A Flight Of Falcons!

I've caught a few of the vintage RKO Falcon movies on Turner Classic Movies from time to time over the years, but recently they ran most of them back-to-back and I recorded them. Like many things, reading or watching, seeing a bunch in succession is revealing. The Falcon is a detective of sorts with a fuzzy literary genesis and a screen presence derived more from The Saint than anything else. What we have in the first movie titled The Gay Falcon is George Sanders as the debonair and smooth-talking man-about-town who appears suspicious to the police and who seems to be attempting to strike out in legitimate business to accommodate his fiance.

We quickly see he has little interest in his Wall Street career and quixotic interest in his fiance. The most striking trait of Gay Lawrence  is his compulsive need to hit on every pretty face he stumbles across. We're supposed to get the idea he's irresistible to women. There's a distinct screwball quality to the love relationships and comedy is no small feature of these frothy mysteries. The mysteries themselves often make little sense.  In the debut he's attempting to bust up a jewel robbery scheme. Despite being engaged to another woman, he spends most of the movie with Helen Reed (Wendy Barrie) and there's way more chemistry there.

So much so that in the second Falcon movie, A Date with The Falcon  Helen has moved in as the new fiance. This one is about synthetic diamonds and the genius who concocts them. The mystery again fails to work really and most of the movie is spent on romantic hijinks.

In The Falcon Takes Over things improve mightily on the mystery front. This movie adapts Farewell My Lovely by Raymond Chandler and for the first time mystery takes the forefront in a Falcon movie. It's a marked improvement and it's interesting to see this film's variation on the familiar Chandler story adapted to film many times since. Ward Bond is particularly effective as the dim but amazing strong and dangerous Moose Malloy. In all three of the first Falcon movies Allen Jenkins plays Dr. Goldie Locke, the Falcon's assistant and for film purpose increasing humor relief. He's fun, but gets replaced.

In The Falcon's Brother we meet Tom Lawrence, who is as advertised the brother of Gay Lawrence. Gay thinks his brother is dead, then learns different and works to uncover a scheme to undermine the U.S. war effort.

Then Gay is incapacitated and Tom takes over the case and the ending results in Tom taking over the role of the Falcon full time. This switch is singular and makes this movie memorable. The fact that the lead role is handed off between real life brothers George Sanders and Tom Conway makes the switch even more fascinating.

After that Tom Conway settles in to solve mysteries with gusto and chase dames as they offer themselves up for that game. He fights to save the republic by putting down spies in The Falcon Fights Back.

And he chases down the answer to mysterious empty planes in The Falcon In Danger. The emphasis in the stories shifts more to murder and adventure and less to romp and romance, though none of it disappears. Sanders was more convincing as the lascivious lover and Conway is much more convincing as a quasi-noir detective.

One way they sharpen the storytelling is the change the settings. In The Falcon and the Co-Eds we find our hero at a swanky girl's finishing school on the east coast. Here he investigates murder with hints of the supernatural. It's surprisingly one of the better mysteries despite an atrocious title.

Then our hero heads west in The Falcon Goes West with a mystery in Texas which falls apart a bit but features a surprising amount of cowboy action on horseback. Then the story shifts south of the border in The Falcon In Mexico where our hero finds the deep secret of a long-dead artist who keeps painting from the grave. This one features some really dandy side characters though the show seems more interested in the scenery than the story.

After that it's off to tinsel town in The Falcon in Hollywood. This one shows Lawrence tumbling around a studio finding bodies and then losing them again. The mystery is okay and the side characters are pretty dandy. A female taxi cab driver in particular adds some spice to a tale which could easily fall apart if the pace slowed down at all.

And finally in The Falcon in San Francisco we have the toughest Falcon story yet. This one has some real noir characteristics with the Falcon finding himself in the clutches of some smugglers. There's a cute kid you want to see less of, and Goldy Locke (Edward Brophy) is back in fine fettle, but when the Falcon gets actually beat up by thugs it's surprisingly graphic for this series which often has its violence happen off screen. There are a couple more of these in the series - The Falcon's Alibi and The Falcon's Adventure - and I'll have to keep my eye out to catch these vintage entertainments.

It's nifty to see the same actors show up in different movies in different roles. It points to the nature of movie making at this time, an efficient industrial style and it allows one to see actors across a range of different character types. It was also most curious to watch these flicks at the same time as sexual harassment scandals tear across the media. The Falcon's behavior around women is terrible, he seems to treat them like samples on a snack tray. His eyes wander up and down without shame and his hands find their way onto shoulders and around hips with abandon. Sometimes he's rebuffed but most often his stolen kisses are treated with an embarrassed glee. We're supposed to be having fun with him as he tumbles from girl to girl with little regard to feelings, but frankly he's a cad pure and simple and an exceedingly selfish one at that.

Rip Off