Author: womo

Also starring: Sergt John Sweet US Army, Charles Hawtrey
A ‘Land Girl’, an American GI, and a British soldier find themselves together in a small Kent town on the road to Canterbury. The town is being plagued by a mysterious “glue-man”, who pours glue on the hair of girls dating soldiers after dark. The three attempt to track him down, and begin to have suspicions of the local magistrate, an eccentric figure with a strange, mystical vision of the history of England in general and Canterbury in particular.

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Elsa Lanchester made her name as a comedienne and chanteuse in revue and cabaret in 1920s London, as well as an actress in the straight theatre and films. Such was her fame that H. G. Wells wrote three silent film ‘shorts’ especially for her, all made in 1928. It was around that time that she met and married Charles Laughton, whose own stage career was rocketing skyward. Hollywood soon beckoned and although Laughton was to become an international film star, Elsa found herself taking something of a back seat. She did play some excellent parts in early 1930s movies, such as Anne of Cleves in ‘The Private Life of Henry VIII’ with Laughton winning the Oscar for the title role, and she is still remembered even today as ‘The Bride of Frankenstein’ (1935). Her later films included an Oscar-nominated supporting role in ‘Witness for the Prosecution’ (1957) which again starred Charles Laughton.

The one Hollywood film in which she received top billing was a B-picture called ‘Passport to Destiny,’ released early in 1944. Halliwell’s ‘Film Guide’ describes it as “one of the silliest movies ever made, even by the standards of wartime propaganda. The risible narrative makes no sense at all, though Lanchester acts as if her life depended on her performance.”

In brief, Elsa plays a cockney charlady who believes she is protected by a ‘lucky charm’ owned by her late husband (shown in a photo to be Charles Laughton himself!). At the height of the London blitz she sets off to Berlin, armed with her bucket and brush and the ‘lucky charm,’ with the intention of assassinating Hitler. She stows away on a boat across the English Channel and then, by pretending to be deaf and dumb, scrubs her way across Occupied Europe to Germany. Language problems are solved by all the Germans speaking English! Elsa gets a cleaning job in Hitler’s Chancellery (it looks remarkably like a Los Angeles bank) but he’s out at the time so she doesn’t get to assassinate him after all.

There’s a sub-plot involving a good German officer whose girlfriend has been locked up by the Gestapo and it is with his help that Elsa is flown back to London. Back home she discovers that the so-called ‘lucky charm’ was in fact part of a job-lot of glass eyes! It is of course all pure nonsense but is uploaded here for its curiosity value and for Elsa’s top-billed performance.

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Billy Carson (Buster Crabbe) gets the Governor to let Daggett (Kermit Maynard) and his gang escape from prison in hopes that they will lead him to the money they got when they robbed the bank.
Billy and Fuzzy (Al St. John) trail the gang to an old mine, but it looks like Billy’s plan will fail when Daggett is unable to remember where he hid the money.

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During World War II, J. Carrol Naish plays an optometrist who is really a Nazi spy. A book of his that he uses to decode a Nazi spy code is stolen from him while he was walking on the San Francisco waterfront at night. A Nazi agent who comes to meet him (John Carradine) is told of the theft and they team up to try to find the book.

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Directed by Steve Sekely, produced by Arthur Alexander and Alfred Stern, written by Martin Mooney (story and screenplay) and Irwin Franklyn (screenplay), starring John Carradine, J. Carrol Naish, Maris Wrixon, Edwin Maxwell, Terry Frost, John Bleifer, Marten Lamont, Olga Fabian, Claire Rochelle and Billy Nelson.

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Source: “Waterfront (1944 film)” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.. 7 March 2013. Web. 17 March 2013.

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Cry of the Werewolf, also known as Daughter of the Werewolf, is a 1944 film starring Nina Foch, based on a story by Griffin Jay and directed by Henry Levin.

A Romany princess descended from Marie LaTour has the ability to change into a wolf at will, just like her late mother. When she learns that Marie LaTour’s tomb has been discovered, she decides to use her talent to kill everyone who knows the location, because it is a sacred secret that only her people are allowed to know.

Nina Foch as Marie Latour
Stephen Crane as Robert Morris
Osa Massen as Elsa Chauvet
Blanche Yurka as Bianca
Barton MacLane as Lt. Barry Lane
Ivan Triesault as Jan Spavero
John Abbott as Peter Althius
Fred Graff as Pinkie
John Tyrrell as Mac
Robert Williams as Homer
Fritz Leiber as Dr. Charles Morris
Milton Parsons as Adamson

This is often cited as the first film to have a female werewolf in it, but an early short silent called The Werewolf (which is indeed the first werewolf film ever made) used that plot device first, in 1913. Unfortunately this film is now lost.

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