Reviews

Diana Rigg's 1968 "Mini-Killers" project is shrouded in mystery. (Incidentally, it's "Minikillers" in the titles, no hyphen.) I've posted the details behind this movie in the "trivia" section.

Minikillers is comprised of 4 minifilms. Filmed in Spain the movie takes advantage of the scenic locales of Costa Brava – however most of the scenery is lost in the washed-out and blurry 8mm film print. Long story short: Minikillers looks like garbage. My DVDR is taken from the original 8mm film and looks rough; colors are muddy, faces are blurred. But Diana Rigg still glows.

Part 1: Operation Costa Brava – Lounging by the pool in her bikini, Rigg notices a toy doll walk up; somewhere distant a Telly Savalas-lookalike sets a time-bomb activation clock. The doll stops in front of some guy by the pool and squirts poison through its eyes; the guy dies. In the melee Rigg takes the doll, investigating; the bald henchman sees this and sends a stooge after her. A quick judo fight outside Rigg's house; she tosses this guy and as he slouches off she spots a clock which has fallen from his pocket – it's the same kind as the clock used to activate the doll. Rigg goes into her swank room to inspect the doll. Unseen by her another doll another comes in, controlled by the Savalas lookalike; Rigg leaves her place just as the poison sprays from doll #2's eyes – Rigg never even sees that it's there.

Part 2: Heroin – Rigg sits along the beach in a wrap, mini-camera in hand. She snaps photos of a yacht and the men onboard – including the mustache-sporting main villain – spot her. The main boss gives the order and the men on his yacht hoist a lever, activating a trap. A strange scene where Rigg realizes she is surrounded by mannequins on the beach – as if she didn't notice? A net comes up from the sand and ensnares the mannequins and Rigg and drags them into the water. Guntoting stooges in the yacht wait as the net's dragged from water – but it's empty! Meanwhile Rigg comes out of the ocean unseen by them – wearing only white panties and a bra, her wrap lost in the tumult – and sneaks onto into the yacht. She slinks onto the bottom deck, investigating – minikiller dolls everywhere. Ever curious Rigg looks into one, finds a bag of heroin tucked inside it – the dolls transport drugs as well. Cute bit where she waves a "naughty naughty" finger in the doll's face. Next she finds a photo of two men, with "Interpol" written above them, and X marks over each face; one of the faces is the man killed in part 1. The yacht gets back to the dock; while sneaking off Rigg's spotted by the Savalas lookalike. A few judo chops and she beats away her attackers; escapes into the main villain's car, races off. Ends with Rigg depositing the stolen car on the street and hopping into her own race car, jetting off; a cop puts a ticket on main villain's car for being illegally parked.

Part 3: Macabre – Rigg enjoys a coffee at an outdoor restaurant. The Savalas lookalike and the main boss watch her from afar. They take the minikiller (from part 1) from her car and activate it, then place it back in Rigg's car. She leaves and they follow in another car. She hears a ticking noise and so stops to look at the doll. Realizing it's been armed, she throws the doll at her pursuers and it explodes; men scatter. Cool bit where Rigg saucily gets out of her car and challenges the bald henchman. A quick fight: she judo-chops him and he plunges off of a hill, out cold. Back at her hotel a porter hands Rigg a note. Apparently she's asked to come to a certain address. That night, Rigg in sexy black minidress arrives at a palatial estate. Men there await with a coffin, one of them the Savalas lookalike. She beats them up and escapes in a horse-drawn carriage.

Part 4: Flamenco – Rigg sits in a packed nightclub, enjoying a flamenco dancer named Sali. In an upper balcony sit the main villain and his Savalas lookalike henchman. Sali it appears is the second of the two Interpol agents in the X'd out photo from part 2. Flamenco over, Sali goes to his dressing room. A minikiller appears and kills him. Later Rigg comes down to Sali's room. Before she can go in she's caught and strapped inside of a cliffhanger serial-type device: bound flat while the stone ceiling slowly descends on her; soon she will be crushed to a pulp. She reaches for the gears… Savalas lookalike comes along to see if she's dead, but discovers that the device is empty. A ring's been jammed between the gears. Savalas himself gets caught in the device. Rigg pounces off into Sali's dressing room, finds beside it a hidden room. Inside it several crates filled with minikillers. Rigg takes one of the dolls out of a crate, remembers the clock-activation device she got from the henchman in part 1. Meanwhile upstairs the main villain messes with a minikiller of his own, charging it up with a syringe of poison. Downstairs, Rigg sets up her minikiller to test it out. She winds the clock and sets it off, but somehow this sets off the minikiller in the main villain's hands. Poison sprays in his face and he dies. The film ends with Rigg enjoying a drink at a bar as cops lead off the bound Savalas lookalike; Rigg winks into the camera, takes another drink, and the credits roll.

The 1932 obscurity Misleading Lady is designated as a "comedy," but I'm not sure that's a proper designation. Because really, this is one twisted film – even when taking into consideration the sordid world of Pre-Code cinema.

Claudette Colbert stars as Helen Steele, a glamorous socialite who's bored with her staid life of luxury. Claudette by the way looks bizarrely young here – if you've seen Lubitsch's 1931 film "The Smiling Lieutenant," she pretty much looks the same in this movie. Bobbed hair cut chin-length, her kohled eyes anime-sized, she appears almost waiflike; indeed it's hard to reckon her appearance in this movie with how she looked just a few months later in DeMille's "Sign of the Cross."

The plot's preschool simple: Helen Steele wants to be an actress, and in order to convince a theater director she's the right leading lady for his new play, she bets she can make the famous, Hemingway-type big game hunter Jack Craigen (Edmund Lowe) propose to her…in three days. (If I'd had the role of Craigen this film would've been five minutes long – "Yes, I WILL marry you!" The End.)

Helen plies Craigen with charm, Claudette really laying it on thick. Sulky, slinky, casting languorous looks, sprawling on divans and blowing thick puffs of cigarette smoke through her nostrils. Three days? More like three minutes and I'd be down on one knee.

But anyone can see where the plot's going: Helen gets her man with ease but guess what, she finds that she's developed feelings for him too. Craigen proposes and through a laborious, pre-audio tape method Helen records his proposal on vinyl as proof of her conquest. The record's inadvertently played however and Helen's ruse is discovered. Craigen storms off, Helen tries to apologize…

And here the movie gets really weird.

An enraged Craigen tosses Helen into an autogyro and flies her against her will to his cabin in the middle of the snow-swept woods. There he manhandles her, drags her around, berates her, forces her to disrobe due to her soaking clothes (a nonetheless erotic scene in which Claudette is stripped down to her undergarments while cloaked in Sternbergian shadow), and even pinions her to the ground with a steel chain girdled about her waist. Through it all Claudette screams, she shrieks, she sobs. You want very much to murder this Craigen, and you wonder once again why this movie is designated as a "comedy."

But it gets worse. A psychopath named Boney (Stuart Erwin) – an escaped mental patient who believes he's Napoleon – turns out to be hiding in Craigen's cabin. But before you think this movie's about to get even more twisted, it turns out Boney's one of those harmless, "slapstick" sort of psychopaths one only encounters in movies; Erwin attempts to lend the character a sort of Marx Brothers feel but fails miserably. I wonder if he's fully to be blamed. Stuart Walker directed this mess, and word is that despite (indeed perhaps due to) his theatrical background he had no competence in film directing; the majority of his films apparently were directed by assistants (ie Mitchell Leisen, who directed the Walker-credited films "Tonight is Ours" and "The Eagle and the Hawk," receiving only an "assistant" credit for his efforts).

And make no mistake – Misleading Lady is a mess. Like most other early talkies this movie is ALL OVER THE PLACE. The first twenty minutes are a delightful romantic comedy, nearly screwball – bored socialite Helen attempting to tame the Great White Hunter but inadvertently falling for her prey. Thirty minutes in the movie becomes a date rape fantasy from hell, with Helen now the screaming abductee of her onetime prey. And the final twenty are something else altogether, nothing but drawn-out "comedic" bits with psycho Boney blathering about Wellington and Waterloo. In fact Claudette actually disappears from the film for several minutes and the abduction angle is just forgotten.

Everything comes to a head when all of the main characters show up at the log cabin (despite that it's in the middle of the woods) and Helen and Craigen embrace, truly in love. Even though he kidnapped her, stripped her, chained her to the floor. Show this flick to Women's Lib groups and they'll go mad. And I can't say I'd blame them – this movie is just flat-out WRONG. The diverse parts don't hang together and the abduction-in-the-woods sequence is unforgivable; in today's day and age Craigen would be locked up and his public image ruined for life.

Claudette's super-cute throughout, displaying all of the traits which would rocket her to stardom in a few years – and which would sustain her throughout her six-decade career. She does both comedy and drama, trading quips and batting her big anime-girl eyes in the more romantic parts. And she really projects terror in the abduction sequence. This is likely the closest she ever got to appearing in a horror film, and Claudette pulls it all off – gnashing her teeth, whimpering in fear, screaming, crying so hard that she sobs. These scenes could've easily come off as histrionic but Claudette gives them the right touch, makes it all believable. You feel her terror. Which only strengthens my argument that this movie is not a comedy.

The twisted world of Pre-Code cinema, where anything went… Here's an obscure Miriam Hopkins film which has been neglected and forgotten. A sterling example of the "anything goes" attitude of early talkies, The World and the Flesh focuses on the Russian Revolution, lending the bloody proceedings a healthy dose of Paramount Glamour.

Miriam plays Maria, a member of the fading aristocratic set, on the run from the increasingly powerful communists. The film opens with the aristocrats hiding out on a freight train, smuggling themselves into one of the few remaining strongholds of the old empire. The communists are everywhere and will kill these aristocrats with pleasure; nerves are frayed and tension runs high. We soon learn that Maria has only recently come into this life of luxury; she was a famous dancer who started out from poverty, acquiring high-society patrons along the way. Now she's one of "them," a fertile prospect for the poverty-class-championing communists who instead associates herself with the rich.

The aristocrats find a safe haven and promptly resume their luxurious lifestyle, dining in high class, bejeweled, attended by servants. Enter Kylenko (George Bancroft) and his communist mini-navy. They storm the palace, smash up things, take everyone prisoner. Maria shows her stuff by refusing to acknowledge them; while the commies wreck the party, Maria insists that the aristocrats keep dancing as if nothing's amiss – and when they won't, she forces her partner to dance with her! One thing I love about classic cinema is how characters are defined in such economical ways – and Miriam Hopkins of course excels as a fiery, strong-willed type. You want to dance with her, despite the armed commies about.

The film continues on as a sort of tables-turned, then turned-again affair: first Maria and her aristocratic pals are the prisoners, then Kylenko and his commies are the prisoners, and etc. This allows director Cromwell to work up the suspense and also enables a lot of tension-filled, character-driven material. But this is also where trouble sets in. For Kylenko is the one who reveals that Maria was once part of the working class, that in truth she should be on the side of the communists…and that if she would give herself to him, he would set her free. So we have Maria trying to capitalize on this for the benefit of her fellow prisoners, going up to Kylenko's cabin to spend the night, under the pretense of suddenly being in love with him. And guess what happens?

Really, this movie's a sort of Bolshevik Rape Fantasy. Much like the Myrna Loy/Raymond Novarro Pre-Coder "The Barbarian," a movie in which "barbarian" Novarro abducted innocent white girl Myrna Loy, turning her into his own private sex toy…and she liked it. It's the same sort of thing here – for after a night of good lovin' Miriam's character falls head-over-heels for her erstwhile rapist. Indeed she's ready to cast aside her aristocratic life for him…this murdering, obnoxious, commie rapist. Truly, they don't make 'em like THIS anymore.

The late-developing romance sours the entire film. Miriam and Bancroft make for an unseemly pair, the bearlike Bancroft towering over the posh Miriam. This of course reinforces the image of Bancroft's Kylenko as a rough sailor sort, but it only serves to make the romantic stuff all the more ridiculous. And the ending…Maria carried off on Kylenko's stout arms, all smiles and tears of joy…are we supposed to NOT ask what happened to her aristocratic friends, with whom we saw her in every preceding sequence? Aristocratic friends which included women and children, all of whom had been placed on death row by the communists?

Production values are strong. Paramount's my favorite of the old studios and here they deliver their patented Continental charm. Russian cities are rebuilt in glorious artificiality; in the opening scenes we get a lot of tracking shots through city streets. John Cromwell directs with finesse, playing up the suspense and action. In fact this is a rare Pre-Code with genuine action scenes: lots of shootouts and fistfights. The soundtrack's not as silent as most early talkies, with a bit of a score playing at times. All in all, despite the bad taste the romantic angle leaves, this film deserves to be resuscitated – it would make a good candidate for the next "Pre-Code Hollywood" DVD collection.

Filmed two months after they paired in DeMille's "Sign of the Cross," Claudette Colbert and Fredric March are reunited in Tonight Is Ours -- here she's Nadya, self-exiled princess of a mythical European kingdom, and March is Sabien, a French national (I assume) who does...well, something. The movie's never very clear on who Sabien is and what he does for a living.

This was the directorial debut for Mitchell Liesen. He's credited with an "associate director" tag, but word is he did most of the chores. There's a visual resemblance between this film and "Sign of the Cross" -- no surprise, as Liesen personally directed sequences of that film as well (although he didn't receive credit for his work). This is a movie that revels in glamour.

The story begins with a "meet cute" between Sabien and Nadya: they run into each other at a costume ball, both of them masked, and quickly repair to the garden where they kiss. Only then do they take off their masks, only to discover that they each believed they were kissing someone else. But no matter, bells are ringing, and swept up with dawning love they spend a starcrossed night together, going from place to place -- a dance party, a bar, a jazz club -- all while still in costume. The costumes are a sight to behold: Colbert wears a sort of art deco clown getup, complete with a puffy collar and sequins which threaten to overwhelm the camera. She wears a domino mask to complete the ensemble. March wears a harlequin outfit, tight-fitting and emblazoned with a giant heart. He wears a black cowl which covers most of his face, leaving only his mouth and chin free, sort of like Batman. These costumes (and others glimpsed in the opening costume party scene) are the highlights of the film, but really a lot of work went into the garments throughout the movie.

The months pass and the two become inseparable, only -- and this is something the movie makes clear -- they don't "sully" their love by having sex. This ends up making the movie a giant tease; just as Sabien and Nadya yearn to consummate their love (Sabien especially!), so too do we viewers yearn to see them do so. But then destiny interferes: an official from Nadya's kingdom arrives to announce the death of her husband, killed by dissidents. Nadya is now queen. She must return home. But the couple is destined to meet again.

The movie's based on a play by Noel Coward, and much has been changed. Coward hated the film but I think it's fantastic. It only has two problems, as far as I'm concerned -- the subplot of the dissidents threatens to overpower the main plot, and their demands are too easily solved at the end of the film. Also, I had a hard time understanding their aims -- the dissidents Nadya meets with at the end are a wellspoken, peaceful lot, yet at the same time there are other dissidents sneaking around with guns -- guns they intend to kill Nadya with. And my other problem is that the second half of the film slows down somewhat -- the first half of this movie is 100% screwball, a year before the genre existed, with rapid-fire dialog, the main characters going from party to party, and nothing but glamour. The second half of the film becomes more of a palace politics sort of thing, with Nadya having long conversations with her administrator, her husband to be, and her mother-in-law to be.

But on the whole this is a great movie. March is good in this -- sometimes he comes off as too stiff (ie "Sign of the Cross"), other times he's incredibly dynamic ("Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde"). Here he bridges the gap -- the guy could spin out lovey-dovey dialog better than any other actor in Hollywood, and he pours it on thick for Colbert. And as for Colbert herself -- my god, she is gorgeous in this film. Colbert was beautiful throughout her life, but I've always had a preference for "Early '30s Colbert," with her big eyes, apple cheeks, and bobbed chin-length hair. She is more beautiful in this film than in any other I've seen her in, save for "Sign of the Cross." In fact I might just prefer her here -- though her costumes aren't as revealing as those in "Cross" (and there are no milk baths in sight), she isn't relegated to wearing the stylized wigs she wore in that film.

Pre-Code naughtiness: Lots of dialog about sex -- when stating why she shouldn't be queen, Nadya basically admits to having slept around with several men. When Nadya relates to Sabien why she left her husband the king, we see it happen via flashback -- basically, the king insisted Nadya pretend to be a slave, so he could chase her around, whip her, and then take her. Early in the film Nadya wears a satin gown -- much like the one Clara Bow wore toward the end of "Call Her Savage," during her destruction of the hotel room -- and it's cut so low that Colbert's cleavage basically hangs out. And the Sabien/Nadya consummation scene is lensed as if Ernst Lubitsch was behind the camera -- Sabien turns off the light, and we see the door to the bedroom close behind them.

It's a shame this movie is so little known. A Claudette Colbert DVD boxset will be released in November 2009, and unfortunately this movie isn't included on it -- one can only hope that it's being saved for a forthcoming "Pre-Code Hollywood" DVD collection.