bkoganbing When Tom Conway met that black cat determined to cross his path he should have gone blocks out of the way. He didn't though and wound up helping Cecilia Callejo break into an art gallery to retrieve a painting for which she modeled. But the gallery owner is dead Callejo flees through a window and Conway has to run from the San Francisco police.The daughter of the dead artist who painted it played by Martha Vickers might provide answers. So might Vickers's stepmother Mona Maris and her new husband Joseph Vitale. So might millionaire Emory Parnell who bought several of the dead artist's paintings. They all wind up meeting in old Mexico providing The Falcon with a host of subjects. Along with ever helpful driver Nestor Paiva and his young son Fernando Alvarado.A middle run Falcon film, the exotic location helps, but it's not anything abut a studio created Mexico.

moonspinner55 Michael Arlen's radio-serial detective returns for another movie mystery (actually, it's the Falcon's brother this time, with George Sanders having since exited from the role and his real-life sibling Tom Conway assuming his duties). For reasons unknown, the Falcon is down Mexico way, being conned by a Señorita who needs his help in retrieving one of her paintings from an art gallery. They break in after-hours (despite a sign near the door--in English--warning that police are on constant watch), only to find a dead man on the premises. Globe-trotting yarn wants us to believe that New York City and Mexico are just a stone's throw from each other, or that the Falcon is really just a nice guy used to helping out desperate women. Neither washes, while the solving of the crime is rote and unexciting. *1/2 from ****

Neil Doyle RKO must have had a very small budget to work with when they made "The Falcon in Mexico", using stock footage of actual location photography but process photography for all of the studio shots with actors in front of the screened location backgrounds. It becomes such a distraction that there's a tendency not to follow the plot after awhile but just to watch how often the actors are in Hollywood rather than Mexico.Whatever, the story is not intriguing enough and nobody seems to be trying very hard to bring it to life. Even the usually vivacious MARTHA VICKERS (who played the nymphomaniac in THE BIG SLEEP) has a hard time conveying any genuine emotion while she pines for her long lost father, while others in the cast are competent enough but not really inspired. NESTOR PAIVA has the best supporting role as an overly enthusiastic but helpful taxi driver called Manuel.Nevertheless, Conway does a decent job as the debonair detective who has the same interest as the police in solving a crime, but seems to be avoiding them at every turn.Some of the background photography is well filmed, but using process shots for scenes involving the actors is too obvious for comfort.Summing up: All in all, a passable B-film entertainment.

bob the moo Never far from women or trouble, Tom Lawrence meets both when he meets Dolores Ybarra trying to get into a door and recover a painting she did. Helping her, Lawrence realises he was duped and that the painting is of her, not by her. These trifling issues are put to one side when they discover a body in the building. The girl flees and, suspected of the murder (as usual), Lawrence does too. The problem with the painting is that the painter actually died 15 years earlier, but yet the portrait must have been done recently. Lawrence seeks out the artist's daughter Barbara, who reveals a mystery around her father's death and the two head to Mexico to investigate further.After being Out West, the film series continues its attempts to freshen things up by "being places" rather than doing things. In this case we have a lazy travelogue that takes us to Mexico with lots of backdrops and footage (with supposedly a famous source!). The mystery starts out well enough and does offer intrigue to a point but it is pretty much lost in the delivery, which seems more interesting in providing a lot of footage of Mexico instead. This bothered me a bit because I was interested by the set up but this waned as I realised that the film itself wasn't that fussed. Berke's direction is fine I'm sure but he is continually overshadowed by the stock footage (supposedly shot by Orson Welles) which regularly takes centre stage. The film also features a couple of songs (a common filler in b-movie world), they aren't much cop here but do add a sanitised flavour of Mexico.Conway is not as smooth as he was in some other of the Falcon films. He is still recognisable as the same character but it does feel like he is going through the motions somewhat with this one. He lacks much in the way of support here as well as his regular comic companions of the police and Goldie/Lefty are absent. Instead we have a bit of life from Paiva in a good sidekick character. Maris, Vickers, Currier, Callejo and others all do so-so jobs but nobody has much conviction about anything – probably not helped by the material.Overall then a fairly uninspiring entry in the series that continues the gimmick of the location from Out West. The stock footage is all well and good but the mystery becomes slack and uninteresting all too quickly.