The Saint in New York (1938)

The greatest movie ever!

It's a mild crowd pleaser for people who are exhausted by blockbusters.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.

Louis Haywards only entry as the Saint, this movie has some interesting legends. The biggest one is that Alfred Hitchcock was supposed to come to the United States and direct it. Hitch did not come to the US until 2 years after this was made, so that did not happen.If Hitchcock had come over, I doubt that he would have directed it at RKO Pictures. I mean this movie is good but it is an obvious "B" Picture made to fill out double features on Saturday afternoons. I think the picture would have had a different cast and star and been made by Selznick on a much bigger budget if it were introducing Hitchock.The changes of how this movie was made are not obvious on camera. What is obvious is that Hayward was not going to be the man down the road. He is okay, but George Sanders would be better. Sig Ruman, a talented supporting actor is among a pretty good supporting cast in this one.It did sell a lot of tickets, though I wonder what the main feature was in theaters in 1938? One interesting feature that year was Room Service starring the Marx Brothers and featuring an unknown Lucille Ball. This might have been the under card for that one.

Frustrated with the inability of the police and courts to deal with organized crime, a citizens committee decides to take matters into their own hands. They enlist the help of Simon Templar, aka The Saint, a British amateur crime-fighter not afraid to break the law or take lives to stop crime. Templar's given a list of names of six criminals and sets out to eliminate them one by one, saving a police inspector's life and rescuing a kidnapped child along the way.The first in RKO's "The Saint" series, based around Simon Templar. After this film, Louis Hayward would be replaced by the much more debonair George Sanders. Hayward would return to the character once more in the '50s in a movie made by Hammer, The Saint's Return. This first Saint film is really good. While I prefer George Sanders overall, there's certainly a gritty appeal about Hayward's Saint. He's a full-on vigilante murderer, a predecessor to the Charles Bronson-types we've had in films the last forty years. He's calm, cool, and collected no matter what jam he finds himself in. He's fun to watch. The tacked-on romance is lame and comes out of nowhere but, besides that, this is an entertaining movie.

So it begins, the start of the realisation of Leslie Charteris' literary creation, one Simon Templar, AKA: The Saint. And it's a good start to be sure.Templar here is played by Louis Hayward, all smirky confidence, lithe and deadly, Templar is "hired" by some big city suits to snuff out New York's baddies who have in turn been snuffing out policemen and getting away with it. He's deadly, has a quip on the tongue and laughs in the face of danger, and of course he can charm the ladies as well. He gets into scrapes, meaning we get to enjoy his many escapes from impending death, he does indeed assassinate bad guys; and has us firmly on side in the process, and he crucially has us hankering for more of Charteris' rogue good guy!It's good old fashioned fantastical fun mixed with some rugged 1930s gangster shenanigans. Hooray! 7/10

Simon Templar, the character alluded to as The Saint, is best known through the UK TV series that ran from 1962 to 1969 with quintessential Englishman Roger Moore in the title role; Moore would of course go on to play the equally enigmatic James Bond. Other, later attempts were less convincing, but in spite of the runaway success of the Moore version, we should never forget the original.The Saint began life as a literary character, the creation of Leslie Charteris (1907-93), who in spite of his emphatically English name was half-Chinese and born in Singapore. The original Saint was a much darker character than portrayed by Roger Moore, Ian Ogilvy or (on film) by Val Kilmer; he was a murderer, for that is what we call vigilantes who execute gangsters without due process of law.In this short black and white film we see Louis Hayward as a sardonic avenger brought in by the legal authorities in New York to clean up the city's underworld any way he sees fit. Even making allowance for 1930s gangster films, the script, the plot (including the romantic sub-plot) and most of all the escapes, are silly, but the one-liners more than compensate for that:"you're getting so crooked, you don't even trust yourself" and later after dispatching two hoods: "they've gone to join their fathers, if they had any". However did that one get by the Hays Code?