Alias the Doctor and Hong Kong Confidential

Michael Curtiz's Alias the Doctor (1932) and Edward L. Cahn's Hong Kong Confidential (1958) both played recently on Turner Classic Movies.  Both films are just a bit longer than 60 minutes and demonstrate their experienced directors' ability to tell a story visually and compactly.

Alias the Doctor was one of five films that Curtiz directed in 1932 as he honed his craft after leaving his native Hungary to work in Austria and Germany before coming to America.  Curtiz and his staff, particularly Polish-born art director Anton Grot, made Alias the Doctor a beautiful combination of emotional story-telling and expressionistic visuals.  It stars Richard Barthelmess, a silent star who faltered in the sound era but remained an effectively brooding presence throughout the thirties.  In the Curtiz film he plays a doctor who takes the fall for his adopted brother's medical mistakes and ends up saving his mother's life after he is caught practicing without a license.  Barthelmess, who starred in films such as Way Down East(1920) for director D.W. Griffith, effectively captures the Griffith view of the beauty and simplicity of the rural life, as he eventually returns to farming and the woman he loves. 

Hong Kong Confidential was one of five films that Edward L. Cahn directed in 1958.  it stars Gene Barry, who was also good that year in Samuel Fuller's China Gate, and the film is as impressionistic as the Curtiz is expressionistic, i.e., Hong Kong is created with a handful of actors and a few signs.  Cahn had been directing films since the thirties (his best film, of the ones that I know, is the Earp Western Law and Order, 1932) and could turn out taut melodramas quickly (he had started as an editor).  Barry plays a federal agent who is a lounge singer for cover and is trying to find a kidnapped Middle Eastern prince, whom the commies are holding hostage until the prince's father signs a treaty with Russia. The bad girl is played by the exotic Allison Hayes, who at the time was starring with Barry in the TV show Bat Masterson.

Both the Curtiz film and the Cahn could be considered B films, made to play on double bills with more expensive productions with longer running times.  Curtiz would later graduate to A films such as Casablanca (1942) after he had learned his craft, but Cahn always stuck with B films, working fast and efficiently, well into the 60's.