Now Over 5500 Reviews and (near) Daily Updates!

WELCOME! Use the search engines on this site (or your own off-site engine of choice) to gain easy access to the complete MAKSQUIBS Archive; more than 5500 posts and counting. (New posts added every day or so.)

You can check on all our titles by typing the Title, Director, Actor or 'Keyword' you're looking for in the Search Engine of your choice (include the phrase MAKSQUIBS) or just use the BLOGSPOT.com Search Box at the top left corner of the page.

Feel free to place comments directly on any of the film posts and to test your film knowledge with the CONTESTS scattered here & there. (Hey! No Googling allowed. They're pretty easy.)

Send E-mails to MAKSQUIBS@yahoo.com . (Let us know if the TRANSLATE WIDGET works!) Or use the Profile Page or Comments link for contact.

Thanks for stopping by.

Saturday, September 6, 2014

FACE THE MUSIC (aka THE BLACK GLOVE) (1954)

Terence Fisher directed many low-budget films noir for Hammer Films before he began rebooting horror classics in lurid EastmanColor. Alas, this one, in spite of a few tasty bits, feels phoned in. American Alex Nicol is the Big Band trumpet star who becomes a murder suspect after sharing a spaghetti dinner with a jazz singer he’s just met. He goes home; she turns up dead. The rest of the pic finds him roaming about as amateur dick, solving the crime between gigs. Nothing wrong with that set-up, but with little atmosphere, needless voice-over narration, bad acting, not much action or suspense and mood-killing well-lit corridors, it’s awfully weak tea for the genre. There are, however, three amusing oddities in the thing: attempted poisoning by trumpet mouthpiece (Yikes!); flirtation in rhymed couplets (droll, man, droll); and frame-up via 78 rpm record with one jazz man faking the style of another player so the cops’ll connect the wrong guy with the victim. (Neat-O!) Too bad the trumpet playing, by Pop-Jazz stylist Kenny Baker, is so piercing, high & unpleasant. He sounds like Doc Severinsen showing off his chops with a stratospheric high note on the old Johnny Carson TONIGHT SHOW.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: Fisher gives better noir in MAN BAIT/’52.

No comments: