By-the-numbers mystery with a nice twist

The Lady Confesses (1945)
Starring: Mary Beth Hughes, Hugh Beaumont, Edmund MacDonald, Emmett Vogan, and Claudia Drake
Director: Sam Newfield
Rating: Five of Ten Stars

When her wedding plans are derailed by murder, Vicki (Hughes) sets out to discover why nightclub owner Lucky Brandon (MacDonald) lied to cast doubt on her fiance's (Beaumont) otherwise unshakable alibi.

"The Lady Confesses" is a standard murder mystery that is elevated by a nice third-act twist. As is the case with many of these B-movies, the short running time leaves viewers wanting for a little more background on some of the characters. It would have been nice to know why the eventual murder victim disappeared for seven years, and it would have helped the story if we'd been given more information about Lucky's relationship to Vicki's fiance, Larry. However, I feel inclined to forgive the filmmakers, because there's not a wasted moment anywhere in the film where they might have squeezed such exposition in -- even the obligatory musical number at the night club is truncated when compared to what is typical in a movie like this.

The cast is interesting in this film, especially if you're a big fan of these kinds of movies. Mary Beth Hughes plays a role very different from the bad girl ones she's usually cast in. Hugh Beaumont also gets to play a role that's a little meatier than what we usually expect from him. He doesn't quite rise to the challenge, but nice lighting and some decent dialogue helps prop up his performance.

All in all, this is not a bad little movie.

'Dead Men Walk' is so-so chiller

Dead Men Walk (1943)
Starring: George Zucco, Mary Carlisle, and Nedrick Young
Director: Sam Newfield
Rating: Five of Ten Stars

Elwyn Clayton (Zucco) is a devoted Satanist who is murdered by his twin brother Lloyd (also Zucco), who wants to rid the world of this evil wearing his face. Although Lloyd successfully covers up the murder, he soon finds himself stalked by his dead brother who has been resurrected by the Dark Powers as a vampire. Worse, Elwyn intends to drain the life from Lloyd's beautiful ward, Gayle (Carlisle) before visiting his undead revenge upon his brother.


"Dead Men Walk" is a just about as typical a vampire movie as you'll ever see. Everything in it is pretty much as you would expect. So long as you're not hoping for anything original, it's a fairly entertaining B-movie.

The best part of the film is the climax where Lloyd battles Elwyn and his hunchbacked minion as a house burns down around them. Again, it's not anything you haven't seen before, but it's nicely staged.

'Beast of Berlin' offers negative 1930s view of Hitler's Germany

Someone call Oliver Stone and/or forward him a link to this post.

As he sets about showing us how Hitler has been unfairly slandered by history and how we can't judge him to be "good" or "bad," he might want to take a look at "The Beast of Berlin." (For background on what I'm referring to, click here.

It's a film made while Hitler was laying the foundation for the death camps and the purges. It's a film that shows that, while many Americans and Britons were turning a blind eye to the evil of Hitler and his National Socialist Party, a few filmmakers were trying to call attention to the truth of Germany and to the evil growing in strength there.

It's too bad that Oliver Stone is apparently committed to be on the side of history's idiots. He could actually do some good with his movies instead of white-washing evil movements and men of the past and lending support to their equals today.



The Beast of Berlin (aka "Hitler: Beast of Berlin" and "Hell's Devils") (1939)
Starring: Ronald Drew, Steffi Duna, Alan Ladd, Hans von Twardowski, Walter Stahl and Henry von Zynda
Director: Sam Newfield
Rating: Six of Ten Stars

A German veteran of WWI and civil engineer (Drew) works quietly with other intellectuals resisting the oppression of Nazis and trying to spread the truth to the people about Hitler and his evil regime. When his wife (Duna) becomes pregnant, he struggles with the choice of continuing his resistance efforts or flee Germany to raise the child in freedom.


"The Beast of Berlin" was one of the very first American movies to present the full truth about Hitler's Germany to the public. It showed the Nazis as a mixture of mindless brutes and embittered soldiers who were still smarting from the humiliation that was dealt Germany by the world following WWI. It also showed that Hitler and his goons were successful to a large degree because the European nations and America were ignoring Hitler's evil or trying to appease him.

Like with Charlie Chaplin's "The Great Dictator" from 1940, Nazi sympathizers and appeasers on film boards in New York and elsewhere tried to prevent this film from being seen. The excuse used in both cases was that the films were inflammetory and would be insulting to Germans in general and Hitler in paticular, but the truth is that the only people who would be insulted by this movie or Chaplin's film would be admirers of the Nazis who wouldn't want the truth spoken about them and the world they were attempting to usher in.

It's a rather a shame that no one seems to have learned the lessons that Hitler and WWII in general tought us.

Today, we have people bending over backwards to appease Muslim fanatics and to avoid insulting them and their admirers by calling them what they are: Brutal subhumans who are bent on imposing a murderous dictatorship on all but themselves. Just like Hitler's Nazis. Hell, they even want to kill the Jews and Catholics, just like Hitler's Nazis. Unfortunately, we're even worse off today than we were in the 1930s, because it isn't censorship boards chaired by Islamo-fascist appeasers and admirers, but the creative community itself who is too stupid and ignorant to see the truth that is taking shape before their very eyes, playing out on cable TV, twenty-four hours a day.

"Beast of Berlin" is a film that actually casts a good light upon the German people; it shows the majority of them as being held captive by Hitler's jackbooted psychos. It shows their brutality and evil for what it was... it even soft-pedals it, as I don't think anyone in America truly believed the depths of evil and depravity that Germany was reaching by 1939.

This is a film that's a bit too preachy at some points and almost laughably melodramatic at others, but, like Chaplin's "The Great Dictator", it's a heartfelt work of art about a subject too few people were willing to discuss at the time it was created. That passion shines through, and it makes the film worth seeing even today.

(Trivia: Ben Judell, the producer of this movie, was forced out of the film company he founded due to the distribution problems the film suffered because of censorship boards nervous about offending Nazis. He went onto independently produce other films geared toward showing the true face of Hitler's Germany, such as the comedy anti-Nazi films, such as the comedy "Hiter, Dead or Alive.")





"Beast of Berlin" is avaliable from Amazon.com for less than $9. It's interesting to see what the contemporary thought was among those who recognized the evil of the Nazis early on. And it might even be interesting for Oliver Stone to see. Maybe someone can buy him a copy of the film as a present?

'The Black Raven' is an inn to avoid

The Black Raven (1943)
Starring: George Zucco, Glenn Strange, Noel Madison, Byron Foulger, Wanda McKay, Robert Livingston and Robert Middlemass
Director: Sam Newfield
Rating: Four of Ten Stars

The Black Raven Inn has a reputation only slightly more shady than its owner (Zucco), but on one dark and very stormy night, it plays host to more than the usual share of crooks and creeps when someone starts murdering the men and women who have been trapped there because the bridges have been washed out.

"The Black Raven" starts strong, playing like a straight-forward cross between a "dark old house" film and an Agatha Christie-style murder mystery. However, by the time the first murder occurs, the movie has already descended into a meandering morass of filler... and when it starts getting good again--right around the time where George Zucco's character begins to show he's more than just a villainous innkeeper who makes his real living by smuggling criminals across the border to Canada--viewers are so bored they hardly notice or care.

Everything about this film is substandard, and it seems pretty clear that most everyone invovled was just there to collect a paycheck... or they're terribly miscast. Zucco, who usually seems to give a movie his all, seems to be sleepwalking through most his scenes, and I don't think Glenn Strange has a comedic bone in his body; he never should have been cast in the role as the comic relief character. Even as a murder mystery the film is fairly lazy (although it does have one minor twist to it, a twist that makes it harder than usual to guess who the killer is because it's someone that is so obvious that the character is dismissed as a suspect in the minds of experienced mystery watchers/readers).This film might be of interest if you're the world's biggest fan of George Zucco, but even then I think you might feel as if you've wasted your time when your done watching it, even at its brief 61-minutes.