The Queen Stole Her Crown

I don't know why but I expected more from a movie called Queen of Blood. This 1966 American film, produced by Roger Corman and directed by Curtis Harrington, owes a lot to a Soviet film called Mechte Navstechu, including its screenplay and its best footage, which is ripped right from that film. But Queen of Blood does have Basil Rathbone in one of his last roles and Dennis Hopper in one of his first along with the always entertaining, and frequently underrated, John Saxon.

We meet Saxon in some lunar office space chatting up a coworker (Judi Meredith). The two go to lunch, where they run into Dennis Hopper and a friend, before they see a broadcast from Basil Rathbone, who plays Dr. Faraday, leader of this space exploration institution.

Around this time, we also start seeing footage from the Soviet movie of an alien ship. All the footage from Mechte Navstrechu is pretty gorgeous and ominous, filled with darkness and lurid colour.

The Sci Fi business of the humans investigating a crashed alien ship is developed decently enough and the plot turns out to be about an alien blood-sucker, played by a compellingly exotic Florence Marly. But mostly I came away from the movie wanting to see the Soviet original.

Both Rathbone and Hopper seem pretty checked out. For different reasons, of course.

Queen of Blood is available on Amazon Prime.

Twitter Sonnet #1582

The early rabbit thwarts the trusty knife.
At dusk, a dozen miles stretched ahead.
They gathered works for tea from flowers rife.
Remembered films would put the vamp to bed.
The bank was softer than the magma needs.
A sleeping dragon dreamt of vagrant beers.
Invention chained a row of random beads.
The dusty glen has cooled the demon's tears.
A flying nose rewrote the daisy bed.
With many nails the fingers painted touch.
It happens fate was little like we read,
Contracted hats were always billed as such.
For dames of green the fields of red were tilled.
With brews of black the hefty cups were filled.

Education in Pearls and Watches

Ginger Rogers escapes from a reform school and finds herself accepted into a secret boarding school for pickpockets in the first part of 1946's Heartbeat. This entertaining first act of the film also stars Basil Rathbone as the headmaster of the school who guides his clutch of thieves with a firm but elegant hand. The second and third acts of the film are an entertaining enough romantic comedy, though.

Rogers plays Arlette whose first target when she's out on the streets turns out to be another famously elegant actor, Adolphe Menjou, whose pearl stick pin she nabs somehow by rolling into him on the crowded trolley. I like to think she caught it with her mouth--at any rate, it's the only way I can think of.

But he catches up with her in an amusing scene in a movie theatre where he allows the dialogue from the film currently playing, about a thief being sentenced at court, to do the talking for him. But instead of turning Arlette in to the cops, he enlists her as a pickpocket for his own purposes, to steal a watch from the handsome young Pierre de Roche (Jean-Pierre Aumont).

She poses as the niece of Menjou's colleague and, of course, Arlette winds up stealing more than Pierre's watch. Rogers is sweet and charming as ever, amusingly off-balance yet canny for most of the film, and Jean-Pierre Aumont is handsome with fetchingly quick mannerisms, a worthy romantic lead. But the conflict the writers were obliged to contrive for the two in the middle of the film manifests abruptly and never with any satisfactory explanation, vaguely being put down to Pierre's class consciousness by a supporting character, but Pierre himself never says anything to support this.

Melville Cooper, the Sheriff of Nottingham from the Errol Flynn Robin Hood, also has an amusing supporting role as Pierre's freeloading friend who briefly desires to marry Arlette. I honestly would like to have seen that though, even more, I'd have liked a full movie about Arlette at Basil Rathbone's school for thieves. Heartbeat is available on Amazon Prime.