Seven Sinners

With female sidekick in tow, a wisecracking private detective follows a trail of corpses around Europe shaking up a sinister criminal network which will stop at nothing -- even causing major train wrecks -- to cover their crimes. Edmund Lowe, Constance Cummings.

Seven Sinners (later titled Doomed Cargo) is based on a story by Arnold Ridley and Bernard Merivale (which I’ve looked for but not been able to find)

This delectable little British trifle is from 1936, so obviously audio and visual are not pristine, but still this is a very engaging crime flick.

It opens when two men dressed in costumes meet at the Hotel Gallico at Carnival at Nice. It's your normal Carnival: fireworks, champagne -- in fact, one of the two men is quite the worse for drink -- and general merriment smacking dames in scanty outfits. The gentlemen part ways and it turns out the fellow in the devil's costume is actually our hero, the "European representative" of an American insurance company, and he's hoping to hook up with an associate from the New York office. But "Fenton" has not registered yet. Harwood heads back to his room only to find the man he'd met earlier dead inside. 

It takes him a while to notice, given that he's so plastered. In fact, it's actually a pretty effective moment when the body slips out of its chair and crumples to the floor. Harwood goes downstairs to report the death and meets an attractive, smart-alecky female in the elevator who turns out to be Fenton.

When they return upstairs with hotel management...the body has vanished!

Fenton insists there is no time to investigate because they have to get to Scotland posthaste because Lady Beckinsale (okay, but not Beckinsale, but Lady Something-That-Starts-With-a-B) is expecting them momentarily because...I forget. Probably something to do with her jewels. They manage to catch their train and Harwood collapses in a drunken stupor dreaming about the murdered man. 

BOOM! Catastrophic train-wreck. And the story is off and running.

This is a fast-paced and witty -- if convoluted -- effort in the vein of  Hitchcock's The Thirty-Nine Steps or The Lady Vanishes. The chemistry between Lowe and Cummings is great and their back and forth is very amusing. There are some genuinely funny bits of dialog.

Fast Company

Rare book dealer Joel Sloane (Melvyn Douglas) and his secretary/spouse Garda (Florence Rice) are investigating a book swindle when the case takes a homicidal turn.

1938's Fast Company is based on the book of the same title by the pseudonymous Marco Page. In the book (which I own, but haven't read yet), Joel's last name is Glass, but that's neither here nor there. I love the mix of --as the book jacket says "raw murder and rare books."

I want to digress here and ask who the heck was Florence Rice? She's so adorable! She's really good in this. She's got a bit of a Myrna Loy thing going on (in fact, the movie is unabashedly trying to ride that Thin Man train) but she's so natural, so unaffected, so darned cute.

And Melvyn Douglas, who was always a little more goofy than dashing, actually holds his own in this one. They do a great job together and it's puzzling and disappointing that the studio did not continue the series with them.

I'm having trouble explaining the plot of Fast Company as it's not exactly linear. Basically Joel and Garda try to help a young ex-con who was convicted of stealing rare books from his fiancee's father. The girl's father is involved in his own nefarious book dealings and eventually he's bumped off and the kid is accused of murder. Garda urges Joel to take the case.

The dialog is snappy, the chemistry between the leads is strong, the plot makes as much sense as these things ever do. It's definitely entertaining.

The subsequent movies are progressively weaker although the star power is higher in the second film, Fast and Loose, with Robert Montgomery and Rosalind Russell. The third film, Fast and Furious, is painful and pretty much a complete waste of time.  

Sleep, My Love

Mr. Thrilling and I were trying to come up with something to watch the other night. We’ve got two Netflix discs of The Hour sitting here, but I wasn’t in the mood. Anyway, we couldn’t agree on anything to rent, so back we headed to our Netflix Instant Queue and low and behold I spotted a film I’d tucked aside for a rainy day. Or night.

Sleep, My Love is a 1948 psychological thriller starring Claudette Colbert, Bob Cummings, and Don Ameche. To Mr. Thrilling’s and my own great delight we’d neither of us seen it and it turned out to be pretty good!

Allie Courtland wakes on a train in the middle of the night and she can’t remember how she got there or where she’s supposed to be headed. Her last memory is of wishing her husband goodnight. She promptly throws a hysterical fit, which I guess is not entirely unreasonable, though I found it annoying. Eventually she calls her husband, Richard, who has already summoned the police.

Only the slowest of viewers will not instantly recognize that Richard is trying to work a gaslight on poor Allie. He claims she’s been sleepwalking for a while now and that the previous night she stole his gun, shot him, and ran away.

Irritatingly, Alison buys this without a quibble. Really? If Mr. Thrilling accused me of any of this without more evidence than a gun in my bag and a sleeper berth on a train, I would have more than a quibble. He’d be lucky if I didn’t shoot him for reals on the spot. Of course that’s because I have a suspicious nature and was weaned on crime fiction. Apparently Allie missed Gaslight when the remake came out in 1944.

Anyway, Allie agrees to see a shrink and so this very creepy bespectacled and mustachioed weirdo shows up and proceeds to freak her out by leering at her and scratching the upholstery and fiddling with the fireplace poker. It unsurprisingly results in another bout of hysterics and a dead faint.

Meanwhile, Bruce, a charming young man she met on the original train, and who was not one whit put off by all signs pointing to Allie having Issues, shows up and begins to get instantly suspicious. Everyone keeps saying how wholesome and healthy and well-balanced Allie is, and that just doesn’t jibe with her husband’s tales of sleepwalking wackiness. Besides, Bruce fell for Allie the second he saw her.

Anyway, Richard hopes to use Bruce to help prove Allie is suicidally unstable, so he lets Bruce escort Allie to a party – instead Bruce takes her to a Chinese wedding -- and then the fun really begins!

This is a great little period piece – all the more charming for a few unexpected touches like Bruce’s Chinese adopted brother, and Richard having to dose himself to prove to Allie he's not drugging her cocoa, and crazy bad girl Daphne's endless supply of lingerie and venom. Smooth performances on the part of all the players help pull it off.