MamaGravity good back-story, and good acting

HottWwjdIam There is just so much movie here. For some it may be too much. But in the same secretly sarcastic way most telemarketers say the phrase, the title of this one is particularly apt.

InformationRap This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Sarita Rafferty There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

gridoon2018 "Behind That Curtain" is not really a part of the Charlie Chan series (Chan himself appears in a minor role, for maybe 2 minutes), and it's not even a mystery, but if you want to get technical, it's probably a better movie than any of the Monogram Chans, and some of the Fox ones as well! Some aspects are dated, of course, but I was expecting a film full of talk enclosed in rooms, and I got plenty of exotic outdoors footage, camel and horse riding, creative use of sound and foreign music, and a palpable sense of illicit passion in a prolonged will-they-kiss? scene. Lois Moran gives a sympathetic portrayal, and is quite hot to boot! **1/2 out of 4.

stimpy25 i just got done watching this train wreck of a film and it is beyond awful. i've never seen a Charlie Chan film until i saw this one. and i love Boris Karloff as well. his scenes as it's been stated are very brief with him having very little dialog. The Directing is quite good actually. that's about the only nice thing i can say about it. as a film it's badly written, badly acted and for a Charlie Chan film even if it's based off the original books he's not even in the film at all until 78 minutes in and has like 3 minutes of screen time. he's barely even mentioned at all in the film even when he's not on screen. i've seen plenty of films from this era where the acting was really quite good. only other films i've seen from this period that i can think of from the top of my head are some of the crap that Joan Crawford was doing during this era. way before she got famous into what she later became. anyways. the acting is so bad that it reminds me of the B movies that were coming out in the 50's that you'd have to get drunk just to get through watching it cause on how bad they are. i do plan on watching other Chan films of course but please stay away from this one unless you are a die hard Chan fan than watch it. but be warned that it's badly acted, badly written and frankly rather boring as well. my score 1/10

Rosabel This film is of historical interest, as the first appearance on film of the Charlie Chan character, even though he doesn't appear until about 50 minutes into the movie, and is in only 3 scenes. But as a movie, it is almost intolerably bad. The actors were obviously very unsure of themselves, making the transition from silent to sound movies. I've seen Warner Baxter in silent films, and he was by no means as frozen as he was in this movie. Now and then he relaxes, and his dialog becomes a bit more natural, as it would be a few years later in a film like "42nd Street". But here, he seems flummoxed by the need to actually MEMORIZE lines - there are several moments where he speaks hesitantly, for all the world as if he just couldn't remember the line, and can no longer just say whatever he wants, as one could in a silent film.Baxter is not the worst offender - the character of Mr. Galt (destined to play the melancholy role of "The Body") speaks so slowly and with such exaggerated pronunciation, is just terrible. Many of the actors appeared to be falling back on stage performance techniques, with loud emoting and over-enunciation, and as a result they over-powered the camera - or they would have, if their loud, artificial voices hadn't been combined with near-immobility. Everyone seems afraid to move - they plant themselves in one spot, then roar out their lines.The camera-work is also very unimaginative for the most part, with one notable exception - the camel caravan traveling over the desert was quite beautifully photographed. It's probably not a coincidence that the scene was purely visual - when the filmmakers could fall back on the more familiar silent movie techniques, they seemed much freer and imaginative. The new technology, by contrast, introduced awkwardness and seemed burdensome.The plot and the script were both very lame. The murderer is revealed very quickly, and mystery is replaced by a love triangle and a romance. Eve, the heroine, overacts horribly, with lots of head-bobbing and wriggling to convey her anguish. Her motivation is completely unbelievable - married to a murdering psychopath who has every reason in the world to kill her, she persists in fleeing from the police, and refusing to help convict him, even when her own life is at stake, and the police have hard evidence anyway, and there is no chance he can escape justice.The script does deserve some credit for treating a theme like adultery in a rather surprisingly hard-edged way. There's no softening of the despicable betrayal, or of the heroine's painful discovery that her husband has been sleeping with their Indian maid - she even finds the latter's earring in her own bed! She has her own moment of temptation later on, but resists with the time-honored line, "After all, he IS my husband!" It's a good reminder that the '20s were by no means a strait-laced decade - the tasteful expunging of sex in the movies came later. But then the movie ruins it by having Eve shrinking from divorcing her cad of a husband (one of my favorite lines, by the way: "Are-you-going-to------DIVORCE------me???") because she is afraid of the scandal. Divorce wasn't THAT big a scandal in the '20s, especially among the rich. Eve is always veering between put-upon, shrinking damsel in distress and unpredictable, capable woman on her own. The movie would have been far better if she had been portrayed as a strong, modern woman throughout, but that Eve would never have been so stupid and sentimental as to leave a murderer roaming the streets.

skoyles Among the necessary attributes of any motion picture, old or new, colour or black and white, widescreen or television, is that the presentation must be satisfying on some level. "Citizen Caine" satisfies our sense of balance; "Gone With the Wind" our sense of honour; "Star Wars" our sense of adventure; "LA Confidential" our sense of justice while numerous mysteries satisfy our need for a neat solution to the problem presented. The satisfaction need not be poetic nor even to our liking but we must be able to say, "At some level this movie was a satisfying experience." "Behind that Curtain" is not. While the historical interest of the exotic locales is fun, the acting is acceptable for the time, seeing Karloff, Baxter, and Park as Chan is fine, the satisfaction factor is zilch. IMDb is rightly leery of "spoilers" in reviews; no such warning is necessary for this creaking amateur script. As one looks for possible solutions to the "whodunit", one wastes one's time. Alas, a disappointment which proves yet again that without a good story no motion picture can succeed.