The Falcon Out West (RKO, 1944)

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

Last night I decided to run a short movie for Charles and I while we waited for the last episode of Icon: Music Through the Lens on KPBS at 10 p.m. The film I picked was The Falcon Out West, the first in the second of the two boxed sets comprising all 13 movies RKO made from 1941 to 1946 about Michael Arlen’s character Gay Lawrence, a.k.a. “The Falcon,” whose day job was in New York’s financial sector but whose real avocation was solving crimes and getting in the way of the police as they attempted – with less success – to do the same. RKO bought the rights to Michael Arlen’s novel The Gay Falcon mainly as a replacement for Leslie Charteris’s character “The Saint” after Charteris pulled the rights, and though they used Arlen’s plot for the first Falcon film they did little more than change the character’s name from Simon Templar, The Saint, to Gay Lawrence, The Falcon. They even used the same actor who’d been making the Saint films for them, George Sanders, though after three Falcon films Sanders was getting bored with the role and wanted out. So someone at RKO hit on the idea of casting Sanders’ real-life brother, Tom Conway (who had changed his last name so he wouldn’t be accused of capitalizing on George Sanders’ success), as Tom Lawrence, Gay Lawrence’s brother, and making a film with both of them called The Falcon’s Brother, in which Gay Lawrence nobly gives his life to foil an Axis plot to assassinate a Latin American diplomat whose country is crucial to the Allied war effort (one of the few times these films, mostly made during World War II, actually drew on the war for its plot). Tom Conway, as “Tom Lawrence.” continued on as The Falcon for nine more series films, of which The Falcon Out West was the fourth. It was written by Billy Jones and Morton Grant, and directed by William Clemens, a hack who’d churned out much of Warner Bros.’ “B” output in the 1930’s before he switched studios. The Falcon Out West is an O.K. series entry which actually began, not out West, but in a New York nightclub (just about all of the Falcon movies start in nightclubs or have significant scenes in them) in which we see the hand of an unseen percussionist beating on a Native American drum. Then the camera pulls back and we see he’s just part of a swing band entertaining at the club. We get some quick exposition that lets us know that Tex Evans (Lyle Talbot, billed way down in the cast on his downward career trajectory from co-starring with Humphrey Bogart and Bette Davis at Warner Bros. in the 1930’s to working for Ed Wood in the 1950’s), a Texas rancher, makes a typically swaggering entrance to the club several sheets to the wind. We’re also introduced to his fiancée, Vanessa Drake (Carole Gallagher), and also his ex-wife (Joan Barclay, for once released from the Monogram salt mines and getting to do a movie – even a “B” – at a major studio), who doesn’t want to be with him anymore but still has enough concern for him that she doesn’t want him hooked up with a gold-digger like Vanessa. The Evans table also includes his attorney, Steven Hayden (Don Douglas), whom I thought would turn out to be the killer – a lot of 1930’s and 1940’s thrillers, including The Thin Man, had the victim’s attorney be the one who did him in (usually because the attorney had been embezzling from him and the victim was about to catch him) – until he got knocked off himself about two-thirds of the way through.

The plot kicks off when Tex Evans does – he falls on the club’s dance floor and loses consciousness, and it turns out he’s been injected with rattlesnake venom through a device that makes it look as if a rattler actually bit him. By the time anyone thinks to call a doctor he’s already dead, and the Falcon deduces that though the crime occurred in New York, in order to solve it he and the other principals will have to relocate to that Western ranch. The place turns out to be a dude ranch but with enough of an “authentic” Western atmosphere that the taxi taking the people from the train station to the ranch is a stagecoach – no doubt requisitioned from RKO’s Western department (whose staff may have wondered why they needed it for a film set in the present), and of course the stagecoach runs away as its driver falls off and New York police detective Timothy Donovan (Cliff Clark) is stuck on the driver’s ledge with no idea how to control the thing. They’re saved by the appearance of butch cowgirl Marion Colby (a surprising role for the young Barbara Hale), who turns out to be the daughter of Dave Colby (Minor Watson), the late Tex Evans’ business partner. The relationship between them was actually a contentious one, which adds the elder Colby to the suspect pool, but after a lot of back-and-forth among the characters – including a cowboy named Dusty (Lee Trent), who may or may not be Marion Colby’s boyfriend and her partner in some nefarious activity or another – the writers pull an occasionally used trick and have Vanessa, the most obvious suspect (especially once we learn that Evans deeded his half-interest in the ranch to her, and then the Falcon finds the missing deed to that effect, giving her a big bow-tied beauty of a motive), and she did it with a ring that contained rattlesnake venom and injected it through two needles that made it look like the bite of a real snake. Supposedly this object was originally designed by a silversmith working for Francisco Vásquez de Coronado in the early 1600’s and then duplicated from the original in Tex Evans’ collection. The Falcon Out West is a reasonably good series entry, though some of the Tom Conway Falcons (including The Falcon in Mexico – with its intriguing plot about a supposedly dead artist who turns out to be alive, only he’s murdered shortly afterwards and the killer and his motive anticipate the 1980’s thriller Legal Eagles – and The Falcon in Hollywood, which is basically the same plot as The Producers but done absolutely seriously) are considerably more interesting. I felt sorry for Carole Gallagher, who from what we see of her could have turned out a really spectacular femme fatale performance in a script that gave her more depth.