In The Navy

Navy Lark Ascending

In The Navy
Directed by Arthur Lubin
USA 1941
Universal Pictures
Shout Factory Blu Ray Zone A

Abbott and Costello were so popular already that they released four movies in 1941 alone and this one, In The Navy, was the second of them. This one stars the famous singing star Dick Powell as the main romantic lead (three years before he tried to change his image by playing a pretty good version of Philip Marlow, if memory serves, in Murder My Sweet aka Farewell My Lovely), Claire Dodd as his romantic interest (who played Della Street in the Perry Mason flick The Case Of The Velvet Claws, reviewed here) and, also as a kind of semi-villainous authority figure role, Dick Foran (this film sandwiched between, among others, his two The Mummy sequels The Mummy’s Hand, reviewed here and The Mummy’s Tomb, reviewed here). 

While it’s a case of Bud and Lou being punctuated by the intrusive ‘reporter tries to break the story of the singing sensation who joins the Navy incognito to escape his adoring, female public before falling in love with him’ plot, along with various musical outbursts, most of which didn’t land for me this time, apart from the wonderful Andrews Sisters numbers in the movie, they don’t take a back seat as much... but, I have to say, I didn’t like this one as much as the previous two movies, for sure. Which just shows how much I know because, the general public liked it fine and the picture raked in even more box office bullion than their previous picture Buck Privates (reviewed here). This wasn’t a direct sequel to that movie, with the boys playing different characters but, there was one coming for sure. Actually, they already had the next picture in the can before this but, because the American public wanted more ‘service pictures’, the Navy movie was released first.

And, although I didn’t find it quite as entertaining, there’s still a lot of nice comedy moments in this and some points of interest too. The routines they do, a couple of them aided by Shemp Howard of The Three Stooges again, are mostly okay but they are still quite amusing and there’s one extended sequence involving spitting water at each other where the guys (and everyone else on set) keep cracking up and spilling the water, with all those takes left in. There are some nice dialogue moments too... for instance, when the lead actress stowing away introduces herself to Lou as Dot and when Lou sees someone coming for her, he yells “Dash, Dot! Dash!” Which made me smile. Also, when Lou asks Bud what some men are working on in a photo, Bud replies ‘That’s a hull of a ship!” Lou says, “You’re telling me. But what’s that thing they’re working on!” Or when Lou is reading about what Stern, Bow and Starboard is and Dot asks him where the Port is, he directs her that it’s near the ice box. 

So yeah, there’s some good dialogue and also some nice visual comedy, such as the moment Lou draws a big hook on a blackboard and then hangs his hat on it like it’s a real one. But there’s also some interesting metatextual stuff going on in the movie too, such as the opening credits where Bud and Lou are hoisting flags up with the names and titles on them and they flag up that it’s Buck Privates, before Bud points out that Lou got the wrong flag and they hoist it back up as In The Navy. And another scene where Lou says he’s going to go out and buy loads of Andrews Sisters records and starts singing one of the songs from the previous film... which is almost fine because the Andrews Sisters are kinda playing versions of themselves in this one but... yeah, it’s still kinda hammering lightly at that fourth wall, for sure. 

The most curious thing, for me, was a whole extended 15 or 20 minute sequence near the end of the movie where Lou accidentally gains control of the ship and sends it on some bizarre military manoeuvres (courtesy of some not too convincing miniatures, it has to be said)... which then suddenly turns out to be part of a dream after he knocks himself out with a sleeping draft. Well, I thought this was a pretty strange choice for the movie, being as it’s right near the end but, reading up on it, it was never originally supposed to be a dream sequence. What happened was, when the Navy saw the crazy movements the ship was making in this big sequence, they immediately withdrew their support for the film... so the studio changed it to being a dream sequence and then they were back ‘on board’ with the film, if you’ll excuse the pun (and why wouldn’t you?). 

And that’s me done on In The Navy, I think. Again, I didn’t like this one as much as the other two but it’s still quite entertaining for the most part and I’m still looking forward to seeing the other 20 plus movies in Shout Factory’s well restored Blu Ray box. I’ll let you know how that turns out.

The Case Of The Velvet Claws

Legal Claws

The Case Of
The Velvet Claws
USA 1936
Directed by William Clemens
Warner Archive DVD Region 1

The Case Of The Velvet Claws is the fourth of the six Perry Mason feature films made by Warner Brothers in the 1930s but it’s also the last one with Warren William playing Mason. Eddie Acuff takes over as Spudsy, the comic relief private detective assistant to Mason on this one but we also welcome back Claire Dodd as Della Street, who played her in the second movie also, The Case Of The Curious Bride (reviewed here).

This one is actually based on the very first Perry Mason novel from 1933 and, I can only hope the meaning of the title is made clear in that book because I’ve got no idea what it has to do with the content of the film, for sure. One thing opens the movie, though, which I’m sure must be a pretty big deviation from the source... that is to say, well, in the books there is often some sexual tension between Mason and his secretary Street. Apparently, in the 2020 TV show, which is still set in the 1930s, they remove that element by making Della Street a lesbian. Here, they come at the issue from another angle. The film starts off with Mason interrupting a legal proceeding and the judge takes a ten minute adjournment in order that she can marry Mason and Street in her chambers. After the two tie the knot, they set off on a honeymoon but, of course, before they have had five minutes of the married life, Mason is taken at gunpoint by a new client, Eva Belter (played by Wini Shaw) and he very quickly gets involved in a case defending her from a murder wrap, with a difference...

In this case, both Eva and the audience think she did it. Mason figures differently but, unfortunately, to save herself, she tells the police she heard Mason get into an argument with the victim at the scene of the crime and throws suspicion on him. So Mason has to try and solve the case while staying ahead of the police who want to arrest him. Of course, by the end of the film, Mason fills everybody in on who the real murderer was... much to the surprise of Eva.

While this one is a little more on the serious side than the screwball antics of the previous two films, there’s still a lot of humour being forced into this one, although it doesn’t seem as well written and falls flat most of the time, it seemed to me. Shenanigans include a running joke where Perry has to keep running out on his new wife, a running joke about him catching and giving everyone a cold and a horrible sequence where Spudsy goes under cover dressed in drag. Yeah, the comedy is not great in this one but it doesn’t distract too much from the plot, it has to be said.

All in all, it’s not a terrible movie although the director did nothing special to push the semiotics of cinema the way one or two of them on this series did. William Clemens also directed the four, quite brilliant 1930s Nancy Drew movies and a couple of The Falcon adventures too. Once again, this was one of a number of films which were promoted on the credits as part of The Clue Club Mysteries, a gimmick Warners were pushing to act as a brand for their mystery movies at the time.

And that’s me done on this one I’m afraid. I’m sorry this is such a short review but I don’t have much more to add. I don’t know if Mason is still married to Della Street in the next film in the series but I’ll let you know sometime soon. Meanwhile, The Case Of The Velvet Claws (whatever that means) is not the best in the series and not one I’d recommend to hook you into these.

The Case Of The Curious Bride

Making It Legal

The Case Of The
Curious Bride
USA 1935
Directed by Michael Curtiz
Warner Archive DVD Region 1

The Case Of The Curious Bride, the second of the Warner Brothers movies based (lightly enough for th original author to actually hate them) on the famous Perry Mason novels by Erle Stanley Gardner, once again stars Warren William as the famous legal hotshot. But already, by the second film in the series, it’s a very different kind of movie from the first one. It also has a very famous director in the form of Michael Curtiz, who would direct many popular (too numerous to mention them all) Hollywood classics in his career such as Yankee Doodle Dandy, The Commancheros and, of course, Casablanca. I’ll name a couple more of this director’s movies in a little while when they become very relevant to one of the minor actors here, just a step up from an extra, in this movie towards the end of this review.

Okay, so I said this was a very different kind of Perry Mason and I certainly mean it. The film pretty much transforms the story and characters into a very frothy, funny romp, starting off with a scene where Mason practically takes over a restaurant in order to prepare a meal. And it’s almost as if the scriptwriters are trying too hard to make it witty and funny and... they don’t let up all the way through. It’s not quite like watching The Marx Brothers at work but it is a little inappropriately handled for a Perry Mason adventure, I would say. It even has a scene where Mason’s detective assistant ‘Spudsy’ Drake accidentally subjects Mason and himself to tear gas and the two have a touching scene where they are crying for comic effect. This movie really is skating on thin ice but... yeah... it just about gets away with it, I think.

And talking of ‘Spudsy’... he’s played by Allen Jenkins, who played the disgruntled police detective in the previous movie (eagle eyed veterans might also remember him as the original version of Goldie Locke in at least one of the early Falcon films). We also have a new Della Street already, this time in the form of actress Claire Dodd. She does alright here though, at least as good as the last person and ably assists Perry when she can, as he gets involved with an old flame who is now married to one person and who was married to another who was legally dead for four years except... now he’s turned up again. However, he doesn’t turn up for very long as he’s soon bumped off for real and she is now the prime suspect. The corpse in question is played by an actor who would soon be even more famous than the director and, okay, I’ll get to that in a minute.

What’s really interesting here is the amount of crude but persistent camera movement in this movie, which seems a little out of place for its time, this close to the transition from silent films into talkies... maybe this was when the equipment started getting quieter to move about again. Anyway, there seems to be a lot of dollying up to characters like a kind of ‘do it yourself’ zoom shot and, also, there’s some very nice footage of a low key car chase where the car behind is shot from the back of another car with a very dynamic set of sweeping camera movements. This really does seem ahead of its time for 1935.

The shots seem to get more elabourate as the film wears on, too. There’s a really odd shot where Della is looking into the camera longingly after Perry has left and the shot just holds for way too long before she suddenly freezes altogether and the frame seems to push in like a zoom into the camera. Not long after this, the director starts using something similar to transition from scene to scene. So, for instance, he’ll dolly out of a shot at the end of a scene and then it will blur and dissolve into him dollying into the exterior of a building, acting as an establishing shot, which will in turn dissolve out as he dollies into the next scene within that location. So, yeah, a very specific visual language is being established by Curtiz as the film progresses. It’s distracting but interesting and I wonder if he was just experimenting with what he could get away with here.

Okay, so I’ve mentioned the comedy and I’ve mentioned the convoluted camera moves... let’s talk about the corpse of the murdered ‘former’ husband. Well, we see him for a few seconds with a sheet over him without getting a look at his face. Luckily, a flashback revealing how he died takes place in the last five minutes or so of the film where the character gets into a fight and then gets accidentally pushed back onto a broken glasss before we see the life fade out of his eyes. He has no lines and he’s on screen for maybe not much more than a minute but this is the fourth little part for an up and coming Tasmanian actor the world would soon know more of, namely, Errol Flynn. I can only assume the director met him while working on this movie and he would, that same year, direct him starring in what would be his break out role from extra to star, Captain Blood. The two would work on many more movies together such as The Charge Of The Light Brigade, The Adventures Of Robin Hood and Dodge City. So, yeah, this movie is worth watching just to see the start of this famous director/actor working relationship.

One last curious thing which I should possibly mention is that, this being a Perry Mason story, there is no courtroom scene in this one at all. Instead, Perry throws a party for a number of guests at short notice (why the heck they all came is anyone’s guess) and unmasks the real culprit (who he will go on to defend after the film is finished, we are told) at the party. So, hmm, don’t know if this was the case in Gardner’s original novel but, I’m guessing not and it seems strange to me to have a film about a famous lawyer and not have any time in court. Still, even for all it’s faults, The Case Of The Curious Bride was certainly an interesting movie and I had a good time with it. I’m looking forward to watching the next one to see if they decided to carry the tone over from this one or not. As always, I’ll let you know.