TrueJoshNight Truly Dreadful Film

Kidskycom It's funny watching the elements come together in this complicated scam. On one hand, the set-up isn't quite as complex as it seems, but there's an easy sense of fun in every exchange.

Voxitype Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

Quiet Muffin This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

Leofwine_draca MARKED MEN is a B-movie thriller with an unknown cast and brief running time. The setting is the desert, where an escaped convict hides out while being pursued by the authorities. The story develops when another, more murderous convict turns up at the scene with his old gang, and there's unfinished business between the two men. All of this material is ordinary and predictable, but where MARKED MEN works is in the presentation of a loyal and heroic German Shepherd called Wolf who saves the day time and again. He's one of the most adorable screen dogs I've seen in a while.

Robert J. Maxwell Warren Hull, a decent actor with a face that is neither handsome nor ugly but as interesting as a hard-boiled egg, escapes from jail somewhere in the East. He manages to hitch hike his way to southern Arizona where he meets a dog he calls Wolf in the middle of the Sonoran desert.First things first. This really IS the Sonoran desert, not a studio mock up. It's surprising, almost shocking, to see location shooting like this in a B movie. Yet there it is in all its overheated glory -- saguaro cactus, cholla, ocotillo, palo verdes, and rocky bluffs that don't look the slightest bit Californian.Hull is trailed through the desert by a half dozen howling wolves, but one of them detaches himself from the pack and joins Hull as a companion. "Wolf" isn't really a wolf. He's a German shepherd apparently kicked out by his owner. This is some dog. His ears are so big they're almost fluorescent and they stand straight up like Batman's. And that TONGUE. Wolf constantly slavers away with this organ hanging a foot out of his mouth.They say a man's best friend is a dog, but I consider that to be no more than propaganda perpetrated by dog people. Cats don't have that disgusting habit of panting and drooling hydrophobia all over the place. And they don't make a lot of noise either, not if you kick them properly once in a while. I camped several times in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument with my cat Bandido. There were no wolves but in the evening Bandido and I heard the far-off yipping of coyotes. Well, man, did Bandido's hair stand on end or what. I couldn't stop laughing. He was frightened too by the numerous Western Diamondback rattlesnakes that emerged at twilight, but it must be admitted that they were fiendishly defensive when approached.Anyway, back to Warren Hull and Wolf, baking in the desert, both pretty chipper considering their circumstances. Finally they reach town -- Tempe, Arizona, just southeast of Phoenix. Tempe, home of Arizona State University, was a small town when this was shot, and even when I stayed there a generation or two later, with a chuckwalla squeezed into every other rock crevice in the vacant lots, a charming, laid back little city with vest pocket parks and Mexican fan palms. Now it's a pristine and expensive example of urban sprawl.Hull meets Isabel Jewell, a nice young blond who invites him in for a snack. She's not a Hollywood beauty nor a bravura actress. Her high, piping, girlish voice is a handicap but she's still appealing in her innocent in her lust for a bourgeois life with a husband and a cottage to call home. As I watched Hull sitting there, chatting with Jewell, I couldn't help wondering why he was so well dressed and groomed -- clean shirt, tie, proper haircut -- and what exactly he'd been eating while hitching across the country without any money. Well, some things man was never meant to know. Jewell's father happens to be a doctor in need of a handyman and Hull fits the bill.Hull becomes a popular fellow in town and he and Jewell decide to marry. Alas, the local cop twigs to Hull's identity as an escaped convict and -- well, then things get really improbably. The same gang with which he broke out of the slams shows up accidentally in little Tempe and robs the bank. Hull feigns joining them, in hopes of finding a way to prove his innocence. He succeeds and marries the girl wearing stockings with seams that run up the back.I've kind of made fun of it but it's not a bad movie. It's diverting in its unpretentious way and not without some charm. It isn't helped, though, by clumsy editing, crude direction, impossible coincidences, and loopholes in the plot.

bkoganbing Although Marked Men starts rather haphazardly once it gets going it turns out to be a pretty nice drama with both men against men and men against the elements present in it.I could never quite buy why Warren Hull was in prison, how could he be that naive? Allegedly a group of some rather rough types ask medical school student Hull to do a driving job for them. It turns out being the getaway driver in a bank robbery. Later on Hull can't make anybody believe that he got innocently roped into it.It doesn't wear well today, but I'm guessing that those Depression Era audiences people did a lot for money and just learned not to ask questions until the consequences smacked them in the face.In any event leader Paul Bryar likes Hull's company so much that he takes him along during a jail break when a couple of guards were killed. Now Hull is on the hook for murder, but he gets separated from the others as they pull yet another job.Hull and a German shepherd dog start traveling together after meeting in the desert. Then Hull arrives at a small town and settles there, even meeting Isabel Jewell and her doctor father John Dilson. But he can't escape the gang and in the end goes back to the desert where Bryar and the group are fleeing after some more robberies.What's a mediocre film up to this point becomes a fine drama in the end. All the elements of vicious greedy men with little water come to the fore. Worst of all is Bryar who cannot control his own greedy impulses. But it's here where Hull proves to be the toughest.This one is from the poverty row studio PRC. But occasionally they turn out a decent film and this is definitely one of them.

mark.waltz Warren Hull is a prison inmate who ended up being forced by a gang of fellow inmates to escape with them from a prison hospital, and is the only one not rounded up upon their initial escape. He travels through the desert, befriends a wolfhound, is lucky enough to be offered a job by the daughter (Isabel Jewell) of a doctor and finds himself settling into the community as if he had lived there all his life, everybody in town preparing for him and Jewell to wed even before they have had their first full date. But the gang escapes again, his true identity is discovered, and now he does everything he can to prove his innocence.While this is obvious hokum, it is charmingly written and acted, and those excesses are quite forgivable. Hull and Jewell are an appealing couple, not looking like movie stars playing regular folks, and are surrounded by a dozen small-town types who don't seem to be acting, just "being". Wolf, the dog, is very well trained, and the thought of him romancing Jewell's smaller pooch is just sillier than the plot line. In fact, the final fade-out will have you rolling your eyes, yet amused by the implications.