CRIME WITHOUT PASSION

Margo

CRIME WITHOUT PASSION (1934). Produced, written and directed by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur.

Reading a note: ""If you're not here by four o'clock the comedy is finished -- Carmen.' You should have signed it 'Pagliacci.'" -- Lee

A brilliant if arrogant lawyer, Lee Gentry (Claude Rains), is involved with a club entertainer named Carmen (Margo) but thinks he would be better off with the less tempestuous and more patrician Katy (Whitney Bourne). Carmen was once involved with a man named Eddie (Stanley Ridges), and Lee tries to make a big deal out of Eddie's coming to see her just so he can make her the "fall guy" and end his relationship with her. But Carmen is no fool, and things don't work out the way anyone intended. Crime Without Passion has some good acting -- Margo [Lost Horizon] and Rains [The Passionate Friends] are both splendid -- dialogue and situations, but it falls apart by ignoring certain realities of the criminal justice system (even back in those days). Just because someone gets shot doesn't always make it first degree murder. Anyway, the film is brief and minor. Hecht also co-authored the screenplay for Legend of the Lost.

Verdict: Good lead performances can't save a turgid movie. **.

LEGEND OF THE LOST

LEGEND OF THE LOST (1957). Director: Henry Hathaway.

The strange trio of Joe January (John Wayne), Paul Bonnard (Rosanno Brazzi) and Dita (Sophia Loren) trek from Timbuktu into the Sahara desert in search of a lost city and treasure that Bonnard's father went to look for -- although he never returned. There's a sand storm, a big spider that crawls over Loren's body, and not a hell of a lot of action in a dull, leisurely "adventure" film that never catches fire. There's some good art direction when it comes to the lost city itself, but it makes no sense that it wasn't spotted from the air long before! Wayne looks tired and bored. At one point Dita shouts out the hilariously cliched line: "I'm no good -- everything I touch turns rotten!" [The weak script is by Ben Hecht and Robert Presnell Jr.] Hathaway directs as if he was half asleep throughout filming. Sexy Loren's hair cut makes her sort of look like a plucked chicken, not an image you normally associate with the busty Italian actress. Her acting is fine, as is Brazzi's and Kurt Kasznar's in a small role as a policeman. All in all, however, the whole enterprise is just a waste of time.

Verdict: For insomniacs only. *.