Fast series

  • Fast Company (1938)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2021) Any resemblance between the love-bickering, funny-detecting married couple at the heart of Fast Company and Nick and Norah Charles of The Thin Man series is strictly intentional: history has it that theatrical exhibitors asked MGM to deliver a series much like it in-between the long production delays between instalments. MGM obliged, and Fast Company is the first of three attempts (all featuring a different leading cast) to replicate the success of Nick and Norah. Taking on the rather interesting world of rare books, our protagonists are booksellers that moonlight as investigators for insurance companies. Things do get more urgent when murder enters the equation, and the film manages to fit an impressive amount of criminal plot, charming repartee, good character moments and evocative details along the way. Melvyn Douglas and Florence Rice are rather good in the leads, but they will inevitably have the bad luck to be compared to the incomparable William Powell and Myrna Loy. Still, as a short quick piece of entertainment, Fast Company holds its own—it’s methadone compared to the good stuff of The Thin Man series, but it does the job if you’re in the mood for something similar. Exactly as MGM first intended.

  • Fast and Furious (1939)

    Fast and Furious (1939)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2020) I was slightly mistaken in recording this Fast and Furious—I thought I was recording the 1954 Corman film—but it turns out to be a nice little surprise: a husband-and-wife amateur sleuth story very much in the vein of The Thin Man. It turns out to be the last in an MGM trilogy explicitly modelled on the more successful Powell/Loy series, except half-heartedly executed with different lead actors every time. In this instalment, Franchot Tone and Ann Sothern play the bickering couple to good effect, even though you’ll still miss William Powell in the lead. Fast and Furious is notable for having been directed by Busby Berkeley, but it does not have any of the musical numbers for which he’s best known. The resulting murder mystery is a bunch of hooey (even the characters pretty much run the gamut of suspects to exhaustion), the relationship between the characters is merely fine… and yet, it’s fun and short at merely 73 minutes. There are some good comedy moments involving summer in the city, lions in a hotel, an ex-asylum attendant, and a querulous user of in-room services. Plus, the setting being a fantasy upper-class version of the 1930s doesn’t hurt. While the 1930s had several much better films in the same amateur-sleuth genre, Fast and Furious is very satisfying even as a second-tier example of the form.