Updated RankingOne Mysterious Night (1944)
★ ★ ½ I watched a few of the other Boston Blackie films that come before this one. They’re like a TV series with each film lasting around an hour. Chester Morris is excellent as the former jewel thief pulled into a web of crime. I wish there was a little more mystery as to who the bad guys are, but it’s more like that 80s film F/X where we’re brought into a secret world full of little tricks and cons. None of it is realistic and by this entry the comedy is overly ‘cute’ for a crime thriller. Boetticher’s direction is no better or worse than anyone else who worked on the series.
Escape in the Fog (1945)
★ ★ ½ Typical of the era, this B-movie throws in as much as it can for an hour’s entertainment. Nazi spies and a fragile woman who has a vision of witnessing a murder. It’s nice to see Nina Foch again so soon after re-watching My Name is Julia Ross. A few sequences are staged with more detail than expected from Boetticher, but the script insures this can’t be more than a way to pass some time.
Seminole (1953)
★ ★ ½ One of the (too) many Universal ‘B’ westerns whose best quality is its brief running time. Anthony Quinn gives his usual 100% as the Indian chief raised in a white man’s world, but he’s not in the film nearly enough. Rock Hudson gets too much time as an army officer who’s sympathetic to the Indians. It’s rare to see a western on the side of the Indians and Boetticher captures the swampiness and loud animal sounds particular to the Florida everglades. Despite that, and an early role for Lee Marvin, this is a knockoff bootleg of Fort Apache.
The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond (1960)
★ ★ ½ The date is 1960, but this looks like a Warner Bros. gangster film from the 1930s, which kept me off balance. The more modern melodrama and bloodless violence came off as unusually strong. The lead actor is no Cagney and Boetticher is not Raoul Walsh, but there's a small amount of interest in this throwback gangster experiment.