blanche-2 George Sanders, Wendy Barrie, John Hale, Jerome Cowan and Barry Fitzgerald star in "The Saint Strikes Back," which serves as the debut of George Sanders as Simon Templar. He follows Louis Hayward who starred as The Saint in "The Saint in New York." Simon travels from coast to coast more than once in this story, which concerns a San Franciso crime ring. A police inspector, accused of being part of the crime ring and subsequently discharged, committed suicide. As a result, his daughter, Val (Barrie) has formed a crime organization of her own, hoping to draw out the head of the ring, a man named Waldeman, who is responsible for framing her father.Templar and Inspector Fernak (Hale) work together to find Waldeman -- of course, Fernack thinks Waldeman might actually be Templar.Directed by John Farrow, the script is a little confusing. Not only that, I lost interest in it after the first half hour and had to go back and try to watch it something like three times. I'm not sure why - it could have just been ADHD.Anyway, Sanders made a good Saint - charming, flirtatious, amusing, not completely on the up and up. But I have to admit, much as I loved him, there was something about Louis Hayward as The Saint that was very smooth and charismatic. He made a big impression on me when I saw The Saint in New York a long time ago.Wendy Barrie plays the late police inspector's tough daughter, and she's pretty hard-nosed. Hale and Sanders play well off of one another.I like some other Saint films better, but this one is okay.

gerdeen-1 In this, the second "Saint" film, George Sanders takes over the role of Simon Templar and makes it his own (though Louis Hayward was excellent in the debut of the series). But even Sanders' talents can't make this a good movie. It's too confusing. At just 64 minutes, "The Saint Strikes Back" is packed with unexplained plot twists, huge helpings of comic filler and enough suspicious characters to form two football squads.In many an early detective novel, the writer included a list of characters, major and minor, so the reader could refer back to it when things got murky. Something like that would have helped a lot here. Maybe the characters could have worn name tags, or the actors could have used their real names.To make things worse, the ending is off-hand and anticlimactic, an utter dud. As a mystery fan, I felt cheated, and I rarely feel that way even when I've guessed the solution. Simon Templar might as well have said, "Enough of this case! Let's move on to another." Fortunately, Sanders' later "Saint" films were much better than this.

JohnWelles "The Saint Strikes Back" (1939) is directed by a young John Farrow, who would not only go onto to make film noir classics like "The Big Clock" (1948), "Alias Nick Beal" (1949) and "Where Danger Lives" (1950), but he would win an Oscar for writing the screenplay for Michael Todd's multi-award winning "Around the World in Eighty Days" (1956). So, not only do you have a notable director at the beginning of his career here, but George Sanders in his first role as The Saint, eleven years away from getting the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for "All About Eve" (1950). Also, there are quite a few familiar faces in the picture: Jerome Cowan, Barry Fitzgerald and Jonathan Hale, all of whom would be active in the motion picture business in the forthcoming decade. So, historically, quite an important film. But there's a lot more to it than just recognisable names. The photography, by Frank Redman, is striking, an impressively long shot at the very beginning of the movie in particular, is a cut above the rest. The acting too, is polished and professional.On the other hand, the screenplay, written by John Twist, from Leslie Charteris's "She Was a Lady" (1931), credited in the film as "Angels of Doom", while it moves briskly along, is a tad confusing. For the life of me, I couldn't tell you who did what and why in this film. But this doesn't detract form the enjoyment, and in a perverse way, it enhances it. It's not the best of its kind, but this proto-noir is certainly worth a watch.

Spondonman It's not too bad a b movie, with Sanders, Barrie, Hale, Cowen, Hamilton, Gargan, Fitzgerald and even Willie Best we could be either with Charlie Chan, Moto, the Falcon, Blackie, Holmes or the Saint etc. In other words you get the chance to spend another hour in the company of some old friends, from plain to urbane, murdering and being murdered - always a pleasure in my book.Barrie's a hard-boiled dame out to avenge and clear her framed and dead father, a police detective by planning and carrying out with her coterie a string of underworld assassinations. Which would surely have had the opposite effect! Sanders joins in the fun simply by dancing in the right club in the right place in the right city at the right time with the right lighting falling on both him and the first killer (at the right time!) and killing him.The story and acting's OK, the only gripe I've got is near the end with the hurried and almost laughable discovery of who the evil genius (Waldeman) was - did they almost forget about his relevance in the plot? That said, a solid entry in the series.