FOLLOWING THE FALCON IN MEXICO

After watching John Ford's The Seas Beneath over Christmas (see my essay on it here), I mentioned the Argentine actress Mona Maris, who was one of the most interesting characters in that film, and who, as if by coincidence, turned out to play a part in a Falcon movie I came across, one of the few I had never before seen.

The Falcon In Mexico is one of the Tom Conway Falcons; you'll recall he replaced his brother, George Sanders, when Sanders wanted out of what Saint creator Leslie Charteris called the 'bargain-basement Saint'  series. (I wrote about the best of the series, The Falcon Takes Over, based on Raymond Chandler's Murder My Sweet, here). Sanders' Gay Lawrence was replaced by his brother's Tom Lawrence, and adjustments were made for Conway's lesser talent. It is Conway at his most hapless; RKO wanted to play the Falcon for more laffs than the Saint, and made the most of Conway's trademark double-take,which, especially when women are confusing him at the same time he is being irresistible to them, has to be see to be disbelieved.

The story is actually a fairly complicated parlour mystery, built around the murder of an art dealer in New York, and the disappearance of a new painting by an artist, Humphrey Wade, who is supposed to be dead. Lawrence had been conned into breaking into the gallery by Dolores Ybarra, a young Mexican woman who claimed to have modeled for the painting. Of course Tom now finds himself in the frame, if you'll excuse the expression, for the killing, but he goes on the lam pronto.

The trail takes him to the artist's daughter Mona (played by Martha MacVicar, soon to be renamed Martha Vickers by Warner Bros.) who is haunted, she believes, by her father's ghost, and thence to Mexico, where her father lived and worked (and which enabled RKO to use some of Orson Welles' stock shots from his never-finished Brazilian film, It's All True). There they meet Maris, playing Wade's widow, and her slick new husband Anton, who's in the Falcon's face PDQ. A Wade collector, 'Lucky Diamond' Hughes (perhaps to distinguish him from Howard Hughes?) shows up trying to chase down the stolen 'new' painting. Emory Parnell plays Hughes with a combination of bluster and sneaky greed that is delightful, if a bit embarrassing (check him out in his jammies when The Falcon breaks in on him).

Dolores soon turns up dead, so throw in the local taxi driver (Nestor Paiva), his son, the mysterious hotel clerk (Mary Currier, a kind of B move Bette Davis), cops and Dolores' father and you've got a twisty mystery that Conway struggles to solve.

Maris (second right in the photo right) is again one of the best things about the film; she has more range than most of the actors involved, though her role doesn't necessarily demand it. She gets second-billing, after Conway, and deserves that, perhaps because this was her second Falcon pic; she played in Sanders' second one, A Date With The Falcon, as the exotic femme fatale who involves him with a gang trying to get a formula for artificial diamonds, which coincidentally prevents his marriage to long-term fiance Wendy Barrie, who, for all her pizazz, isn't as interesting as Maris.

Paiva as Manuel, the taxi driver (center in the picture above), does a nice job of insinuating more than the usual Mexican cliches in his role, but the hidden star is MacVicar (left). She seems to be sleepwalking through much of the movie, but then, when the mystery becomes clear, you realise that has been the effect of his haunting--and the closing scenes when he is 'herself' again her vitality jumps off the screen. It is no surprise Warners had things in mind for her, and it was her bad luck to have her part in The Big Sleep reduced when the film was re-edited to emphasize the Bogart-Bacall relationship, following their success in To Have And Have Not. I wrote about that for Crime Time many years ago, perhaps I'll need to revisit the piece myself. In the meantime, this is a fun episode of the Falcon series, helped by the setting and especially by the two actress leads.

THE FALCON TAKES OVER, REVISITED

Thanks to the magic of BBC IPlayer, I had managed to catch up with a few of the old Saint movies just before and during the Olympics—a little light relief, as it were. I recommended them on twitter (@carlsonsports, if you're interested) and one follower asked if I could recommend the Falcon films as well. I suggested he try The Falcon's Brother, in which George Sanders' brother Tom Conway replaces him as the lead character, and The Falcon Takes Over, which famously is based on Raymond Chandler's Farewell My Lovely. Then I realised I probably hadn't watched the latter in twenty or more years, and I gave it another viewing. It was made in 1942, and it holds up well for a series B-picture.

Transforming a complicated Chandler story into a light-hearted romp could not have been easy, but it is amazing just how much of Chandler's plot remains. The most interesting thing is Ward Bond's (uncredited) performance as Moose Malloy (the Chandler characters retain their names) – not as sympathetic as Mike Mazurki and obviously pumped up by a padded suit, Bond plays it almost like a horror movie villain, a better-looking Rondo Hatton. And it's revealing yet again to be reminded of just how cold and evil Bond could be when a part required it. Helen Gilbert makes a compelling Velma, too: she's attractive in a vampy way (helped by a Veronica Lake hairdo) rather than beautiful, and you can see her allure to Moose as well as to other gangsters. It is something of a giveaway as far as the plot goes, but Gilbert makes the best of it. And she is tiny; Sanders towers over her, and by rights they should have been able to get one shot of her and Moose standing to establish the beauty and the beast nature of their relationship.

Gilbert is an interesting story. Originally a cellist, her entry into films seems to have been via the MGM orchestra and a short-lived marriage (as most of her seven marriages were) from 1936-39 to the much older Mischa Bakaleinikoff, a musical director at Columbia, whose brother Constantin was a musical director at RKO, and indeed is credited as such on The Falcon Takes Over, though the score was actually done, uncredited, by Roy Webb. Her most interesting marriage was to Johnny Stompanato, the Mickey Cohen strongman more famous for being murdered by Lana Turner's daughter, or so the story goes. If you want a good comparison in actual Chandler movies it would be to Martha Vickers, from The Big Sleep—she projects the same sense of raw and dangerous sexuality. Like Vickers she never escaped to bigger roles, and like Vickers her career was over by the 1950s, even though in Vickers' case her performance in The Burglar should have reinvigorated it.

It's also a pleasure to see (unbilled, of course) two favourites in small but crucial parts: Turhan Bay as Ampthor and Hans Conreid as Marriott, where I'd argue he's at least as good, if not better, than Douglas Walton or John O'Leary, from the two straight-forward adaptations. What is interesting is the way that, in this film, you can see much more clearly the way the stories which Chandler grafted together to make his novel don't actually mesh perfectly—particularly the 'Mandarin's Jade' section.

Of course the big problem is the need to make this a Falcon movie. It's no surprise Leslie Charteris sued Michael Arlen for stealing his Saint—the films are almost indistinguishable from the Saint, particularly the Sanders ones, except that the humour is a bit broader (Alan Jenkins in the comic sidekick role and James Gleason as O'Hara, the cop are both great, but the play between O'Hara and his bozo underlings tires quickly). Seriously, how can you hate a picture where Gleason growls at Jenkins 'Awright Goldy, for the last time, why'd you knock off those swamis?' Sanders seems already bored with the role, and his fatal power over women—one kiss makes them faint, literally—belies his character's name, which is Gay Lawrence. There is something unconvincing about the charm of Arlen's Gay Falcon, and Sanders appears to enjoy making him a bit of a helpless buffoon in the face of femininity. That's why Lynn Bari, as Anne Riordan, whose role grows from the original novel, and is far bigger than in the movies which followed, is so refreshing. There's an element of His Girl Friday, which was released the previous year, about her wisecracking character, and the way she treats the Falcon as an equal, more or less. It's something Chandler wouldn't have done, and something which made the Bogart/Bacall combo work so well in The Big Sleep, so much so that Howard Hawks went back and made Vickers' role smaller and played up that chemistry of equals. It's only on a small scale, but this RKO programmer is the better for it.

I'm recovered from the Olympics, but the Falcon made a diverting evening anyway—I should take my own advice more often.

THE BIG SLEEP: TWO NOTES

I've written about this before, but each time I watch The Big Sleep, I'm surprised people affect finding the plot so hard to follow. I was reminded of this as I watched it yet again on Air NZ to LA yesterday. The famous story about the screenwriters being unable to figure out one murder in Raymond Chandler's novel may have prompted this response, but, just for the record, here's the scorecard of the seven killings:

1. Geiger (blackmailer, pornographer) killed by chauffeur Owen Taylor to protect Carmen Sternwood
2. Taylor killed by Joe Brody (played by Louis Jean Heydt, pictured left, with the impressive Sonia Darrin as Agnes Lowzier, an appropriate surname) to get blackmail film he took from Geiger
3. Brody killed by Carol Lundgren (Geiger's chaffeur & lover, note the ambiguous name) in mistaken revenge
4. Harry Jones (replacing Brody as Agnes' dogsbody) killed by Canino to shut him up about Eddie Mars' wife
5. Canino, gunned down by Marlowe in self-defense, but also for Jonesy
6. Eddie Mars, shot by Marlowe but killed by his own men, set to trap and kill Marlowe
7. Sean Regan (already dead when story starts) killed by Carmen in the novel, but here left ambiguous, with Mars labelled the killer, although how he would not have recognised Carmen, if he were involved in blackmail, is hard to figure.

Bogart's Marlowe also seems to have sex-appeal like Stacy Keach's Mike Hammer. Women keep giving him the eye, and, because this is a Howard Hawks film (and taking place during World War II) they are often eyeing him more or less as equals. Which makes a great contrast to the way Martha Vickers' Carmen is presented--and an even bigger contrast to the way Chandler draws her, where she disgusts Marlowe. These Hawks-type babes, of whom Lauren Bacall, is an archetype, include:

1. Librarian (Carole Douglas) 'you're not the antiquarian book type'. This seems to have been Carole Douglas' only film role. 
2. Dorothy Malone's Acme Bookshop owner, who literally lets her hair down (after taking off her glasses) and whom, after their interlude, Marlowe calls 'pal', a very Hawksian touch
3. Countergirl (Deannie Best) who lights Marlowe's cigarette; the kind of male perogative women often exercise in Hawks' films
4. Taxi Driver (Joy Barlow) 'nights are better, I work days'
5. Hat check (Lorraine Miller) and Cigarette girl (Shelby Payne) at Eddie Mars' club and
6 Marlowe calls Mona Mars (Peggy Knudsen) 'my kind of gal', for the way she stands by Eddie Mars.

It might be interesting also to consider the over/under on how many of these women spent time on the Hawks casting couch. And on just how important Jules Furthman's one-liners are to the excellent script, written with Leigh Brackett, who probably provided a fair few herself, and William Faulkner.

 In my most recent viewing of the movie, in 2022, I noticed that Marlowe gives his cop friend Bernie Olds the wrong address for Geiger's house --it's quite clearly 460, but he gives a number in the thousands. Go figure.

PAUL WENDKOS: THE INDEPENDENT OBITUARY

My obituary of the director Paul Wendkos is in today's Independent; you can link to it here. I liked The Mephisto Waltz quite a bit when it came out, but it was my later discovery of The Burglar, a small gem which is arguably the greatest of all David Goodis adaptations (and features a part for John Fasenda, later to be the stentorian voice of NFL Films) and is a feverishly atmospheric film where Dan Duryea, despite being too old for the role, catches perfectly the doomed frustrations of Goodis' world. It's a small classic, and provides a rare substantial part for Martha Vickers, who contrasts brilliantly with Jayne Mansfield; you can almost sense her 'been there, done that' feeling. Wendkos really only came close to repeating such atmosphere with The Brothers Rico, but the made for TV format wasn't geared to those kinds of moodyness.