitting the right note.
Director: John Farrow
Future blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo contributed the script to this Anne Shirley programmer, which uses the exclusionary and snobbish dynamics of sorority houses as a way of discussing larger socioeconomic issues. The cards are laid on the table late in the film in which Alice’s (Shirley) father (J.M. Kerrigan) suggests that a great many conflicts in the world are caused by the very nature of cliques–whether those groups be that of a sorority, a club, or even a nation. Class is a major issue in the picture (Alice only attracts the attention of sororities when it is believed that her father is wealthy), and the screenplay definitely lambasts upperclass pomposity, which was a favored topic of Trumbo that would get him in hot water. Other than the intrigue of Trumbo’s screenplay, there’s very little worth remembering. Shirley’s performance is exactly what one expects–she’s naive, hopeful, and despite a few hiccups ultimately good-hearted–and the supporting players are serviceable. There’s an unintentionally humorous but charming sequence in which Alice is asked on a date by her love interest (James Ellison) while getting her blood pressure checked. Where else do you get to hear the words “systolic” and “diastolic” uttered as a means of flirtation?
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