The Falcon in Mexico (RKO, 1944)

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

Afterwards I ran Charles the next in sequence from the boxed set of the Falcon movies, produced by RKO’s “B” unit from 1941 to 1946: The Falcon in Mexico, made in 1944 and one of the better entries of the second leg of the series, where Tom Conway replaced his brother George Sanders as the Falcon, a.k.a. Tom Lawrence. (The gimmick was that the original Falcon was Gay Lawrence, Tom’s brother, who was killed off when Sanders wanted to leave the series and was replaced by his actual brother playing the brother of his now-deceased character.) The Falcon in Mexico was noteworthy not only for using two film clips from Orson Welles’ unfinished 1943 South American documentary It’s All True (though the scenes used here were shot not in Mexico, but in Brazil) but because of the intriguing plot line and a much better director, William Berke, whom for years I’d written off as a studio hack but actually turned out to have an interesting background. He’d started in the world of independent filmmaking (such as it was in the early 1930’s) and returned to it towards the end of his career; just before his death in 1958 he shot films based on the first two Ed McBain 87th Precinct novels which were quite good (and one of them featured the very young Jerry Orbach as a teenage thug decades before his famous trademark role as a New York cop himself in the TV series Law and Order) and showed he had a real command of the noir style.

He shows that in The Falcon in Mexico, too, at least in the opening reels taking place in New York City. Tom Lawrence stumbles on a young Mexican woman, Raquel (Mona Maris), trying to break into an art gallery and steal a painting she says is hers. When the Falcon sees the painting he immediately realizes that Ybarra isn’t its owner, but its model, and the painter is Humphrey Wade (Bryant Washburn), an American expatriate who fled to Mexico and died there in 1929. Only the painting is clearly of a living woman who would have been only a child in 1929. The painting had been consigned by the gallery owner, whom Lawrence finds dead on the gallery floor, to collector Winthrop “Lucky Diamond” Hughes (Emory Parnell), who claims to own every extant Humphrey Wade canvas that isn’t held by a museum. The Falcon flies to Mexico to trace down Dolores after she flees and ultimately ends up in a small town, taken there by cabdriver and guide Manuel Romero (Nestor Paiva, later the boat captain in the first two Creature from the Black Lagoon movies), who travels around with his son and seems to be a typically annoying comic-relief character – until the end, when he’s revealed to be an undercover agent of the Federales (a legitimate surprise from writers George Worthing Yates and Gerald Geraghty, whose brother Maurice Geraghty was the series’ producer).

The Falcon is on the trail of Humphrey Wade’s daughter Barbara (Martha Vickers, still being billed as “Martha MacVicar”), and he also runs into a Mexican dance duo, Dolores Ybarra (Cecelia Callejo) and her husband Anton (Joseph Vitale). In a rather grim irony that could have been made more of if the filmmakers hadn’t been limited to a 70-minute running time, Barbara reunites with her father, who it turns out wasn’t dead at all and had continued to paint during his 15-year incognito sojourn in the Mexican countryside, only just as the two reunite he’s shot by a sniper and killed for real. The killer turns out to be “Lucky Diamond” Hughes, who’s suffered financial reverses that caused him to sell the famous lucky diamond ring that was his trademark and gave him his nickname, who wanted Wade dead for fear a series of new Wade paintings would dramatically reduce the value of the pre-1929 Wades he already owned. A variation of this plot was used in the 1986 film Legal Eagles (a quite underrated attempt to revive the comedy-mysteries of the 1930’s with a starry cast – Robert Redford, Debra Winger, Daryl Hannah – and directed quite stylishly by Ivan Reitman coming off the success of the first Ghostbusters), which was also loosely based on the legal battle waged by the heirs of abstract painter Mark Rothko against his gallery owner.

In Legal Eagles (a dumb title that probably hurt the film commercially), the artist died accidentally in a fire and the gallery owner killed to protect his secret – that he had a large stash of paintings by the dead artist and he was doling them out slowly enough to maintain the premium that attaches to artworks once the artist dies and therefore there aren’t going to be any more of them. He had told the artist’s daughter (the Daryl Hannah character) that all his remaining paintings had been destroyed in the fire that killed him, but they hadn’t been, and that way he could sell them without having to share the proceeds with her. Charles immediately noticed which scenes were directed by Orson Welles – one of fishing boats set out with their big butterfly-shaped nets and another in which Welles’ footage was used as the background in a three-way process shot, a surprisingly intricate special effect for a “B” – and he liked the movie overall, though I think he was a bit less taken with it than I and he spotted a goof: Bryant Washburn looks the same age in his live footage as he did in the photo of him his daughter had from before his supposed “death” 15 years earlier. (Today they’d use an old head shot of the same actor so it would be the same person, but in fact younger.) The film is also an interesting bit of movie trivia in that it features two actresses who worked with Humphrey Bogart: Martha Vickers, most famously, as Lauren Bacall’s nymphomaniac sister in The Big Sleep; and Mona Maris (who was active in films until she died in 1991; she made her last movie, Camila, in her native Argentina in 1984 after a 31-year hiatus), the star of Bogart’s first feature-length movie, A Devil with Women (1930).