kidboots The Crime Doctor series was usually consistent in it's style and excellence, helped enormously by Warner Baxter as the unobtrusive doctor. The stories were always a bit different to the usual cops and robbers fare with Doctor Ordway's most important job to get to the root of the patient's problem. This movie, though, seems to have it's fair share of holes and starts out with a troubled man, having lost his first wife on their honeymoon and soon to lose his second in a rock slide - again on their honeymoon. Even though the fall was an accident it was caused by the young man's strange behaviour and though he is acquitted, the brother of his first wife feels it was no accident.Dr. Ordway enters the picture when a newly married socialite Kathleen Massey (Hillary Brooke) begs him to come to dinner to observe her husband and diagnose whether he is insane or not!!! Yes, it is the same husband whose former wives were involved in those honeymoon accidents. The brother who made the original allegations keeps popping up everywhere driving Carson (dare I say it) insane, until this particular night he makes his appearance as a waiter and has it out with Carson in front of everybody - minutes later Carson is found dead!!Now the storyline goes off on a completely different tangent - wants you to forget about Carson and his troubles (the brother doesn't appear again!!) and concentrate on Kathleen, who apparently has always loved Miguel Bragga (Anthony Caruso) (well for a few weeks anyway) - who, along with his sister (Lupita Tovar) have a mystical disappearing dancing act that they perform at a local night club. As Kathleen tells yet another of her love sick suitors, she liked Carson "well enough" but only married him for the financial help he could give her father. I think the viewer loses sympathy for her and seeing she tends to disappear from the second half - it doesn't help her case!!The movie then concentrates on the Braggas who, publicity says, are a pair of modern day vampires who are never seen in the day time, never sleep in their beds and when Ordway makes a search of their "castle", finds two silk lined coffins in the basement. His buddy in this movie is a writer (Jerome Cowan) who has cooked up the vampire publicity for the pair and brings them to Ordway's notice when he comments on their amazing disappearing act. Even though production values are good and events are explained, the ending seems hastily put together - it would have been interesting to keep the angry brother around, at least as a red herring!!Still it was nice to see Lupita Tovar again. She had a few roles in the early thirties, usually as "native girl" and she was in the Spanish version of "Dracula" but she married director Paul Kohner and retired (their daughter was actress Susan Kohner). And I am definitely convinced that it is Virginia Mayo by the pool - what do other people think???

Michael_Elliott Crime Doctor's Courage, The (1945) ** 1/2 (out of 4) Strange fourth entry into Columbia's series is your typical detective film until half way through when it turns into a horror film. The Crime Doctor (Warner Baxter) is asked to check out a husband who is on his third wife. The guy's previous two wives all suffered accidental deaths days after the wedding but there's a subplot with vampires thrown in. This is the third in the series that I've seen and it works the best because of how strange it actually is. I'm really not sure what made the writer turn to vampires but it makes for some interesting plot twists, although none of them really add up in the end. Baxter also seemed to do his best work here and the supporting cast is interesting if not totally successful.

theowinthrop Of the original Oscar winning actors (prior to Lionel Barrymore, Fredric March and Charles Laughton), an unfair curtain of neglect has descended on them. In one case, Emil Jannings (the first Best Actor winner), he only had himself to blame because he insisted on not only working for Germany in the Nazi period, but he was a full throated supporter of Nazi policies. Despite doing some first rate work after 1927 (including Profesor Emanuel Rath in Von Sternberg's THE BLUE ANGEL), most of his film work is ignored as Nazi propaganda. The second winner - well more about him in a moment. The third was the splendid George Arliss, the first British actor to win Best Actor (for DISRAELI) and who really gave pretty entertaining performances in his talkies that hold up pretty well. But too many modern critics decry his many "biographical" films, claiming he made Dizzy, Alexander Hamilton, Cardinal Richelieu, Nathan Rothschild, Voltaire, and the Duke of Wellington all look alike and all seem to have two traits: reorganizing or saving society, and uniting young lovers. Actually, Disraeli, Richelieu, and Voltaire do look something alike from their paintings and pictures, but Hamilton, Rothschild, and Wellington don't look alike.As for the second winner (and first American born actor to win the Best Actor Oscar), Warner Baxter is a peculiar case indeed. From 1928 through 1933 he was turned into a cog in the Hollywood dream factory, turning out one picture after another in rapid succession. Most of these (including his Oscar Winner, In OLD ARIZONA) are rarely shown. Yet some of them (SUCH MEN ARE DANGEROUS, DADDY LONGLEGS, TWELVE HOURS TO LIVE) are pretty good performances. Later films he made showed he was not a performer to brush aside: THE ROAD TO GLORY about the hopeless trench warfare of World War I, THE PRISONER OF SHARK ISLAND about Dr. Samuel Mudd, and KIDNAPPED based on the Stevenson novel, were all worthy films. Yet most people, when asked for his typical film role, recall only one (maybe they'll recall SHARK ISLAND too): Julian Marsh in 42ND STREET. His fate was to be broken by overwork. His last major performance in a leading production was as "Kendall Nesbit" the wealthy publisher and suitor in Mitchell Leisin's LADY IN THE DARK (1941) with Ginger Rogers, Ray Milland, and Jon Hall. He also played the title role in ADAM HAD FOUR SONS which helped introduce Ingrid Bergman and Susan Hayward (as "good" girl and "bad" girl respectively) to American audiences. But he suffered a nervous breakdown due to overwork in the early 1940s. So his output decreased afterward. And his appearances were somewhat easier to take - his intensity was removed, for better or worse.It was Baxter's luck that he got a detective series' role to play with. In 1943 he first appeared as psychiatrist, Dr. Robert Ordway. Ordway gets the moniker of "the Crime Doctor"* in his series, and solves murders like Nick Charles or Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe. Yet the films about those three sleuths (and Charlie Chan and Mr. Moto) are still remembered quite fondly, whereas "The Crime Doctor" series was as forgotten as Chester Morris' "Boston Blackie" or George Sanders / Tom Conway "The Falcon". (*Interestingly enough, in the unrelated Sherlock Holmes spoof, WITHOUT A CLUE, Ben Kingsley as Dr. Watson offers his services to a skeptical Scotland Yard as a replacement detective to Holmes, to be called "the Crime Doctor"!)The series did have a good number of character actors supporting Baxter. In THE CRIME DOCTOR'S COURAGE the cast included Jerome Cowan, Lloyd Corrigan, Hillary Brooke, and Emory Parnell. The production values may not match MGM's values for THE THIN MAN series or Warner's for THE MALTESE FALCON, but they aren't to be sneezed at. Look at the sets for the nightclub scenes in this film, where the Bragas (a brother and sister dance and magic act) perform an illusion in which the sister vanishes in front of the audience. It does look like a realistic theater setting. Dr. Ordway is on a vacation trip to California, and gets drawn into the murder of a fortune hunter. The man apparently committed suicide in a locked room. Ordway is certain the victim was murdered. Gradually methods of entry are turned up (one by Corrigan, who notices a trap door's frame under the carpet - oddly the police did not notice it). The plot soon bogs down into motives and theories of guilt. The Bragas are odd - they never appear out of their home before sundown. They have no mirrors in their home or in their make-up room in the nightclub. And at least one seems able to be invisible. Could they be vampires?Baxter does solve the case later, and finds a more prosaic explanation. But the film lacks any sense of reality - it gets so bogged down in details about the supernatural that one suspects it should have stayed in that area for it's solution. Also, Baxter is workmanlike in his detective work, but he's too relaxed (even in his final battle with the villain). One gets the impression that the production staff decided to go easy on him due to the recent breakdown.My favorite character in this is Emory Parnell as Lt. Birch. Typically impatient and ham-handed (like Donald MacBride or Nat Pendleton in similar films), he admits (at one point) to Baxter that his father wanted him to have a career as a real estate broker. As the film ends, we realize that Parnell would have been an excellent real estate broker!

cosiz It's Saturday, it's raining, and I think every movie should have at least one comment... so I just watched "The Crime Doctor's Courage" all the way through. It's a murder mystery with a typical cast of characters, and a couple of the usual suspects -- each with their own possible motive for the crime. The story starts abruptly and the viewer is thrown into the plot with no character development or storytelling whatsoever. I guess that's not too surprising for a B movie of this period. There are also some moments which look and feel like this is pre-WWII, but perhaps that is due to the writer's background in radio shows.The "Crime Doctor" is the sleuth who happens to be visiting California for some R&R from his psychiatry practice on the East coast. He hooks up with a mystery novelist friend with whom it is implied has been along for one or more previous mystery solving capers. The novelist occasionally fills the role of sidekick to our sleuth (AKA Dr. Watson), and also occasionally lightens things up with a bit of comic relief (sort of).There is also a somewhat simple, but not quite bumbling police captain who at times is annoyed by the meddling sleuth. And then there are the mysterious Braggas, a brother and sister who are dance artists at a night-club. The dance is sort of an interpretive dance that happens to be one of those moments which feels more like the 30's than the 40's. Though the story location is California, the Braggas appear to live in a castle!There was one plot element which managed to keep me somewhat amused, but I won't divulge any more than that because I always enjoy movies more when the story is discovered, rather than known in advance. (even though I can think of many, many, B films which would rate higher and it is difficult to say that watching this one is time well spent) I have not seen any other movies from the "Crime Doctor" series, so I can't make any comparisons.