Lew Ayres is an out-of-work actor who stumbles into a plot by the villainous Basil Rathbone to stir up a bunch of apparently random ax murders in Chicago.
Actually there is madness in this method. Rathbone, a doctor himself, has assumed the identity of a famous neurosurgeon from Europe. There are only seven people in this country -- evidently all of them living in Chicago -- who can identify him as a phony. He hypnotizes (or something) people whose names he copied from a patient file in the hospital and sends them out on their lethal journeys.
I don't want to get into this too deeply because (1) it would take too long to explain the details of the plot and (2) the ending has a couple of surprises in it.
Lorraine Day, with whom I was desperately in love as a child, plays someone so dumb in this movie that she deserves a Darwinian Award for her survival. But nobody has ever gushed with surprise so sweetly. (Is that okay, Lorraine, dear?) Lew Ayres, in what is essentially a comic role, is a horse of a different color. He claims to be able to quote poetry. "And all the while the night was haunted by her smile." I Googled this couplet to death and could find nothing, so I'm compelled to believe the writer, Rose Caylor, thought it up herself. It's in the tradition of Byron and the rest and in fact isn't bad. But then there are literary allusions sprinkled throughout the script. A reporter shouts out "Curfew shall not ring tonight," from Rose Hardwick Thorpe's poem of the 1860s. And Ayres introduces himself with an Irish accent as Steven Daedalus, a character from James Joyce's "Ulysses." There are probably other allusions that I missed. They're not important to the plot. They're just insider jokes. If you get them, great. If you miss them, nothing is lost. The Marx Brothers did it all the time.
I imagine Rose Caylor as a relatively recent graduate of USC or someplace, majoring in English Literature, who decided to write a screenplay and had an agent who was cunning enough to sell it. That's rather neat. Nowadays, all the screenplays seem to be written by people with MBAs and follow a particular formula: If a movie made money, let's copy it. To hell with Steve Daedalus. The fourteen-year-olds won't get it. Smacks too much of homework. (Lorraine, sweetheart, wherever you are in plus time and minus space, I hope you don't think I'm being too harsh on the kids.) But, in sum, I have to say that without Rose Craylor's sometimes comic interjection, what we have here is a B movie from the early 1940s. Ax murderers are at large, and Ayres and Day uncover the method behind them. Both performers, and the little-seen Basil Rathbone, do what they're told. It works out okay.
Actually there is madness in this method. Rathbone, a doctor himself, has assumed the identity of a famous neurosurgeon from Europe. There are only seven people in this country -- evidently all of them living in Chicago -- who can identify him as a phony. He hypnotizes (or something) people whose names he copied from a patient file in the hospital and sends them out on their lethal journeys.
I don't want to get into this too deeply because (1) it would take too long to explain the details of the plot and (2) the ending has a couple of surprises in it.
Lorraine Day, with whom I was desperately in love as a child, plays someone so dumb in this movie that she deserves a Darwinian Award for her survival. But nobody has ever gushed with surprise so sweetly. (Is that okay, Lorraine, dear?) Lew Ayres, in what is essentially a comic role, is a horse of a different color. He claims to be able to quote poetry. "And all the while the night was haunted by her smile." I Googled this couplet to death and could find nothing, so I'm compelled to believe the writer, Rose Caylor, thought it up herself. It's in the tradition of Byron and the rest and in fact isn't bad. But then there are literary allusions sprinkled throughout the script. A reporter shouts out "Curfew shall not ring tonight," from Rose Hardwick Thorpe's poem of the 1860s. And Ayres introduces himself with an Irish accent as Steven Daedalus, a character from James Joyce's "Ulysses." There are probably other allusions that I missed. They're not important to the plot. They're just insider jokes. If you get them, great. If you miss them, nothing is lost. The Marx Brothers did it all the time.
I imagine Rose Caylor as a relatively recent graduate of USC or someplace, majoring in English Literature, who decided to write a screenplay and had an agent who was cunning enough to sell it. That's rather neat. Nowadays, all the screenplays seem to be written by people with MBAs and follow a particular formula: If a movie made money, let's copy it. To hell with Steve Daedalus. The fourteen-year-olds won't get it. Smacks too much of homework. (Lorraine, sweetheart, wherever you are in plus time and minus space, I hope you don't think I'm being too harsh on the kids.) But, in sum, I have to say that without Rose Craylor's sometimes comic interjection, what we have here is a B movie from the early 1940s. Ax murderers are at large, and Ayres and Day uncover the method behind them. Both performers, and the little-seen Basil Rathbone, do what they're told. It works out okay.