The Falcon's Adventure

Tom Conway plays The Falcon , a womanising adventurer with a taste for the high life of night clubs ,fast cars and daring do .He comes to the rescue of a young woman --played by Madge Meredith-who has been entrusted with the formula for synthetic diamonds , invented by her father .The bad guys want the formula and only The Falcon's intervention prevents them from abducting her . They do succeed in killing her father and framing the Falcon for the crime however .He obtains the formula and sets out by train to Miami where he proposes to hand it over to a trusted friend of the inventor .The bad guys try to steal it en route without success and there are further deaths before the lively fist fight climax on board a yacht where Ms Meredith is incarcerated , It passes the time well enough but there is one ludicrous bit of plotting involving an alligator farm ,that is an insult to the intelligence .Get past that and you might well enjoy this vintage B picture . The acting might politely be described as functional

It was the last of the Falcon movies leaving Dick Tracy as the only celluloid sleuth from RKO studios

This is the thirteenth Falcon film. Tom Conway has lost none of his humour and style, and is not showing signs of getting tired. The film has a very satisfying story, with lots of red herrings, suspects, and dames. Madge Meredith is the good girl of the story, she plays it adequately but by no means sets the screen on fire. Myrna Dell is a bad girl, and she puts on an excellent face of stone, with eyes of agate, and you are just waiting for her to kill as many people as possible to cheer herself up. Edward Brophy is back as Goldie the sidekick, but surprise surprise, his manic over-acting has stopped, and he is actually under control. This is a fine tribute to the directorial skills of William A. Berke, who had done so many Westerns he probably was not prepared to take any nonsense from a Brooklyn dummy. The result is that for the first time, possibly in his career, Brophy was toned down enough actually to add something to a film rather than try the viewer's patience with the irritating behaviour of a retarded but unruly six year-old. It all goes along very well, and is thoroughly entertaining.

Tom Lawrence and Goldie head off on holiday with a strict agreement that they won't get tied up with "no dames". However when Lawrence spots a woman in trouble and intercedes to find that he has rescued Louisa Braganza –niece of a scientist. He learns that Louisa may have been kidnapped to get a formula for manufacturing industrial diamonds from her father. When her uncle is murdered, the Falcon is the #1 suspect and he makes a break for it to find the people who set him up. With the formula entrusted to him by Louisa, Lawrence has bought himself some time but with the police and the killers on his trail he still must move quickly.

In the final of the thirteen Falcon movies, Tom Lawrence gets mixed up in a murderous plot to get hold of a formula for manufacturing diamonds. Putting the Falcon on the other side of the law and pursued by them adds an element of tension to the film and injects a bit of pace into the mixed plot. With the film series coming to an end I had worried that it would just collapse – hence them making no more films, but in reality this film is of the generally reasonable standard of the rest of the films. The plot is a bit contrived at the start but once you get into it, it is pretty engaging and quite fun with mystery and some nice action (albeit rather old fashioned stiff punches etc). The conclusion is rather unsatisfying though and I didn't think it did the plot justice by seeming to end rather abruptly and without really being a meaty end to the story. Of course it is an even more annoying end to the film series, featuring as it does as rather wet joke from Goldie and a chuckle from the cast – not the way an enjoyable series should have bowed out.

The cast are mixed but Conway is very good and by this stage my memory of his brother had pretty much gone to the point that I now think of Conway when I think of the Falcon character. Brophy's returns in the revolving role of comedy sidekick – despite the fact that he had already been in the series as a detective in The Gay Falcon. He is OK but you do feel that all the actors in that role are just doing an impersonation – none of them, particularly Brophy, ever really made the role their own or did anything new with it. Meredith is OK and is better than the simmering love interest that have been used during parts of the series. The bad guys don't make enough of an impression – partly causing a weak ending to the story. Jason Robards Sr makes an appearance as the police detective and is good with straight support.

Overall this is mostly a good film and the main body of it is quite engaging and fun. However the start feels a bit forced (convenient) and the ending is a rather weak end to both the film and the series. The cast are mixed but Lawrence is strong and the film is worth seeing and will please fans of the series even if you can't help wishing that it had gone out on more of a high than a plateau.

Both the Falcon series and the Boston Blackie series are guilty of re-using a plot more than once - I wouldn't be surprised if that were true of many series.

In this one, the MacGuffin is the formula for industrial diamonds which I am pretty sure was used before. The Falcon (Tom Conway) saves a kidnapped woman and winds up being framed for the murder of her uncle, who owns the formula and is trying to get it to someone in Miami that has arranged for backers.

Some clever moments, one regarding a blonde the Falcon saves from someone harassing her on the train.

Tom Conway does a good job - it was his last foray as the Falcon. He's charming, but this wasn't very exciting.

Of interest, pretty Madge Meredith's career was derailed a bit when she was sentenced to five years in prison on an assault charge - it turned out that in fact she had been framed and was released. She worked into the '60s.

BBC2 have been showing several Falcon movies recently in the afternoons and I have taped most of them. They are worth having as they are not available on VHS or DVD anywhere. The Falcon's Adventure was the 13th and final Falcon movie.

In this one, The Falcon rescues a woman from kidnappers who want her father's secret formula for making diamonds but he gets blamed for his murder. The pair of them then flee to Florida where he gets blamed for another murder! He is cleared at the end though.

Tom Conway plays the Falcon well and is joined in this one by Madge Meredith, Edward Brophy and Ian Wolfe.

Though not brilliant, This and all of the Falcon movies are worth watching and are not too long either.

Rating: 3 stars out of 5.