The biblical title ("When the people heard the sound of the trumpet, they raised a great shout and the wall fell down." Joshua 6:20) has actually very little to do with the story of this drab and cut-rate mystery film, except its ending.
The film has a morbid opening in which the body of a priest is found in his parish where he has evidently hanged himself. Thanks to Lee Bowman's Gilbert Archer we are left wondering whether the priest was murdered over the two ancient Bibles that are only means to decode a map that would lead to a lost Da Vinci painting. However, the supposedly lost masterwork that is finally revealed is also one of the worst paintings ever sighted on film.
This was the final film directed by Lothar Mendes (1894-1974) and his only work produced by Columbia Pictures. Mendes was a Berlin-born stage actor for Max Reinhardt and got into the motion picture business in 1926 and worked as a director and writer in Germany, Austria, Britain, and Hollywood.
No comments:
Post a Comment