Written by Lee Katz
Directed by Vincent Sherman
Starring Wayne Morris, Rosemary Lane and Humphrey Bogart
USA, 1939
This is a fun little intersection between screwball, noir, sci-fi and horror as a quippy reporter gets in trouble for prematurely reporting the death of an eccentric actress – even though he saw her dead body with his own eyes! Also on the scene is a monkey, but there’s never a monkey payoff. This violates the rule of Chekhov’s monkey, if I remember, where if you put a monkey in the beginning of your movie there better be some monkey business by the end of it.
I say screwball cuz I can’t help but think of HIS GIRL FRIDAY and other similar flicks every time the reporter hobnobs with his boss and coworkers at the newspaper. It’s all fast-talking, snappy dialogue. It’s fun to watch!
Turns out there’s a mad doctor in town who has been draining bodies of a rare blood type in order to keep the imperfect synthetic blood he’s created working long enough to figure out how to fix it, thus keeping alive his mad assistant who is a previously deceased child killer played by… Humphrey Bogart!
It’s fun to see Humphrey Bogart in a pre anti-hero/tough-guy/gumshoe role, a rare turn as a creepy villain. He doesn’t have much screen time but makes great use of what little time he has, and since the movie’s nice and short, you don’t have much time to think about it!
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