Spend The Night: With a gentleman crime buster.

A Perfect Night In For...Gentlemen Crime Busters.
The Saint In New York (1938. Dir. Ben Holmes) / The Falcon’s Adventure (1946. Dir. William Berke)
According to Hollywood lore back in the 1930s and 1940s if you wanted to bust a crime wave the last people you should go looking for were the cops. They might have had caps with shiny badges, truncheons and a duty to uphold the law, but when it came to ruthless racketeers the movie police stood aside to let foppish and wealthy playboys have a pop - usually with far more success.Hence a plethora of crime-busting movie shorts and serials that would draw up the blueprint of literally hundreds of TV shows, in which smart men with smarter tongues would show the justice departments of cities around the world how to do their job properly. RKO were one of the great Hollywood studios and beat all with their line in horror and crime movies during the 30s and 40s. They produced an outstanding array of out and out classics including The Hunchback Of Notre Dame, Out Of The Past, King Kong and, of course, Citizen Kane, possibly the greatest movie of all time. But like any studio RKO had a production line of budget pictures, often released as serials and based on popular radio shows, comic strips (Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, for instance) and pulp novels of the time. Most of these budget flicks were memorable simply because they were so dire. But RKO’s reputation for quality film-making rubbed off on their budget movies. Their cheap but effective series of the Leslie Charteris’ Saint novels were given a boost by the casting of Louis Hayward as the slick super sleuth Simon Templar, but it was George Sanders, who took over from Hayward after The Saint In New York, who really made the role his own, before, bizarrely, leaving to star in a Saint rip off called The Falcoln, made by the same studio. We’ll come to them in a little while. There were nine Saint movies made in the late 30s and early 40s and the stories were also made popular adaptations on US and British radio at the same time. It would take Roger Moore’s smoothy, self deprecating take on Templar in the 1962 TV series for the Saint to steal the Sanders halo and spread the Saint gospel world wide. Leslie Charteris had once tried to produce his own TV version of The Saint with David Niven (a potentially inspired bit of casting) but it took the TV might of cigar chomping Lew Grade to bring the Saint to the small screen and part of the package was his insistence that Moore be the star. Moore would play the role until 1969 and he basically repeated it into the early 1970s as one half of The Persuaders (another Lew Grade smash hit), honing the persona of gentleman hard man that grabbed the attention of Bond producer Cubby Broccoli when Sean Connery’s 007 replacement George Lazenby didn’t work out. The Saint not only blessed Moore’s future career, it set him up financially for life. Sales of the show world wide generated hundreds of millions of dollars, Moore cannily made sure he bought the rights to most of the mid 1960s colour episodes and watched the royalties come flooding in. Compared to the sophistication of the TV show the 1930s versions look decidedly frayed around the edges, but there’s a rawness and verve (no doubt brought about by the budget restrictions) in evidence that makes them an interesting waste of an hour or so. They were almost all entirely identical, too and nearly always involved Templar going somewhere exotic (Bali, Havana, Stoke-on-Trent, etc.) to bust a gang of racketeers or Nazis. Or, as the war in Europe drew progressively nearer, both. Our chosen adventure sees The Saint go to New York (the clue’s in the title) and bust a gang of racketeers, some of whom, if memory serves, have heavy German accents.Having scored a huge success with The Saint, but mindful of the fact he was a Brit, RKO introduced a home-grown crime-fighting character known as The Falcon. What resulted was a perfectly acceptable, although workmanlike, series of crime mysteries (like The Saint, The Falcon took to kicking Nazi butt as the war in Europe progressed) headed up by the suave bruiser and his wise-cracking manservant. Originally the role was taken by George Sanders for the first outing in 1941 but after three episodes he went off to enjoy greater stardom as an A-list movie star. His real life brother Tom Conway took over the Falcon roost and steered the series through another 16 budget outings with plots borrowed from as many sources as possible – not least The Saint which provided plot lines for a good half of the output. By the time Adventure came out in 1946 the writers were repeating plots of earlier Falcon movies in all but title. The Falcoln’s Adventure is a rip roaring example of standard crime-busting fare. It’s wooden by today’s standards but is enlivened by Edward Brophy as the Falcon’s comic relief sidekick.

The Drink: The gentleman crime-buster will relax with a cocktail, perhaps a Gin-Martini from a hi-ball glass. Don’t confuse it with a screw-ball, that’s an ice-cream with a bubble gum at the bottom, you wouldn’t want to stain your tuxedo.

The Food: A gentleman crime-buster will always dress for dinner, it puts gangsters on edge. He will eat soup, correctly, but will be too busy making wry observations about his fellow guests to finish his mains.