Carga Sinistra

They probably should have stopped making Falcon movies when George Sanders and Tom Conway had finished their runs with the franchise. Hard to watch the Falcon become a shell of his old self. Spending more time with his dog than the ladies, and driving a Studebaker. The script may be okay, but it has a low-budget B Movie feel to it.

Gay and Tom Laurence (real life brothers George Sanders and Tom Conway) were the Falcon in the early 1940s. So why is a guy named 'Wattling' now appearing in some poverty row series where HE is called the Falcon as well?! In addition to not being the Falcon, this guy acts nothing like the suave and sophisticated Falcon of old. The new guy has a cute dog(!?) and talks incessantly--and he's just nothing like the originals.

As for the rest of the film, it's bizarre and nothing like the old Falcon plots either. Some knucklehead comes to Wattling and claims he murdered someone (so why didn't he just go to the cops first?!?!?). But, soon after, the admitted killer is himself murdered in prison--poisoned. So, Wattling appoints himself a some sort of avenging angel and spends the rest of the film trying to figure out who was behind all this--as well as to figure out what the man was REALLY planning before he died.

While the plot has some nice twists, the characters are just all wrong, the acting is terrible and I wouldn't even recommend this to Falcon freaks--as he's just a shadow of the originals at best. Dreadful on many levels.

This was the first of three films made by the small "Film Classics" company in 1948-49 starring actor-magician John Calvert as The Falcon, and it's very much unlike the latter two films. In this one, Calvert does magic tricks at various times throughout the movie (!!) AND his co-star is a dog named Brain Trust (!!!) who is listed as playing "himself." Calvert actually talks to the dog in some scenes. Perhaps the dog was a nod to the successful Thin Man films, but fortunately the dog routine was dropped in the latter two films, as were the magic tricks (which are a pleasant distraction,actually!). The film starts, and ends, with Calvert sitting in his bathtub! In the first scene, a man named Ramon Delgado comes to see The Falcon and confesses that he killed a man last night because the man was involved with his wife. Delgado feels that the killing was in self-defense and asks the Falcon to help him turn himself in to the police and see that his rights are respected. Of course, as this is a murder mystery, things are obviously not as simple as that, and the plot unfolds in a fascinating way. As in the other films in the series, the resolution is unexpected and quite exciting. This film was directed by John Link, a journeyman who mostly worked as an editor, and it also features some nice location shooting in 1948 L.A. A fine supporting cast of veterans--Roscoe Karns as the police lt., Rochelle Hudson as the seductive Mrs. Delgado, Theodore Van Eltz as a seedy attorney, Lyle Talbot as a mysterious "business man",

and comedian Tom Kennedy, who often played a dim-witted copy, as a dim-witted thug! Trivia note: supporting actor Michael Mark appears in small but significant roles in all three Falcon films... in this one, he's the man working at the Salvation Army. Calvert's smooth, laid-back, but witty approach to the Falcon role is a refreshing change-of-pace, and it's a shame they only made three of these films. This is by far the quirkiest of the three, the latter two being more straight-forward detective films minus dog routines and magic tricks. All three Calvert Falcon films are recommended to fans of low-budget 40s murder mysteries/detective films.

This is the first of the three low budget Falcon mysteries after RKO had ditched the character. Here he comes in a different guise played by the career magician John Calvert. He has a cute dog called Brains Trust. The funniest Brains Trust moment is when the docile dog has been tied to a chair by an intruder to the Falcon's apartment.

Other bizarre moments include a skull ornament that chatters. Obviously the Falcon has learned magic skills to operate the skull to do this. I like the poster for this film that shows the skull wearing a magician's top hat. It's an attractive piece of film poster art that helped to attract my attention to this movie in the first place.

The mystery begins when a character named Delgado visits the Falcon for help to get him off on a crime of passion crime-alleviation charge with the police. He says he has killed a man for fooling with his wife. But is he being straight? The plot becomes more involved as suspicion passes from one character to another.

I reckon that this is a well disguised whodunit. Only a twist at the very end causes the real murderer to be revealed.

The handsome and urbane John Calvert gives a tough yet breezy performance as Hollywood private eye Michael Waring - code named "The Falcon" . Although Calvert possessed a polished and charismatic screen presence and appeared in nearly thirty films for RKO and Columbia his first love remained the art of magic through which he became an international variety star.

This is a real bargain basement production and there's one particularly curious quirk that's worth listening for. Whenever any of the supporting cast refer to the last name of Calvert's character it's obvious that changes have been made in the post production process. Specifically, it seems that the name "Waring" has been cut out on each occasion and substituted with "Watling". The obvious question is .. why ? Possibly some kind of copyright issue ?