AlsExGal

• or perhaps I was just getting used to it? The film is another take on the "Raffles" kind of thing (stifles yawn) where an elegant thief is stealing from the rich leaving Scotland Yard spooked.

Jack Raine is the detective-sergeant, decked out in evening dress for most of the picture and speaking with an accent that would make him appear better suited to appear before the microphone at the B. B. C. Reading the news. Did all police in those days attend Eton?

He befriends Dolly at a night club. Why not? She is mixing with quite the wrong crowd and our Detective friend thinks she may supply him with a lead or two. Anyway this gives us the chance of seeing some night club scenes and a song or two is popped in for good measure. Dolly is played by Muriel Angelus, a name that would be lost these days - but she introduced "Falling in Love with Love" in 1938 (if that is a help). Dolly seems to think the detective must be keen on her, but he has a wife (Eve Gray) who is of the type that doesn't like her husband working and leaving her at home bu her lonesome.

The dialogue is not too bad in places - but it would have been better delivered by others rather than the thespians in this who were used to enunciating to the gallery and stopping their flow for 'dramatic pauses'. This tends towards the unnatural and everyone speaking "fratefully nacely" spoils one's enjoyment somewhat.

Having harped on its worst points, I wouldn't chuck the film away altogether, as it does have some very good scenes in it - which tend to wake one up before one has a chance to doze off completely. As I said the night club scenes are interesting and there is also quite an exciting chase through the fly-tower of a theatre.

All in all, not too bad for an early British talkie if one is prepared to put up with some of the short-comings. It was directed by the German Richard Eichberg.

First the plot - A group of convicts from Devil's Island try an escape through the jungle. Joan Crawford is there because, even as a lady of the evening, she's been ejected from Devil's Island for hiding convict Gable in her room. Except she didn't hide him. He escaped and hid himself. Gable says she did hide him because, well, he's a despicable human being and didn't get sent to Devil's Island for dropping out of Sunday School.

Peter Lorre is a professional snitch who is not a convict who hopes for renumeration for his tattling or maybe Joan Crawford's sexual favors if he doesn't tattle.

Normally, Joan would have taken a boat home, but then she and Gable would not interact for the rest of the film, so we can't have that. So the officials say she has to leave the way she came - through the jungle.

So as Crawford and the convicts fight and snarl their way through the jungle in an attempt to reach the shore there's also Ian Hunter there as the often mentioned Christ like figure to make sure those who are about to die see the errors of their ways. There's also plenty of sparks a-flyin' between Crawford and Gable. Once they reach the shore, the survivors set sail in a boat and then face thirst and doldrums as the number in the party dwindles. Can Hunter make saints out of our star sinners?

Complications ensue.

Technically, this film is very well done. It's problem is that, for me, it incorporates almost everything that makes a film unpleasant and even a bore. For one - It's almost entirely set in the jungle or in a boat. I didn't even like the Tarzan films that much as a kid because of the setting. Also, even though the film is almost completely set outside it is very claustrophobic. Finally, like some early talking film, it is entirely too talkie. Its advantage over its 1930 counterparts is that the dialogue is not ridiculous as it was when the movies first learned to talk, and yet it is not memorable either.

Peter Lorre does make this film better than it would have been without him, and Gable and Crawford still sizzle after all these years, yet it was just not enough to make this experience tolerable for me.

...starring Joan Crawford as carny girl Lane Bellany who gets stranded in a town run by crooked sheriff Titus Semple. Working in a local diner she and deputy sheriff Fielding Carlisle (Zachary Scott) begin to fall for one another. When Titus gets wind of this he puts the kibosh on the relationship. He pushes Carlisle into a loveless marriage with the respectable but vacant daughter of a respectable prominent family and gets Lane sent to jail for prostitution on a trumped up charge. The carrot he uses to tempt the weakling Carlisle is that he plans to make him governor someday and that Carlisle will get nowhere without Titus helping him.

After she gets out of jail Lane goes to work at an...ahem..."road house" where all of the important men congregate for "entertainment". Here she meets local businessman Dan Reynolds (David Brian). She marries him and they move into fashionable Flamingo Row.

Titus and Reynolds become political enemies, but Greenstreet has the goods - framed and real - on everyone in town and so ultimately it's up to Crawford to set everything straight. It's only in her moment of sacrifice that she realizes she really loves Reynolds, but he's already walked out on her when he learns of her tawdry past. Complications ensue.

A highlight is Gladys George as the local roadhouse owner (read brothel) who takes a shine to Crawford and who also knows a few secrets about the local gentry. Among the co-stars is Alice White in her final film. This was probably Greenstreet's finest and nastiest film role. This film would have probably been better, as in more authentic, had Crawford been about ten years younger. It's a shame she spent so many years - primarily the production code years - stuck in so many lousy MGM scripts.

Directed very reluctantly by Michael Curtiz, who tried everything to get out of it but turned out a quality film in the end.