The Saint In Palm Springs

Errant Stamps

The Saint In Palm Springs
USA 1941 Directed by Jack Hively
Warner Archive Blu Ray Zone A

So here we have the next installment of my off and on rewatch of the movies based on The Saint. This is the sixth in the series and it’s also the fifth and final one for George Sanders in the title role. Sanders would jump ship on the Simon Templar but not the studio when he swapped this role out for another character who Leslie Charteris, writer of The Saint novels, once referred to as a ‘bargain basement’ version of his. I’m talking, of course, of the films where he played The Falcon... which was a series which also left him behind after a while but in a much more interesting fashion, if I recall correctly. Don’t worry, I’ll get to that when I start revisiting The Falcon movies for this blog. They’re on the ‘to watch’ pile.

It’s actually a bit of a film for ‘lasts’, actually. This is Jonathan Hale’s fifth and final appearance as Inspector Fernack. This is also Wendy Barrie’s third and final appearance in The Saint series of films but, strangely, she plays a different character in each one. She also followed her leading man Sanders into The Falcon series. Finally, we also have Paul Gullifoyle playing in his third and final of The Saint movies... although it’s only the second appearance of his character Clarence ‘Pearly’ Gates in this one.

The film is a short one but it’s a charming romp, like most of them and, although Sanders maybe is a little too ‘upper class’ for the role, he still does a great job and who can blame him with the quality dialogue he gets in these things. The words used in these 1930s and 1940s films positively sing themselves off the page and they really show up the movies that are thrust into our cinemas these days. Nobody is writing dialogue as good as this anymore.

The Saint In Palm Springs starts off with a ticker tape directive to arrest The Saint as he disembarks from an ocean voyage but, of course, he gives the two welcoming policemen the slip and fastens them together with their own handcuffs when they try to take him in. When The Saint turns up shortly later, unnanounced, in Ferneck’s office, we find it was all an elaborate ruse by the inspector to attract The Saint’s attention so he could ask him for some unofficial help. That help being that he wants Simon Templar to escort his friend and the extremely valuable stamps he has on him to a close family member of the gentleman in question. These stamps are worth gazillions of dollars and there have already been two attempts made on his friend’s life.

Ferneck, who is a character I enjoy a lot, is only in the movie for... probably less than ten minutes but he starts the adventure off and he also has probably the best line for when his detectives return empty handed and cuffed together by The Saint... “Well, you'd better go down to the police garage and borrow a file. When you get those things off, you better use it to sharpen your wits.” Of course, one wonders why the heck he had to send out a false telegram to his own department to look for The Saint anyway, instead of just sending them out to discretely collect him but... um... no, I’ve got no answer for that one.

Alas, Ferneck’s friend bites the bullet, so to speak, just after Templar arrives. Templar manages to hold on to the stamps, however and agrees to deliver the ‘cargo’ to Wendy Barrie’s character Elna Johnson personally and look after her/them until they can be safely and officially squirreled away. On the way he meets a femme fatale who right away tips her hand to the audience that she is after the stamps but also, it seems, there is more than one interested party in these tiny scraps of paper.

The film then, for all its one hour and six minute running time, becomes a series of scenes in Palm Springs where The Saint, Elna and Pearly Gates try to keep up with the stamps as these little items leave a trail of corpses in their path. It's a flimsy plot but, with all that sparkling dialogue it's a pleasant enough watch and, although not his best, finishes Sander's run on the series fairly nicely (in fact, he literally rides of into the sunset on a horse at the end of the tale, like an old Western movie). There are some fairly silly things about it too though...

Like the fact that expert pickpocket Pearly Gates is on probation and he has to check in each day after his job with his parole officer to keep himself from going to jail for ten years... so what job have they found him to do while on parole? House Detective for the resort that Templar is staying in, of course. Seriously? How in heck do you give a seasoned criminal a tide over job as a house detective... this makes no sense. It’s almost as silly as the overhead model shot of Palm Springs used as an establishing shot when The Saint arrives. I’m pretty sure it’s a model because there are no people walking around it... then, when we cut to the resort itself, all the exterior locations seem to have been recreated in a studio. It’s not an uncommon thing for those days but it does look fairly silly at times.

Another silly thing is the presence of George Sanders’ stunt double during a ‘lights out’ fist fight during the story. I use the word ‘double’ loosely because, honestly, he looks nothing like the person he’s doubling for. And it’s not a particularly violent fist fight either, to be fair. One wonders why they needed a stunt double for this scene in the first place. Perhaps at Sanders insistence?

All silliness aside, though, The Saint In Palm Springs is still another good dose of Simon Templar’s shenanigans and, once again, features a Roy Webb score which utilises the ‘Saint jingle’ that Sanders whistles throughout. Whether it was actually Leslie Charteris or Roy Webb who came up with that jingle is a matter on which there is some disagreement but it gives the films some continuity (which even carried over to the Ian Ogilvy TV series Return Of The Saint in the late 1970s, if my memory is not failing me). So, much to be recommended in this one and, as I said earlier, I will be following Sanders’ transition into The Falcon series in a while (not to mention Tom Conway’s version of the character... which makes for an interesting story itself). In the meantime, I will carry on with The Saint series with an actor I don’t recall seeing in the part before, taking over from Sanders. The next three films, I think, are totally new to me. So look out for that next one at some point in the very near future.

The Saint Takes Over

Tomb’s Raider

The Saint Takes Over
USA 1940
Directed by Jack Hively
RKO/Warner Brothers Archive 
DVD Region 1

And, once again, I’m back into the process I started a couple of years ago on this blog, that of rewatching all of The Saint movies. This one is called The Saint Takes Over and is the first one, as far as I can make out, not having the direct writing influence of the character’s creator and scribe, Leslie Charteris. The previous movie was also not based on a Charteris novel but it did have his involvement in developing the script... which was a surprise to me considering the gimmicky nature of the previous outing, The Saint’s Double Trouble (reviewed by me here).

Now it always makes me scratch my head when the makers of films based on the books of a prolific writer such as Charteris (there are so many Saint novels out there) choose to do their own thing with the writing rather than call on any number of a wealth of already great books involving the character but, there you go... maybe they got away with paying Charteris less for the use of the character rather than base it on one of the novels, who knows? What I do know for sure is that there’s no real drop in quality in this one.... although the Simon Templar character seems to be much more honest and playing up to the “modern Robin Hood” reputation he has earned in the fictional universe in which he exists. Perhaps to temper Templar’s lack of true criminal deeds in this one, George Sanders manages to play him, with the help of some well written dialogue, as still existing as that character with no drop in credibility at not “rubbing anyone out” or “thieving money”. Indeed, the one slight untruth he wishes to bring into play as a fiction created for the police is even exposed by the person he’s trying to protect in a scene right near the end of the film... but I don’t want to give away too many spoilers on this one.

The film opens, and I think this must be the first time in any of The Saint movies, with an animated version of Simon Templar’s famous stick figure at the beginning of a more standard credits sequence... accompanied when this animation is active, by the whistled version of the title character’s signature melody, composed by either the film’s “music director” Roy Webb or Charteris himself... depending on who’s story you believe (for more on this dilemma, see some of my other reviews of the earlier Saint films). I don’t know if an animated figure features in any of the later films in this series (I will know soon but I can’t remember from the last time I saw them all, decades ago) but I do remember they used to use stick figure animations on the end titles of the Ian Ogilvy TV series The Return Of The Saint... which also made use of that famous, musical jingle as an ingredient of its theme tune.

After the credits we see Sanders playing The Saint using his Sebastian Tombs identity and behaving in a less than welcome, forward manner on a cruise ship (which is something Sanders could always get away with in that he was pretty much typecast as “a cad” as an actor). The brunt of his affection, Ruth Summers, is played by Wendy Barrie, who also played the leading lady in a couple of the other George Sanders movies about the character. Bizarrely, she played a completely different character in each of these movies and it wasn’t until she followed Sanders into The Falcon series of movies, the following year, that she got to play a repeat character opposite Sander’s hero. The Saint saves her from a couple of card sharks and also gets to paraphrase the famous Dorothy Parker quote “Men don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses” with the line “Don’t go to bridge classes with men who wear glasses” here. This made me chuckle and I guess that must mean one of the film's two screenplay writers, Lynn Root or Frank Fenton, must have been a fan or, remembering the circles Parker moved in at the time, possibly knew her at one point.

We also learn in this sequence that the New York Police Inspector Fernack, played so wonderfully again by Jonathan Hale, has been suspended from activity by the police. In fact, he’s been framed by a collective, criminal ring of mobsters who planted $50,000 in his safe. Soon enough, both Templar and, in a quite obvious twist which I won’t comment on too much here because it deals with something which some people might still consider to be a ‘reveal’, Ruth Summers, plus the wonderful Paul Guilfoyle as new series regular Clarence “Pearly” Gates... are all working, one way or another (by the end of the movie), to clear Inspector Fernack’s name. This is proving difficult because, each time Templar and Fernack try to isolate one of the key witnesses to testify about the frame up, they end up dead and in such a way that it looks like Fernack has rubbed them out himself.

That’s about as much as I’m going to say about the plot of this one because it is fairly simplistic but there’s more than enough to make up for it in the way of sparkling dialogue and the way it’s shot.

The film is full of loaded comedy shenanigans with Sanders and Hale bouncing lines off each other... with Fernack once more finding himself working with Templar when he really should be handing him in to the police as a key suspect. It’s fun to see him at a loss, too, when he complains at the start of the film that, now he’s been suspended, it feels funny not to be going into work. Fernack’s wife hands him the washing up from their breakfast and says, “Thats what you think is it? That's your mistake Henry. Youre just going to find out what real work is." Which is a nice, comic moment with a certain amount of truth I’m sure a lot of housewives and househusbands would clearly identify with.

The way the movie is shot is not overly creative but it’s certainly not nearly as dull as it could be. Asides from the great noir style lighting making full use of hard to see sets and landscapes, shadows and silhouettes, as was standard practice in the days of cinema when the directors weren’t afraid of leaving the lights off in scenes, there are also some nice touches which director Jack Hively gives the film to lift it out a bit where other, less conscientious directors, may well have left it a more mediocre concoction. He tends to use a lot of moving camera, for example, and in a scene where a character has to read from a paper, he has the character and his associate walk around the room to read from the paper, the camera following them to raise the level of subconscious interest in the visual style and thus aid concentration of the otherwise dull trotting out of plot points.

There’s also a nice bit of visual shorthand where two of the many villains of the film, although one turns out to be an ally by the end of the picture, are introduced by two big photos in a newspaper with a headline explaining their story function... backed up by some dramatic, sinister music which tells you right away that there is villainy afoot and the film makers would like you to associate that villainy with these two, for the time being. This is, obviously, a tried and tested formula for these kinds of movies and, although it’s slipped out of use... presumably for it’s quick fix, clichéd familiarity... it certainly contributes to the director’s overall speedy pacing of this movie... which is a valuable asset when you consider that these things were just a little over an hour in running time, presumably released as B-features, and you really did have to move quickly to try and cram everything in.

There’s also an interesting bit of ‘almost’ product placement here. At one point, Pearly Gates is reading a newspaper and it’s made very clear he’s reading the Dick Tracy cartoon strip in the paper. Later on, the same character is reading one of the actual issues of the era’s Dick Tracy comics. Now I did some quick research, through the usual channels, and it seems that although there had already been three successful Dick Tracy serials, put out by Republic in the 1930s, it wasn’t until 1945 that the first of four stand alone films came out, released by RKO who also made this movie. I don’t know why it took another five years before a feature movie was made of the Dick Tracy character but the two references in this movie makes me wonder if they weren’t maybe already courting the rights to the character at this point. If anybody knows if that was the case or whether these two references were purely in the spirit of contemporary pop culture references, then please leave the info in the comments section below this review.

And that’s all I’ve really got to say about The Saint Takes Over. George Sanders and Jonathan Hale are both absolutely brilliant in this and ably supported by the kind of top notch character actors and actresses you would expect in this Golden Age of Hollywood movie making. Another thoroughly entertaining entry in the series and both Sanders and Wendy Barrie would return for just one more picture in The Saint series of films before jumping ship with the similar series of films about The Falcon character (yeah, don’t worry, they’re all on the pile to watch and review once I’m done with The Saint). If you like The Saint movies then this is definitely a corker and it certainly captures the spirit of the novels, barring those slight but skillfully hidden concessions towards the central character (possibly due to censorship issues and the Hayes code?) and fans of The Saint should definitely enjoy this one.

The Saint's Double Trouble

Templar Nights

The Saint's Double Trouble
USA 1940
Directed by Jack Hively
RKO DVD1 Region 1

So, finally, I am continuing with my catch up on the series of The Saint movies I started rewatching and reviewing a couple of years ago, after an unscheduled break. The Saint’s Double Trouble is the fourth in the series, and the third with George Sanders in the title role. Although this one, for some strange reason not known to me, is not directly based on any of the original Leslie Charteris novels, he apparently did have a hand in developing this one for the screen... which is a shame in some ways, due to the gimmicky nature of the plot. You’ll see what I mean in a minute, if the title doesn’t already give it all away to you.

The film starts off with a coffin being taken to a postal service in Cairo, being mailed, allegedly, by Simon Templar to his old Egyptologist friend Professor Bitts in the US (played here by Thomas W. Ross). And who do you think would walk into a post office with a coffin in his arms? Yep, here we have what can only be called a “guest role” for the original “authorised” screen Dracula, Bela Lugosi. After this scene, he drops out of the film until somewhere about two thirds of the way through the picture and it’s a shame that his inability to learn the English language, and having to learn his scripts phonetically, had already reduced him to these kinds of minor roles. In this film he plays a character called “The Partner”, who is really just a human clue for Simon Templar to pick up on in his fight against the real villain of the piece.

Now, after having watched this for 15 minutes, I started getting confused. By this time, you see, I had forgotten what the title of the movie was and when Simon Templar went back to his hideout to consult with his gang of criminals... um. What? Yeah, it’s the old doubles plot. These days it’s one of the sure signs that a movie or TV show has gotten to the point where it’s “jumped the shark”, in modern parlance... and that’s one of the reasons why I was surprised Charteris was involved in this one. Even in those days it was getting to be a bit of a cliché, I suspect, and certainly a sign that the scriptwriters were running out of ideas. As it happens, though, it did manage to fool me... so it was either done incredibly subtly or... I didn’t anticipate the complete lack of realism in the way the characters were pitched.

By that last comment I mean to say that, although George Sanders is obviously playing both roles, his voice and characterisation of the “double” are exactly the same as each other. Seriously people? They’d even have the same voice? Furthermore... how the heck does the double know enough about Simon Templar’s personal life to be able to frame him for a string of murders? Anyone could fake up a Saint calling card, sure... but they wouldn’t, for instance, have a knowledge of the history between Simon Templar and Professor Bitts or, as it turns out, Professor Bitt’s daughter, played by Helene Whitney. So there’s that.

Still, it doesn’t really matter because the cast are all pretty good, although the locations being used all seem to be limited to the same three or four settings, with characters going back and forth between the specific areas laid out in the first 20 minutes of the movie... with the exception of a jail scene near the end of the film (and that’s giving away nothing in terms of plotting, by the way). Jonathan Hale is back on hand as Inspector Fernack, the Inspector Teale equivalent of The Saint’s American set adventures... and I’m happy to say he’s playing the character a little smarter than he did in the last entry. Still not as sharp as he was in the original Louis Hayward opener, The Saint In New York (reviewed here), but certainly no longer a completely helpless buffoon, at least.

The pacing is not as speedy as the blistering third film in the series (reviewed here) and, in all honesty, the dialogue is not as sharp or as singing as it was in that one either. However, the characters are all fairly charming (even the villains) and it whiles away its short running time fairly pleasantly. Sanders impressed me a little by actually being quite ruthless and tough when it came to risking the lives of the people who are playing against him... and still manages to come out of it as less of a thug and more of a righteous person who is, nevertheless, also a Robin Hood style criminal. I was also pleased that the writers were not afraid of killing off one of the more likeable, good guy characters in the film... and stuff like that is always a bonus to add a touch of weight to the drama and ensure that to Simon Templar in this one, just like a 1980s action hero... this time it’s personal!

Now, to be fair, there were gaping plot holes in this and not too much done in terms of actual detecting and problem solving as Simon Templar tries to get to the bottom of the mystery. It’s very much late 1970s Roger Moore as James Bond territory when it comes to any actual investigative techniques being used. That being said, the lack of logic and realism in terms of the plot mechanics in no way detract from this being a pretty entertaining experience and Sanders is surprisingly capable in a role which has him leaping undetected onto the running boards of cars or being tied up in a sinking row boat... this is all good stuff.

Once again, the trademark tune which Sanders whistles and which is claimed by Charteris himself as his invention (although my money is still on musical director Roy Webb, who continues duties on this entry) is heard and, certainly, it’s something that fans of later incarnations of The Saint in film and television, especially Ian Ogilvy’s turn as Templar in the TV show Return Of The Saint, will be very familiar with. So it’s good that at least some films were going for a certain amount of musical continuity... much more than the powers that be in Hollywood seem to be attempting these days, at any rate.

The ending is a short and sweet affair. I’m pretty sure these shorter movies would have been made to be the supporting feature to larger budgeted productions in most cases, but it certainly ensures that the film doesn’t outstay it’s welcome and I have to say, despite my objections to Sanders in the role in comparison to Louis Hayward, who I think played the character perfectly to the version in the books, I am still having a blast with this series of films and am enjoying these just as much as I did in my early teens, in the 1980s. So you can be sure there’ll be another Saint review on here soon and I need to get my skates on in that respect so I can start catching up to The Falcon films again. Watch this space.