The Falcon’s Brother (RKO, 1942)

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

After Dr. Broadway I ran Charles The Falcon’s Brother, fourth in RKO’s Falcon series of detective films with George Sanders playing the title character, whose true name was Gaylord “Gay” Lawrence. This actually began as an RKO series featuring Leslie Charteris’s good-bad character The Saint, which Sanders had begun playing in 1939 and continued for two more years until Charteris abruptly pulled the rights to the Saint character. No problem: RKO simply bought the rights to a novel by Michael Arlen called The Gay Falcon and filmed it with George Sanders, essentially just changing the name of the character from the Saint to the Falcon. Only by 1942 Sanders was getting bored with the character by either name, and he asked RKO to let him out of the series. The ingenious solution RKO’s staff, particularly producer Maurice Geraghty, came up with was to cast George Sanders’ real-life brother, Tom Conway (he had changed his last name because he wanted to make his own career and not capitalize on Sanders’ success), as Tom Lawrence, the Falcon’s brother.

Geraghty assigned two mystery pulp writers, Stuart Palmer and Craig Rice, to concoct a script in which Gay would be incapacitated for most of the movie, Tom would take over for him, and at the end Gay would die a noble, self-sacrificing death so Sanders could relinquish the role and Conway could take it over for good (or at least for the nine remaining films in the series). What Rice, Palmer and director Stanley Logan came up with was a film that starts on a ship coming to New York from Cuba; Gay Lawrence is waiting at the dock to meet the brother he hasn’t seen in years, but is told that his brother has been murdered aboard ship. Of course it’s a case of mistaken identity, and Tom Lawrence turns up very much alive. The two team up to solve the original killing and find that the murders revolved around a fashion magazine owned and edited by spoiled rich kid Paul Harrington (James Newell), who’s engaged to couturier Arlette (Charlotte Wynters), but she’s getting restive about the relationship and suspects he might be a bit “off.” When one of her models, Diana Medford (Gwili André), also turns up murdered, Arlette edges away from Harrington – though even she doesn’t suspect how evil he really is.

It turns out Harrington is a contact for a German sabotage ring, using the cover of his magazine to send Axis agents coded messages about the upcoming battles of the war, like the cover featuring a model in a bathing suit with a sash reading “Honolulu” and blocks reading “12” and “7” – which the two Falcon brothers finally realize was a code letting the Nazis in on the secret that their Japanese allies were about to bomb Pearl Harbor on that date. The good guys figure out the riddle of the cover of the latest issue and realize it’s a signal for an assassination plot against a Central American diplomat who’s key to keeping Central and South America either out of the war altogether or, preferably, on the Allied side. (This was a major foreign-policy aim of the Franklin Roosevelt administration, mainly because Germany and her allies needed valuable war materials like platinum they could have got from Latin America if the U.S. hadn’t done a major diplomatic outreach, the Good Neighbor Policy, to keep those countries on our side.) The Central American diplomat is being flown in on a seaplane (a lot of RKO movies featured seaplanes, a relic of the days when Merian Cooper had been both RKO’s chief of production and a board member of Pan American Airways, which in addition to servicing U.S. travelers going to Latin America also operated the famous China Clipper – and many of their flights were on seaplanes), only a whole bunch of Germans have occupied the resort near the bay where the plane is to land. A sniper prepares to take a shot at the diplomat and Gay Lawrence is too late to stop the shooter, but not too late to throw himself into the path of the bullet, thereby sacrificing his own life for Anglo-American security.

Though it’s a bit disappointing that we see so few scenes of the Lawrence brothers actually working the case together, The Falcon’s Brother is a well-done film, given topicality by the war-related plot and with a nice stereotype-tweaking performance by Keye Luke as Gay Lawrence’s Asian houseboy, who speaks perfect English but frequently puts on a pidgin accent to callers the Falcon wants to put off and not have to deal with. The Falcon’s Brother is an estimable film and a good transition for a series that managed to maintain a high level of quality by “B” detective standards, including at least two subsequent films that were of special interest: The Falcon in Mexico, about an artist who fakes his own death to boost the value of his paintings and then gets killed by real, which uses stock shots from Orson Welles’ unfinished documentary It’s All True; and The Falcon in Hollywood, which uses the basic situation of Mel Brooks’ The Producers – an unscrupulous and crooked producer decides to make a deliberately bad movie, get several times the production budget out of his investors and abscond with the rest – for a serious crime film.