Raw Deal (1948)

In the book, the Japanese followed up by intercepting the US Atlantic Fleet as it traversed the Strait of Magellan using a couple of long-range submarines.

More Kung Fu Flu Films:

Singapore.

I don’t care how many times Mr. Kung as been to the Orient, I’m not sure he’s going to get much out of this film. Despite supposedly being set in Singapore, this is surely “Singapore studio Hollywood backlot” except for some fly-over stock footage at the start of the film.

These are the types of films, I swear, we could do better writing in a half-hour brain-storming session. This is stock Hollywood shlock that shows minimal effort on all parts, including the actors.

But I stayed with it just to see. Thankfully it’s only 79 minutes long which helped. Fred MacMurray plays a diamond smuggler, Matt Gordon. He meets Ava Gardner pre-war. Loses her mid-war. Finds her again after-war.

Ava Gardner is a complete bore in this. I confess I haven’t seen a lot of Ava Gardner films but her beauty alone can’t disguise the fact that, at least in this one, she can’t act a lick. All she does in this one is speak softly and try to look like either a wounded dove or a love-struck doormat.

MacMurray is all wrong for this as well. But with the lame plot, no actor could have fixed this one. The whole movie is based on Matt Gordon coming back after the war and trying to recover the $250,000 worth of pearls he had stashed in his hotel room. He could have grabbed them at any time but they string this along for no particular reason.

In the meantime, this familiar hotel where he met Linda Grahame (Ava Gardner) brings back all kinds of memories. We get a flashback early on in this film and I confess I got a little lost. Gordon is saying goodbye to Grahame as she leaves on a boat. Because the Japanese are on the way? That’s what I thought at the time. But then later she is apparently killed as Gordon and Grahame are running around the city as it is being bombed.

Admittedly, I missed something or misinterpreted something. But I couldn’t help at the time seeing the opening flashback as a gratuitous flashback.

Anyway, to lower the film’s IQ further, it turns out the Linda Grahame wasn’t killed in the Jap bombing of Singapore. Gordon discovers her post-war in the hotel the two of them used to frequent. She’s now married to another man and doesn’t remember him or her own past.

The IQ slips further when the police inspector pretty much lets MacMurray go, recognizes that he is in love with Grahame, and even his MacMurray’s plane returned to the airfield when Grahame shows up, having suddenly recovered her memory and realizing she is in love with Gordon. Of course, Grahame’s current husband is understanding.

It’s a mess. I'm sure the real city is much more interesting and charming, but you won't find that here.

I’m not specifically looking for a film so that Mr. Flu Manchu can relive old times. But I ran across 1949’s Malaya with Spencer Tracy, James Stewart, and Sydney Greenstreet. What could go wrong?

Just about everything. This is perfunctory movie, at best. They were going through the motions. Nothing made sense. During WWII, the U.S. government agrees to go along with a plan hatched by a journalist, John Royer (Jimmy Stewart), to smuggle all (or most) of the hidden rubber that is said to exist deep in the jungles, hidden from the Japanese occupiers of British Malaya.

Somehow Royer and Carnahan (Spencer Tracy) would almost single-handedly coordinate all this under the nose of the Japanese. The U.S. would also bring a gigantic freighter to haul away the rubber (as well as bringing $1,000,000 in gold to pay for it).

I can see a small commando raid going in and maybe stealing a couple coconuts. But a project this size, led by a journalist, deep inside Japanese-controlled territory seems ludicrous.

And even if they brought that rubber back with them in the one ship, wouldn’t that just be a drop in the bucket? But this film treats it like it would be a major breakthrough.

This is really awful from start to finish but I stayed with it. First off, there was no reason for Jimmy Stewart to even be in this. Spencer Tracy would have been enough. It makes no sense to have both. It’s a great example of completely amateurish film making. The script is a mess of inconsistencies and things that don’t make sense.

Never does this become even a heist film, which it could have been at the very least. I’m not sure what it is even after watching it. One reviewer says it all:



The search continues for a film set in southern Asia that doesn’t suck.

Yes. But it was very well camouflaged. Oh, brother.

Yes, The Bridge on the River Kwai would be the kind of film I'm looking for...or even half as good. Malaya was on the about-as-good scale as the regular flu morality rate: 0.1% as good.

You’d need a bean counter to do the math. But I wonder if you could load enough raw rubber into a submarine to cover the cost of gas just getting there and, not to mention the cost of taking a sub off the front line which could be sinking tens of thousands of tons of enemy shipping.

Much better would be a commando raid to smuggle some Malayan scientist who had perfected a synthetic rubber formula or something like that. At least that would be believable.

Some of those U-boats made it both ways, providing Germany with needed supplies.  They had some large U-boats, as did Italy, some of which were in fact supply boats.  (The Germans used them to supply regular submarines at sea to keep them active longer.)  The US, as far as I know, had no non-combat submarines, though the quality of US torpedoes for the first couple of years made their use somewhat limited.  (The Germans had the same problem, much of it caused by the difficult conditions their U-boats operated under.  They finally fixed them by copying torpedoes from a captured British U-boat -- the Seal, I think.)

I thought I recognized Carlson and checked up on him.  He was in a few monster movies, including the main hero in The Creature from the Black Lagoon.

Let me tell you about a movie that is not quite the worst one I’ve ever watched all the way through. But by far it is the worst heist movie I’ve ever seen. It’s so bad, they don’t actually even complete the heist.

Hell Bound features John Russell (mainly an actor in Westerns, I guess…he’s terrible in this) as the mastermind of a heist. Jordan means to steal a quarter million dollars worth of drugs from a Navy hospital ship.

This movie is truly bizarre. It starts (interestingly) with a short movie made by Jordan which he is showing to a mobster. He needs this mobster’s money and resource to help put together the heist. This short movie is highly detailed — and actual enactment — of how the heist will go.

The plan doesn’t even pass the smell test. Depending on a guy to overdose on insulin so that an ambulance is sent for whereby the nurse (in on the scheme) smuggles the drugs off the boat? Making sure the other accomplice is onboard because he is spotted and picked up at sea (his story being that his boat went down)?

Anyway, you know everything is going to go wrong, and it does. But the really odd bit is  the strange and confused vibe from the film makers. The movie is called “Hell Bound.” At one point Jordan (the ringleader) introduces himself to someone as “Mr. Natas.” Okay. We get it. Or do we? It's such a cluster-f*** of film making.

Maybe that explains the stupidity of the plot. Here you have a movie opening with a plan that is to be so well-coordinated that the mastermind of the plan even made a film to sketch out how it would all go.

But then everyone he recruits for his team he bullies and otherwise abuses. (One guy he basically beats the hell out of until he agrees to become part of the plan.) That is how you’re going to have a tightly-run Mission-Impossible-like heist? It’s so incredibly stupid that you become hooked somewhat to see if the ending can be a sort of crescendo of inanity.

The strange thing is, the ending is the best part. The idiot, Jordan, is there at the docks waiting to see the culmination of his plan. But things go very wrong. The guy who takes the insulin in order to really be sick (instead of just feigning it) actually dies. This was to provide the excuse for an ambulance being sent for and the drugs being picked up from the sick man’s room and smuggled out. Well...I guess that part still could have worked. They did need an ambulance.

The other accomplice on the boat (and this is truly hilarious) is dragged off down the gangplank under arrest. But he was supposed to have taken advantage of a distraction (a fake fire) to steal the drugs and them leave them in the room of the sick guy. But this guy (and we know this even beforehand….the ringleader also knows this beforehand) is already hooked on drugs. And he’s just come down from a high so now he’s itching for more. So instead of going with the plan, he’s so in need of drugs that he runs madly to try to get to the drugs to use them for himself. He’s easily caught.

So there you have the ringleader maybe twenty yards away watching the culmination of his plan. He sees the sick guy is not sick but is dead and is being carried off the boat on a stretcher, his body covered by a tarp. The other onboard accomplice is being led away in cuffs by a couple officers from the ship. The ambulance does pull up on time but this aspect was botched as well when Jordan (previously) had knifed the chick who was supposed to play the part of the nurse. Why is he knifing at the last minute members of his highly-coordinated height team? Your guess is as good as mine.

Anyway, the chick who replaces her as the nurse basically points out Jordan to the cops at the dock. Thus ensues what is actually an interesting and well-filmed chase seen that mostly happens in a junkyard. It becomes a different (and good) movie from about 7 minutes.

This one is so bad I can’t recommend it even for the “so bad it's good” aspect. But if you’re a fan of Film Noir, you could be amused by some of the dumbest and clumsiest dialogue ever put to film. This has “amateur-hour” written all over it and John Russell, in particular, is terrible as the lead. His strange performance may also be the only reason to watch this.

Stuart Whitman has a small role as the ambulance driver who is not in on the plan. But he’s part of the two-person crew that includes the nurse who is in on the plan. She’s a babe (she really is) and, of course, they fall in love. This movie can be found on Amazon Prime Video. Please don’t find it. But if you do, let me know what you think of it.