Black & White World

The Saint Takes Over (1940) & The Saint in Palm Springs (1941)

All right, this is more like it.  Even though I didn’t much care for the first of the Saint movies that I saw, something told me it would be worth hanging in there to keep trying the rest of the series, and it was.  George Sanders, who wasn’t quite enough to carry the weak script of The Saint Strikes Back, is in fine form in these next two entries, the script is much lighter and breezier, and long exposition-laden monologues are replaced by action.

I’m giving a slight edge to The Saint Takes Over because overall the humor is quicker and more natural, and the plot is a tad less preposterous.

With these two movies I was able to see that the Saint movies are basically exactly the same as the earlier films in the Falcon series—even Sanders’s co-star, Wendy Barrie is the same.  Although, I thought it odd that Barrie appeared in all three Saint films that I saw, and played a different role in each.

The perplexing thing about Simon Templar is, how exactly does he know everything?  In Sherlock Holmes movies, Holmes always explains how he was able to work out the clues.  Templar just seems to know, which is kind of lazy story-telling.  But Sanders is charming enough that it doesn’t matter much in the end.

The Saint Takes Over: 
The Saint in Palm Springs: