The Fallen Sparrow

I watched The Fallen Sparrow some weeks back. I thought I had blogged about it, but I'm a few weeks ahead in a sense in that I have a couple of other movies I watched weeks back but haven't blogged about due to needing to watch other things actually coming up on one or another of the movie channels soon and blogging about those. A search of the blog suggested that I hadn't yet blogged about it, and on further consideration, I was thinking of Experiment Perilous, which I did do a post on back in March. So now's the time to blog about The Fallen Sparrow.

John Garfield plays John "Kit" McKittrick, who is returning to his old home in New York after quite a long time away. He served with the Abraham Lincoln Briagde in the Spanish Civil War and spent a substantial amount of time first as a POW (the Lincoln Brigades having been on the losing side of the war) and then after having escaped, recuperating out west. But he's returning now because of the death of an old friend.

That old friend had helped Kit escape from the POW camp in Spain, and his death was ruled a suicide, but Kit just knows different. Still, it's going to be tough to figure out, in part because the police want the case dropped; the people responsible for the death are going to be tough to crack; and Kit still isn't fully recovered from his POW experience, hearing sounds that sound like his torturer, sounds which may not exist.

One person who may be able to help Kit is Ab (Bruce Edwards, an old friend of Kit's who lets Kit stay at his apartment. Kit also meets Toni (Maureen O'Hara), who seems involved in all of this somehow, being the purported relative of a French prince who may or may not be a real French prince. In the prince's circle of acquaintances is Dr. Skaas (Walter Slezak), who also clearly knows far more than he's letting on, and has a son Otto (Hugh Beaumont years before becoming Ward Cleaver) who is also in on it all.

Apparently everybody is after Kit because his unit killed a big Nazi general, and Hitler wants to avenge the general's death by getting the unit's standard. Kit supposedly knows where it is (well, he actually does), which is why he was tortured in the POW camp and why the Nazis follow him to New York to find where that damn flag is.

The Fallen Sparrow is a movie that unfortunately has an inscrutable plot, which is a shame because Garfield gives about as good a performance as the material lets him. O'Hara is somewhat miscast but does as well as she can too, while Slezak once again runs with the story and gets to have fun as the bad guy. It's just a shame that all of this is in service of a bizarre plot that makes little sense (which is probably why it and Experiment Perilous ran together in my mind).

The Fallen Sparrow is available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive collection.