The Hound Of The Baskervilles

Dogging The Law

The Hound Of
The Baskervilles
USA 1939 Directed by Sidney Lanfield
20th Century Fox Blu Ray Zone B

Well the time is upon me. I finally get caught up on a rewatch of the classic (and best) series of Sherlock Holmes films on a lovely set of Blu Ray transfers from, judging from this first one in the series, some pretty good prints. Rather than get the expensive, five disc US version I plumped for the Italian/German 7 disc release (since nobody has seen fit to make these available on Blu Ray in the country where Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of the original stories, lived... as yet, for some unfathomable reason). Both sets have all 14 films with the only real difference, from what I can make out since this Italian edition can be easily set for English language, with or without English subtitles in its menus, seems to be that the Italian set is £30 cheaper than the US set and that’s not including any import fees.

And what a film this is. The Hound Of The Baskervilles is the first of the original run featuring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, who were so popular as Holmes and Dr. Watson that they also played them for a number of years on the radio too. This was the first of two Sherlock Holmes films made and released by 20th Century Fox in 1939, the same year that Basil Rathbone and some of the cast of this one shot Son Of Frankenstein for Universal, which I believe was filmed just before this one (and which you can find reviewed by me here). I won’t go over the plot here again because so many people know it (or if they don’t, they don’t want it spoiled) but it takes a few liberties with Conan Doyles original novel (I think I’m right in remembering this was the longest Holmes story he wrote, novel length, as a kind of flashback story in between killing him off in the stories and then, later, snatching him back from death for more money spinning tales).  

Joining the winning team of Rathbone and Bruce (easily my personal favourite Holmes and Watson) was Richard Greene (future TV Robin Hood, star of Sword Of Sherwood Forest, reviewed here and who got top billing above Rathbone), Lionel Atwill, John Carradine, Wendy Barrie (who was in a fair few films in The Saint and The Falcon series) and, of course, Mary Gordon as Holmes’ housekeeper Mrs. Hudson, who would stay with the series along with the two male stars when it made the transition, after the first two films. The transition being that, after the two Fox films, which were both set in Victorian times like Conan Doyle’s original stories were, there was a gap of three years before Universal hired the three actors for a continuation of the series, this time contemporising them so that Holmes' adventures were updated for a 1940s wartime setting.

This one is pretty great and it’s wonderful looking back on these fantastic performers and character actors playing in a well oiled mechanism of a film. The direction and camerawork both look great for the roughly 4:3 aspect ratio of the time and, as evidenced by these quite good Blu Ray transfers (so far), all filmed in a very crisp black and white. There’s also a nice sequence near the start, where Atwill’s character is reading from a manuscript to fill in Holmes on the legend of the film’s titular Hound. The flashback is presented as a live action sequences of events but, it’s depicted as a little vignette superimposed into the centre of the manuscript, with the edges of the pages and the text, some overlapping, at the edge of the action. So, yeah, a nice touch.

Rathbone is absolutely amazing as Holmes, not quite emotionless and certainly he injects the required air of authority into the character for sure. And then there’s Watson, as played by Nigel Bruce. This guy is fantastic but I notice he’s not quite as bumbly and stupid as I remembered him to be in these. Maybe that comes later with the transition to the Universal scripts but here, he certainly does take the initiative and seems much smarter than he perhaps ended up as, later in the run. Although he certainly doesn’t penetrate Holmes disguise as the old peddler, hawking his wares around the vicinity of the Grimpen Mire. But you know what? That’s okay because, one of the things I remember very clearly and, it’s certainly the case here, is that unless you are seriously looking for it, the audience isn’t going to easily penetrate Rathbone’s disguises in these films. I remember being fooled quite a lot as a kid when I first watched these (at 5.40pm in the evening, week days on BBC2 in the early to mid 1970s, if memory serves) and looking at them now, if I didn’t half remember them, I would certainly be fooled again. Rathbone is hard to spot as he makes his voice gravelly and stoops behind a fake beard and moustache. It’s great make up and works much better than a lot of the stuff you see actors trying in modern movies, it has to be said.

The sets are fantastic too... especially the outdoor sets which try very hard... and succeed... at looking very much like the Moors on which half the action takes place. You can still tell it’s a big studio set but, certainly, it’s much more lavish and believable than, say, the sets used to stand in as exterior locations that Universal were using for their horror movies at the time. These really work and there are certainly no tell tale creases in the sky as people go about their business.

And, yeah, just a treat of a movie. I won’t say much else about it because you should discover these for yourself, if you don’t already know them but, certainly, The Hound Of The Baskervilles is the first in a classic run of much loved and popular films which should be on every film enthusiast’s radar. Definitely one to check out if you’ve not seen it.

A Date With The Falcon

Marry In Haste

A Date With The Falcon
USA 1942
Directed by Irving Reis
RKO/Warner Archive DVD Region 1

Warner: Some spoilers lurk within.

Released just three months after The Gay Falcon (reviewed here), which was the first film in this 13 movie series, A Date With The Falcon once again stars George Sanders as Gay Lawrence, Allen Jenkins as his sidekick Goldy and, contrary to what the muddleheaded IMDB has to say about the matter in their trivia section, Wendy Barrie is back as his fiancé Helen Reed. And this time, The Falcon and Helen are getting ever closer to tying the knot, if only Gay can make his rendezvous on time and take the agreed plane to cart them off to their wedding. But, of course, instead of catching the plane they are trying for... and much to Helen’s mounting ire during the course of the movie... the three become embroiled in another criminal adventure.

This is the first of many not based on the original short story by Michael Arlen (as the first film) but just using his character. However, in spite of the Hollywood tendency to spin their own yarn to suit the screen and mess things up, this one proves that the studio certainly knew their job here as it’s a much more pacier and fun film than the previous installment.

The plot involves an inventor, Waldo Sampson (played by Alec Craig), who can copy and manufacture diamonds which have exactly the same properties as real ones from which they cannot be told apart. The problem where he’s concerned, it turns out, is that he’s a ‘kindly inventor’ and has developed the formula to manufacture these as a cheap option for their use in industrial equipment like drill heads. Of course, this is not why criminals want both the formula and the man behind them and it isn’t long before Waldo is found dead... or is he? What most people don’t realise is that it’s only his twin brother who has been iced by ‘the bad guys’ and that the real Waldo has been kidnapped so the formula can be extracted from him and sold for a profit. Enter The Falcon, who finds himself accidentally involved in the case, despite trying to refuse Inspector Mike O’Hara, played by James Gleason. Something that both Helen and Goldy are a mite displeased about.

This one has quite a nice few touches that set it apart from a lot of the stuff going on in films I’ve seen from that period. Not that they’re necessarily unique, of course... just that I haven’t seen nearly enough films from this period, obviously...

One thing the story does, for instance, is have the criminals try to take out The Falcon, first by shooting at him and, when that fails, by kidnapping him as a deterrent in case he should decide to get involved. So, yeah, a kind of pro-active strategy because The Falcon’s former reputation precedes him and they want to take no chances. Thus they inevitably bring about their own future doom by involving him peripherally in the plot against his will. This is something, actually, that a lot of criminal gangs in the Doc Savage novels of the 1930s and 1940s used to try regularly, because Doc’s larger than life personality was such that if he ever got involved in their plot, their chances of carrying it out successfully would be pretty slim. So, yeah, it’s an old storytelling ruse for sure but I don’t remember it coming up too many times in the movies. It somehow feels a bit too convenient to me here, though.

The film rolls along at a breakneck pace too. The Falcon manages to get his kidnappers’ car pulled up by insulting the police in a neighbouring squad car and using their fury at him to arrest him and bring him safely out of the grasp of his captors. Once again, George Sanders shows a flair for a good comic turn and, in a later scene where he’s not concentrating on what he’s doing, perfectly times, along with Wendy Barrie, a moment where he manages to pour champagne on a table instead of in her glass without either of them noticing. This is shortly before the villains have him in their clutches once again.

As usual, his fiance gets him in even more trouble trying to get him out of it. For example, when he gets into a hotel room and finds the dead body purported to be that of the inventor, he clambers out onto the ledge outside a fifth floor hotel room to evade capture by the police when they arrive, only to have his waiting fiance on the street below make a scene and call attention to him, allowing the police to discover him. Which is a neat little thing right there... normally those ledge walk scenes in thrillers always work.

And, like the previous film, both Goldy and Helene both find themselves running afoul of the police in different situations and both end up under arrest while the police attempt to round up their number one suspect, The Falcon. Of course, all goes well at the end and, like the previous movie, everything comes out in the wash when all the guilty and innocent parties converge in the police station. This one doesn’t end up with a ‘new case’ dropping The Falcon’s way as the last film did and, that wasn’t picked up in this one anyway. Instead, we have a scene where Gay, Helen and Goldy are in a plane and on their way to their wedding destination. Whether the next film picks up from that I can’t remember (it’s been a few decades since I last watched these) but I’ll find out soon enough courtesy of Warner Archives’ two volume collection of the films in the series.

A Date With The Falcon has less stunning shot set ups in it compared to the prior movie but makes up for it with a wittier script, a lively and continually twisty plot and, of course, a nice ensemble of actors who have good chemistry together. Definitely a good time if you like 1940s mystery thrillers and I look forward to the next ones. It’s just a shame that George Sanders... oh no, wait, I’ll get to that in a couple of Falcon movie reviews’ time.

The Gay Falcon

Lawrence
Flight n’ Gal

The Gay Falcon
USA 1941
Directed by Irving Reis
RKO/Warner Archive DVD Region 1

George Sanders made five movies in 1941 alone, which was pretty much par for the course in Hollywood of old. The first one he shot that year was his final appearance as Simon Templar in The Saint In Palm Springs (reviewed here). The series continued without him but Sanders’ final 1941 movie was the first of what was a 13 film series based on a Michael Arlen character called The Falcon... who was very much like The Saint, although he was more like a private detective. Indeed, the creator of The Saint, Leslie Charteris, who wasn’t best mates with RKO, tried to sue the studio as he saw the character as a cheap imitation of him (the results of the dispute have never been made public, as far as I can see). Hugh Sinclair carried on in the role of Templar in the series of movies based on The Saint character.

Now, it’s often said that The Falcon film series was 16 films long but that’s actually not true. The last three movies are based on another writer’s novels of a character also called The Falcon, although, for some reason, the series was still credited up as being Arlen’s character, even though it’s clearly not the same person. This would explain why the two Warner Archive DVD collections only cover the first 13 films. That being said, Sanders only played The Falcon in the first three and, in an interesting move... oh no... I’ll get to that interesting swerve in the series when I get to the third movie.

Anyway, Sanders was now heading up The Falcon series and, in a move to give audiences a more ‘saintly experience’, they also cast Wendy Barrie as his long suffering fiancé who is trying to get him to give up crime solving and other women. Barrie had already starred opposite Sanders in three separate Simon Templar movies, although she played different characters in each. The Falcon also has a side kick in these films, much like The Saint would often have a ‘stooge’ helping him out. In this film it’s Allen Jenkins playing ex-thief Jonathan G. 'Goldie' Locke. And another element which is interchangeable with The Saint films was the common practice of having a police inspector who gets things wrong and eventually accepting the lead character’s help to solve the crime... in this film it’s Arthur Shields as Inspector Mike Waldeck.

In the books, the lead character is actually called Gay Falcon but, in the first film here, he’s Gay Laurence (which changed to Gay Lawrence for the next two) and The Falcon is more of an alias (again, as in The Saint films). So yeah, if you watch The Gay Falcon it is pretty much like watching another Saint sequel, to be honest, although the screenplay on this one doesn’t quite have the same, well, written sparkling wit of Sanders’ former role.

That being said, it’s an entertaining enough watch although it’s a little light on action. I can’t remember if the series gets more action oriented as it goes on because, the last time I watched these would have been in the early 1980s on BBC2 at 5.40pm or 6.20pm on weekday evenings, when the re-runs of the Charlie Chan and The Saint films had run their course. However, light on action doesn’t mean it’s light on murders (there are three of them) and there’s lots of running around as both The Falcon and Goldie are both under suspicion from the police at various points in the movie.

Sanders pays it cool and his new female assistant (Nina Vale, for this one movie only) helps him get by the police while at the same time bringing down the wrath of his fiance, who inadvertently gets him into more trouble as the story goes on. Although I suspected the real villain of the movie, who is revealed in a twist near the end of the picture, I didn’t really see it coming until I’d remembered at the end of the picture, just before the reveal, that I’d considered this a possibility at the start of the movie... so that’s kind of good. The camera work is quite good too, with people being framed in the 4:3 ratio as and when they are needed in the shot and almost making up ‘too perfect’ photographic compositions on cue. There’s a lovely sequence, for example, where Sanders and Vale have broken into a hotel room and are waiting on the ledge outside the windows for the returning owner of the apartment to leave again. When that happens, Sanders re-enters the room but we stay outside as Sanders is perfectly framed in a middle slice of the screen with square petitioned window frames creating the space for the action on either side. There’s some quite nice stuff in the movie, for sure.

Paul Sawtell provides some appropriate but not too striking music here and the pace, even without much action, is fairly fast and, like I said, it’s an okay entry into the series which would run for quite a few installments. Each story ends with a kind of cliffhanger preview which may or may not dovetail into the next film in the series. I don’t believe the throwaway end scene of a lady in distress is picked up in the next one but I’ll let you know soon enough. I’ll be working my way through these pictures, revisiting them now after many decades and I’ll bring the reviews to the blog as I work my way through them. I loved these as a teenager and I’m sure I’ll be spellbound by them now. So I’ll make A Date With The Falcon again sometime soon.

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.