Mummy in Manhattan (1936)

D. Raoul Walsh
B&W

It made sense in 1936 to cast Jimmy Cagney as a tough hitting private detective. It meant that Cagney could do all the things he was good at, but actually do it on the right side of the law. So he could intimidate guys by yelling at them, as long as they were bad guys; he could slap guys about and shoot them with aplomb, as long as the guys with bruises and bullet wounds were bad; and he could cuddle up with dodgy dames, as long as he led them on the path to redemption rather than further down the rocky road to badness. What’s more he got to live at the end of the movie and the audience could cheer him as a hero. Yes, Cagney could be the same wild and violent and dangerous Cagney we all loved as long as he was being wild, violent and dangerous for the powers of truth and justice. It’s the American way.

Of course having gone down the road of making Cagney a big bad, but actually virtuous and good, detective in New York City, there’s no real explanation as why on Earth his antagonist is a long dead Egyptian Pharaoh.

Welcome to ‘Mummy in Manhattan’!

This is the kind of genre mesh-up which is common today but must have been like splitting the viewer’s skull open and stirring the contents around with a spoon back in the 1936 – a hard-hitting detective, supernatural horror movie, with some broad comedy thrown in just in case anyone felt short changed.

When the adopted daughter of the Egyptian ambassador disappears, Cagney is called into investigate. At first he thinks it’s her ex-boyfriend, but gradually his investigation leads him to the Museum of Natural History where a special exhibition is taken place – a tomb of the evil boy king “Totem-Munara’ has recently been discovered in Egypt and now the artefacts have made it to New York City. But it seems that old Totem is not as lifeless or as harmless as the smug museum administrators imagine.

It looks like noir in its shadowy black and white, but it’s also clearly channelling Boris Karloff in a way which must have had the lawyers at Universal twitching. (Although the fact that both were leaping on the recent discovery of Tutankhamun meant they didn’t have an artful hieroglyphic leg to stand on.) The film is stagey as hell with all the shocks signposted, but Cagney is having an absolute ball. It’s great to watch him sneer at his adversary, as who else would have the guts and gall to sneer: “Come on, bandage boy, you think you’re tough but I can take you down with scissors, see”?

At first glance this would look to take Cagney out of his comfort zone, but what makes it so brilliant is that Cagney just makes it his comfort zone.

The Story of Fire (1937)

D. Wilhelm Dieterle
B&W


In-between playing Louis Pasteur and Emile Zola, Paul Muni had time to appear in another 'historical' movie playing another 'historical' character. The veracity of this particular history is a lot more up in the air though, as here Muni is - for want of a better phrase – ‘that bloke who invented fire’. Yes, the 1930's favourite go-to actor for big and worthy roles, straps on some animal skins and a fake beard and pretends to be the man who first clocked the notion that if you rub two sticks together you might just get results. This is bizarre notion and one that should be a Eureka moment in a comedy sketch, rather than the basis of a whole movie; so to drag the story out the filmmakers make these particular cavemen the most verbose and articulate troglodytes this side of the Parthenon. As rather than grunting around in the dark, these cave dwellers make speeches with the passion and grace of Aristotle as they determine whether they should harness the destructive power of this new-fangled fire stuff.


We are with the Garl tribe (they may be more advanced than you’d expect your standard man, who’s just this moment evolved from chimps, but they still haven’t got around to pretty names) who are having troubles from a rival tribe called the Theraks. One night in a great storm a lightening-strike is witnessed and a tree bursts into flames. The power of this new phenomenon, which they swiftly call ‘fire’ - thus revealing themselves as the ancestors of the Anglo-Saxons – is one desired to help them in their battle against the Theraks. But how to capture it? The young warrior leader takes the problem to their wise man (Muni), the one person likely to be able to work out how to create fire, but also the one most likely to see the ethical and moral dilemmas of doing so.


Basically ‘The Story of Fire’ is an unholy mess. Primitive caveman who are as eloquent and verbose as any faeces and Neanderthal-blood smeared Shakespearian king, trying to decide whether it’s right to harness one of the fundamentals of human existence. It plays like a Mel Brooks or Monty Python sketch that has been stretched to an abnormal length and unaccountably had all the jokes removed. (That’s until the final scene, when Muni stares at something round and brings his hand to his chin to ponder. The same man inventing fire and the wheel, truly he was the Edison of his day). The drama is so ridiculous and artificial and the speeches so over the top and pompous that it keeps you watching with a kind of hypnotic fascination as to how bad it can get. Muni and the other actors try their best, but it’s written on their furry faces that they know they’re beating a dead mammoth.


What I like about this film though is that it actually bloody exists. These were the days when biblical movies were still big business at the box office, so it’s truly fantastic to have this film out there, pushing the envelope and showing that even in the 1930s American cinema was thinking of other origin stories for man – even if the story they came up with was utterly preposterous.

Dropper Harris and the Menace from Beyond (1939)

D. Ted Green
B&W


The third Dropper Harris film clearly realises it’s the last in the series. That’s not to say it’s lazy, everybody involved is clearly giving a hundred percent even when they know the material they’ve been given is utterly ludicrous. Cary Grant in particular looks like he’s relishing the absolutely ridiculous dialogue and lunatic scenario, knowing that this isn’t something he’d find himself doing for Howard Hawks or George Cukor. This has the feel of everybody letting their hair down, of an entire production team chilling out and just throwing stuff to the wall to see what would stick. Cary Grant later wrote (and indeed directed a film) about his experiments with LSD, and this feels like he’s slipped some to the crew to give the whole production that blissed out, psychedelic, “logic is there to be broken, man” type of atmosphere. As here we have a plot involving Dropper Harris, London citizen and number one agent for the British secret service, taking a trip into space. Yes, this is Dropper Harris goes to the moon.


If you were expecting some common-sense plot to explain this development, then I’m sorry you’re out of luck. There are reasons given for why all this happens, explanations offered for all that takes place, but they don’t stand up to even the briefest scrutiny. Indeed this is the second version of this paragraph I’ve written, in the first I tried to explain the plot, but after much head scratching and confusion I just gave up. Again the makers aren’t being slap-dash, this is a film that knows its money shot is Dropper Harris (Cary Grant) and Binky (Tommy Harrison) bouncing around in Flash Gordon outfits on the moon with big silly grins on their faces. That’s what’s on the poster, that’s what the public wanted to see and – goddamnit! – that’s what we got.


Yes, there’s some nonsense about the Russians having opened a moon-base and sending rays back to Earth, but it’s purely window dressing. This is about Dropper, Binky and new team member/love interest Catarina (Dorothy Lamour) going to the moon. That’s where the fun lies and everybody is set to have the time of their lives. Grant in particular has a big, very un-Cary Grant-like goofy grin, as he prances around in Buster Crabbe’s cast-offs spouting alternatively meaningless mumbo-jumbo or over the top atrocious dialogue. He’s still brilliant in this film. Indeed the genius of Cary Grant’s acting is that even when he knows what he’s doing is totally ridiculous, even when part of him is obviously making fun of each scene even as he acts in it, he still takes the audience with him. He never capsizes the film, never ruins it by playing it like panto – somehow he manages to be both serious and in on the joke at the same time, and the result is some of the most joyful silliness you will ever see.


There was nowhere else for Dropper Harris to go after this (except, perhaps, Mars), but we should be thankful these movies exist. A gleeful series of mad, lunatic 1930s adventure films, which always felt out of this world even before they actually went there.

Those who Enter the Skaneateles Hotel (1939)

D. George Waggner
B&W


Whereas other film trilogies ebb and flow, with some entries clearly not matching the quality of others, the original Skaneateles Hotel trilogy manages to hold a fantastically consistent line of quality all the way through. The first two entries are variations on a theme, showing what an innovative studio can do with a fantasy setting in a hotel, while this third does what fantasy does best and aims for epic. Picking up on one of the themes of the second film, the refugees from some unknown conflict, here we have the hotel in wartime. Except of course that the Skaneateles Hotel is too big to ever really be affected by some far off conflagration and so here we have a war between two distinct and implacable tribes taking place in the hotel itself. Now I’m well aware that a war between two different parties in a hotel sounds like a Marx Brothers movie that never was (and certainly would have been preferable to ‘Room Service’), but such is the scope and vast vistas already created within the Skaneateles Hotel that the whole thing seems utterly believable and incredibly tense.


Once again we’re greeted by the smiling and menacing form of Boris Karloff, but here there are four separate and very different guests – there’s English aristocrat, Basil Rathbone; the brilliant Peter Lorre in his stock role as mysterious European; reporter, Ginger Rogers (on loan from RKO and definitely not dancing); and loudmouth, Jack Carson. Although the four arrive at different times of day and night, they soon find themselves thrown together by the ever changing corridors of the Skaneateles Hotel. Wary at first, the four are forced to get over initial reservations, to learn to trust to each other, so they can survive in this world of rogue spies, murderers and distant gun battles.


This is the film where Karloff seems at his most vulnerable. Unlike in previous entries, the omnipotentcy deserts him when he’s suddenly dropped into the action with the others, and he flails as much as they do. It’s an unusual and distressing sight. Fans of these films have gotten used to his unflappability, his almost imperious façade, to have that taken away from him feels like the crushing of something. The five of them flee, hole up, make alliances and try to leave the hotel, as they know that outside its cavernous walls  – and this becomes increasingly hard to imagine as the film progresses – there is peace. At first glance much more of an isolationist tract than the last film, this is a film about how much more preferable peace is than war, and how you shouldn’t stick your nose into the conflicts of other peoples. Except is it? As the film progresses it seems more and more the case that Karloff is just misdirecting, that he knows exactly what he’s doing, knows precisely what is needed. As the film progresses it becomes clear that he is in no danger, that he is still directing matters, and that it is his war.  And at that point the message seems to be there are some conflicts in this world of ours, be they within the Skaneateles Hotel or without, that are impossible to avoid.
One of my favourite scenes of this whole series is at the end. After all the chaos, fear, bloodshed and danger, Karloff calmly returns to the front desk, wipes his hands and gets on with his day. Anything is possible in the Skaneateles Hotel.


The establishment would go dark for a little while now, but the doors would reopen….

Return to the Skaneateles Hotel (1938)

D. George Waggner
B&W


We’re back!


Much more than Frankenstein’s monster, the unnamed concierge/manager/overlord of the deeply mysterious Skaneateles Hotel is the role we should best remember Boris Karloff for. It has everything, not only allowing him a glowering physical presence – capable of turning from contempt to sweetness in a heartbeat – but also line after wonderful line of dialogue to be intoned in his glorious graveyard voice. It’s the voice of doom, but also soft as treacle and inviting despite its spookiness. Here we are welcomed with narration, wherein Karloff explains to us that while the world and the universe may change, nothing alters in the sanctuary of the Skaneateles Hotel. This we know is a joke, as we’ve already seen that the ambience, décor and the layout itself is constantly shifting at the Skaneateles Hotel.


In what we would now call a cold opening, the young David Niven is the first to check in, playing a caddish young Englishman with a string of broken hearts behind him. Outside his room he meets the kind of pneumatic, suggestive blonde that the Hays Code was surely supposed to have stamped out, she leads him like a siren back to her room, where the door slams ominously behind them. It might be that they’re having a night of pleasure together, but his scream suggests otherwise.


The meat of the story though is the arrival of another couple, this time the younger and far less charismatic pairing of Allan Jones and Melody Hazel. Obviously these are a duo we’re not going to care about anywhere near as much as Claude Rains and Marian Marsh, but that doesn’t matter – as the film knows its true star is the hotel itself and the ever brooding and ominous presence of Boris Karloff. Going for a stroll before dinner, our young lovebirds become horribly lost and disorientated, marching down seemingly the same corridor again and again. When they try a different turning, they’re first threatened by Bela Lugosi (playing second fiddle to Karloff once again and clearly hating every second of it), before having an elaborate con-trick played on them by Lon Chaney Jr, where they’re nearly separated and have to run for their lives. They end up in a strange and huge ballroom, one which rolls and lilts like a ship and is crammed full of refugees from some far off war (problems in Europe no doubt playing on the filmmakers’ minds). Joining with the refugees, the two have to hope that when Karloff does show up he’ll save them rather than damn them.


The worlds of ‘The Lord of the Rings’ and ‘Game of Thrones’ obviously have whole continents to play with and explore. Vast vistas the likes of which we have never seen before. The true genius of the Skaneateles Hotel is that they manage to give us the same sense of scale and size all while filming in a studio and basing the action in one location. Our focus is the hotel, which is at turns a scary, mischievous, deadly, benign and benevolent pile of ever shifting and changing bricks. It, along with its most prominent employee, are the true stars. And what this first sequel proves is that it doesn’t matter if your nominal leads are Zeppo Marx’s replacement and a pretty flapper girl who never made another film, as long as Karloff and the hotel are in place, you can still make a fantastically scary, amazing and edge of the seat film.

The Hotel at Skaneateles Avenue (1937)

D. George Waggner
B&W


J.R.R Tolkein thought that his books would never make a successful transition to film; similarly if George R.R. Martin had been born forty years earlier, the best either could ever have hoped for in their lifetimes were some English characters actors wandering around Yorkshire, some rubbery dragons and a shit-load of stuff happening off screen. The Skaneateles Avenue stories don’t have the same literary pedigree (being based on a couple of now obscurer than obscure tales in pulp magazines), but that doesn’t alter the fact that they are actual fantasy. Yes it’s fantasy that eschews dragons, swords fights and mysterious rings; but in its ever changing corridors, vast horizons of suddenly open rooms with seemingly infinite variations, the Skaneateles Avenue Hotel offers as much scope for wide vistas and endless stories as anything in Middle Earth or Westeros.


The great Boris Karloff is the key. Here he is cast as the concierge, as the manager, as the supposed solver of problems, as the face which pops up when you least expect it. He is at points the charming, omnipotent overlord of the Skaneateles Avenue Hotel and at others as equally helpless a victim of it as any of his guests. Sometimes he’s the puppeteer gleefully pulling the strings, others just another mannequin being twisted around in knots. But whatever else is happening it’s always his looming face and menacing voice that welcome us, telling us he hopes we have a lovely stay – which reassures us in no way shape or form.


Claude Rains and the now almost forgotten Marian Marsh (as if she genuinely did check into a mysterious hotel never to be seen again) are the husband and wife who arrive wet and desperate for a room on a horrific, stormy night. They are greeted by Karloff at his most obsequious and shown up to their room, but before long they’re lost in a maze of their own desires and fears, changing corridors, shifting floors and doors that seem to open to vast other worlds. Without a doubt the set design on this film, changing as it does from tight and intimate corridors, to crowded ballrooms which seem to stretch on as far as the eye can see, is astounding. Along the way they meet various other lost guests – including Basil Rathbone and Lon Chaney Jr – who may be trying to help or hinder, or perhaps a combination of the two. And every so often Karloff shows up, still seeming so solicitous to their needs but looking less and less trustworthy with every appearance.


Say what you will about Universal Films in the 1930s, but they knew how to slap some celluloid into a projector and say “now, THAT is a horror movie!” ‘The Hotel at Skaneateles Avenue’ represents a bending of the normal format, making it a film not just about thrills and chills, but about fantasy and other worlds. Although not as well known as its Transylvania and Castle Frankenstein stable mates, this trio remains a hugely influential and important series (Doctor Who’s ‘The God Complex’ is clearly a homage). What makes it so interesting and amazing to see with 2014 eyes is how successful these films are at putting this claustrophobic fantasy onto the big screen. Other worlds and vistas – like those created by Tolkein and Martin – would still be far beyond what was possible in 1930s cinema; but here we have fantasy, and fantasy which happens in a world that manages to be both fantastically big and humanly small, created successfully on a cinema screen in a way which will make any genre fan lick their lips with relish.

Argonauts of the Air (1937)

D. Jimmy Cowdell
B&W


It’s H.G. Wells week this week on The Alternative History of Cinema. There’s no specific reason for this, on this blog I just pick things on a whim and whimsy and go from there. And since in recent weeks, two H.G. Wells adaptations have occurred to me, I thought I’d create thematic unity by running them together. Yes, I really should have done it in September for his birthday or something like that, but sod it! All year around is a good time for Bromley’s finest literary son. First up we have a stilted, cut glass tale of British derring-do in outer space. Set in the wonderful year of 2014, but clearly much more the 1930s. The future, much like the present, is British and nothing is going to stop that. Get your Union Jack marked spaceships at the ready, put your stiff upper lip in place, and off we go.


Based on the very short Wells story of the same name, this is the almost Monty Python set-up of spaceflight from the suburbs. Just outside the two up, two down of the new suburban developments, there are rockets lined up ready to fly to the furthest reaches of space. There dashing young men queue up to be spacemen and take the glory of Britain to the further possible horizon, while dowdier men in pinstripe suits and bowler hats man Mission Control – just like Mr Benn’s most out of this world adventure. We hear tales of a moon-base, a Martian colony (where in a throwaway line it seems we are teaching the Martians about civilised government), of how the Saturn fleet is now mighty. But a threat is coming from closer to home that could seriously harm this brilliant endeavour.


For the most part this is derring-do of a Bulldog Drummond style. Lewis Coleman is Captain Jack Cook, a legendary figure in the space corps – the kind of man with a pencil thin moustache, slicked back hair, a rakish grin and a glint in the eye bright enough to weaken the knee of any poor susceptible member of the female species. He’s the type of Englishman who is every woman’s dream (although that dream probably involves pounding her lover’s buttocks once a week with a cane to really get him off. Yes, he’s that type of Englishman!) Clearly the film makers have seen Flash Gordon as there are the plastic rocket ships, onesie space uniforms, strange new planets. But at the forefront, hands on hips, staring handsomely into the distance, looking both heroic and rather repressed, is our very English hero.


But there’s a problem, the large staff back at space-fleet command has been infiltrated. It hasn’t been infiltrated by a Martian, or a Venusian or a moon person – no the big threat comes from closer to home, it comes from the anarchists. Arthur Simkins, as rat-faced an actor as ever lived, is Karl Mannix, an anarchist who is determined to destroy the space-fleet. He doesn’t dream of a glorious space Empire, he dreams of bringing England to its knees. After a few acts of sabotage a general meeting is called and after a bumpy opening, Captain Jack carries the day and gets the workforce on its side. It’s then that Mannix, and his sinister foreign cohorts, decide to step the plan up and kill Captain Jack, slaughter the glorious symbol of the British Space Empire itself. But the will of the people is stronger. Joined together – every member of the space corps, from Captain Jack Cook down to a lowly cleaner named Marjorie (who stares at Captain Jack with a mix of motherly pride and lustful wantonness) is able to root out and get rid of the these subversive infiltrators. Space flight is for all and the all join together to make sure that the malcontent few do not destroy the great dream of mankind.


It’s a beautiful image, one that precedes ‘Star Trek’ by thirty years, and chimes well with Wells’ own political views. But it also makes for an oddly confusing movie. The anarchists are clearly portrayed as left wing themselves. There they are with their pamphlets, their copies of Marx, their exaggerated (as it turns out) claims about poor working conditions. And so they don’t seem to be that different from the grouping which eventually crushes them. Yes, socialism without Marx is an ideal Wells is on record as desiring, and this is a film where the Marx is forcibly removed from socialism. Yet there is little on the screen to truly explain what that means and we’re left with a story where some left wing patriots get rid of some really left wing malcontents so that the bowler hatted fellows of Wimbledon, Surbiton and Worcester Park can continue their work in Britain’s glorious imperial space-race.

Dropper Harris and the Opera of Doom (1938)

D. Ted Green
B&W


A year after the first Dropper Harris movie, Cary Grant was back. This is interesting in itself, as sequels were far from the norm back then and certainly not the done thing for major stars. They were the preserve of men with the surnames Weissmuller and Crabbe, Olympic swimmers who’d turned to – what could loosely be described as – acting, rather than serious cinema players. Yet the ‘Dropper Harris’ movies, although clearly made with a higher budget and better actors, are trading in the same language as your Tarzans and Flash Gordons. They are popcorn, adventure films, there to provide mindless entertainment, but of a higher quality and with bigger thrills. Which means that decades before George Lucas and Steven Spielberg took those old adventure films and turned them into ‘Indiana Jones’, Cary Grant was – as always – already leading the way.


Here we are back in a London of the mind, a London that bears as much resemblance to the 1930s or the 1890s as it does to now. There are horse drawn carts and Dropper Harris’s housekeeper seems to be wed to an old fashioned mangle. But there are also speeding black Ford automobiles and gangsters, some of whom would not be out of place in Chicago. Harris catches what he refers to “the London tube”, but it’s one of those sleek trains you imagine carrying you from Grand Central to Union Station. It even has a bar for god’s sake! Most jarring of all though is Harris’s portable communication device, which he keeps in his pocket and looks and treats just like a mobile phone (albeit it’s something like a Nokia from the turn of the century, rather than an iPhone. This film isn’t that forward looking!) This is a mix of the present, the past and a million possible futures. This is Dropper Harris’s world and we’re supposed to goggle at it.


Along with his trusty sidekick Binky (Tommy Harrison), Harris finds himself again investigating a music based case. This time they are backstage at the opera where two warring parties of gangsters are prone to machine-gunning each other at the crescendos of arias. One is your standard group of hard-faced, monosyllabic muscle, the others are Charles Laughton’s antiquarian gangsters. Hoodlums, known as The Charing Cross Road Gang who – and I’m not making this up – love nothing better than first editions and are running a protection racket involving all the libraries in London. Elsewhere we have the delicious Margaret Lockwood as a femme fatale soprano, and Claude Rains as an ineffective policeman. The plot, once it gets there, never really leaves backstage of The Royal Opera House – and so we have something like ‘Night at the Opera’ meets ‘Scarface’ meets ‘The 39 Steps’ but even more complex than such a bizarre mash-up would suggest. Mystery piles on top of mystery until it all falls over into a conclusion which is brilliant, but doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense. That doesn’t matter though, as by the end, all we want to know is what is Leslie Howard’s conductor really up to?


It’s incredibly fun and fast paced (seriously, the way Grant rat-tat-tats the dialogue here makes it seem like he was doing ‘His Girl Friday’ while on mogadon). If you tried to think about how all the strands actually tie together your brain would explode, but this is one of the most invigorating films the 1930s ever produced.

Murder at Greystone Grange (1934)

D. John Harris
B&W


What’s that you say? There’s a new film opening down The Ritzy? A murder mystery at an English country house? Ooh, intriguing. Very Agatha Christie. Oh, this isn’t her? Never mind, it’s a scenario which always offers a lot of promise. Who’s in it? Okay Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, Madeleine Carroll, Ralph Richardson, Edith Evans, Peter Lorre and Peggy Ashcroft. Hmm, Madeleine Carroll I know as she’s your proper film star, but as for the rest I’ve heard the names – I’m not much of a theatre goer, I’m afraid – and that good things are expected. Promising young actors then. And Edith Evans who isn’t actually that young. Okay, I’m sold. Let’s go!


If ever there was a film where the over-talented cast tries valiantly to get above underwhelming material, it’s ‘Murder at Greystone Grange’. Gielgud is a wealthy industrialist who invites various associates – including: his supposedly demure sister Ashcroft; socialite Carroll; penniless duchess Evans; mysterious European investor Lorre; and man about town/mystery novelist Olivier – to a dinner party at his fantastic old manor house, Greystone Grange. But at the stroke of midnight the lights go out and the next anyone sees is Gielgud’s lifeless body sprawled on the floor.


The script is credited to a Deidre Evans, with direction by John Harris. These are two individuals whose work I confess I don’t know, but whose names just scream out pedestrian and mediocre. Can we really expect great things from a collaboration between Harris and Evans? Clearly not. It’s often difficult to physically and unmistakably see a lack of something, but inspiration here is painfully and utterly missing. So, what makes this creaking, aged curio interesting is watching that talented cast try their absolute hardest to breathe life into material so limp it almost feels in need of a mercy killing itself.


Olivier has moments to shine as the callow young lead, Gielgud is dominant as the aged industrialist, Richardson is shifty as the butler and one only needs to point the camera at Lorre to make him a sinister European. There are good things in the performances. But there is also a director with absolutely zero sense of control. In comparison to Gielgud and Ashcroft’s underplaying, both Lorre and Olivier wildly overact. Olivier mostly gives into his tendency to attack any scenery he sees as if he is peckish Neolithic man and it’s a tasty slab of woolly mammoth; while Lorre is all eye popping and dramatic gestures galore. His pronunciation of “telephonist” is definitely worth seeking out however, making it sound like one of the most exotic substances known to man.


What truly lingers from the film though is Carroll, who brings the charm and understanding of a proper film star. It’s a genuine movie performance and another reason why she should be better remembered today.

Dropper Harris and the Speeding Bullet (1937)

D. Ted Green
B&W


It’s no doubt Cary Grant’s later association with Alfred Hitchcock which ensures that the Dropper Harris films are now forgotten relics of a more dashing age. And that’s a shame, as they’re a bit creaky and stiff (but then a lot of films in 1937 are a bit creaky and stiff) but these are sharp and suspenseful movies, which are a lot more fun and free-wheeling than most American thrillers of the age. Yes, the plot doesn’t make much sense. Yes, the version of England it pedals couldn’t be any more obviously California unless the Hollywood sign appeared and all the houses of parliament started to sing ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’, but I have a massive soft spot for this film and its sequels. Whatever their flaws, they’re a lot of fun. And Cary Grant is a great choice for the square jawed hero, as even when he’s playing it straight he can’t help but seem to subvert the whole concept.


We’re in London, the home of pea-soupers and cheerful cockneys and the occasional horse drawn hansom carriage (the last detail is particularly baffling, as otherwise this is set in what is then the present day). Grant is Hugh ‘Dropper’ Harris, the finest investigator in the British service. His job title is as vague as ‘consulting detective’ and it’s never clear throughout the series whether he’s a policeman or a spy, but it doesn’t really matter. He is Richard Hannay with a license, or Bulldog Drummond in spats. What he calls himself doesn’t matter, his job is to have adventures, and along with his sidekick Binky (Tommy Harrison) he’s about to find that the case of the speeding bullet is one of the most dangerous he’s ever had.


The conductor of the London Philharmonic is gunned down mid performance (shades of the original ‘The Man Who Knew Too Much’), but it seems that the bullet struck before the shot was fired. How is that possible and – more importantly – who did it? Dropper Harris is on the case. Of course this is just a creaky hat-stand on which to hang the whole thrilling adventure, and you may wonder if it’s actually sturdy enough or whether it will collapse with a thud and the swishing of tailored jackets – but, rest assured, it may wobble from time to time but there’s enough ballast to provide 84 minutes of top quality black & white hi-jinks.


So off we go: there’s Sylvia Sydney as the most fatale of femme fatales, smoking through a cigarette holder as if brandishing a weapon; there’s Madeline Carroll as the good girl possibly gone bad, clutching both pigtails and a revolver; there’s Spencer Tracey as the businessman who may be behind it all; and Humphrey Bogart as his menacing henchman.  (Grant, Tracey and Bogart all in one film together, and still it’s only remembered by geeks like me. Go figure!) Most of them don’t even bother to tackle the accent, which combined with Grants transatlantic tones make this London one of the most international cities in the world.


It’s a film with some of the best scenes anywhere in cinema. Here’s Spencer Tracey trying to intimidate Cary Grant over cocktails – a triumph of cracking dialogue and clinking glasses and lots of good natured smiling. It’s two friends together, laughing and telling jokes, with one friend making it clear he’d like to murder the other. Elsewhere we have Bogart trying to do a bit of menacing while he and Grant try out pogo-sticks in a Bloomsbury toy shop. Just watching those two icons of cinema bouncing up and down while exchanging breathless dialogue is one of the most joyful sights I’ve ever witnessed. Clearly they felt that joy, as the camera is constantly cutting to obviously let them laugh at the ridiculousness of it all, And finally there’s Sylvia Sydney cornering Grant in front of the monkey cage in private zoo in Kensington Palace, launching into a long and wide-eyed speech about how she likes thick and long lasting cigars, the kind only the right kind of handsome Englishman possesses. It’s a triumph of innuendo, double entendre, a shared bag of peanuts and a chimpanzee who mugs as if in a silent comedy, clearly wanting star-billing in his own right.


(On a side note, is there really a private zoo in Kensington Palace? I think The Tax Payer’s Alliance should investigate.)


It sounds exactly what it is, a very Manhattan film – not Bloomsbury or Chelsea or Waterloo or Mansion House or any of the other names the film’s characters drop in without having a clue what they’re talking about. But that doesn’t matter. This is set in London like Terry Gilliam’s film is set in Brazil, it’s a glamorous state of mind, a fantasy world of beautiful woman, guns, danger and an impossibly dashing leading man.


As its Grant who truly makes this film great. In the wrong hands it could have been po-faced, but Grant is so convincing as this super secret agent even as he has fun with the material. It’s what makes him the finest cinema leading man there ever was. Cary Grant always manages to be convincing in every role he does, even when he’s being Cary Grant. Here he winks at the audience to let them know that it’s all a joke, even as he carries us along with the excitement and danger. He know this isn’t a serious film, he know that the rope isn’t going to burn and that the safe is not going to drop on Dropper Harris’s handsome skull, but he takes us through and lets us both take it seriously and laugh at it and have an absolute whale of a time as we do.