The Saint Meets the Tiger *** (1943, Hugh Sinclair, Jean Gillie, Gordon McLeod, Wylie Watson, Clifford Evans) – Classic Movie Review 3227

Following his debut in 1941’s The Saint’s Vacation, the handsome, debonair, suave and witty Hugh Sinclair (1903 – 1962) stars again as Leslie Charteris’s modern-day Robin Hood sleuth character Simon Templar in director Paul Stein’s 1943 eighth and final chapter of the RKO series.

Screen-writers Leslie Arliss, James Seymour and Wolfgang Wilhelm adapt Leslie Charteris’s very first Saint novel, Meet – The Tiger!, as the Saint investigates a dead body left on his doorstep and ends up a quiet seaside village in Cornwall, where he pursues a gang that has stolen a fortune in gold and a mysterious villain known as The Tiger.

It proves a bright and lively addition to the series, boasting a busy plot that includes multiple murders and good characters that include a smooth villain in Clifford Evans’s Tidemarsh, aka The Tiger.

Jean Gillie, Gordon McLeod and Wylie Watson are also strong assets as Templar’s love interest, Pat Holm, Inspector Teal of Scotland Yard and Horace, the Saint’s butler. Also useful to fill any empty spaces are Dennis Arundell as Lionel Bentley, Charles Victor as Bittle, Louise Hampton as Aunt Agatha Gurten and John Salew as Merridon, the curator of the Baycome Museum.

Also in the cast are Arthur Hambling, Amy Veness, John Slater, Claude Bailey, Noel Dainton, Eric Clavering, Ben Williams, Tony Quinn, Alf Goddard and Norman Pierce.

The film finished shooting in June 1941 but was not released until 1943 due to a dispute between Charteris and RKO, which was about to release The Gay Falcon in October 1941, the first film in its new The Falcon series, and he thought The Falcon was a copy of The Saint, with its same star in George Sanders.

Luckily, obviously, the suave sleuth survives the story, but the RKO terminated here and Sinclair never played him again, though original series star Louis Hayward returned in the role just once more in a one-off British revival by Hammer Films in 1953 – The Saint’s Return.

Jean Gillie (1915 -1949) died of pneumonia at only 33, having made 22 movies. Although her character Pat Holm makes many appearances in the book series, this is the only film in which she appears.

Wylie Watson (1889- 1966) is best remembered as Mr Memory in Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (1935), a character who claimed that he stored 50 new facts in his brain every day. He is also memorable as one of Richard Attenborough’s nasty razor gang in Brighton Rock (1947) and as the devious, manipulative storekeeper Joseph Macroon in Ealing’s Whisky Galore (1949).

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 3227

Check out more reviews on http://derekwinnert.com