Our
Relations
“A couple
of Singapore Eskimos.”
A masterpiece of
the first water, consciously so. It begins with four cups of tea passed around
and around a placid matrimonial table, but this is a thematic prelude (like the
gag coda) to a film that stands with Way
Out West and Sons of the Desert
in another tempo entirely, though it is made up of incidents and situations
intertwined like several two-reelers, the allegro
con brio of farce.
Stan and Ollie
have twin brothers long since “gone to the bad” as sailors and
thought to be hanged. Bert and Alf put into port, pick up a package for their
captain, and then a couple of girls. Confusion of identity is the order of the
day. The scene shifts from Denker’s Beer Garden to The Pirate Club, a
“high-class joint” like the set of Britten’s opera Billy Budd yet stylishly a monochrome
white (cf. Luther Reed’s Rio Rita). A couple of gangsters want
the package, Stan and Ollie are nearly deep-sixed.
Some critics have
found this hard to follow, but the film makes sure with musical themes
(nautical, cuckoos) to identify the action. Variety
recognized it, the New York Times was
nonplussed, Halliwell acknowledges the feat.
Which is how the
other half lives, or the sins of youth, represented concurrently.
Castle
in the Desert
“Sixteenth
Century-Fox”, Jean Renoir said. A one-eyed jack of a
scarred scholar and his wife, a princess in the Borgia line.
“Expensively
educated” number two son Jimmy on furlough from the Army for one week provokes
this comment, “glamour boy who jump to conclusion sometimes get hair
mussed.”
The scarred
stepbrother, tried for poisoning, is said to have been “killed in the
Spanish War,” a prince and yet no Borgia.
“Say, Pop, you haven’t been drinking, have you?”
“Only
wine of discovery.”
Jimmy Chan has an
idea, but “theory like thunderstorm, very wet.”
Furthermore, “sharp
wit sometimes much better than deadly weapon,” a crossbow, say. “Jimmy,
please! Remember you are rear guard, not Cupid.” Indeed, “timid man
never win lottery prize.”
Leonard Maltin, “first-rate
mystery”.
The Catholic News
Service Media Review Office, “playful murder mystery”.
Hal Erickson (Rovi), “would have been a worthy screen finale for
the inscrutable Mr. Chan; alas, the character would be revived two years later
in a much inferior series at Monogram.”
Halliwell’s Film Guide, “one of the sharpest Charlie Chan mysteries.”