Not a cartoon

Back in August, I did a post on the Charlton Heston movie 55 Days at Peking, I think for Ava Gardner's day in Summer Under the Stars. It's a movie that I couldn't help but think of as I was watching another Heston film, Khartoum.

Khartoum is the capital of modern-day Sudan, but a bit of a history lesson is in order. Back in the 1880s much of what is now Sudan was a sort of protectorate under Egypt since the two countries were both Muslim, although of different ethnicities, causing no end of friction. Meanwhile, Egypt wasn't particularly strong itself, being more or less a vassal to the Ottoman Empire. Egypt, however, was home to the Suez Canal, completed about a dozen years earlier and a vital transport link. So the British had troops stationed in Egypt to keep the Suez Canal open and the Egyptian government stable.

Further south in what is now Sudan, a man named Muhammed Ahmed (played in the movie by Laurence Olivier) claimed that he had been called upon by the original Muhammed to be the Mahdi (this is how I'll refer to the character for the rest of the post since that's also how he's referred to in the movie), which is a sort of Islamic version of the Messiah that to Christians is supposed to come in the end times. Further complicating matters is that other branches of Islam certainly weren't about to believe that this upstart from backwater Sudan was a Mahdi. So the Mahdi needed to assert absolute political power able to drive out the Egyptians to get the other Muslims to notice. As the movie opens, a former English soldier leads an Egyptian army south, only to get ambushed by the Mahdi's men.

This is a problem for the government of the day back in London, led by William Gladstone (Ralph Richardson). They can't really let the Mahdi overrun Sudan, or even worse get farther north. But there are a whole bunch of Egyptians stuck in Khartoum, and the British can't really let them get stranded to their fate. The fact that the ambushed Egyptians were led by a Briton makes action more necessary, at least for domestic political purposes. An envoy returned from Sudan, Col. Stewart (Richard Johnson), comes up with an idea which is to send Major-General Charles Gordon (Charlton Heston) back to Sudan. Gordon is known among the Sudanese people, and has a good reputation there as a more honest broker who helped destroy the slave trade. Perhaps Gen. Gordon can get the Egyptians out of Khartoum. If not, the British can wash their hands of the whole thing because Gordon's reputation means there's not a need to send the British army yet, which would provide its own set of political difficulties for the Gladstone government.

Gordon decides to accept the mission, but Gladstone, not trusting him, requires that Col. Stewart go along as an attaché. When the two finally get to Sudan, they realize that the Mahdist army has advanced farther north along the Nile than anybody knew, and that they threaten to surround Khartoum and besiege it. Gordon, with his reputation, is able to go to the Mahdi alone and unarmed, which creates a degree of trust between Gordon and the Mahdi to the point that the Mahdi reveals his true intentions.

So a war of waiting ensues, as the Mahdi waits for the right conditions to begin the final assault on Khartoum with Gordon figuring out a way to defend the city long enough for another way to get the Egyptians out besides sending them straight down the Nile which isn't an option. Political pressure mounts on Gladstone back in London, and he finally relents and allows the creation of a relief force under Maj. Kitchener, although he doesn't imbue the force with any urgency. Since all of this is based on real events, you can look up the history yourself to find out how it ended if you want to know going into the movie.

Khartoum is the sort of movie that I don't think could really be made today, at least certainly not in the form that it was made back in the mid-1960s. Modern sensibilities in the filmmaking community would probably insist on the portrayal of the British as unambiguously villanous. As for the film that we have, it's certainly competently made, and well acted, but the screenplay is the weak point here. It's slow, with a story that's more character driven than plot driven, and runs too long at over two hours (the exact running time will depend on whether the print includes the overture and exit music).

It could have been a Crime Does Not Pay subject

A short B movie that had been sitting on my DVR for quite some months that I recently got around to watching was the 1944 film The Last Ride. There's another film from 2011 with the same title about country singer Hank Williams, but this is a completely different film and story.

The movie's release date of 1944 puts it squarely in the middle of World War II. As you'll recall, there was a lot of rationing going on. No new automobiles were being made since all of the factories were converted to making vehicles for the military, and rubber for tires was in short supply too. So the young people who feel they're having their lives taken away from them through no fault of their own are not exactly thrilled. One group of youths finds that the tires on their car have been stolen, which is fact part of a tire racket. Joe, whose tires were stolen, learns from his friend Harry about the tire bootleggers, who are actually part of that racket by stealing the tires and then adulterating the rubber to turn one tire into more, and then charge through the nose for it. After getting his "new" tires, Joe goes for a drive, only for the tires to go bad, killing Joe and his girlfriend.

Virtuous policeman Pat Harrigan (Richard Travis) just knows that this is really a case of murder, but getting the goods on the people in the tire racket is going to be difficult. Indeed, he thinks he's got a couple of witnesses to Joe's being sold the illicit tires, but they get killed before they can testify. Pat's going to have to come up with another way to bring the gang to justice.

Worse, Pat's brother Mike (Charles Lang) sees to be making money on other people's misery, even though there's a war going on and a lot of propaganda about how everybody needs to do their part. Worse, a subplot has Mike as a romanti rival for Pat's girlfriend Kitty (a young Eleanor Parker). On the other hand, Mike's knowing a bunch of bad guys gives Pat an idea. He goes undercover with almost nobody other than the police chief (Wade Boteler) knowing. He takes a bribe in a way that's going to become very public and then punches the police chief to get himself "fired", which is quickly revealaed to be a ruse, not that you didn't know this before it's known.

If it's obvious to the viewer that Pat is going to be going undercover, it ought to be obvious to the bad guys too, although they seem to be surprisingly stupid for a gang that's been stealing people's tires for the rubber and making money hand over fist by doing it. They seem not to know that Pat is undercover, except for one guy who has the good sense to trail Pat to the otherwise deserted apartment house that serves as the rendezvous spot for Pat and the Chief. It puts Pat in danger, but since there's a Production Code and there's a war on anyway, you know that Pat is going to foil the gang at the end.

The Last Ride isn't a great movie, but it is a good example of what Warner Bros. could do with its B movies. It's also an interesting example of how the studios were contributing to the war effort in all sorts of ways, even to the propaganda of why we had to sacrifice our rubber for the war effort. For that reason alone the movie is worth one watch at least.

Madam Parton

Dolly Parton died back in September, and since the death was unexpected, I didn't really think about the movie of hers that I'd had sitting on my DVR since TCM ran it back in March or so. That movie is The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, and recently I got around to watching it.

Jim Nabors plays Fred Wilkins, deputy sheriff of Lanville County, TX, under sheriff Ed Earl Dodd (Burt Reynolds). Linville County is famous for one thing: the Chicken Ranch, a brothel which had been open for decades. In an opening sequence, Fred informs us of the founding of the brothel at the beginning of the century, how it survived both the Depression as well as transfer in ownership from one madam to the next, and remained open until recent times, with the most recent proprietress being Mona Stangley (Dolly Parton).

Mona has some strict rules for her girls, but they're rules with a purpose, part of which is that the brothel not be hated by the people in town. In fact, thanks to those rules and Mona's charity work, the people in the county mostly like the brothel because it's fairly peaceful apart from the fact that it's selling sex. In short, they tolerate it, with even the sheriff not doing anything about it in part because he's in a fairly committed relationship with Mona, even if he doesn't plan to marry her.

But then big-city reporter Melvin Thorpe (Dom Deluise) comes onto the scene. He's a muckraker who plans to advance his career by, well, raking muck, so when he learns about the open secret of the Chicken Ranch, he decides he's going to whip up people in the rest of Texas against the Ranch. Somehow he does do this, with political pressure being put on Sheriff Dodd to close the place down. Dodd impresses upon Mona the fact that she should probably lay low for a while, at least until the political furor dies down, at which point she can quietly reopen the Ranch.

Except that the Ranch is also at the center of a tradition. Every year over Thanksgiving, the University of Texas and Texas A&M play the big in-state football game, and the alumni backers of both schools had a scheme whereby the team that won the game would be driven to the Chicken Ranch to have a night with the girls there. Unfortunately, the Ranch is supposed to be closed still over that Thanksgiving weekend, but the alumni don't care, and drive the winning team to the Ranch for a night of debauchery that really makes the news and pisses Thorpe off even more.

The plot of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas is a really good plot for a light comedy, the sort of thing that Dolly Parton and Burt Reynolds excel at. Unfortunately, the movie is based on a Broadway musical, and naturally, the idea in producing the movie was to keep it a musical. The musical numbers mostly don't work here. The Melvin Thorpe numbers don't fit local TV news, with it making Thorpe come across as ridiculously obnoxious. And then the locker room number after the big football game absolutely brings the movie to a screeching halt. It's a bit of a shame becaus Parton and Reynolds are both likable here. Charles Durning, who plays the governor, earned an Oscar nomination and is qutie good too.

The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas really deserved a better fate than it got.

Briefs for Halloween 2026

We're up to Halloween for another year, which means a usual crop of horror movies on all the channels, including FXM. Granted, the schedule this morning started off with Black Widow which isn't exactly horror, but it's always nice to see something like The Innocents show up. As for TCM, they've got some Looney Tunes horror cartoons in the end-of-the-morning block. The first of them is Transylvania 6-5000, a short that I haven't seen. YouTube TV, unsurprisingly, lists it as the feature frilm from the 1980s that had the same title, which I also I have to admit that I've never gotten around to seeing. My memory is of Ed Begley Jr. being on The $25,000 Pyramid whichever summer the movie came out, promoting it to the hilt.

Tonight is also the night when the clocks go back one hour. Unfortunately, none of the schedules I've found mention what's going to be filling that extra hour. That hour comes during The Seventh Victim, which is listed as starting at the first 1:30 AM with the following movie starting at 3:00 AM. The Seventh Victim is only 71 movies, so there's clearly that extra hour there.

There are several deaths worth mentioning this week. Of course the first two that people are going to notice are the two Star Trek-related deaths. Walter Koenig, who played Chekov on the original series, died on Sunday at the age of 90. And then on Wednesday, Patrick Stewart died aged 86. He'll be best remembered for having taken his career in a completely different direction by playing Capt. Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation, but before that he was a Shakesperean actor.

Dying the same day as Patrick Stewart, and a death more likely to be overshadowed by Stewart's, is Elke Sommer, who was about a week shy of her 86th birthday. I first saw Sommer as part of the team doing the Miss Universe beauty pageants back when that was a a big thing on CBS and I think still hosted by Bob Barker. At the time I had no idea what she was famous for, but she was one of those European actresses that Hollywood brought over in the 1960s to try to turn into the next big European star. Sommer had the great good luck to be in A Shot in the Dark, but she was also in some stinkers.

The Bat

A movie that's suitable for Halloween although, as of the time I wrote of this post wasn't yet mentioned on the TCM schedule for October, is the Vincent Price movie The Bat. But since it was on my DVR about to expire, I made a point of watching it to be able to write up this post. And, sure enough, it wound up as part of the schedule since it is after all Halloween and this is a Vincent Price film. The Bat is showing early on Halloween at 5:30 AM.

Vincent Price plays Dr. Wells, the town doctor in one of those Hollywood small towns that's small enough to apparently have only one doctor and be close enough for people to get away to secluded cabins. Getting away is local bank (there only seems to be one bank in town) president John Fleming, who confesses to Dr. Wells that he's embezzled $1M in securities from the bank and would give up half of that to Wells in exchange for Wells helping him fake his death. Dr. Wells responds by killing Fleming, thereby saving his own life, but having the problem of being on the hook for a killing in an era where there's still a production code.

Meanwhile, back in town, Cornelia Van Gorder (Agnes Moorehead) has come to visit in order to get away from it all and work on her next book. To do that, she's rented a house owned by Fleming, not realizing or caring that the house has a history. After all, Cornelia isn't a local, so why should she believe any of the stories about what might or might not have gone on in the house? That, or the idea that there's a killer on the loose called The Bat, who has an ability to get into places humans can't? Of course, all of the servants in the house believe in it, and don't want to work in the house.

And, wouldn't you know it, but Cornelia and her secretary Lizzie actually see the hand of The Bat, before seeing an actual bat that bites Lizzie and starts flying around the house before the two women are able to trap it in a closet. The police come out, and then discover that Dr. Wells is doing scientific research that involves experimenting on bats. This last bit, combined with the fact that we already know Wells is going to have to face the Production Code, makes Wells one of the prime suspects for being The Bat.

And there's also the issue of the embezzled securities, which ties into the rest of what's going on in the movie. The viewers of course know that the deceased Fleming, who is still assumed to be off in the mountains getting away from it all, is responsible, but nobody else knows, so there are all sorts of suspects. The learn from the deceased Fleming's nephew that the house Cordelia is renting is one of those Hollywood houses that has secret hiding places, so perhaps the securities might be somewhere in the house. So all of the main characters wind up at the house, at which point the identity of The Bat is revealed and the innocent people get to have a reasonably good ending for them. The wicked, of course, get punished.

The fact that there was still a Production Code in force makes The Bat a bit of a mess. But thanks to the presence of Vincent Price and Agnes Moorehead, the film is raised above the level of schlock to something that is at least reasonably worth watching. It's not a great movie by any means, but it will certainly entertain you.

Well, the character is named William Bonney

It wasn't uncommon back in the Hollywood studio era for studios to produce biopics that were ostensibly about a famous subject, but barely reflected reality. Recently, I watched another film that fit that description: the 1941 version of Billy the Kid.

Robert Taylor plays Billy Bonney, aka Billy the Kid, and as the movie opens he's climbing into the living quarters above a jail in what is probably Lincoln County, NM (although the location backgrounds are very obviously Monument Valley in Utah) where he overpowers a sheriff's deputy and frees his friend Pedro (Frank Puglia), whose main purpose in this story is to provide some musical background and then be a key plot point later in the movie. Billy takes Pedro to a saloon run by cattle baron Dan Hickey (Gene Lockhart). Hickey makes his money selling cattle to the US government, who need the cattle to feed their soldiers.

But it's a bit of a ruse, as what Hickey and his men really do is cause competing ranchers' cattle to stampede, which means that Hickey's cattle would be the only ones left to sell to the government. Unfortunately, this time, the stampede kills one of the opposing farmers, which is a big problem. Meanwhile, one of the men affected by the stampede is Jim Sherwood (Brian Donlevy), who knew Billy when the two of them were kids.

Jim is working for one of the competing ranchers, Eric Keating (Ian Hunter), so Jim brings Billy and Pedro to the Keating ranch with the possibility of jobs. This is the depiction of the Lincoln County War, which has been depicted by Hollywood several times, notably in Chisum and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, although it's even more fictionalized here than in other movies. Keating has a sister Edith, and Billy falls in love with her, not that they're romantically suited for each other. And there's also the issue that people are still getting shot. The sheriff, McAndrews, has been working for Hickey, so Keating decides that he's going to go see the territorial governor (which would be Lew Wallace of Ben-Hur fame although he's not a character in this movie) with the aim of being deputized into law enforcement.

Keating, however, gets waylaid and ever returns to his ranch, leading Sherwood to go and get deputized himself; he's the Pat Garrett character even though the names have changed. Billy, here on the side of Keating's men, decides to go into town to get Hickey and the men Hickey sent to kill Keating, but Hickey is no dummy and sends the actual killers away so that they can't be found. Now, we know that the real life Billy the Kid was killed at the tender age of 22, so the question remains of how this movie version of Billy is going to get it in the end.

One of the reviews of Billy the Kid that I read made the argument that this is a generic Hollywood western, except that MGM decided to attach the name of Billy the Kid to is, which causes all sorts of problems considering the liberties that they had to tak with what's known about the real Billy Bonney's life. If it had been about totally fictitious people, the movie might be better. But what we actually get is a bunch of nonsense that probably looked nice on screen back in 1941 since it's in Technicolor. But even then, the print that TCM ran isn't all that good, so we don't even rally get the benefit of Technicolor.

Neither Charles Laughton nor Richard Widmark

When I was a teenager I was able to see the 1987 film No Way Out, I think courtesy of my late uncle who ran one of the local movie theaters. I learned fairly early on that it was a remake (or, based on the same source material) as The Big Clock. It was quite a bit later that I learned about the 1950 movie also titled No Way Out which has a completely different story. Anyhow, I finally watched my recording of when TCM ran the 1987 No Way Out, which is the first time in many years that I'd seen it.

The movie opens by setting up Yet Another Flashback. Lt. Cmdr. Tom Farrell (Kevin Costner) is being interrogated by a couple of military intelligence guys about his relationship with the Secretary of Defense, David Brice (Gene Hackman). Flash back to six months earlier -- we know it's six months because the film puts this right up on screen. Farrell went to school with Brice's chief of staff, Scott Pritchard (Will Patton), who invites Farrell to a party where Pritchard introduces Farrell and Brice. Also at the party is Susan Atwell (Sean Young), and somehow, the two of them wind up in a limousine together on the way back to Susan's apartment and immediately begin a one-night stand.

Farrell has to ship out to the Philippines, but he gets recalled to Washington because the Secretary of Defense wants him as his liaison between the Department of Defense and the CIA: presumably, being a friend of the Secretary's chief of staff is a good enough character reference. Getting to go back to Washington also means that he's going to be able to see Susan again. They resume their relationship, with Susan even taking a fateful Polaroid of Farrell.

What Farrell doesn't know is that Susan is also having a relationship with... Secretary of Defense Brice! This is obviously a problem for all three of them, and causes what is at first an awkward situation when Brice knocks on Susan's door while she and Farrell are having a tryst. Things get much worse when Brice and Susan get in an argument where Brice accidentally knocks Susan over a railing, sending her falling to her death. It should be manslaughter, but even manslaughter is a serious problem for a Secretary of Defense.

So how to frame somebody else? Well, there are two lines of attack here. One is that Polaroid, which didn't actually develop well, leading to a blurry image. Allegedly even primitive computer technology of the 1980s can clean up stuff like this, so that we'll find out who Susan's other lover is. Now, Farrell is no dummy, and he begins to cotton on to the fact that he's going to be implicated in Susan's killing even though he's quite innocent. This again being the 80s, there's also the Cold War going on, which offers the Secretary of Defense a convenient way of throwing the dead Susan under the bus by intimating that the other lover was actually a well-known Soviet agent named Yuri. The CIA is investigating, and this being a pre-Trump movie the intelligence services are portrayed as being dishonest and more than willing to go around the law to get what they want.

No Way Out is a well-made movie, and it's easy to see why it was a box-office hit. For me there was an issue with the ending. I also had the feeling, watching it a second time, that it's a bit more rooted in the 1980s than The Big Clock was rooted in its era. It's a minor quibble, however, and No Way Out is definitely still entertaining almost 40 years on.

Der amerikanische Freund

Another of the foreign films that was sitting on my DVR about to expire that I had to make a point of getting around to before that expiration was Wim Wenders' The American Friend.

The movie is based on Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley (played here by Dennis Hopper) character, as Wenders was apparently a big fan of Highsmith but couldn't get the rights to the particular Highsmith book he wanted to adapt. Ripley here is an underworld gangster shuttling between New York and Hamburg. In New York he commissions art from Derwatt (director Nicholas Ray), who has faked his own death because this raises the price of his art at auction; the auction is held in Hamburg. At the auction in Hamburg, Ripley meets Jonathan Zimmermann (Bruno Ganz), a gallery worker who frames artwork, but the two don't get along.

Ripley has his life, and gets approached by Raoul (Gérard Blain), a French gangster, as part of a murder for hire plot in the Paris Métro. Jonathan has his life, which isn't much, considering that he's been diagnosed with a blood disease that may or may not be terminal. And he's got a wife Marianne (Lisa Kreuzer) and young son to look after. Ripley isn't exactly pleased with the idea of killing this guy in Paris, but he has an idea which is to rope Zimmermann into killing the guy in Paris.

Raoul is no dummy, so he comes up with a good idea of his own to get Zimmermann to agree to do the murder. This is to take Jonathan to Paris for a second medical opinion, only to have the test results faked so that Zimmermann will believe he has a very short amount of time to live. So it won't really matter if he gets found out in the murder; he'll be dead soon anyway. That, and the money could leave his wife and kid financially secure.

Zimmermann is actually good at luring the guy to his death, but things get more complicated because Ripley and Zimmermann begin to form a friendship. So when Raoul wants to use Zimmermann to help commit another murder, Ripley is horrified. And he's right to be horrified, since this killing is going to set off a gang war that will leave Ripley in danger, but even more so the much less guilty Zimmermann who, after all, has been roped into something not of his own making.

The American Friend is a Wim Wenders film, which means that it runs at a leisurely pace and is more about the characters than the story. This may not be to everybody's taste. And, I have to be honest, I think I prefer some of the other Wenders films I've seen to The American Friend precisely because this one needs to be more story-focused. Hopper and Ganz both do a good job with their roles, and the film is visually interesting for its look at the late 1970s. But I think it could have been a better film.

Once again, for some values of "loved"

I'm always interested in early talkies, even if they turn out not to be so good. The way at which America looked at itself and some of the cultural norms that are different from today, close to a century on, are sometimes quite interesting. An example of this that really isn't a very good film is Three Who Loved.

One of the three is John Hanson (Conrad Nagel), presumably a Swedish immigrant although he's lost his accent and is working as a New York bank teller in an era when this was considered a highly respectable occupation. He works with his best friend Phil Wilson (Robert Ames), and both of them live in a rooming house run by fellow Swedish immigrant Anna Larson (Bodil Rosing). Anna is the aunt of Helga (Betty Compson), who happens to be the longtime girlfriend of John, or at least was back when he was still in Sweden as comment is made that John hasn't seen Helga in ten years.

But Helga is coming over to America to live, with John planning to marry her. In addition, in order to improve his life, John has been studying law at night and is hoping to take the bar exam as he's got a law firm already willing to take him on once he passes the bar exam and is admitted to the bar. Helga likes John and Anna does too, so there's the chance for them all to live happily ever after.

Yeah, right, since we're only about 15 minutes into the movie. John is supposed to be a good guy, but he's so busy tring to improve his life so that he can provide better for Helga that he doesn't have enough time for her. And he can't even bother to get engaged to her the day she steps off the boat. Phil, on the other hand, has no compunctions about putting the moves on Helga although it starts off innocently enough when John suggests Phil show Helga a bit of New York and John can take her out the following night. Helga falls in love with Phil, although he's not as much in love with her as she is with him. Anna can see the former and warns John, but even she can't see the latter.

And then the characters start to make really stupid decisions. The movie starts off in the mid-1920s, when the economy is going great guns. And John spends money he doesn't have -- an idiotic lack of probity for a banker -- first by buying stocks on margin and then putting $7500 down as the "first payment" for a house, a ridiculous sum for 1926. (IIRC, the house I grew up in was a 1974 new-build that cost maybe $50K in inflated money.) When John's stock tout shows up saying John needs to back his stock or lose his entire investment, what does John do but embezzle $10K from Phil's till. (What were bank tellers doing with this much cash on hand?) Phil is absent because he's just about to walk out on Helga after telling her he's going to get a marriage license.

Needless to say, the bank examiners show up and find Phil $10K short and about to leave for South America, so he is to them and the police obviously guilty. And John won't admit guilt because he knows Phil was about to walk out on her anyway and can't leave Helga high and dry. So John lets Phil be wrongly convicted and marries Helga, fathering a son (a very young Dickie Moore) by her.

Five years pass and Helga is trapped in a loveless marriage, at least from her point of view, because she's still busy pining after Phil not realizing he was going to jilt her. John sees Helga treating him and the kid not so well by constantly partying with her friends, while Phil is in prison vowing revenge against whoever sent him up, not realizing that the person in question is in fact John. And then Phil escapes and goes to Helga and John's house for help....

As you can tell from the synopsis, Three Who Loved is certainly interesting, although the plot becomes a complete mess in the second half. That, and it was produced by RKO, who at this early stage seemed to be making movies competently, if cheaply with the result being things that provided product for the exhibitors without being terribly memorable. The three main characters all need to be taken by the neck and shaken to get some sense into them. And poor Betty Compson has to put on that accent. Three Who Loved is definitely worth watching as a product of its time, even if it's not very good.

Dr. Cyclops

Horror movies tend to get overlooked at Oscar time, I think, with the exception of the effects awards. An example of a film that TCM was in fact able to show during 31 Days of Oscar because it got a Visual Effects nomination is Dr. Cyclops.

As we saw a few months back when I reviewed The Invisible Ray, radium was considered something of a great hope in terms of its potential medical uses, despite the radiation also being extremely dangerous. The ore was often found in exotic out of the way locations which, in the case of Dr. Cyclops means the Amazon jungle of Peru. Dr. Thorkel (Albert Dekker) is working on the good use of radium together with Dr. Mendoza (Paul Fix). But, Thorkel is beginning to lose his eyesight along with going mad, the latter of which Mendoza is noticing. So Thorkel kills Mendoza, and writes to America to get research help.

The American institute sends Dr. Mary Robinson (Janice Logan) and Dr. Rupert Bulfinch (Charles Halton). They suspect there might be some sort of major discovery, so they engage Bill Stockton (Thomas Coley), a mineralogist who can't really refuse the offer because of the debts he's racked up. Getting overland to Thorkel's jungle research station is going to be difficult, and the pack animal owner Steve Baker (Victor Killian) is only going to rent the animals if he's able to go along. Rounding out the cast is Thorkel's servant Pedro (Frank Yaconelli).

The group gets to Dr. Thorkel's station, only to learn that all he wanted was for Bulfinch or Robinson to look at a couple of slides because of Thorkel's declining eyesight. This, along with other things such as bones that might be the harbinger of a new species, pique the group's curiosity, which is heightened when Bill determines this is the motherlode for some of the best pitchblende (the ore of radium and uranium) out there. And, Thorkel has learned how to harness it much more precisely than anybody before him.

Except there's the issue of how he's planning to use those radium rays. Thorkel has been experimenting on reducing the size of man in order to decrease man's environmental impact. But anybody figuring this out is going to be a danger to Thorkel's insane plans. And now this group of interlopers from America has come and seen those plans! So Thorkel locks them in the radiation chamber and shrinks them down to size, with the plan to kill them after subjecting them to suitable horrors since the group knows what's going to come and Thorkel is Bond-villianous in the way he reveals his plans. He could step on them, or let the cat kill them the way it kills mice.

Of course, the group isn't about to let any of this happen, and try to figure out a way to fight back. They being human, they really are the most dangerous game. Also, being miniature, it's a good excuse for the movie to engage in creative special effects, leading up to the climax.

Dr. Cyclops is another of those movies where they splurged on special effects, and Technicolor, to the point that the screenplay suffers. This isn't the most original plot by any means, and the cast shows that having the best actors in it wasn't that terribly important. Still, because of the effects, even a recycled plot works well enough to entertain. Only the effects that involve the players against rear-projection photography don't work so well, since the backgrounds look grainy from being so blown up. That's a minor objection. Dr. Cyclops, while not being great, succeeds at what it sets out to do.