The 13th and final film in the RKO series
with George Sanders and then Tom Conway and it is pretty standard by the
numbers. It was ready to pack its bags and leave town. The Falcon walks in
on a dead man, gets conked over the head, wakes up right before the cops
show up, is about to get arrested and escapes and has to solve the case.
It's been done a thousand times before and is just lazy writing. In these
old B films murders are always splashed across the headlines in dramatic
fashion like they so rarely happen. How times have changed. There are just
too many today. It would fill the paper. The Falcon is back with his sidekick,
Goldie Locke (Edward Brophy), and they are once again going on vacation.
They need to stop that because a murder always gets in the way. They don't
even get out of the city this time.
They see a woman (Madge Meredith) being kidnapped and put a stop to it. The
bad guys are looking for a formula - all on one piece of paper - to create
synthetic diamonds of great quality. Said inventor is killed, the Falcon
blamed and the woman entrusts the Falcon to get the formula to a man in Miami.
And so it goes with a gang trying to get their hands on it. Conway was to
go on to play Bulldog Drummond a few times as well as a number of other B
films and then TV. The Falcon series did have a little more life in it with
three films produced by something called Falcon Pictures starring John Calvert
with a name change. Not sure if they are available.
I noticed that Madge Meredith had her own run in with the law a year
after this film. She was sentenced to jail for complicity in beating, kidnapping
and robbing a group of men. In 1951 though the case was looked into again
and they concluded that she had been framed and Gov Earl Warren (later on
the Supreme Court) commuted her sentence. She went back to her career and
lived till 2017. That would have made a better film than this.
