The face don't care

TCM had a night of body horror movies some months back. One of the movies that I hadn't seen was The Hand, which I recorded in part because of its star, Michael Caine. I finally got around to watching it and, as always, that means that now you get the review.

Michael Caine plays Jonathan Landsale, a cartoonist living in Vermont with his wife Anne and daughter Lizzie. However, it's become a bit of a strained marriage. Anne has an offer for a job at some new age institute down in New York City, and she thinks having their daughter studying in New York instead of middle-of-nowhere Vermont might be better. Jonathan doesn't want that, and besides, there's more space to do cartooning in Vermont and it's cheaper, too.

So the husband and wife drive down to New York to see the apartment, but get in an argument along the way while also having to deal with lousy drivers. Anne tries to pass a truck when a car comes in the opposite direction, and in the ensuing accident Jonathan's right hand is severed at the wrist. Obviously nobody wants to lose a hand, but it's even worse when you're a cartoonist and you make a living using that hand to draw things. Anne and the police stay behind to look for the hand in the hopes it can be re-attahed, but since they're in a field with thick grass, they can't find it.

Jonathan does get a prosthetic and and learns how to use it, as well as dealing with the residual nervous system sensations that amputees apparently film. Jonathan's agent suggest somebody else take over the strip, but Jonathan hates the direction the other guy wants to take it. Worse, Anne seems to be having a romantic relationship with a yoga instructor at the institute.

Oh, but that's not the worst thing at all. Jonathan starts having something that might be nightmares, or might be some sort of dark hallucinatory premonition, in which he has visions of the severed hand doing really nasty things like strangling people to death. To deal with that, Jonathan decides a change is in order, and takes a job as an adjunct professor at an unorthodox college in rural northern California, where he's going to teach cartoon drawing to people who are about as talented as Billy Crystal's students in Throw Momma From the Train.

Unfortunately, Jonathan continues to have those horrible visions. He makes a friend in the form of fellow instructor Brian Ferguson (Bruce McGill), and then suddenly, one of his students shows up at his house in the woods. That student, Stella, doesn't know what she wants to do in life, but is more than comfortable having sex with Jonathan which ought to be a big no-no not just because Jonathan is married but because sex between teacher and student is way wrong. Then again, it also turns out that Stella had been thinking of going down to Los Angeles with Brian for the Christmas holidays, which leads to the movie's climactic finale.

The Hand received poor reviews at the time of its release, and having watched it it's not hard to see why. The movie has a glacial pace, and a lot of the time it feels like there's not a lot going on. And for what is supposed to be a horror movie, it's not as if there's that much horror, not even of the sort in a Val Lewton movie where the horror is not explicit but desiged to be in the viewer's mind. Michael Caine tries, but even he can't save this one.

However, The Hand has apparently become a bit of a cult film in the intervening years, so watch and judge for yourself.

High Aces

Another movie that TCM ran during their Summer Under the Stars salute to Christoper Plummer was a World War I aviation drama called Aces High. I'd never heard of it before and, as it turns out, this was a TCM premiere, which might explain why I hadn't heard of it. Well, that and, after having seen the movie, I understood why it doesn't get shown all that often.

Plummer plays Capt. Sinclair, a pilot during World War I, although we don't see him at first. Instead, the action opens at Eton in 1916, where the next group of students is about to be graduated. John Gielgud, in a cameo role as the headmaster, leads the students in prayer before introducing them to a former student of theirs now serving with distinction, Maj. John Gresham (Malcolm McDowell). One of the students he speaks to, Stephem Croft (Peter Firth), is the kid brother of Gresham's girlfriend.

A year passes, and Croft is now a lieutenant who is serving with the air corps precisely because he looked up to Gresham and wanted to serve under Gresham. However, what he finds isn't all that it's cracked up to be as the air base is a bunch of bombed-out houses in some god-forsaken French village not far from the front lines. Croft doesn't yet realize how stressful and difficult aerial combat is, or the high attrition rate that it leads to, with the concomitant fatalism. Sinclair is Gresham's second-in-command, and warns Croft not to look up too highly to Gresham because of what war does to people.

The pilots go up and engage in dogfighting -- this is, after all, a World War I movie -- and in one of the first dogfights Gresham saves Croft's life, which is only going to make things more difficult for Gresham who doesn't want Croft to look up to him. There's a German pilot shot down and the alleged custom that a pilot shot down is for 24 hours the personal prisoner of the pilot who did the shooting. And then there are also unsuccessful missions that result in English pilots getting shot, which greatly darkens the mood in the British camp.

One way to deal with all of this is to see the proverbial "girl in every port", which Croft is given the opportunity to do as well, although this leads to more disillusionment as well when Croft goes back to see the girl again and finds that she's seeing a French officer. Finally, the pilots are asked to take part in a more dangerous mission to deal with some German balloons that are being used for surveillance. The balloons are harder to get rid of, and defended to the point that going after them results in a lot of surface-to-air shooting.

I suppose that if you're an aviation buff, there's a good deal to like in Aces High, as there's a fair bit of aerial combat footage. But as for the movie as a whole, it didn't quite work for me. The plot feels really muddled, with too many cameos (Ray Milland and Trevor Howard also appear) leading to extraneous scenes. The various pilots at the base are also too alike that it's a bit difficult to keep track of everything that's going on.

Briefs for July 18-19, 2026

I have to admit that I haven't been watching as many movies recently with the soccer World Cup on. For a while, I was about four weeks ahead in my posts here, but it's gone down to a bit over two weeks. The tournament ends tomorrow, which I suppose is also a good time for me to hunt down my DVD of Victory and watch it again. Not a great movie by any means, but a lot of fun.

Where I've really been remiss is in not posting obituaries of people who have died, although to be fair that's become a bit of an issue ever since I started getting ahead in terms of my movie posts instead of having the discipline of writing up one new post and putting it up that day. I think the first one would be Louise Lasser, who appeared in several of Woody Allen's early films before reaching even greater fame on TV with Norman Lear's comic soap opera Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. Lasser, who died on August 6, was 87.

British actress Joanna Pettet, who appeared in some 60s movies I've blogged about like Night of the Generals and The Group, died on August 7 at the age of 83. One of the movies that Wikipedia's deaths page mentions is the 1970s horror film The Evil, which is one of those films I kind of wonder whether I've seen since those 1970s horror films have a way of blending together. But a search of the blog doesn't bring it up. I guess I'll have to search it out and add it to the pile of movies I've got to get around to watching.

Sam Neill is probably the best-known of the current crop of obituaries, as he appeared in some highly underrated little 1980s movies like Dead Calm and A Cry in the Dark. Of course, those get a bit overlooked because in 1993 he starred in a movie you might have heard of called Jurassic Park. Neill died August 13 at 78, and apparently has a couple of posthumous releases currently scheduled for next year.

And there's Oscar-winning actress Brenda Fricker. Fricker won the Oscar for playing Christy Brown's mother in My Left Foot, although would probably be better known to casual film fans from bigger-budget Hollywood films like the second Home Alone movie or the remake of Angels in the Outfield. Fricker died on Thursday; she was 81.

Over the Edge

Teens in trouble have been a staple in movies, although during the studio era it was more an exploitation movie thing. With the end of the Production Code Hollywood started giving us somewhat less unrealistic fare. One of those more recent films showed up on one of the FAST channels, giving me the opportunity to catch the second half of it: Over the Edge. So when TCM ran it, I recorded it to be able to watch the whole thing commercial-free.

Opening narration about vandalism gives way to a new-build community called New Granada, CO, which is not fully built out yet, which seems like a bit of a problem because who would want to bring their family to a community that's still half under construction? And as such, you can understand why the teens are in such a state of discontent. One such teen, Mark (Vincent Spano) takes his BB gun out on an overpass and shoots at a police car, which is obviously a problem. Seeing this is Richie (Matt Dillin in his film debut), who races away, but gets found by the police Carl Willat (Michael Kramer), the "good kid". They're taken to the police station, and it's intimated that this isn't Richie's first go-round with the juvenile justice system.

Carl is shown as being from an upper-middle-class family where his father (Andy Romano) is a car salesman and one of the community leaders trying to bring new business to New Granada. It's community leadership that leaves him terribly out of touch about the state of the teens in town, and a sharp contrast from what Richie's family is like. Their one hangout isn't a mall like it would be in Southern California, but a youth rec center that's a construction site of its own, with a corrugated metal roof and the one do-gooder adult in the movie running it. When the Willetts drive by what was originally planned to be the sort of bowling alley/sports place that kids could hang out at and find that its use is changing to an industrial park, it's enough to hurt poor Carl.

Since Carl isn't going to have much else to do, he falls in with Richie and the rest of the teens in town. This isn't the sort of place that has the well-defined cliques of later teen movies in the 1980s, so they all go to the same house party and otherwise hang out together at an abandoned house, as well as doing target shooting with a gun that Carl's would-be girlfriend found.

Unfortunately, all this petty criminality goes wrong, leading to Richie "borrowing" his mom's car, picking up Carl, and going for a joyride that tresults in the police following the two and shooting Richie when the policeman sees Richie's gun. Richie dies, and poor Carl is really in trouble now, much too young to be off on his own but not really able to go home. The adults are increasingly alarmed. They already held one assembly that obviously didn't work, and now they're going to hold another. This time, however, the teens come up with a way that's bound to get the parents' attention. I don't want to say exactly what happens, but I will say I was quite surprised to see the climax that the movie had.Over the Edge is supposedly based on a real story, or perhaps inspired by a story about a new-build community where things went badly wrong with the teens. I'm not certain quite how realistic the movie is, but then I should admit that my childhood was quite a lot different from a lot of people's. That, and I'd be about 10 years younger, so a late 80s adolescence was probably also rather different from a late 70s adolescence. Over the Edge is interesting, although I do have to say that I found the acting rather variable in quality. And really, is every single adult in this town that stupid and clueless?

Still, Over the Edge is a movie that's absolutely worth watching.

Better than stepping on somebody else's toes

I've mentioned in a couple of other movies that I've blogged about here that both James Gleason and Donald O'Connor were selected to be part of TCM's Summer Under the Stars in August 2025. As it turns out, they also did a movie together, although the structure of the movie makes their common appearance rather brief: On Your Toes.

Gleason plays Phil Dolan Sr. the patriarch of a family still trying to make it in vaudeville even though it's a dying business. Queenie Smith plays Mom, while O'Connor plays a young Phil Dolan Jr. Dad wants him to keep going with vaudeville, while Mom insists he get an education. Another of the acts in the same troupe as the Dolans has a young ballet dancer of Russian descent, Vera Barnova, although her act leaves the troupe.

In any case, 15 years pass and Phil Jr. (played as an adult by Eddie Albert) has gotten something of an education, trying to make it as a songwriter and, if possible, a "serious" composer. In a hotel lobby he runs into grifting Ivan Boultonoff (Leonid Kinskey), a composer for a Russian emigre ballet company managed by equally grifting Sergei Alexandrovitch (Alan Hale). Ivan offers to give Phil music composition lessons, although it's as much a way for him to hear Phil's ideas, and liking them, get them to Sergei. That, and get the main credit for the music since the orchestrations are going to be his. Phil's recompense, as it were, is going to be dancing a minor role in the current show.

And wouldn't you know it, but the prima ballerina of the company is none other than... Vera Barnova, also all grown up (and played by Vera Zorina). The two meet again and rekindle a friendship, although it's expected that Vera is going to have a more serious relationship with one of the male dancers. But having a friend in the prima ballerina is a valuable thing to have. With that in mind, when things go south with a male lead, Phil's vaudeville dance experience comes in handy as he knows all the dance moves for what's going to be an experimental jazz ballet.

What Vera and Phil don't know is that, for various reasons, a group of Russian agents have been brought in to assassinate the original Russian lead dancer as part of the climax to the jazz ballet. Vera and Phil do eventually learn of this plot, but it's mid-performance, forcing them to try to keep dancing long enough for the authorities to stop the murder from going forward and catching the responsible guilty parties.

On Your Toes is based on a Rodgers and Hart musical that, to be honest, I hadn't heard of before seeing the movie. Having read the reviews of the movie, it seems that enough was changed from the original stage musical -- or at least enough of the traditional songs removed -- that fans of the stage musical aren't fans of this movie adaptation. At the same time, the ballet numbers we get in the movie are apparently faithful renditions from the original stage musical, and are considered highlights. For me, not having seen the stage musical, I don't have that issue. I do have other issues with it, however, such as the grifting nature of Ivan and Sergei that it makes them both more unsympathetic than humorous.

So, On Your Toes may not be for everybody, but some people are really going to like it.

Caesar's Wife

Somerset Maugham was an exceedingly prolific writer. Or at least it seems that way; maybe it's more that his works are the sort of things that were considered suitable for turning into movies. Some of the famous ones include The Letter and The Razor's Edge, but there's a ton more out there. A movie that I didn't realize was based on a Maugham play until I sat down to watch it is Another Dawn.

Errol Flynn is the star here, playing Denny Roark. He's a pilot with the British military in one of their possessions in Arabia, serving under Col. Wister (Ian Hunter). For some reason, Denny's sister Grace (Frieda Inescort) also lives in the area, which I'd have thought unlikely. In any case, as Denny returns from a mission having survived by the sking of his teeth, he gets some good news from Wister who, in addition to being his commanding officer, is also a friend. Wister has to take two months' leave for reasons, and is going to be going home to England for the time. Denny is getting a temporary promotion to commander, which is good career advancement for him.

On the same boat as Wister is Julia Ashton (Kay Francis). She's an American going to England for reasons, and is being pursued on board ship by a businessman in whom she has absolutely no interest. Wister saves Julia from this guy's advances, and the two become friends, although this being prim and proper England under George V, it's not going to go any further just yet. Wouldn't you know it, however, but Julia is staying with the same friends in England that Wister is staying with, so they keep seeing each other.

Wister immediately falls in love with Julia, but the feeling isn't mutual. It's not that Julia has anything against Wister; instead, she was engaged to the sort of pilot who in those days would have been considered an explorer. He went out one evening on an experimental flight and never returned, with no evidence of his plane ever having been found. Presumably, he crashed into the Irish Sea and the plane sank with him drowning. But Julia is still in mourning for her late boyfriend and can't love anybody else. However, since Wister is so nice, and she knows she can never love anybody, she agrees to make Wister happy by marrying him. She does consider him a friend, after all.

Wister and his new wife get back to the Arab sheikdom where he and Denny are stationed. Julia gets off the train and Denny sees her, treating her like a perfect gentleman because he doesn't realize who she is: Wister hasn't seen any need to wire ahead that he's returning with a wife. Denny, like his commanding officer, falls in love with Julia, which is obviously going to be quite awkward when he finds out that this woman is married to his commanding officer. But how is the love triangle going to be resolved?

One subplot in Another Dawn, which is frankly not well handled, involves Wister's manservant Wilkins (Herbert Mundin). Wilkins goes back to England with Wister, and is given a give by some of his fellow soldiers. That gift is a box of white feathers which, if you've seen the movie The Four Feathers, you'll know means his fellow soldiers consider him a coward. It's so obvious that this is foreshadowing for something that happens later in the movie, and frankly, it's a subplot that doesn't do very much to advance the movie.

As for the rest of Another Dawn, it's the sort of drama where you can see why one of the studios of the 1930s would want to acquire it and turn it into a movie. There's a fairly good love triangle story at its heart, and the sort of story that would have given a studio ample opportunity to open up the action what with the exotic setting (not that there would have been any location shooting, of course). The cast does a good job with their roles, although the movie is ultimately just a programmer. A competent programmer, but a programmer nevertheless. I think that's why Another Dawn is not as well remembered as some of the other movies based on stories by Somerset Maugham.

Before RCA got the trademark

Rin Tin Tin was a German Shepherd rescued during World War I, and his popularity in movies naturally led competing studios to make dog pictures of their own with similar-looking canine actors. One such silent was His Master's Voice, starring a dog named Thunder.

The structure of the movie is a bit interesting. Thunder is much older and has a son, Flash, and the two can talk to each other as it were through the use of title cards, not that the humans would have known this. Anyhow, Flash asks his dad how his dad's master became the hero he is, which goes back to the Great War. So, once again, we get a flashback....

Before the US entered the war, Bob Henley (George Hackathorne) was an architecture student in one of those small towns, with a girl Mary (Marjorie Daw) he was interested in, although piece of work Jack tries to steal Bob's girl because he knows Bob is a coward who won't stand up for himself. Even worse is that when there's a contest to design a new library for the town, Jack "offers" to take Bob's design into the office to submit it, even though it should be obvious that Jack is going to submit it under his own name.

As for that war that's about to come to America, Bob has no desire to fight, and his mom has no desire to let him go off to Europe. But the draft board comes, and not only drafts Bob, but finds that Thunder would be great for service with the Red Cross. Now, you'd think this would be a perfect opporunity to have Bob be Thunder's handler and work in the ambulance corps or some such, but the US military being assholes, they split Bob and Thunder up.

Over in France, Bob is about to desert since he's still a coward who is unable to fight. But then he sees Thunder, and the two being reunited, Thunder becomes Bob's mascot in the trenches. Bob gets sent on a dangerous mission, and at least this time it's not his cowardice that lets him down, but in fact getting injured by German fire. Thunder is there to save the day, however, as well as let Bob take credit for heroism. It even makes Bob able to stand up to Jack when he returns home, so that we can have our requisite happy ending.

To be honest, the story in His Master's Voice is kind of sappy. But the production is actually fairly well handled, for a movie that clocks in at a bit under an hour. That short running time, however, makes things feel a bit more like a skeleton of a story than something that's fully fleshed out. His Master's Voice is another of those movies that's certainly not bad, but not great, and memorable more for the fact that the dog is a main character here.

A different affair from Summertime

Another of the movies that had been sitting forlornly on my DVR waiting to be watched before it expired is The Venetian Affair. So, as is once again the case, I sat down, watched it, and then wrote up this review.

As you might have figured out, the movie is set in lovely Venice, Italy, although the story itself isn't quite so romantic. Instead, it starts off with some sort of international conference on disarmament, this being the days of the Cold War. Except that one of the participants in the conference blows the thing up, killing a dozen high-level diplomats!

Bill Fenner Robert Vaughn is an American journalist working in the New York bureau of the International Wire Service. This is a big story that needs more than one correspondent, so he's called to Venice where he's going to work with his colleague, Mike Ballard (Roger C. Carmel). Or, at least, that's what he thinks. At the airport, he's met by Frank Rosenfeld (Ed Asner, still early enough in his career that he's being referred to as Edward). Rosenfeld is a CIA station chief, and already knows Fenner because Fenner used to work for the CIA himself.

And, indeed, that's part of why Fenner was called in. He's got spy knowledge but, no longer being a spy, he can do things that the known spies can't really do. One of those things is to get close to Dr. Vaugiroud (Boris Karloff), who has written up a report on the investigation into the bombing at the conference. That report may itself be a bombshell, pun intended, so if the Americans can get their hands on the one copy of the report, never mind just knowing its contents before publication, so much the better. Fenner sees Vaugiroud at a press conference and learns the Americans may be coming out on the bad end of the report.

But that's not the only reason Fenner was brought over to Italy. It seems that one of the people who has more knowedge of what's going on that she's let on is one Sandra Fane (Elke Sommer). Sandra just happens to be the former Mrs. Bill Fenner, with the two divorcing in part because of Bill's character, and in part because of Sandra's politics.

There are, of course, people around who don't want the Americans to get the report, and they're more than willing to kill to get at the report. Not only that, but they're willing to do things that some might consider even worse, like mind control. So everybody flits around Venice for a good 90 minutes or so until it's decided to wrap up the story by blaming everything on the Communist Chinese, who were at this point still pariahs in the eyes of the First World.

I think I've stated before that the dark and cynical spy movie of the 1960s is not my favorite genre of film. And to be honest, The Venetian Affair might be even worse than other movies in the genre that I've seen like The Ipcress File. There's just no reason to care about any of these characters, and the movie is also very slow. I suspect it was an opportunity for the Americans involved to get a working holiday in Venice, which has always been a photogenic place. They just got lousy work to do.

The Lodger (1944)

I mentioned a few months back that one of the movies that's back in the FXM rotation is the 1944 version of The Lodger. I'd seen it before, but surprisingly, a search of the blog claims that I haven't done a post on it. With that in mind, I decided I'd wait for it to show up again on FXM so that I could re-watch it and do up a post to go with the FXM showing. That next showing is tomorrow, July 13, at 7:15 AM.

The Lodger is based on the same source material as the Alfred Hitchcock movie of the same title, a 1913 novel by Marie Belloc Lowndes; that novel was also the basis for the Jack Palance movie Man in the Attic. As you may know, the material is based on the famous Jack the Ripper serial murders of 1888, although, as the identity of the real Jack the Ripper was never determined, what happens to the stand-in character here is obviously different from whatever happened to Jack the Ripper.

In a portion of the Fox backlot that stands in for London, a drunken music-hall player heads for home, only to get waylaid and murdered by an unseen person. This is presented as not being the first of the Jack the Ripper murders, so the whole press already has been been reporting breathlessly for some time on the murders and everybody has been waiting for the next one to happen.

At about the same time, even though it's late evening, a man walks up to a middle-class house not quite where the murders have been occurring but close enough to get there at night. The man, taking the name Slade from a nearby street sign (Laird Cregar), says that he got the address of this house from an estate agent who told him that the house was letting out rooms. In fact, that is true; man of the house Robert Bonting (Cedric Hardwicke) has suffered some financial reverses and he and his wife Ellen (Sara Allgood) need to rent out the upper rooms to make ends meet. Slade is presented as someone we're obviously supposed to suspect of being Jack the Ripper, and he takes the rooms.

Things get worse when the Bontings' niece, Kitty Langley (Merle Oberon) returns from France. She had been working there as a singer in a revue, but she's about to take on a new job as the lead in a London music-hall revue. However, she's also the same exact sort of actress whom Jack is believed to be attracted to. Slade seems to be OK keeping to himself, although Kitty takes an interest in him, trying to invite him to see her new show. This also serves to increase the suspense, as Kitty seems to have no clue that she might be in any sort of danger. Her aunt and uncle, however, begin to suspect that Slade and Jack the Ripper might be one and the same.

Meanwhile, an old acquaintance who used to work in the same theater where Kitty is now performing shows up briefly; after leaving she too gets murdered by Jack. This brings in Scotland Yard in the form of Detective Inspector Warwick (George Sanders). He too takes an interest in Kitty, although you might think this is a bit unprofessional. In any case, the police do have to be around to keep Kitty safe, since she is in their eyes an obvious target for Jack especially once her aunt and uncle bring their suspicions to the police.

This version of The Lodger effectively brings all of this to a successful climax. The one objection might be that, because of the Production Code we know the Jack the Ripper mystery can't be left unsolved. Be that as it may, the cast does a good job, especially Laird Cregar, who died much too young. There's a fair bit here that bears similarity to Cregar's final film, Hangover Square, another smallish picture that's very well done. Both of them deserve to be seen more often.

The Mayor of 44th Street

I mentioned some time back that I somehow wound up with several movies on my DVR which all star George Murphy. So I've been watching them and writing up these posts to save in draft and then schedule them after a suitable break between them. This time, the movie that I watched is another RKO programmer, The Mayor of 44th Street.

Murphy plays Joe Jonathan, a booking agent who works with a whole bunch of musical acts (which conveniently is also a way for the movie to pad things out) serving the sort of nightclub that started going out of style in the years after World War II and espeically once television came along. It's the sort of business that's ripe for having the Mob try to push in and force people to book specific acts or pay protection money to keep the Mob away.

One such gangster is Bits McKarg (Rex Downing) who, it turns out, is actually just a teenager leading a whole bunch of teens who basically heckle the sort of bands that they don't like, although they're really no more harmful than the Dead End Kids were, whether it was in the Dead End Kids days or even when they became the Bowery Boys. But Bits looked up to the movie gangsters of the 30s, and wants to be a tough guy, and his gang of youths is going to be useful later in the movie.

The more important gangster is Ed Kirby (Richard Barthelmess in his final role before retiring). Ed and Joe had a past together, but Kirby got sent up to prison some years back. Cop Tommy Fallon (William Gargan) shows up at Joe's office one day to tell him that Ed is applying for parole. This is something that troubles Joe, but even more so troubles his long-suffering girlfriend and dance partner Jessey (Anne Shirley). The obvious fear is that Kirby, if he gets out of prison, is going to come back to Joe and cause a whole world of trouble.

Sure enough, Kirby gets out of prison and goes looking for Joe. Worse for Joe is that he's made what could be seen as a mistake in taking on Bits as a sort of young man to mentor. Better to teach Bits how to do things honestly and make a good living than have Bits stay the way he was. Kirby is going to need a job to satisfy his parole officer, and the only person who can give him that chance, at least according to Kirby's lawyers, is Joe. (Can't Kirby work as a secretary to the lawyers?) Joe is dumb enough to give Kirby another chance.

It's not too hard to guess what happens next, which is that Kirby goes back to his old ways of trying to shake down everybody he sees, even though this isn't what Joe wants at all. And with Bits still looking up to gangsters like Kirby, it's going to be hard for Joe to resist the pressure, at least not without getting the crap knocked out of him.

George Murphy isn't the world's greatest actor, largely because he doesn't exactly have a ton of charisma. He's nominally the lead here, but it's more of an ensemble of second-tier stars, who more or less work well together. Nobody's going to mistake The Mayor of 44th Street for a prestige picture, but it's another of those films that works for what it does and entertained the people as the bottom of the bill back in the early days of World War II.