The Falcon Strikes Back (RKO, 1943)

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

Somewhat to my surprise, last night at 10 p.m. when I was ready to run a movie on DVD, my husband Charles requested one of the RKO Falcon “B” detective movies, and I picked out The Falcon Strikes Back, made in 1943 and the first in the series since Tom Conway definitively replaced his brother, George Sanders, in the role of the Falcon. The previous movie, The Falcon’s Brother, had featured both Sanders and Conway playing brothers, and at the end Sanders’ Falcon took a bullet and died to protect a European diplomat Nazi spies in America were trying to assassinate so Conway’s Falcon could take over the role. The Falcon Strikes Back is a rather convoluted film that manages to crowd quite a lot of plot into its 66-minute running time. In the opening the Falcon is in bed with an ice bag on top of his head, obviously sleeping off a hangover, when a beautiful woman walks through a full-length window in his bedroom (one wonders how a man involved with crime has such lousy security). The woman is Mia Bruger (Rita Corday), who demands that the Falcon help her find her missing brother, whom she insists he can locate at the 333 nightclub. Alas, when the Falcon goes there in his big white convertible (which he’s able to park immediately in front of the club – one thing that annoys Charles is that almost never in the movies does anyone have trouble finding a place to park even on the busiest of city streets – don’t try that in real life!).

Only he;s led to a back room, where he’s knocked out with a blunt object wielded by the forearm of an otherwise unseen thug, and when he comes to Our Hero (t/n Tom Lawrence – the version Sanders played was his brother Gay, short for Gaylord) is in a rural part of New York state. He’s told he’s near Highway 64, and when he asks where that’s near, he’s told, “Highway 14.” Then he’s arrested by police, including his old New York acquaintance Inspector Timothy Donovan (Cliff Clark), because he was knocked out and unconscious in the back seat of it, his car was stolen and used as the getaway vehicle in a robbery of $250,000 in war bonds. Lawrence is in the classical HItchcock-hero position of having to prove to the cops that he didn’t commit the crime by finding the people who did, and the trail leads to a remote summer resort where Mia is hanging out and so are a number of other people, including French war refugee Bruno Steffen (André Charlot); Rickey Davis (Erford Gage), who’s Steffen’s caregiver and whom Lawrence recognizes as a strong-arm crook with a long record; Gwynne Gregory (Harriet Hilliard, better known as Mrs. Ozzie Nelson in a long-running radio and TV series; they were a couple in real life and in Nelson’s band, where she was the female singer, and I expected the writing committee – Stuart Palmer, Edward Dein and Gerald Geraghty – to make her a singer at the resort and have her bandleader-husband get jealous of the womanizing Falcon, but no such luck), who seems to be there just to give the Falcon a piece of eye candy that will make his more-or-less ongoing girlfriend, reporter Marcia Brooks (Jane Randolph), jealous; and Sammy Dugan (Edgar Kennedy), who runs a puppet show that performs at the resort. (The Velma Dawson Puppets get credit as the puppets in the movie.)

Mia Bruger, who got the Falcon into this trouble in the first place – when he and the police visited the 333 club it turned out to be a clubhouse for a group of women volunteering to knit uniforms for The Boys – is found dead, drowned in the resort’s swimming pool, and the resourceful Gwynne Gregory dives in the pool and brings up her body. Later Rickey Davis is also killed, and the Falcon makes a deduction probably even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would have thought a bit too far-fetched. Puppeteer Dugan is giving a benefit performance at the resort, but he’s also shown as a man who is so frugal he will literally pick up a dropped safety pin (he explains that due to wartime priorities he’d have a hard time getting any more), Our Hero decides that a man that cheap wouldn’t give a benefit performance without an ulterior motive, and he ultimately realizes that Dugan is the killer. He’s rigged up his puppet show so it can play without him – the puppets are moved by an elaborate series of levers and gears powered by an electric motor and synchronized to a recorded soundtrack (a year later the makers of the film Laura would have radio broadcaster Clifton Webb give himself a similar alibi by pre-recording his broadcast so it would sound like he’d been doing a live show at the time of the murder – and his motive was that years before he, Rickey Davis, Nia Bruger and dowager Geraldine Lipton (Wynne Gibson, 13 years after RKO had given her a star buildup which didn’t take) were all involved in a heist in San Francisco, only the other three got away and left Dugan to take the fall. Now he’s out after revenge and he’s killed two of his former colleagues and goes after Mrs. Lipton, though the Falcon and the police are able to intercept them and arrest the two remaining co-conspirators alive.

Both Charles and I had expected a war-themed plot, and given how rarely characters in classic-era movies who used wheelchairs actually needed them (just about every time you saw a movie character in a wheelchair, at some point in the plot he or she would get out of it and show they’d been posing as a cripple for some villainous reason; this changed only when Lionel Barrymore’s arthritis got so bad he needed a chair for real, so his bosses at MGM looked for roles he could play from one) we were both expecting Bruno Steffen to turn out to be a non-crippled leader of a Nazi spy or sabotage ring – but then the immediately previous Falcon movie, The Falcon’s Brother, had used the gimmick of an out-of-the-way resort as a hotbed of Nazi spies and the writers (including at least one who’d also worked on The Falcon’s Brother, Stuart Palmer) probably didn’t want to go back there so soon. As usual with films of this type, the characterizations and banter between the actors is far more important than the rather dull mystery – though it’s refreshing to see Edgar Kennedy, usually the comic foil of Laurel and Hardy or the Marx Brothers, actually playing a serious villain. At least two of the Tom Conway Falcon films proved especially interesting as precursors of later movies – The Falcon in Mexico not only uses a stock clip of fishing boats from Orson Welles’ unfinished documentary It’s All True but has a plot device later used in the underrated 1986 neo-screwball movie Legal Eagles with Robert Redford, Debra Winger and Daryl Hannah (new works by a presumably dead artist start appearing on the marketplace, but later the artist is murdered and the killer turns out to be his gallery owner, who doesn’t want a stream of new works by the artist lowering the value of the ones already in his inventory); and The Falcon in Hollywood not only uses the same plot premise as Mel Brooks’ 1968 classic The Producers (an unscrupulous producer decides to defraud his investors by extracting from them several times the money his production will actually cost, then making the show deliberately bad so the investors will write it off as a flop and not ask where their money went) but actually plays it seriously.

The Falcon Strikes Back doesn’t have any similar points of interest, but at least it’s a competent, workmanlike thriller and Tom Conway delivers the goods – even though, not surprisingly, the performances he gave in three of the first four Val Lewton RKO horror productions (Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, The Seventh Victim) are a lot more challenging and get a lot more out of him than the relatively superficial Falcon does. One interesting thing about The Falcon Strikes Back is its director, Edward Dmytryk, who had already started his rise from the “B” ranks with his 1942 film Hitler»s Children, about a couple of American teenagers trapped in Nazi Germany, and he was getting ready for his masterpiece, the 1944 Raymond Chandler adaptation Murder, My Sweet. At least two scenes in The Falcon Strikes Back anticipate Murder, My Sweet (whose source novel, Farewell, My Lovely, had already been used by RKO for a George Sanders Falcon film, The Falcon Takes Over)