The Saint Meets the Tiger

When you deposit a body on Simon Templar's doorstep what else can you expect but that the Saint will get involved. But on which side of the law?

In an opening that was taken from The Maltese Falcon when Captain Jacoby arrives on Sam Spade's door dying and with the falcon, Simon TEmplar has a similar experience and before long is involved in exposing a smuggling racket. He's got competition though, another master criminal called the Tiger, identity unknown, is also cutting himself in on the plans. We're not sure who's with who except that Scotland Yard has an undercover man as well.

This is the second of two films that Hugh Sinclair starred in as Simon Templar over in Great Britain. This one's not as good as the first though Sinclair makes one breezy Saint. The story line is kind of muddled though that could be bad editing.

For fans of the series only.

Ultra lightweight movie almost floats away. Jean Gillie is fine as Pat Holm (borrowed from the very early Saint novels), but Hugh Sinclair suffers compared to the more magnetic George Sanders and lacks the vocal charm of Vincent Price's radio Saint. One of the appealing things about the Simon Templar character was the suspicion that he was only on the side of the good guys for as long as it would prove profitable. None of this comes through in this Republic effort, though the production values are reasonably high.

For the second time, Hugh Sinclair is Simon Templar. Ben Williams dies on his doorstep, raving about a million pounds in gold. Intrigued, he investigates with the aid of Jean Gillie, leading to a mysterious figure known as the Tiger.

Like the previous one, this was produced in Great Britain. Unlike the previous one, RKO did not distribute it in the United States. Instead they sold it to Republic Pictures. They would produce no others.

It's quite a clever entry in the series, based on the first Saint book that Charteris wrote. I like Sinclair's version of the Saint as someone actually does something more energetic than your typical George Sanders episode. My opinion, however, does not result in lots of people in 1941 saying "Oooh! Joan Hickson is in this one! Let's go to the movies!" at least in part because I'm writing this more than eighty years later.

The Saint Meets the Tiger" was the first of the Saint books, but appeared rather late in the series of movies. The Saint is following the trail of a million pounds sterling of gold stolen from a Bristol bank by a gang headed by "the Tiger", a criminal mastermind. Hugh Sinclair, who doesn't much look the part initially, grows on you as the Saint with his witty and confident performance. His sidekick, Horace, has been transformed from a rough retired seaman to a dapper butler. The story isn't, of course, exactly the plot of the book, but it is close enough to give you fond reminiscences of the book. The cast is very similar in most respects to the main characters in the book. One of the main differences is that the identity of the Tiger is revealed quite early in the movie, and that revelation is virtually the last event in the book.

Some of the action scenes are a bit simplistic, to the point of virtually being bungled. Yet the charm of the dialog and the heroes overcomes those deficiencies. If you like these classic old mysteries, you can do a lot worse than "The Saint Meets the Tiger".

THE SAINT MEETS THE TIGER is the second film RKO made in Britain with a British cast with Hugh Sinclair in the title-role. The plot is a familiar one: the Saint (Hugh Sinclair) travels down to Cornwall to uncover a smuggling plot involving in which one million pounds of gold will leave the country. What makes this thriller worth watching, however, is its incidental pleasures: although much of it is shot in the studio, with quite obviously phony backgrounds, there are occasional sequences shot on location in Cornwall, where we get an authentic impression of what British seaside life was like during the middle of World War II. There are some notable performances from Wylie Watson as Horace, the Saint's faithful butler with a penchant for listening to gangster thrillers on the radio. When he is drawn into the action he takes every opportunity to assume the tough-guy role, pointing his loaded pistol at the villains. The eponymous Tiger/ Tidemarsh (Clifford Evans) comes across as a very clever mastermind - on the one hand he is more than willing to look after Pat Holm (Jean Gillie) and ensure that she comes to no harm; on the other hand he shows his true nature while trying to deal with his gang. The members of said gang are cleverly delineated, ranging from crooked financier Lionel Bentley (Dennis Arundell), whose facial expressions seldom change, even when he is holding the Saint at gunpoint; to Bittle (Charles Victor), a tough-guy with an accent combining South African clipped vowels and a Chicago twang. Needless to say they are outwitted at the end, leaving the Saint to walk off into the sunset with Pat on his arm, but one has to admire their ambition.