MOVIES

The Silk Express (1933) is as odd a jumble of plot devices as I have ever seen.  Youthful Neil Hamilton represents a textile mill owners' organization in the midst of a silk boom, compelled to import raw silk themselves to avoid exploitive pricing by unscrupulous speculators.  They have 72 hours to get the bales from Seattle to New York by train, and the speculators will do anything to stop the Silk Express.  There is a surprise discovery of Mongolian Silk Rust, and an imperilled archaeologist suffering from a rare Asian Sleeping Sickness which slowly deprives him of movement and senses and will kill him if he falls asleep, along for the ride to the only clinic in North America that can save him.  Naturally it turns into a Locked Room / Vanishing Weapon murder mystery on wheels.  Guy Kibbee shows up as a cantakerous lawman, along with Allan Jenkins in an uncharacteristic role as a scholarly hobo.  Not really thrilling, but odd.  6/10

Wives Under Suspicion (1938) stars Warren William, a fine figure of a man but no great shakes as an actor, in a somewhat unexpected psychodrama nicely directed by James Whale.  William puts a gloss of superficiality onto everything he does but this eventually becomes effective in spite of him.  The opening sequence is outstanding, and it is less formulaic than I expected but difficult to recommend.  It seems this is Whale's second treatment of this story, filmed in 1933 as The Kiss Before The Mirror.  5/10

I'm trying to find a Warren William film in which he does some real acting, and The Case of the Curious Bride (1935) presents him as Perry Mason, a wisecracking scoundrelly master-chef lawyer who has no qualms about concealing or manufacturing evidence, unnerving to anyone accustomed to Raymond Burr. Also startling is the fact that Mason's assistant Paul Drake is renamed Spudsy and played by Allan Jenkins in his conventional lowbrow mode.  It is only late in the movie that Spudsy is referred to as Drake, to my shock and dismay.  Claire Dodd doesn't have much to do as Della Street but answer the phone and look admiringly at Perry. Overall it is a fair murder mystery with lots of San Francisco locations.  Errol Flynn appears in a brief role that requires fighting but no speech. 5/10  I also saw William (and Flynn) recently in Don't Bet on Blondes (1935), an unremarkable Love Insurance farce.

Four's a Crowd (1938) is a frenetic screwball comedy starring Rosalind Russell and Errol Flynn, and it's a pretty good one if that is what you are looking for. 7/10

The Perfect Specimen (1937) pairs Flynn with Joan Blondell in a mild Rich Boy, Poor Girl comedy.  Joan is charming as always with soft shoulder-length hair and summery print dresses befitting her role as daughter of an eccentric professor, and she induces Flynn to break out of his golden cage and live it up.  Allan Jenkins helps out, and there is a lot of shouting "I would NEVER marry you!" before it is over. 6/10

I'm off in my own little world here.  I did see one recent movie, GANTZ - Perfect Answer (2011), the second of two movies based on the GANTZ manga.  It's all pretty ridiculous with lots of things blowing up and people brought back from the dead by a big black sphere to shoot aliens.  Wasn't as bad as Green Lantern.  Which was mostly pretty lame.  That's why I watch more movies from the 1930s.  At least you get Allan Jenkins, Guy Kibbee, Margaret Hamilton, et.al.even if the movie stinks.