Tag: mysteries

Foreign Film February: Le Corbeau (1943)

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In a small French town, someone calling themselves The Raven (or Le Corbeau in French) is sending out poison pen letters – gossipy missives accusing various townsfolk of scandalous goings-on. Though letters are sent to nearly everyone in town, accusing loads of people of all sorts of terrible things, they concentrate on Dr. Rémy Germain (Pierre Fresnay) accusing him of having an illicit affair and of performing illegal abortions.

At first, the letters are kind of funny, at least to those who are not being accused, but as more and more of the townsfolk are being accused things become serious quickly. One man commits suicide after being told something in a letter. Fingers get pointed. Demands are made to those in power. The letters must be stopped.

Directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot who also helmed the masterful Diabolique (1955) and The Wages of Fear (1953) Le Corbeau is a terrific little mystery in which the answer to who The Raven really is doesn’t matter nearly as much as what those letters do to the townspeople.

Made in the middle of the Nazi occupation of France the film can be seen as a commentary of the paranoia many French people felt during this period. Never knowing who to trust or what to believe. Interestingly, it also caused problems for its directors since it was produced by a German company, and the French were none too accepting of Germany-made things after the war. They eventually got over it.

It is sometimes called the first French film noir and I can totally see that with the moody black-and-white photography and Dutch angles. It falls just short of being the masterpiece that the two other films of his I mentioned earlier in this review, but Le Corbeau is still a wonderful film deserving your attention.

Foreign Film February: The Vanished Elephant (2014)

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Welcome to Foreign Film February 2025. I started the month off with a bang, watching three movies over the weekend. Then I got busy and distracted and forgot to actually write about them. Here we are nearly one week into this, the shortest of months, and I have neither watched any other movies nor written anything.

Hopefully, the rest of the month will go better. But considering…well *waves hands frantically in all directions*…everything else going on in the world, I wouldn’t count on it.

The Vanished Elephant is a beautiful, strange, moody, and confounding neo-noir mystery that questions the very fabric of the story it is telling the longer it is spun.

Edo Celeste (Salvador del Solar) is a successful crime writer who has decided to end his long-running detective series. Naturally, as these things go, a real-life mystery forms. New clues have come to light which might let him understand what happened to his fiancee who disappeared several years prior.

He keeps finding packages full of photographs which, when placed together in a certain order will reveal a much larger picture. There is a whole complicated procedure that I did not at all understand that led him to figure out in what order to place the photographs.

Some murders happen. He investigates on his own despite the real police constantly telling him not to. Eventually, he will become a suspect.

As the film progresses this fairly standard mystery formula begins to dissolve to be replaced by an even bigger mystery about the nature of story and reality. To say more would be to spoil its many surprises.

Ultimately, it didn’t work that well for me. I found it more unintelligible than mysterious. It is definitely a film that will work better for the viewer on a second viewing as you’ll likely discover details that will help you understand what it is doing. I’m just not sure I care enough to give it another go.

It is well-made and quite beautiful to look at. It reminded me a bit of David Lynch’s movies, but that might just be because he just died and I’ve been thinking about him of late. But it does have that beautiful weirdness about it.

Murder Mysteries in May: Murder Most Foul (1964)

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Margaret Rutherford played Miss Marple, the Agatha Christie crime solver, in four films (well, technically she has an uncredited cameo in The Alphabet Murders, but it’s just a gag). I’ve seen three of them and they are all delightful.

Murder Most Foul is the third film in that series. It finds Miss Marple on the jury in a murder case. One in which everyone thinks the man on trial is guilty. Even the judge pushes for a guilty verdict. But Marple has her doubts. So much so that she hangs the jury.

Naturally, she investigates. Clues lead her to a theatrical troupe (who have just performed a mystery based on an Agatha Christie story, Murder She Said – which was the first film in this series). She suspects the dead girl was blackmailing an actor in the troupe. Naturally, she finds a way to join them.

As always with this type of thing the cast is an eclectic group, each with their own secrets and possible motives for murder. Marple does her best to snoop them out.

Margaret Rutherford plays Marple as an eccentric, dotty old lady, who loves murder mysteries and uses her knowledge of them to solve real-life ones.

I think I liked Murder She Said slightly more than this one, though I’d put it on par with Murder at the Gallop. Though they do tend to get jumbled up in my mind. They are all very slight, but thoroughly enjoyable.

Murder Mysteries in May: P.J. (1968)

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The movies of the 1960s remind me a lot of the movies from the 1980s. Both decades featured a lot of neon-colored, flashy, stylish films without a lot of depth to them.

There were massive cultural changes taking place in the ’60s, the studio system was dying while the Production Code was lessening its grip. All of this changed the ways movies were made and the types of films audiences wanted to see. The 1980s brought in the blockbuster age and the advent of home video created a surge of low-budget, straight-to-video releases.

I don’t quite have an over-arching thesis about this, although I do think there are also similarities in the decades that followed – the 1970s and the 1990s, but I’ll save that ramble for another day.

What I’m really thinking about is Marlowe and P.J., two detective films that are very much 1960s movies, but that both throwback to all those film noirs from the 1940s.

With P.J., George Peppard plays the titular Phillip Marlowe-esque down-on-his-luck private eye. He’s so far gone he doesn’t even have an office, just a bar he frequents where the bartender keeps his messages.

He is tasked by millionaire William Orbison (a deliciously sleazy Raymond Burr) to play bodyguard to his mistress Maureen (Gayle Hunnicutt) who has been getting some threatening letters.

Orbison takes the mistress and his wife (and P.J. and his business partner Grenoble) to the Bahamas for a little relaxation. When Grenoble finds himself murdered P.J. realizes he’s been set up. He was hired to become the fall guy.

Through a myriad of twists and turns he eventually clears his name and proves who did the murdering.

I’ll be honest, I watched this movie about a week ago and I’ve watched another eight films since then. The details of this one have grown hazy. I had to look up the plot and scroll the images on IMDB to remember anything about it. But I do remember liking it. I guess it just wasn’t all that memorable.

George Peppard is good. I’d only seen him in Breakfast at Tiffany’s but he’s incredibly charming and he works well as a private detective who’s both charming and headstrong. I love watching Raymond Burr play a heavy, especially one as slimy as he is here. I grew up watching him on Perry Mason reruns so it’s a lot of fun seeing him play someone so completely different.

The music and the feel of the film are very swingin’ ’60s. At one point there are a couple of girls in bikinis dancing in a giant martini glass. So, yeah, it is definitely worth watching, even if I can’t remember the details.

Murder Mysteries In May: Cover Up (1949)

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In my review of the 1935 adaptation of The Glass Key, I mentioned a scene in the 1942 remake that starred William Bendix. In that scene, Bendix plays a thug who gets to slap around Alan Ladd’s character. He does so with such gusto that he nearly steals the movie. It made me an instant fan.

I’ve since watched 11 films starring the actor where he’s mostly played tough guys, loveable lugs, and the like. He was a bigger man physically, and not exactly handsome so he fits the role of the heavy, but there is a goofy warmth to him, which makes him interesting.

In Cover Up he plays Larry Best the sheriff of a small, Midwestern town investigating a murder. Except he doesn’t seem all that interested in investigating it at all.

It is actually an insurance investigator, Sam Donovan (Dennis O’Keefe) who does most of the investigating. The dead man was shot and the sheriff ruled it a suicide. The trouble is the gun is nowhere to be found, and there are no powder burns on the body which would indicate being shot at close range. When Sam pushes Larry for answers he just shrugs it off. In fact, no one in the town seems all that interested.

Turns out the dead man was good and hated by pretty much everyone. Clearly, he was murdered and clearly, it is being covered up. Almost everyone in town is helping with the cover-up because whoever killed him is well-liked and the dead man deserves to be dead. To a normal investigator, this would be enough. Suicide prevents an insurance pay out and that’s that.

But Sam is no normal investigator. He pursues the matter strongly even if murder means a double indemnity payout. The film owes a clear debt to Double Indemnity but it is nowhere near as good.

Naturally, there is a girl. Anita Weatherby (Barbara Britton) becomes the love interest. She’s also the daughter of one of the prime suspects. But there is little heat between her and Sam and almost no cleverness to their dialogue. Even my beloved William Bendix doesn’t add much. He’s fine, but rather more reserved than usual.

The mystery is serviceable and it is set at Christmastime which adds a nice holiday theme to what is really a rather cozy film noir. That’s the thing, it isn’t a bad film, it is exactly the kind of movie you might throw on during the holidays while you are at your in-laws, full of ham and good cheer.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Guilty of Romance (2011)

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When you watch as many movies as I do you are sometimes going to venture into the strange. You’re gonna watch a few films that make you say “What the Hell did I just watch?” I’m not entirely sure I liked Guilty of Romance. I’m definitely sure I didn’t quite understand it. But I’ll never say I was bored watching it.

It begins with a grizzly murder. A young woman has been dismembered inside a rundown flat in the Love Hotel district of Tokyo. Parts of her body are wearing a pretty red dress with the missing parts being replaced by mannequin pieces. Other sections of the corpse are fitted out in the same manner but in a schoolgirl uniform. The head and sex parts are missing.

Police detective Kazuko Yoshida (Miki Mizuno) is on the case. The story intercuts the investigation with that of bored housewife Izumi Kikuchi (Megumi Kagurazaka). She’s married to a famous novelist. He’s an exacting husband. He leaves at the same time every morning and returns promptly in the evening. When he arrives he expects his slippers to be waiting for him in the entryway and to be placed in a precise manner. He complements her tea-making skills in a way that lets us know he’s chastised her about it before. When she places some Japanese soap (not the French stuff he likes) in the bath, he berates her.

Their marriage seems to be without romance, love, or satisfying sexual encounters. She’s approached by a woman in a shop who claims to be a talent agent. Izumi is pretty enough to be a model she says. The photos turn out to be softcore in nature. Later she meets Mitsuko Ozama (Makoto Togashi) a sex worker who convinces Izumi to join her in that work.

In some ways, the film is about this repressed woman, living a very traditional lifestyle, diving deeper and deeper into sexual liberation.

Kazuko is more modern and liberated. She’s a police detective, a working woman in a field dominated by men. She’s also married, to a man who seems perfectly nice. But she’s had affairs as well. Currently, she’s involved with a man who likes to play domination games.

There is a lot more to the story but to delve any deeper would be to spoil it. The murder mystery takes second shelf to all of the sexual shenanigans. Director Sion Sono is interested in the ways women must navigate their own sexuality, and society’s demands upon it.

It is a deeply weird, subversive film. At times I was quite uncomfortable watching it. Especially early on when Izumi is being pushed into sexual acts she’s clearly not ready for. But the film wants us to be uncomfortable. This isn’t sex for titillation, there is always a reason behind it. I’m not always sure I understand those reasons or can get behind them fully, but I’m glad I watched it.

Recommended, but not for the faint of heart.

Murder Mysteries In May: The Falcon Takes Over (1942)

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A good murder mystery needs a good detective. Well, not necessarily a detective as mysteries have been solved by police detectives, private detectives, federal agents, spies, newspaper reporters, priests, and little old ladies. But whoever is solving the mysteries must be good. Also interesting.

Interesting detectives in good stories often find themselves in ongoing series, solving murders over and over again. Great ones become iconic and get adapted for decades. Consider Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot. Sometimes a detective will be quite popular for some time and then be forgotten. Lost to time.

The Falcon was a suave English gentleman detective created by Michael Arlen. He was adapted into sixteen films – the first three starred George Sanders as Gay “The Falcon” Lawrence. In the remaining films Gay’s brother Tom (portrayed by George Sanders’s real-life brother Tom Conway) became the star.

All of the films were b-movies (and I’m using the original sense of the word – films designed to be the second half of a double feature) but popular ones.

I searched for the first two films (The Gay Falcon and A Date with the Falcon) but couldn’t find them streaming anywhere. So I settled on this one, the third in the franchise.

It is very loosely based on the Raymond Chandler novel Farewell, My Lovely. Moose Malloy (Ward Bond) a big, dumb, brute escapes from prison and shows up at a swank nightclub looking for his girl, Velma (Helen Gilbert). The club used to be a dump when she worked there and now nobody remembers who Velma is. In his anger Moose barges inside and questions the manager so fiercely he kills him. He forces a man named Goldie (Allen Jenkins) to drive him away.

Goldie just happens to be the Falcon’s right-hand man. Moose lets Goldie go and after he’s questioned by the police and is removed as a potential suspect he and the Falcon go Moose hunting.

The plot takes a lot of twists and turns with a stolen jade neckless, blackmail, and more murder all showing up. A cute reporter (Anne Revere) joins our hereoes to add a romance angle.

I’m a huge Raymond Chandler fan and his story helps the film a lot. Everything else going on makes me wonder if I’d enjoy these films very much at all. I love George Sanders but he’s fairly bland here. The Falcon is much more akin to Nick Charles in the Thin Man Films (svelte, sophisticated, and light-hearted) than Chandler’s hard-boiled, rough-and-tumble Phillip Marlow. I suspect me knowing the source material hindered things a big as the Falcon doesn’t jive with my notions of who the detective should be in this story.

But it goes off well enough. It is very light, and fun. Allen Jenkins is having a blast, and gets all the best lines. It is a perfectly fine Saturday afternoon type movie and worth watching if you like that sort of thing.

Murder Mysteries In May: The Kennel Murder Case (1933)

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I’m certainly not the only person who loves murder mysteries. Go to any bookstore and you will find shelves lined with them. Turn on the television to nearly any station and you’ll likely find one. Countless movies have been made in the genre. As I noted in my keynote it is an extremely malleable genre. It can be fitted to suit any audience’s needs.

As one might know from my yearly participation in Noirvember I am a huge fan of film noirs and the hard-boiled way of writing. It was actually the Coen Brothers who turned me on to such things. I’d heard their movie Miller’s Crossing was inspired by a couple of books from Dashiell Hammett so I went to the library and started reading him. That led me to Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain which led me to their movie adaptations and the rest is history.

But I’m getting away from myself. The Kennell Murder Case is based on a book by the same name by S.S. Van Dine. He was a conetemporary of Hammett, but his books have greatly fallen out of favor. They were getting that way by the time Chandler started writing a decade or so later. Chandler directly called Dine out in his essay on mystery writing The Simple Art of Murder in 1944.

Philo Vance was the name of Van Dine’s detective. Here he’s played by William Powell (who would find great success a year later in The Thin Man, written by Hammett). In the books, apparently, Vance is a bit of a dandy, an intellectual and aesthete who solves murders by picking up clues the police miss.

Powell (who had previous played Vance in three other films) plays the character like a prototype for Nick Charles in The Thin Man movies. He’s intelligent and upper class but not distinctly so. He’s witty at times but the script isn’t all that sharp.

The plot is basically a locked room mystery. A man is found dead inside his room. The door is locked from the inside, as are the windows. He was shot in the head and the pistol is laying by his side. Suicide is the obvious answer, but Philo Vance doesn’t think so. He just saw the man the day before at a dog race and he seemed perfectly upbeat. When the coroner realizes the cause of death was a blow to the head by a blunt object, and not the gunshot the case is on.

There are more murders and more mysteries that arise, but honestly I was bored from the begining. The pacing is sluggish. The dialogue comes with these odd pauses between lines and the scenes don’t cut out for several beats after everything that needed to be done is done. And as the dialogue isn’t all that clever, and the action not all that well done all of that slowness just makes the film seem like its longer than it actually is.

I always like William Powell, and he’s fine here, but the character is underwritten and the story so underwhelming, that I can only recommend this to die hard fans.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Malignant (2021)

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It is time for both the Friday Night Horror Movie and Murder Mysteries in May. One would think it would not be difficult to find a film that fits both of those descriptions. Murder is horrific after all. But for tonight, I found it nearly impossible. The trouble, I’m realizing is that since mysteries and crime stories are some of my favorite genres, I’ve seen a lot of them. I wanted to watch something I’d never seen before and that proved difficult. I was probably using the wrong search terms.

I eventually landed on Malignant. It was directed by James Wan who has helmed several horror films I’ve enjoyed (namely The Conjuring and Insidious). Even when I’m more ambivalent about his films (namely the Saw franchise) I’m always impressed with his craft as a filmmaker. He definitely knows how to move a camera and create some true cinematic scares.

The basic synopsis of the film – woman begins having visions of terrible murders only to realize they are coming true – has been done many times before, but that type of thing can be effective and with Wan at the helm, I figured it would at least be interesting.

I was wrong. So very, very wrong.

In general, I’d say picking on a film’s plot holes (both real and imagined) is one of the lazier forms of criticism. A film is more than a plot and a great movie can overcome bits in the story that don’t make logical sense. But I also realize that when a film isn’t working for me I tend to get angry at those holes in the plot.

Malignant is a very stupid movie. So much of what happens either doesn’t make sense or is just completely bonkers. But the thing is Malignant is also a film that completely understands how utterly ridiculous it is. Few films from major studios are allowed to have such a ludicrous premise and are given the chance to just completely go for it.

Had I been in a better mood, had I been less tired, or had I been with some friends who enjoyed dumb, stupid, ridiculous horror films I might have allowed myself to just go with it and have a good time. As it is, I could barely make it through.