by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
This morning I watched
TCM’s latest presentation of one of the Falcon-series detective films, The Falcon’s Adventure — not that the word “adventure” had any particular
reference to the plot, which is a farrago of the usual nonsense. On his way to
a fishing vacation with his long-suffering comic-relief companion “Goldie”
Locke (Ed Brophy), Tom Lawrence, a.k.a. The Falcon (Tom Conway) sees a
beautiful young woman, Louisa Braganza (Madge Meredith), kidnapped by a
sinister cab driver and gives chase. Lawrence’s car gets in the way of a police
vehicle that’s also chasing the girl and the baddie-cabbie, but he frees her,
takes her back to her hotel in the city, and learns that she’s a Brazilian in
the U.S. to help her uncle Enrico (André Charlot) negotiate the sale of a
formula for making industrial diamonds. Only no sooner does Lawrence find
Enrico and obtain the formula for him than the sinister cabbie crashes the
hotel room, knocks Lawrence out and kills Enrico, leaving Lawrence’s wallet
behind so the police will think Lawrence is the murderer. Lawrence takes Goldie
to Miami, home of Enrico’s contact for the formula deal, Denison (Ian Wolfe),
only on the train Lawrence hears a blonde woman, Doris Blanding (Myrna Dell),
arguing with a masher who’s pushed his way into her compartment.
In the one
genuinely honest and surprising (more or less) reversal in the script by Aubrey
Wisberg and baseball fan Robert E. Kent), she and the “masher,” Benny (Steve
Brodie), turn out to be husband and wife, and part of a criminal gang out for
the formula masterminded by an industrial diamond maker named Sutton (Robert
Warwick), who also hired the cab driver to kidnap Luisa and hired him to kill
Enrico — and Denison as well, once again framing Our Hero for the crime.
Eventually Sutton tricks Louisa into trusting him and bringing the formula on
board the yacht, which is about to sail for Brazil, only the Falcon takes over
(no wait, that was another film in the series), boards the yacht, kills the cabbie-gunman, and
along with Goldie holds the rest of the gang at bay until the police arrive.
One especially enthusiastic imdb.com reviewer called this “the Casablanca of ‘B’-movies” (no, that’s Detour!); I wouldn’t go that far, but for all the
familiarity of the plot (there must have been some especially interesting
ballgames going on when Robert E. Kent worked on this script) there are some
interesting noir-ish atmospherics in
William Berke’s direction (for some reason RKO had two cinematographers working on this little “B,” and
one of them was Harry J. Wild, who photographed RKO’s noir masterpiece Murder, My Sweet) and good performances by the women (though Madge
Meredith is clearly struggling to fake the accent that would have come
naturally to Rita Corday!) and reliable ones from Conway and Brophy. Too bad
this was the last Falcon movie
that RKO would make, though independent producer John Calvert bought the rights
and cranked out three more (with an actor other than Conway) before the Falcon
was finally laid to rest on the big screen in 1949.
