Reviews of Classic Film, with artwork and news
LAST UPDATE February 18, 2025
Fast Review: Think Fast, Mr. Moto, 1937 – Peter Lorre as the judo-expert Japanese detective who is tracking a smuggling ring while aboard a cruise ship crossing the Pacific Ocean, then in the Chinese city of Shanghai. An inexpensive start to the movie series (Lorre did eight Mr. Moto movies) that isn't really a B-film but is just barely a sub-A, if just because of the cast and the pretty good cruise ship and Shanghai sets. Think Fast, Mr. Moto moves quickly except for a bit of the shipboard romance between secondary stars Virginia Fields and Thomas Beck. Lotus Long is on hand in a nice small role as a phone operator who gets caught up in the investigation against the smuggling ring, and J. Carrol Naish along with Sig Ruman add more strong character acting, but the best material is Lorre mildly walking into traps and confrontations and wiping the floor with various attackers. The film poses the puzzle of whether Mr. Moto is even "on the side of the good" but it of course winds up that way, but only in the last minutes. Lorre's Mr. Moto not only outfights his enemies, he also out-thinks both the good guys and the bad guys by the time the credits toll.
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Fast Review
Thirty Day Princess - 1934: This comedy stars Sylvia Sydney and has a script by Preston Storages (and Frank Partos), and on top of that there's a young Cary Grant along with Edward Arnold, and yet somehow this is second rate for all concerned. Sydney sometimes has the energy and focus to pull the dialogue and screen performances up to a higher level, and Edward Arnold is in fine shouting mode more or less throughout, but Cary Grant is rather rough around the edges and the script doesn't help a lot. Elements that turn up in later Preston Sturges' films like Easy Living and The Lady Eve are much more perfunctory here, and in general the tale of a veteran newspaper publisher falling in love with a young woman masquerading as a princess (because the real one is quarantined with mumps) has a hard time gelling all the ideas together smoothly. There is good tricky screen writing here, though, and if you're familiar with the "twins" gag from Palm Beach Story, you get sort of the acorn version here and it is a real plus for a movie that often feels out of step with its own ideas. Maybe Thirty Day Princess is the sort of film that drove Sturges towards later directing his own films from his scripts. Sylvia Sydney is fine and the main thrust of the story is perfectly screwball, but somehow a lot of this movie is simply out of time with itself.
Review
Midnight - 1939: Poor people thrown into the world of the rich is a mainstay of screwball era comedies, and Midnight handles it funnily, gracefully and effectively. Claudette Colbert is a young and beautiful American in Europe trying to find a way to marry into a better income level, gets lucky with a payout from a rich mother wanting her to stay away from her infatuated son, and Colbert immediately takes the wad of cash to Monte Carlo and ... blows it all. More on Midnight, 1939
Updated review: Hercules Against the Moon Men, 1964
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Send Me No Flowers - 1964: Rock Hudson is a high-achieving hypochondriac who mistakenly hears his doctor referring to someone with only a few weeks to live before "their ticker" gives out, and he nervously applies the diagnoses to himself.
More about Send Me No Flowers - 1964
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