The Falcon in Danger (RKO, 1943)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s “feature” was the next in sequence in the Falcon series with Tom Conway at RKO: The Falcon in Danger. The omens for this one weren’t good – the director was William Clemens, who’d previously ground out similar “B” mysteries for Warner Bros., and the writers were Fred Niblo, Jr. (son of the director of the Valentino Blood and Sand and the silent Ben-Hur) and Craig Rice. Surprise! The Falcon in Danger turned out to be quite good, with a genuinely interesting and surprising plot (though I guessed it about two-thirds of the way through), stylish direction by Clemens and cinematography by Frank Redman (oddly there are more shots in this movie that look like film noir than in the previous series entry, The Falcon Strikes Back, even though that one was directed by Edward Dmytryk just a year before he made one of the film noir masterpieces, Murder, My Sweet) and a solid supporting cast – with one exception, Amelita Ward’s annoying performance as Texas-born Bonnie Caldwell, who has somehow become the fiancée of Tom Lawrence, a.k.a. The Falcon (Tom Conway), even though her cornpone lines and butter-thick fake Southern accent make this look like a match made in casting director’s hell.

The film begins with a dramatic sequence in which a number of people are waiting for a plane to come into a New York airport – only the plane cracks up on landing and, when it finally stops, it turns out to have no one on board. The plane was carrying a complement of passengers including Stanley Harris Palmer (Clarence Koib), owner of a large factory producing crucial war materiel (the mystery doesn’t have to do with the war but the war is very much a part of this 1943 film, from the morale-boosting posters to the key scene set in a recycling center for scrap metal and a scene in which Tom Lawrence escapes a trap laid in an antique store after hours by turning on its neon sign and thereby alerting the police and the local air raid warden, who was supposed to be enforcing a dim-out in the neighborhood), and his assistant Wally Fairchild (Robert Emmett Keane). Palmer’s daughter Nancy (Elaine Shepard) and Fairchild’s niece Iris (a marvelously hard-edged performance by Jean Brooks, future writer-director Richard Brooks’ first wife and the woman who literally walks with death at the end of Val Lewton’s vest-pocket masterpiece The Seventh Victim, made the same year) both receive ransom notes demanding $25,000 for the safe return of the two men, who were presumably kidnapped off the plane at its last stop, at which all the passengers were removed and the plane was flown the rest of the way by automatic remote control. (In other words, it became a drone.)

Among the principal suspects are Nancy’s poor boyfriend Kenneth Gibson (Richard Davies), whom Palmer didn’t want her to marry because he has no money, and a family of crooked antique dealers headed by Morley (Felix Basch), who run a basement shop in New York (its address is 327 but it’s in the same building as an above-ground apartment building labeled 32 – familiar to classic movie buffs as the building in Citizen Kane in which Charles Foster Kane was keeping Susan Alexander as a mistress) out of which they pursue various criminal endeavors. Palmer, who lives in another set recycled from an Orson Welles movie – it's the Amberson mansion from The Magnificent Ambersons, and I suspect RKO amortized their losses on that film from how often they reused the set (from The Seventh Victim to a 1952 two-reel comedyt called Ghostbuster – note the singular title), actually turns up unharmed and says that he was the victim of kidnappers who forced him to parachute from the plane and then picked him up on the ground and held him, but – as I began to suspect about two-thirds of the way through – Palmer was the actual culprit. Fairchild had discovered documents proving that he was the rightful co-owner of Palmer’s company and Palmer had used a shell corporation to defraud him of his half-interest, then offered him a job at a humilatingly low salary. The two struggle about this during the flight, one of them pulls out a firearm, They Both Reach for the Gun (Maurine Dallas Watkins, your plagiarism attorney once again thanks you for all the work) and Palmer accidentally kills Fairchild, then concocts the whole story about the kidnapping to cover up his crime (though how the Morleys found out about it and sent the fake ransom notes remains a mystery).

It’s noteworthy that Palmer’s lie about what happened to him on the plane is presented visually as a flashback – a rare instance (seven years before Alfred Hitchcock supposedly pioneered the device in Stage Fright) of a visual flashback turning out to be a character’s lie. The Falcon in Danger is a movie that tries to be quite a few things – screwball comedy, French farce, mystery, proto-noir and even horror (the Morleys’ antique shop is straight out of The Old Dark House) – and it manages to shift gears quite nicely even though it could have done with a lot less of the so-called “comic relief” filmmakers still thought was obligatory even in a movie made this late, two years after the 1941 version of The Maltese Falcon had dispensed with the comic relief and essentially set the ground rules for film noir. It’s also quite a good entry in the Falcon series – maybe not as good as the best Conway Falcons, The Falcon in Mexico and The Falcon in Hollywood, but still a tough little movie, well directed and acted by Conway with his usual insouciance (Val Lewton and his directors and writers got considerably more out of him, but in this movie – and in the series generally – he was all too aware that he was essentially understudying his brother, George Sanders, who had starred in RKO’s films based on Leslie Charteris’s Saint character and, when Charteris pulled the rights, simply switched over to playing Michael Arlen’s Falcon as a virtual clone of the Saint).