The Saint Strikes Back

This is not George Sanders' best "Saint" movie by any stretch("The Saint in London" gets that honor). Instead we get an average low-budget mystery movie that has very few surprises. George Sanders is introduced to us as Simon Templar in this movie. Sanders plays him as a suave, urbane and sophisticated hero, rarely caught off guard("not the man who knows everything, just the man who knows the important things"). Unfortunately the script in this production lets him down. Not only is it less than engaging, it also tends to be needlessly confusing. Wendy Barrie plays the female lead(as she did in two other Sanders-Saint films)but she is much too stiff. I don't have a problem with her playing the character as a tough-as-nails femme-fatale but I think Barrie overdoes it and the result is that her character loses credibility. Neil Hamilton (commissioner Gordon on TV's Batman) plays one of Barrie's associates in crime like some kind of effeminate twit. This undermines what should be a strong bond between him and Barrie. The "surprise" ending is weak and anyone who has not guessed it well in advance has obviously not been paying attention throughout.

There is one great sequence that almost makes the film worth seeing. It occurs when Inspector Fernack(Jonathan Hale) has a bout of indigestion and hallucinates about Lobsters riding trucks(!!). Salvator Dali eat your heart out.

Above mentioned sequence and Sanders are the only reasons to bother with this one (unless you want to see Wendy Barrie chewing on the scenery). I give it 6 lobsters out of 10.

"The Saint Strikes Back" (1939) is directed by a young John Farrow, who would not only go onto to make film noir classics like "The Big Clock" (1948), "Alias Nick Beal" (1949) and "Where Danger Lives" (1950), but he would win an Oscar for writing the screenplay for Michael Todd's multi-award winning "Around the World in Eighty Days" (1956). So, not only do you have a notable director at the beginning of his career here, but George Sanders in his first role as The Saint, eleven years away from getting the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for "All About Eve" (1950). Also, there are quite a few familiar faces in the picture: Jerome Cowan, Barry Fitzgerald and Jonathan Hale, all of whom would be active in the motion picture business in the forthcoming decade. So, historically, quite an important film. But there's a lot more to it than just recognisable names. The photography, by Frank Redman, is striking, an impressively long shot at the very beginning of the movie in particular, is a cut above the rest. The acting too, is polished and professional.

On the other hand, the screenplay, written by John Twist, from Leslie Charteris's "She Was a Lady" (1931), credited in the film as "Angels of Doom", while it moves briskly along, is a tad confusing. For the life of me, I couldn't tell you who did what and why in this film. But this doesn't detract form the enjoyment, and in a perverse way, it enhances it. It's not the best of its kind, but this proto-noir is certainly worth a watch.

You have to stay wide awake to follow the plot convolutions of THE SAINT STRIKES BACK and by the time it reaches its final scene you may lose your way keeping track of a number of undeveloped characters whose names are bandied about with such nonchalance that in the end it hardly matters when you discover who the main culprit is.

The plot revolves around hard-boiled dame WENDY BARRIE who's surrounded herself with gangsters in order to avenge the death of her father. Barrie gives the kind of performance that should have made her a femme fatale in a number of B-films, but nothing more than that. She's a one note actress if ever there was one.

Fortunately, the script is graced by the presence of GEORGE SANDERS, who can deliver a crisp line with so much bite and sarcasm that it's fun to see him using his verbal wit on some unsavory characters. NEIL HAMILTON makes no impression whatsoever in a colorless role as a man supposedly in love with Barrie, but BARRY FITZGERALD turns up to put some spice into the story, at least in the last half of the film.

It's strictly formula stuff intended to entertain as a programmer in the late '30s and offers nothing very original or new to make it anything more than something of passing interest.

George Sanders makes his first appearance as the Saint in this film and all I can think is: "Hey, It's Addison DeWitt, private eye!" Because this Saint is nothing but snide, more prone to shoot off a cutting remark than a gun. Did Sanders ever make a movie where you didn't get the feeling he was slumming? Where you didn't get the feeling it pained him to be surrounded by such fools? (Making one wonder, then, why the hell he married Zsa Zsa Gabor.) Playing opposite as the romantic interest is Wendy Barrie, who comes off as more hard-boiled than a two-hour egg. Then, of course, Barrie was a pretty tough broad, having been Bugsy Siegel's girl before Virginia "I'll put my mouth where the money is!" Hill came along. This was also the first of Barrie's three appearances in the Saint series, although she played a different character each time.

But what of the film itself? Well, there's not much to say--the plot is confusing the minor characters difficult to tell apart and the visuals not particularly interesting. The real enjoyment in this picture comes from Sander's deadly wit and Barrie's remarkable aura of toughness.

When Simon Templar (aka The Saint) helps self-styled crime boss and daughter of a disgraced cop Val Travers to get away from a nightclub after they were both involved in a shooting. The police connect Templar to the shooting and call in Inspector Fernack from New York to bring him in. Meanwhile Templar gets on the wrong side of Travers and earns her vengeance while also trying to get to the bottom of the mystery surrounding her father's fall from grace at the hands of an internal investigation.

Following on from the hard edge and anti-hero approach of The Saint when he was in New York, this film cannot help but feel like much more of a sedentary affair with a more liberal approach perhaps befitting the San Francisco setting. That said the film still has a nice feel to it that makes it just a shade better than the b-movie series generally achieved from this point onwards. Much of the credit should probably lie with Farrow's direction because he does give it quite a professional and gritty atmosphere. The story is quite good although not anywhere near as engaging as it should have been and I must admit that at times I drifted away as it lacked a consistent hook to keep me watching.

Coming in to replace Hayward, Sanders was never really going to do it for me as I already knew him to be all about the smoothness and the suaveness and it didn't surprised me when his criminal edge was played down to almost nothing and he turned in the sort of performance that made him vastly inferior to the original Saint (in my mind anyway). Support is pretty good from Val Travers – not quite a femme fatale perhaps but certainly a tough woman when required. Hale is OK while people like Elliot, Fitzgerald etc all fill in around the edges.

Overall a well-directed film that is a reasonable stab at continuing the series but, for reasons that are perhaps obvious, scaling down the mean edge the original had. Problem is that I liked this about the original film and found this film lacking teeth for being smooth without the savage. Sanders is a nice lead but he cannot lift the material and the end result is a standard b-movie that will please fans of The Saint and The Falcon.