Skulls sans screams

Yep, both of these films feature a prominent object of the craniomandibular sort -- with and without their accompanying chassis, and fortunately devoid of wearying screams (or Steele).

Fact is, we don't come to learn much of anything about the skulls in question, beyond their simple presence. So alas, Hamlet these movies ain't -- though one of them does feature a Hamlet-esque "play within a play".

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Manfish (1956)

Grade: C-

We'll be seeing a fair bit of Creighton Tull Chaney over the next few posts, and -- at least in terms of his bare, middle-aged flesh -- we see the most in Manfish, a film that well may take the cake for the single most deceptive title we've encountered yet.

Now, you're probably imagining some breathless tale of a half-human, half-piscine hybrid. You can see it now, it's either scales from the waist down (too bad it ain't Womanfish, nudge-nudge, know what I mean?) or some fish-mouthed abomination croaking "Please, kill me". Right?

But no, "Manfish" is the name of the boat. YA SRSLY.

Given his age and well-known bad habits, Chaney actually looks pretty good here, in the physique sense -- though in portraying the dull-witted first mate known as Swede, he's still trading on his Lennie persona from Of Mice and Men, nearly two decades later. Oh well, it's a paycheck, and Lon Jr. knows how to play it as well as anyone.

Manfish splices together two of Edgar Allan Poe's stories, "The Gold-Bug" and "The Tell-Tale Heart", and transplants them to the Caribbean to spin its yarn about a treasure hunt, a guilty conscience, and a jacked but thoroughly unlikeable sea captain (John Bromfield) who drives the whole shebang. (It wraps all this in the world's most gratuitous framing story, by the way, but that's soon forgotten.)

Captain Brannigan hunts turtles, which already makes him a bad egg in our book, and really this lying ol' dirty birdy seems to spread misery wherever he goes. He's eking out a living in the Caribbean until he has a confrontation with an aging professor (Victor Jory) and his bored-looking, wonky-eyed consort Alita (Tessa Prendergast) --

-- whereupon he soon develops an acute interest in the professor's sweet ring and his sweet thing.

With this information and the Poe as your guide, if you hazard a guess at the remainder of Manfish's plot you'll probably get it right. Sure, there's tension, betrayal, greed, and angry confrontations galore, but those are essentially condiments, structurally speaking. It's maps, treasure, and post-trangressive psychosis that built this city.

Even so, for the most part Manfish is entertaining enough to watch at least once, and lacks the unpleasant aftertaste of IDGAF cynicism that mars many similar films. The writing and acting are at least serviceable throughout, and the film's underwater sequences are attractively shot...

...though in general it has a habit of letting its wordless outdoor set-pieces -- both above and below the water line -- go on for far too long. Far, far too long. As in, "What the hell is the point of this shit?" too long.

That, and the film's predictability (thanks to its, ahem, Poe-rigins), are the biggest places where Manfish falls down somewhat.

But these aren't lethal flaws in what is otherwise an unexceptional but competent outing. In fact, besides the overlong bits we mentioned above, Manfish is that rare film on this box set that (mostly) didn't make us wish we were watching it for the second time, so that we could reach for the fast-forward button and get it over with faster. Some days, that practically counts as a success in our books.

Add the occasional flashes of warmth or humor that help to liven up proceedings, and though Manfish may be a C-minus film, it's a solid C-minus. You know, the kind that feels like you've accomplished something, even though you'll have to retake the class. Isn't that right, Professor?

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Murder at Midnight (1931)

Grade: D

Here's something telling about this film, and it's not a spoiler so don't worry. The title event? Yeah, turns out the clock is set wrong. Take that, Chekhov.

But as you can see there is a gun in Murder at Midnight, which gets used right away as part of an elaborate skit that itself is merely a clue in some rich-people variant of Charades. If that sounds complicated it really isn't, but what's weird is that everyone seems to think it's normal to put on a one-act play, with props and all, just to clue the word "idealize". Once again one is reminded that the rich are, as F. Scott Fitzgerald said, "different from you and me." (But he didn't say it to Hemingway!)

Of our Umbrellahead pair, at least one of us is fond of early talkies and inclined to be charitable toward them. Still, this tale of intrigue and inheritance was too familiar, yet too muddled, for us to enjoy much. The film's chain of murders is probably one link too long to be believable -- and while it may be amusing to watch a highly visible housefly crawling around on an actor's shoulder, it doesn't exactly inspire confidence that this production is a fully-assed affair deserving the benefit of the doubt.

Also, we have to say the trope of the "famous criminologist" is already wearing out its welcome -- understandably so, since he's always going to be the culprit, a red herring, or a Mary Sue. At least Sherlock Holmes was an awkward, grumpy cokehead. And that's not the only familiar trope in Murder at Midnight, not by a long shot (or a long-distance call).

Throw in abundant false leads and a pile of unexplained motivations, and Murder at Midnight starts to feel less like an adventure than an indenture. At least Millie the maid -- played by the troubled, scandal-plagued Alice White -- is kinda cute if you're into that sort of thing, and the butler (Brandon Hurst) is thoroughly buttlesome.

It's fascinating to see what films like these think will pass for "comic relief". In the case of Murder at Midnight, it's a portly plainclothesman assigned to the house (Vernon Dent), who eats a lot of peanuts and drops the shells on the rug.

And...that's pretty much it.

It does inspire a prominent vacuuming scene, though, so if that's your kink go nuts (pun completely unintended!).

It feels mean-spirited to pick on Murder at Midnight, and it's certainly not excruciating to sit through, unlike some others we've seen. Still, even in 1931 the industry knew how to do better than this, and in a murder-mystery there's never an excuse for a script that's foggy in the details. A few funny lines or attractively filmed sequences aren't enough to make Murder at Midnight a truly worthwhile watch.