The Falcon in Hollywood (1944)

Tom Conway plays the Falcon, Tom Lawrence, who is on vacation in California and at the Hollywood Club track betting on the horses. He bumps into Inspector McBride (Emory Parnell) and Lieutenant Higgins (Frank Jenks), who ask him if he's seen Louie Buchanan (Sheldon Leonard). He hasn't, but shortly thereafter he does. He then meets an actress, Lili D'Allio (Rita Corday) who uses numerology to predict things. When Lili departs to make another bet, Peggy Callahan (Barbara Hale) sits next to him and asks that he pretends to knows her to dodge those same police. After they leave, Tom learns that Peggy used to be a "hoofer" in Buchanan's club back East. Lili returns to find that her purse is missing and the Falcon tries to find Peggy to retrieve it. After seeing her depart in an automobile, he hails a cab, driven by Billie (Veda Ann Borg), who is also a stunt driver that knows her way around the Hollywood studios, a good thing given that they follow Peggy to Sunset Studios. Billie has heard of the Falcon and is very excited to help him.After Tom bluffs his way past the gate guardsman, he hears a shot from Stage 5. Upon entering, he finds a man's body holding a ring. Hearing a sound, he exits the set and enters the wardrobe department, where he meets its head Roxanne Miles (Jean Brooks). He questions her, but is interrupted and departs, running into the guardsman and Billie. He tells them about the body, but when they follow him, he interrupts a film being made by jumping into a fight sequence. The film's director, Alec Hoffman (Konstantin Shayne), is furious and about that time, the film's producer Martin Dwyer (John Abbott) arrives. Dwyer, a successful Broadway producer, is frustrated that his first picture in Hollywood seems to be jinxed; it's running behind schedule. He is also an eccentric, superstitious and always quoting Shakespeare. When Tom explains about the body, he learns from his double's attire that it was Ted Miles, the lead actor who's also Roxanne's husband. Since the body is missing, no one believes Tom that a crime has happened and he is escorted out.While leaving, the Falcon runs into Peggy who pretends not to know him. Evidently, she is known on the set as Loraine Evans and has been forced on the director by an investor who wants her in the picture even though she's just learning. However, Tom does retrieve the purse, and runs into Lili. Apparently she has an appointment with Dwyer herself. After eluding the guardsman, Billie and Tom find their way into the prop room where they find the body. They exit to call Roxanne, informing her that there's been an accident involving her husband. She calls Alec and they go together to find the body, meeting Tom and Billie, who accuses them of the murder. But just then, the watchman arrives, and Billie and Tom escape once again.Billie drives Tom to Miles's apartment where the Falcon finds a picture of Peggy as well as a investment contract for the film signed by Dwyer. He sends Billie to make a duplicate key of the apartment and soon Peggy shows up. Apparently Miles helped Peggy get away from Louie to become an actress. Suddenly a shot is fired through the window. Tom suspects Louie, and that Peggy maneuvered him in front of the window. When Louie enters the window though, it appears Peggy is upset that he's following her. He wants her to return to his club. When the police arrive, Louie exits through the window, and Peggy sneaks out. When Billie arrives with the duplicate key, the police suspect the Falcon is guilty of the murder until Billie finds a bullet hole and Tom tells them about Louie.The police take Tom to Dwyer's office where Dwyer says that Miles was an investor in the picture but needed money to pay off a gambling debt back East. Dwyer didn't have the $50,000 so he gave him a sacred ring from India. The police feel reassured of their presumption that Louie's guilty, but take everyone to Stage 5 to question the others involved. They learn Lili had predicted the murder. They venture to the plaster making room where Tom discovers the murder weapon encased in a bust. He accuses Alec of hiding it there; he admits it and is taken away by the police. Dwyer is upset because they were scheduled for a full day of location shooting the next day.The next morning, Lawrence is called to the set by Roxanne who explains that Alec was held by the police over night, but is innocent, and that his work on the picture is actually quite good despite all the delays. When they hear that the day's shoot has been called off, they return to Dwyer's office just before the police arrive with the murder weapon and information that the gun was registered to Dwyer. But Dwyer produces a police report indicating that he had reported it stolen two weeks ago. About that time, they learn that Hoffman is out on bail and the location shoot is back on.The location shoot is at Lili's place, complete with swimming pool. It turns out that Lili bailed out the director Alec. During the filming of a scene, Peggy's character accidentally shoots Alec with a gun that was supposed to be just a prop with blanks. Shortly thereafter, Tom finds Louie at the house with Peggy and assumes he's captured the culprit. But Louie says he's trying to solve the mystery, knows who did it, and asks them to meet him at the Coliseum the next day. When they do, however, he shows up dying of poison, contained in the sacred ring he's now wearing.It's pretty obvious now who did it.

I switched on TCM and watched "The Falcon in Hollywood," a 1944 entry in the series made after George Sanders, the original lead actor in the role, was replaced by Tom Conway (Sanders' real-life brother, though Conway had changed his last name so he wouldn't find the path to success greased by his brother's coattails), a remarkable little movie that's most noteworthy for its plot premise (spoiler alert!), which is the same as "The Producers" only carefully not played for laughs: an unscrupulous Broadway producer, Martin S. Dwyer (John Abbott), best known for dramas — he did a production of "Hamlet" on the Main Stem and proudly displays a poster for it in his office, along with a bust of Shakespeare, whose dialogue he's fond of quoting — comes to the "Sunset Studios" in Hollywood to make his first film. He picks a musical, Magic Melody, and sells 200 percent of the film to various investors, including John Miles, a playboy with a fortune which he's willing to use part of to bankroll a movie so he can act the lead role even though he's never acted before; Alec Hoffman (Konstantin Shayne), a Stroheim-like director with a string of flops behind him; and Louie Buchanan (Sheldon Leonard), a gambler who was imprisoned in New York for fixing horse races but escaped.Tom Lawrence (Tom Conway), nicknamed "The Falcon," is in Hollywood on a vacation when he encounters movie star Lili D'Allio (Rita Corday), a believer in numerology, at a horse race. He also encounters Peggy Callahan (Barbara Hale, a bit of a surprise to see as a baddie since we're used to her role as Della Street in the 1950's Perry Mason TV series), Louie Buchanan's girlfriend; and Billie Atkins (Veda Ann Borg in a great vehicle for her), a lady cabdriver who zips Tom Lawrence around the L.A. streets (playing themselves instead of being safely represented by the RKO backlot) at near-warp speeds. She explains that she's a stunt driver in movies when she isn't working as a cabbie, and her salty performance makes her a considerably more interesting character than the more openly attractive glamour girls the cast abounds in — Hale, Corday and Jean Brooks (Richard Brooks' first wife and the star of the magnificent Val Lewton production "The Seventh Victim") as Roxanna Miles, costume designer for Magic Melody and John Miles' estranged wife, who has the hots for director Hoffman and hopes to marry him — as does D'Allio. There's a lot of running around the "Sunset" lot and the character of an old gatekeeper who becomes a red herring, but eventually Tom Lawrence figures out the whole plot: producer Dwyer was sabotaging his own production, including murdering his leading man, wounding his director with a supposedly blank-loaded gun (and deliberately exposing the day's film, ruining it so that it couldn't be developed and reveal the truth about the attempted murder of Hoffman), and eventually killing Buchanan with a trick ring from India that contains poison in its metal so that as the wearer has it on, the poison is slowly leaching into his system and ultimately knocking him off.The film has some interesting real-life L.A. locations, including a confrontation at the Coliseum as well as an opening scene at the Hollywood Turf Club at which we meet most of the principals, but the most fascinating thing about it is the "Producers" plot element (Dwyer was sabotaging his own film so he wouldn't have to pay off the investors since either it would never be released at all or would fail) done deadly seriously. It was actually an urban legend on Broadway for decades before Brooks filmed it — indeed, Groucho Marx actually wanted to use it as the plot for "A Night at the Opera" but MGM production chief Irving Thalberg vetoed it.

The Falcon was a character, like The Saint and The Lone Wolf and Boston Blackie, who belonged to the more-American decade of the 1940s. This was the era of individualism in movies, of the private investigator, the lone adventurer, the tough-minded gent who refused to be intimidated by bullies and crime bosses. If the era's screenwriters showed some preoccupation with physical violent potential that led to the denigration of mental toughness in favor of physical courage (during a WWII era), they also produced a few intelligent heroes such as The Falcon. He is a Brit, one who attracts trouble, and women, the way a magnet does iron filings--and who is adept at dealing with both. The part also ably played by his brother George Sanders here is essayed by low-key leading man Tom Conway. The delightful element in this entry in a low-budget fun series is that the producers play the quiet, suave Falcon off Billie", a brassy, talkative and beautiful cabbie entrusted as a role to comedic genius Veda Ann Borg. I find it miraculous that the studio bosses of the time did not notice the potent chemistry between the two characters and make a sequel with Billie as a more streetwise companion to their somewhat-taciturn hero. The other thing that is noteworthy about this story I suggest is that the action which begins at a racetrack with the old 'switched handbag routine" leads to multiple murders at a movie studio; studio-based and later location-based problems with a production headed by Shakespeare-quoting dour John Abbott help to make possible some clever character revelations, and the eventual unraveling of an intricate mystery of motivations, mayhem and secrecies. Among others in the extraordinary "B" film cast are able Sheldon Leonard, lovely Barbara Hale (later of "Perry Mason" TV fame), Rita Corday (aka Paulie Crozet), Konstantine Shayne as a nasty director, Jean Brooks in an intelligent role, and Emory Parnell and Frank Jenks as befuddled policemen.. All are very adequate at doing whatever is asked of them. This is a low-budget production all the way, of course; only localizing it in a movie studio's existing soundstages and sets obscures this fact. The location jaunt is a delight, featuring a swimming pool area and additional zones, and the racetrack sequence is also very ably directed by action-film great Gordon Douglas.. Technical credit should be given to the sound department and to Renie for her fine costumes also. This was in its day a "programmer", a story enlivened by good and by cheap touches of inspiration. But anyone who dares to call it dated needs to look at the post 1972 filmmakers' 99% fizzled blockbusters consisting of inadequate acting, special effects and missed script opportunities, This is the best of the Falcon series, and from my perspective as a writer, that is rather a proud accomplishment in the area of providing entertainment on the cinematic screen.

Fast paced mystery, surprisingly unpredictable. It's nice to see so many locations in Los Angeles of the mid 1940's. Much of the film gives you studio backlot scenes, and behind the camera context, within a Hollywood soundstage. Even so, the story draws you in, and the characters are believable. The film moves at a good pace, and keeps you guessing. Thoroughly enjoyable.