Superb Moto entry, which for me ranks with Thank You, Mr Moto as the best in the series. It's got energy, imagination and a fantastic gallery of characters and twists. It's mostly said in Port Said where Moto tries to stop agents of that perennial 30s bogeyman, the unnamed foreign power, from causing a breech between British and French by blowing up the French fleet in the harbour. This already elevates the movie because it's based in truth - the baddies are clearly Axis, that British-French conflict was real and there's extra resonance because it was the British who wound up sinking the French fleet! (This is easily the most political film in the series.)
This gets off to a great start when we first meet Moto he's played by a different actor to Peter Lorre. So you think he's either a friend or a baddie... he's a friend who winds up getting killed for Lorre. The villains in this one are the most ruthless and clever Moto ever faced - in part because normally we didn't know who the baddy was until the very end.
George Sanders is on hand as a monocle-wearing sophisticate, and thus villainous, and John Davidson is a browned up henchman, both excellent - but both led by Ricardo Cortez, as a very clever agent, who has a day job as a ventriloquist in a variety show (shades of Mr Memory in The 39 Steps). Cortez is never very far behind Moto, figuring out the identity of not one but two foreign agents, and always a threat until the end.
There are some great other characters as well; the female lead (Virginia Field, who was in Think Fast, Mr Moto) is the trashy owner of a dingy bar and Cortez's lover - she's a smuggler so we think she's bad but actually she turns out to be not that bad, unwilling to betray England and she shoots Cortez. Robert Coote is on hand as a silly ass Englishman touring the colonies, who isn't particularly funny but earns his keep in the last act, inadvertently putting Moto in real danger then helping him get out of it again.
There's also John Carradine as someone who at first seems to be bad but then turns out to be a British agent - and in a shocking scene, is exposed, thrown into a diving bell and left there to die by Cortez! (Who wants to blame the attack on French ships on the British.) It's a full on sequence and the filmmakers devote a decent amount of time to it.
There are moments of excess and silliness of course (Moto's escape from a planted bomb felt too easy - he just realises the bomb is there), and the part of the French admiral's wife felt undercooked. But it's a first rate entertainment.
NB There is a tribute to Warner Oland of the Charlie Chan films - the marquee for a show lists Charlie Chan in Honolulu with "final day" written across it - Oland had just died.
No comments:
Post a Comment