The Saint Strikes Back *** (1939, George Sanders, Wendy Barrie, Jonathan Hale, Neil Hamilton, Jerome Cowan, Edward Gargan, Barry Fitzgerald) – Classic Movie Review 3218

For this 1939 second crime thriller in RKO Radio Pictures’s eight film series about The Saint, The Saint Strikes Back, debonair George Sanders takes over as Simon Templar from Louis Hayward, who played him in The Saint in New York (1938), and triumphantly makes the role his own. Wendy Barrie also stars as gang leader Val Travers.

This time Simon Templar aka The Saint foils an assassination attempt by a member of Val’s gang, is arrested for the murder of the gang member but persuades the cops to let him lead the hunt to seize a shadowy criminal mastermind. He ends up solving a series of ingenious San Francisco murders and clearing Val’s dead father of a crime.

The Saint Strikes Back (1939) with George Sanders.

There is lively acting from a fine ensemble cast (with Jonathan Hale back as the American police inspector Henry Fernack), taut direction by John Farrow, and a nifty, twisty screenplay by John Twist, based on Leslie Charteris’s 1931 novel She Was a Lady, which was also published as Angels of Doom and The Saint Meets His Match. Twist moves the story from England to San Francisco.

Also in the cast are Jerome Cowan as Cullis, Barry Fitzgerald as Zipper Dyson, a burglar working for Travers, Neil Hamilton as Travers’s friend Allan Breck, Robert Elliott as Chief Inspector Webster, Russell Hopton as Harry Donnell, one of Travers’s gangsters, Edward Gargan as Pinky Budd, one of Travers’s henchmen, Robert Strange as Police Commissioner, Gilbert Emery as Martin Eastman, James Burke as Headquarters Police Officer, Nella Walker as Mrs Betty Fernack and Willie Best as Simon Templar’s servant Algernon.

The Saint in New York was a hit so RKO announced they would make a sequel called The Saint Strikes Twice with Louis Hayward, but he ended up signing a long-term contract with producer Edward Small and making The Man in the Iron Mask (1939) instead.

RKO then borrowed George Sanders from 20th Century Fox and changed the title to The Saint Strikes Back, planning to make it along with The Saint in London, and the series finally got into its stride.

Six more films followed The Saint Strikes Back, starting with The Saint in London (1939), followed by The Saint’s Double Trouble (1940), The Saint Takes Over (1940), The Saint in Palm Springs (1941), all with Sanders, and The Saint’s Vacation (1941) and The Saint Meets the Tiger (1943) with Hugh Sinclair.

Barrie appears in two more Saint films, playing different roles – The Saint Takes Over (1940) as Ruth Summers and The Saint in Palm Springs (1941) as Elna Johnson. She also appears in The Gay Falcon (1941) and A Date with the Falcon (1942) with Sanders.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 3218

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