Movie Night!

Another stroll through Poverty Row, the tawdry low-low-budget collection of film studios that probably were not the stuff of which dreams were made.

Tonight it’s Victory Pictures’ 1936 ludicrous The Face in the Fog – a great title.

The movie…not so much.

But it has its charms;

• It features bullets made from frozen water. The bullets melt after doing their damage, destroying the evidence (brilliant!), but amazingly survive for hours in the killer’s pocket before they’re used (stupid!).
• There’s a theatre company terrorized by a hunchbacked villain called “The Fiend.” Well of course there is.
• It features the classic death scene line; “I recognized him. It was…agh-h-h-h-!”
• Our hero (an obligatory and intrepid newspaper reporter, engaged to marry the obligatory social editor) has to race to his desk to retrieve his pistol and his snap-brim chapeau before he can “follow that car!”
• Said hero-reporter is accompanied by an obligatory and comedic dumb photographer. People once built careers playing this stock character. All my actor friends sitting idle in these pandemic days should be weeping now.
• Beautiful and plentiful shots of great shiny cars with running boards and exterior-mounted spare tires are major moments in the flick. I’m not a car guy but these are knockouts and probably a single man’s ticket home.

All that…

All that……

…and it’s still pretty silly.

…frozen bullets…

I loved it.