George Sherman | The Tulsa Kid | Mystery Broadcast | A Scream in the Dark | The Crime Doctor's Courage | The Secret of the Whistler | Reprisal!
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Some common subjects in the films of George Sherman:
Settings:
The ranch the Tulsa Kid aids, is multi-racial, while everyone else in the film seems to be all-white. A sympathetic Hispanic is one of the ranch hands: Sherman's films are full of non-stereotyped Hispanic characters.
There is a nice musical performance of O Dem Golden Slippers. After the song, Sherman includes some camera movements, following characters into and out of the room.
Both films contain behind the scenes, working areas as well: the newspaper morgue here, the catwalks in Courage. Both of these areas are non-glamorous, in the sense of containing anything elegant. But they are filled with visually fascinating rectangular furniture or objects, which make for complex rectilinear paths through the room.
A spooky cellar briefly shows up here. This locale will be developed more fully in Courage.
Sherman likes his actors to be in corner areas. The place where the side wall and the back wall meet forms a vertical line; Sherman often has his chief actor directly along that line. A striking shot of this sort occurs right in the beginning, when the heroine is standing up on stage at the radio broadcast. To her left we see the back wall. with radio actors seated on chairs on raised platforms, and on the right is the side wall, with the sound effects woman's desk. The two regions are utterly dissimilar in their visual appearance. The heroine seems to be the boundary between the two regions, someone who links the two up, and who is at the center of the radio broadcast. There is a similar approach at Stanley's home, where he is seated at his desk. The vertical line of his body is right along the corner of the set.
Both Sherman's direction and Russell Kimball's sets emphasize vigorous, long horizontal and vertical lines. The first long shot of the radio studio is a classic piece of composition. We see both the broad horizontal lines of the platforms on the stage, and the repeated vertical lines above them of the curtains, and what look like some sort of acoustic panels.
It is hard to evaluate Sherman's artistic responsibilities for these films. Both this film and Courage have well done sets, photography and atmosphere. Is Sherman personally responsible for this? Did he merely have the good taste to hire talented people to work on the films? Or is the truth a combination of both?
Cinematographer William Bradford often does interesting things with lighting patterns on walls. These sometimes recall film noir, including one night scene at the heroine's apartment, where the light patterns fall on a barricaded door. Most striking is daylight coming through a window in Stanley's study, and shining on a glass brick wall on the other side. The bright, criss cross grid effect is unique, something I've never seen in another movie. Film noir rarely included this sort of effect involving bright daylight.
The film shows much of Sherman's liveliness. There is his mixture of suspense, comedy and beautiful sets and costumes. However, this movie is a lot more cornball than Sherman's more polished works. The dialogue creaks, and the characters seem a lot less three dimensional than in other Sherman films. The film is cheery and good natured throughout, and will probably be enjoyed by lovers of old film mysteries who can ignore its technical imperfections.
The world of this tale is less artistic than some of Sherman's films: there are no characters in the arts, except the journalistic hero and his sidekick, a newspaper photographer. There are also no Hispanic characters. In fact, the sheer workaday ordinariness of some of the suspects in the film is stressed, an ordinariness that humorously contrasts with the zany surrealism of the situations they are in.
The film is an odd mix of the private eye and amateur detective traditions. Our hero, who is completely fresh to the investigator business, often seems a lot more like one of the amateur detectives in a traditional movie whodunit than a tough private eye. He is completely non-hard-boiled. Instead, he is a leading man type, always dressed in sharp 1940's suits, or his tuxedo. In one sequence, he is interrupted while dancing at a night club by a would-be client, and he returns to his office in his tux. For the next ten minutes, he is sleuthing around in his tuxedo. This is pleasant wish fulfillment fantasy for an audience. It has little to do with the hard-boiled world of most 1940's private eyes.
The heroine is secretary to the local Chief of Police, as well as assisting the hero getting his new business started. She seems at least as intelligent and professional as the hero. This is typical of Sherman's respect for women and their capabilities, and recalls the female writer-sleuth of Mystery Broadcast (1943).
The movie is based on Jerome Odlum's mystery novel The Morgue Is Always Open.
The film recalls the zany world of Craig Rice. As in Rice, there is a comic look at hard-boiled material. There is a partnership between men and women to solve crimes. The hero and heroine are humorous, knowledgeable city types, good natured, sophisticated and kind hearted. The black comedy with the corpses recalls such Rice works as Having Wonderful Crime (1943). There is a surrealist tone to both. In both Rice's novels and this film, each new crime echoes the last, in a surrealist manner. The plot eventually builds up into a big tangle, one that is humorous to contemplate, and hard to sort out. This is a typical Rice approach.
The costumes are by Republic's long time designer, Adele Palmer. She has the heroine, the hero's girl friend, in a series of spectacular 1940's suits.
One scene in the film sets the tone. The hero is shown in his office, dressed to the nines, and setting in a black leather armchair. He looks like the last word in sophistication.
The Crime Doctor's Courage (1945) is one of a series of B detective stories made at Columbia. Warner Baxter stars as the Crime Doctor, a psychiatrist sleuth, although there is little psychoanalytic material in the film. The titles of the films tend to have the words "Crime Doctor" in them, but are otherwise fairly meaningless: the Crime Doctor does not do anything especially courageous in this one! There are ten movies in the series, but this is the only one directed by Sherman.
Later scenes show a nightclub. First, we see a dance floor, filled with beautiful murals and ceiling decorations. Later, we see the rafters above the stage. Catwalks stretch on all sides, in rectilinear patterns. It is an irresistibly photogenic area.
The dance number is continuously interrupted by blinding flashes of light. O'Connell does a good job with these, making a striking visual effect. O'Connell worked on many of Hawks' silent films, and Scarface (1932). He then drifted into B movies, including the 1940 Boston Blackie films, such as Budd Boetticher's debut film, One Mysterious Night (1944). The dance number here is related to ballet. It has original music by the classical composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco. This is an index of the care that was taken on this obscure B-movie.
This is the only film I can find credited to art director John Dala. He probably did other Hollywood films, but credits at this B-movie level are often obscure.
This film was made at the height of the film noir era, yet it shows only a little influence of noir. Like many B detective stories of the period, it faithfully follows a separate tradition of filmmaking. It does show the enthusiastic visual polish of many noir films, however. The beautiful clothes also recall the noir fashions of the 1940's. However, the evening clothes worn by all the characters are a bit more upper crust than the suits typically worn by urban noir players. The men are in double-breasted black tuxedos, the women in spectacular evening gowns.
Both have multi-racial ranch households, in areas that are otherwise all-white.
Both have trial scenes, in courts where justice is being subverted by pressure from evil societies outside the courtroom.
Both have scenes where men get lassoed. In Reprisal!, this is done by the bad guys to the Sheriff. In The Tulsa Kid, the hero does this to villains.
Both have scenes in which two cowboys dance to festive music at a party. They dance individually, with rhythmic body movements, not in unison - but at the same time. No women are dancing. In both films, O Dem Golden Slippers is being played. In The Tulsa Kid, these are good guys, at a wholesome celebration; in Reprisal!, these are bad guys at a drunken celebration of sinister values.
Much of the action is in the town square, near the General Store. This store has a complex angled porch. This looks like a standard part of Columbia Studio's Western town, which shows up in numerous movies.
Other scenes use different schemes. The Native Americans sometimes have bright colors, such as the old man's purple shirt.