Hola amigos, been a long time since I last rapped at ya. I posted a page for Mal & Dee and then immediately after I set up some files for a reprint project. Then, I headed out to San Francisco yet again and caught a lot of Giants games and saw some nature and rocked out to some bands (including a reunited Lost Goat, a favorite of this blog. I did not get much drawing done. I worked on a Mort Inkingbot strip but I pretty much was on the go most of the time so when I did sit down to doodle, I was exhausted, and there was no point to putting a bad finish to a low brow concept and then having to redo it when I got home. And when I got home, I had a lot of work stuff to rush into, and I was pretty much exhausted most of the time outside of work.

So what have I been doing? Catching up on some comic book reading and movie watching. And some actual book reading. I have a stack of comics that I’ve just accumulated in my subscription box and picking up in the dollar bin; like half a series of this and that, that I finally got around to. I also got around to the stack of DVDs I’ve picked up…over the YEARS. Yeah, when I head out to SF, there’s a big record store with a huge DVD section and in there is a Film Noir section that’s pretty great, and I check it against streaming sites to see what is or isn’t public domain and pick up what I feel is necessary (or a great deal). Sometimes the transfers of these old movies aren’t any better than what’s on YouTube; major studios literally had a print-on-demand DVD-R setup for a lot of classics from the 1940s & 1950s. I have some I bought sealed! And then I find some of these movies on Tubi or elsewhere and “I could have waited instead of this impulse buy, so I could write about it and 3 people read it, what a waste.” I hope that’s not the case, I generally enjoy the movies I pick up and talk about here. Which, I hope IS the case, with my shiny new blu-ray from the Criterion Collection!

Let’s get to it!

What did you watch? The 1944 paranoid spy ring thriller Ministry of Fear.

Is this a prequel to the movie 1984? Like the various Ministries get their own movie? No.

You’re right, a proper prequel would be called “1983.” …Ministry of Fear stars Ray Milland and was directed by Fritz Lang, frequents subjects on this blog, so I had to check it out. It turns out I had seen this movie already, or part of it, but hadn’t reviewed it yet. So, here we go: it starts off with Milland waiting out the clock in an insane asylum, he has been sentenced to recover for a convoluted ‘mercy killing’ of his terminally ill wife in what might’ve been a suicide she committed because he didn’t have the guts to do it himself, or he did do it and then makes up a story that he couldn’t go through with it and so his wife…you know… Anyway, he’s about to get on a train to London. The train station attendant encourages Milland to visit a fair across the way while waiting for the train.

Milland steps over and goes to a clairvoyant tent to get his palm read. He says just the right thing in asking for his palm to be read, and the clairvoyant tells him to go to the booth with the cake-weighing contest and guess a specific weight. So, he does, and he wins the cake. As this happens, Dan Duryea (another frequent guest on this blog) pulls up and seems disappointed that Milland has the cake. Everyone is like, “oh wait, that guy had the right weight,” but Milland isn’t going along. It’s his cake, now! He gets on the train, as does an elderly blind man. The train stops and it’s lights out for passengers because the Germans are flying overhead and bombing the countryside. The blind man conks Milland on the head with his cane and grabs the cake and runs off into a dilapidated stone house, shooting at Milland. Milland must really want this cake, maybe he is insane. The Germans fly overhead and blow up the stone house and the ‘blind’ man inside it. All Milland can recover is the handgun, with a broken handle.

Milland hires a private detective in London to help him scope out the organization that hosted the fair, “The Mothers Of Free Nations.” They visit the office of MOFN and an Austrian refugee brother & sister pair (Willi & Carla) are amused by the cake story. Willi takes Milland to meet others from MOFN in hopes to find the clairvoyant lady from the first reel, and is introduced to a bombshell blond who was not the same lady. And Dan Duryea is there also! The group holds a seance, and when the lights go down, Duryea is shot and killed. The other attendees think it’s Milland, and Willi offers to stand by while they get the police. Willi goes along with Milland in pretending to be knocked out so Milland can flee.

Milland’s private eye friend is missing and also their office is ransacked, and serious looking men are milling about obviously looking for Milland. Milland calls Carla, who brings him to an used bookstore, where they hide out. There are a lot of books from a psychiatrist about Naziism. 

Some things happen that cause Milland to think that everyone in this group are Nazi spies. Hold that thought though, the bookshop owner wants Milland and Carla to deliver a case of the psychiatrist’s books to a hotel suite, but there’s no one by that name there. Milland opens the case, and it’s a bomb. He barely survives the explosion, watched by the police in a hospital, with Carla nowhere to be seen. He explains his conspiracy to them from the beginning, so they take him to the site where the blind guy was exploded, and after a lot of sifting, find the other part of the gun handle that Milland had been holding on to, as well as…the cake! Wow! Within the remains of the cake was microfilm, full of plans for the Allies to fight off the Nazis. And the psychiatrist was an advisor to a security council, so he must have leaked it.

The cops give Milland a lot of leeway into this investigation, taking him to the tailor with the same name of the person whose name was on the hotel room. It turns out…it was Dan Duryea! Still alive! He was sneaking more microfilm into suits to be worn by other Nazi spies, with the next customer delivery…TO WILLI!

Wow, that’s…an adventure. Then what? Aaaaa I think the Allies defeat the Axis powers and WW2 eventually ends.

Was it noir? No.

Was it good? Um, yes, though I don’t think it’s one of the better Lang movies. It’s a little deeper than the other man-fighting-the-Nazis adventure, Man Hunt (1941). Lang fled Germany despite claims to head their film propaganda before the war started, so Hollywood a good vehicle to tell stories of the average person getting used and fighting back against those tainted by Nazi ideology.

That said, as exciting as some of the hunt Milland goes on to get to the bottom of the scheme, it’s just as silly. Such an odd coincidence that he sets things off by saying just the right thing to the palm reader and now he’s involved in espionage. The cops are also generous in letting him lead the search for the cake back in the countryside, something I doubt they’d let a raving lunatic do after found in an exploded apartment. Not one of the better stories but still an enjoyable adventure.

Anything about the cast? Marjorie Reynolds plays Carla. She had a long career. I’ve seen her on Svengoolie thanks to an Abbott & Costello movie, The Time of Their Lives, one of the few where Abbott & Costello don’t work together as a comedy team. The psychiatrist is played by Alan Napier, who was Alfred on the Batman TV show. Willi is played by Carl Esmond, an actor from Austria who had moved to Hollywood in the late 1930s. He was cast in a role as a german pilot for a film and started receiving threats from German nationals, so I think he decided it be best to stay in America.