Diagonaldi Very well executed

Cathardincu Surprisingly incoherent and boring

Kodie Bird True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.

Rio Hayward All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Robert J. Maxwell It's early 1942. Jimmy Stewart is a reporter recently returned from Southeast Asia, soured because his brother was killed on Wake Island. He's enlisted by the feds to smuggle three hidden hordes of rubber out of Malaya, but he needs the help of a former companion, Spencer Tracey, whom he sent up the river by selling a scandalous newspaper story. The fed arrange for Tracey's release.Tracey is ensconced in Alcatraz. He's brought to the warden's office and meets Stewart for the first time since his betrayal. "Well, well, well!", says Tracey, all smiles, as he walks up to Stewart and punches him on the jaw. Still smiling, Tracey cradles Stewart's face lovingly in his hands and says, "I didn't really let that one go, you know," and then pinches his cheek like a baby.That pretty much sets the tone of the rest of the picture. Fifteen minutes with the embittered and determined Stewart and the rest of the film belongs to Tracey. It isn't that Stewart's performance is in any way inadequate. But his role has little in the way of dimension. He's played cynical and unpleasant types before, up to and including "Rear Window." This is an extension of the same character.Tracey is marvelous. Here, he's a man of impulsive action and pragmatism, selfish. And he was only one year away from playing the sentimental role of the "foxy grandpa" in "Father of the Bride." If this had been made in 1942 instead of 1949, it could easy have been a cheap flag-waver. The Japanese -- Richard Loo, a Hawaiian-born Chinese -- are still treacherous and a little fanatic. The plot is a thing of shreds and patches. Stewart and Tracey are going to save the US rubber industry by smuggling out a couple of boat loads of rubber -- one hundred and fifty thousand tons carted along a small river in small boats, without the Japanese army of occupation noticing the strange activity.But it's not nearly as bad as it might sound. The direction is efficient, the performances alone would save the film if nothing else did, and the dialog has some keen edges to it, even during dull scenes of Tracey and Valentina Cortese murmuring to each other about their mutual love. Sidney Greenstreet adds a flaccid stability. And Richard Loo is hilarious as Colonel Tomura.A few feet of location footage aside, as well as some shots of PT boats I swear was lifted from "They Were Expendable," it was all shot on the MGM lot. All the white men wear white suits. (No pith helmets, and I wept at their absence.) Tracey and Stewart hire the usual movie-style riff raff in colorful and raggedy outfits to man the boats that will carry the smuggled rubber.Enjoyable. Not the stupid plot but its execution.

vincentlynch-moonoi Spencer Tracy plays a smuggler who is released from prison to help Jimmy Stewart sneak a huge rubber crop out of Japanese-held Malaya during WW II. They sneak into the country and meet up with Sydney Greenstreet (in his last film), who helps them recruit a group of men to assist, including Gilbert Roland. They use money and force to purchase all the available rubber, but the Japanese find out and ambush the last shipment. Who will live to complete the mission? I don't like the first 18 minutes of this film because I don't care much (at least usually) for film noir...and although this is not a gangster flick, the beginning is definitely noir. It is nice, within that portion of the film to see Lionel Barrymore, and nice also to see John Hodiak, both of whom do what they need to do to advance the plot.Some people don't like the Jimmy Stewart character we meet here, because it's not the nice Jimmy Stewart we all came to like. Here's he's a rather cynical newspaper reporter, and he does fine in the part.About 20 minutes into the film he teams up with Tracy, fresh out of Alcatraz for the heist of the rubber from Malaysia. If you are a fan of Tracy, and have seen his pics from 1945 to 1948, you know he was aging fast, and here, in 1949, he is surprisingly older...and it's not makeup.The Old Dutchman is played by Sydney Greenstreet, who was suffering from diabetes and a form of kidney disease at the time. This was his last film before he retired; he died a little over 4 years later. Here he plays the owner of a café of sorts, in a role not dissimilar to the one he played in "Casablanca", although here he is sweatier and dirtier.Richard Loo plays Japanese Colonel Tomura. Gilbert Roland is one of the men who helps Tracy and Stewart. John Hodiak is an FBI agent. Valentina Cortese is good as Luana, Tracy's girlfriend.This is not a great film like "Casabalnca", and it was clearly not a film into which MGM invested great sums of money. But, it's a different kind of WWII film, and as such, a welcome change. The action is pretty decent, and it does make some sense. Tracy is very good here, Stewart is reasonably good, and there's a degree of suspense since you have a pretty good idea that one of the good guys is going to die before the end of the picture. But, which one? Tracy and Steward fans will want this on their DVD shelf. It's on mine.

deschreiber Even with a better cast, this would not have been much of a film. On the surface it looks like it will be some sort of action film, with spies going into enemy territory to steal, or rather negotiate on the black market for, essential supplies. But there's little intrigue and very little action. Most of the scenes are simply characters sitting in chairs talking to one another. The surprise at the very end of the film is so far-fetched as to undercut the credibility of nearly everything else. The love story involves two people who have no reason to be attracted to one another. There are elements of Casablanca here, set in a country occupied by the enemy, a nightclub owner consorting with an enemy officer, the gambling being fixed by the owner to pay someone he wants to do a favour to, and a cynic acquiring higher ideals; but it's all a very pale imitation of Casablanca. Some comments suggest that there is something "noirish" about the film. Well. it's in black and white, but it does not have the requisite sense of evil and foreboding.But the biggest failure is in the casting. James Stewart is supposed to play a sour, hard-bitten, cynical operator who finds a little patriotism late in life. But Stewart can't help coming across as a nice guy. He may speak the tough words, but the tone is wrong. His eyes shift in that self-deprecating way of his, he carries himself in that modest way of his, and he just doesn't come off as the character he is supposed to be playing. When his partner is punching someone over and over in the face, Stewart looks repelled by the brutality. Spencer Tracy is probably even worse in his role as a tough jailbird who is let out of Alcatraz to help in the mission. He looks old; his figure is dumpy, his way of moving is slow. He threatens a man, but he doesn't seem very scary. (DeNiro would know how to do that.) He is the romantic interest of a nightclub singer who is crazy over him, yet he's way too old for her and doesn't have anything of the sort of animal magnetism that might make him believable as her lover. In fact, to be honest, there were moments when Tracy looked like he couldn't act. The Japanese have been beating him, trying to get him to talk; Tracy frowns a little but registers no pain, no discomfort, no fear; he shakes it off and then looks comfortable. When he dumps his girlfriend to keep her safe, his face shows nothing.I forced myself to watch to the end because I have an interest in Malaya. On its own terms, this movie would have lost me long before the mid-way point.

frank_olthoff (Version reviewed is the 90-minute German-language showing on ARD on July 5, 2001.)There are two rather unbecoming aspects about this movie, one being its blunt nationalism, the other one its odd casting. Where you would have expected, say, William Holden as the daring journalist and, well, Humphrey Bogart as the cynical hotshot, you get Jimmy and Spence. It's not that they don't act well, but the rôles just don't seem to fit. What a difference with handsome Mexican Gilbert Roland who is chosen perfectly (as Romano).Journalist Royer (Stewart) gets his rival/friend Carnaghan (Tracy) out of prison with help from official sides (fine thesping by John Hodiak) for the good of the nation, that is, to haul all possible rubber out of British, but Jap-occupied, Malaya for the United States. Of course, the European land-owners give all assistance possible to support the sacred case, including a voluntary beating that Ian MacDonald gets from Tracy. America's raw nationalism was curiously carried right into the German translation: dubious Bruno Gruber (played by "Charlie Chan" Roland Winters) is named Marty Robber (or so) in German dubbing version of 1955, because a badman just couldn't have a German name to German audiences... This should be worth a correction, although the forgery effect is not as high as in the original 1952 dubbing of "Casablanca", that was corrected in a new version as late as in 1968. (Stewart, by the way, is synchronized well by Eckart Dux this time, not by regular Siegmar Schneider.)Although film's humour is well-measured, it cannot conceal, but rather contributes to, the dare-devil chauvinism, four years after the war ended. Tracy played something of a contrary rôle in "Bad Day at Black Rock", as regards the U.S. relationship to the Japanese.There's a lot of epigonism of "Casablanca", though not as much as in its immediate successors, in "Malaya". We have Richard Loo's Col. Tomura marching into the bar like Maj. Strasser; Italy's Cortese in the European female part (the story might have done without her, were there not some nice dialogues with Tracy); and the wonderful Sydney Greenstreet, who somewhat resumes his Senor Ferrari rôle (that parrot of his is a blue one, I suppose).Despite this emulation, Frank Fenton's screenplay has something interesting about it that makes this movie agreeable after all. But it wouldn't have taken the famous leading players, close to miscasts, for something that appears like an MGM "B" production to me. - Worst thing is, I couldn't spot DeForest "Bones" Kelley anywhere around, although he is said to be there.