The Saint (97) 24/5/21

[Aclea]

I like Graeme Revell's score as well, but it's one of those yes/no/maybe films for me too. The best Saint film to date is the first:



"It's my job to catch men who break the law. Why, if an archangel came down here to cure a leper and parked on the wrong side of the street, I'd have to give him a ticket."
"Yeah, but a saint ought to get his ticket fixed."

Originally intended as a big budget Fredric March-John Cromwell vehicle and briefly mooted as Alfred Hitchcock's first American film before RKO decided to go with contract director Ben Holmes, 1938's The Saint in New York is the closest to Leslie Charteris' original character as the movies or TV ever got. Less a benign Robin Hood, he's a man who seeks his thrills by taking on criminals from the wrong side of the law (that is when he's not starting revolutions in South America), here moving from stealing from them to killing them as a vigilante hired by both the police commissioner and an anti-crime committee of big businessmen. As he boasts, despite having "an Englishman's aversion to arrest," he enjoys being careless and he really loves his work, whether he's gleefully playing with Charles Halton's crooked mouthpiece like a cat with a cornered wounded mouse or taunting Sig Rumann's mobster with a penchant for sending underlings who've outlived their usefulness into the other room for a moment. Part punk, part poet, it helps that Hayward's gifted with such great dialogue that even Paul Guilfoyle's hoodlum (a real gem of a performance) is as impressed as he is confused by his eloquence and sang froid: "Just like out of a book. I never heard such talk."

You can see the final twist coming by the halfway point but, surprisingly for a post-Code film, it inhabits very morally murky waters getting there. The police not only condone his actions but give him his gun back when he forgets it on a car seat and exhibit a wonderfully practical sense of cynicism that feels more pre-Code early-Thirties Warners Bros. than late thirties RKO: when the Saint claims his first victim, cop on the case Jonathan Hale's reaction on seeing the dying man is to bark "Call an ambulance. I hope it comes too late," while `The Big Fella's' favored femme fatale is openly fickle with her affections, casually admitting "I have no notions of loyalty. I help those persons who win my admiration for the moment," and naturally winning our hero's heart since his code is very much the same.

Sadly Hayward, loaned out for the picture by producer Edward Small, wasn't able to return for the sequels, with the character being reworked to play more to George Sanders' strengths. As a result, this is very much a one-of-a-kind entry in the series, and such an enjoyable one that it's a real pity it didn't continue on similar lines. There's always the thin hope that the latest mooted adaptation in development follows its lead and goes back to the character's less clean-cut roots, but if it doesn't we'll always have New York...

The only one of the RKO Saint films not released by Warner Archive in the States, the UK DVD from Odeon isn't a great transfer but surprisingly is a noticeable improvement over the BBC's print (which also has poor sound quality) and is certainly acceptable considering the film's comparative rarity.