A Ronda dos Pavores

A meek and mild chess reporter (!) gets involved in a mystery surrounding a valuable stolen chess set and murder aboard a train.

In the Land of Oz, Jack Haley's a great Tin Man; in the land of screen detectives, he's a bust. His Larry Elliot is neither funny nor attention-getting. Instead, Elliot is basically feckless and in a dull, unamusing way. I don't know what the screenwriters were aiming for, but whatever, it didn't come off. The result is even odder since Mainwaring and Shane were two of the best scripters in the business. The mystery part too, sort of comes and goes, before collapsing into a badly staged climax. Then too, where does the title come from since there is no scary part.

The one compensation is catching Detour's (1945) hard-case Ann Savage doing a 180, playing instead a sweetly supportive leading lady. Wouldn't have believed it without seeing it. And what's the deal with Barton MacLane as the tough desperado. He's wasted in what looks like a tacked-on role, maybe to boost marquee appeal. Too bad.

Anyway, this is one of the least engaging of the amateur detective genre of which there were many at the time. In fact, the whole thing appears tacked together in a hurry-up editing room.

The TIN MAN.. Jack Haley with his Massachusetts accent is the big name in this one from Paramount, 1945. It's listed on Moonlight Movie Channel as "Scared Stiff", but the opening title card says "Treasure of Fear". Haley is Larry Elliot, the bumbling reporter that keeps making bad decisions in his reporter's stories. Haley should have demanded a re-write of the script... this was a couple years AFTER wizard of oz, so clearly he had star-power from that. Co-stars Ann Savage. This story is all over the place. and the bad guys keep saying "that's the dame, See? and give us the loot, See? i guess humphrey bogart started that. or maybe Ed Robinson. skip this one. It's a no -go. yecch. directed by Frank McDonald, who seems to have appeared about the same time as talkies did in hollywood. Pass on this one.

The Oz Tin Man Jack Haley plays a soft daydreaming reporter who continually irritates his editor by missing out on real news stories. He keeps his job because he is the nephew of the newspaper boss. His main passion is chess and by chance he ends up in a place that houses the very valuable jeweled chess pieces of Kublai Khan. There is a dead body and an armed killer and intrigue where he is forced to stay. But rather than just running away from all that he is more anxious to get to a grape harvest 40 miles away to cover a routine story for the newspaper.

All the passengers of a Greyhound bus are forced to stay at a boarding house and winery combined while a dead body found on the bus is being investigated. The boarding house is home to eccentric twin brothers who each own their respective halves of a valuable chess set. Among the passengers who have to stay there is a boy genius who is also a prankster. In a crowded room he declares that there is a murderer among them while they all have to wait for the sheriff to arrive.

This lighthearted Paramount mystery is full of incident. There is a hilarious scene at the end when a bunch of crooks are retrieved from a wine vat. The film could have been a lot funnier with the right cast but the mystery element is interesting enough. It's just that Jack Haley and the background music is a little too overmuch at times. But I would watch this again and also 'One Body Too Many' (1944) which is another of Jack Haley's comic mysteries.

The plot of this movie has a forgetful chess editor going off to cover a grape festival. His uncle, who runs the paper, hopes this will turn him into a normal reporter (When he covered the funeral of the mayor he failed to mention a woman's suicide over the grave, nor does he mention the riot that occurred at the chess match he was covering when he was called away for the grape festival assignment.) In typical fashion he takes the wrong bus to the wrong place and ends up mixed up in with a gang of wanted killers.

This was the first time I had ever knowingly watched a Jack Haley movie other than the Wizard of Oz. While I thought his performance was good I absolutely hated his character. No one could be that stupid and so unaware of what was going on around him. He's the type of person that you could set on fire and he'd pay it no mind. Its completely unbelievable. It ruins what should otherwise be an excellent little film that has a good B cast, some chills and thrills.

If you're curious you could try it, perhaps Haley's character won't run you the wrong way, as for me this goes into the no need to repeat pile.

Alas, a combination of weak direction and impossibly labored acting from the lead, Jack Haley, has firmly put the skids under a very promising script. True, despite Haley's strenuous efforts to undermine credibility, a number of sequences do succeed, particularly the action spots (such as the revolving wall and the slippery vat) in which director Frank McDonald suddenly comes to life. Otherwise he seems helpless to stem Haley's inveterate mugging. The support players are likewise overawed or outdistanced by the "star". Only Walter Baldwin, Lucien Littlefield, George E. Stone, Eily Malyon and Dick Curtis (in that order) manage to create believable yet interesting characters. Even the normally raucous Veda Ann Borg is incredibly subdued.

By the humble standards of the Two Dollar Bills (the industry nickname for producers Bill Pine and Bill Thomas, who almost always worked in tandem), production values seem reasonably high. Not that it matters.