The Seven-Ups (Philip D'Antoni, 1973)

 Cast: Roy Scheider, Tony Lo Bianco, Larry Haines, Richard Lynch, Bill Hickman, Jerry Leon, Victor Arnold, Ken Kercheval, Lou Polan, Matt Russell, Joe Spinell. Screenplay: Albert Ruben, Alexander Jacobs, Sonny Grosso. Cinematography: Urs Furrer. Production design: Ed Wittstein. Film editing: John C. Horger, Stephen A. Rotter. Music: Don Ellis. 

The Seven-Ups has sections that remind me so much of Jean-Pierre Melville's crime films, that I found myself wishing that Melville had directed it. I can sense director Philip D'Antoni striving for the kind of ambience Melville achieved in movies like Bob le Flambeur (1956) and Le Doulos (1962), and in Roy Scheider he has the kind of actor like Alain Delon or Jean-Paul Belmondo who could bring off a certain world-weary style. D'Antoni does succeed in using New York City settings as effectively as Melville does with Paris, but there's a slackness to the film's pacing, a lack of energy and tension, that undermines it. The exception, of course, is the great car chase scene in the film's middle. The Seven-Ups is part of a trilogy of car-chase movies for D'Antoni, who also produced but didn't direct Bullitt (Peter Yates, 1968) and The French Connection (William Friedkin, 1971). The chase in this film almost saves it from being just another movie about vigilante cops using unsanctioned methods to take out criminals, a subgenre that reached its peak in Clint Eastwood's Harry Callahan movies, Dirty Harry (Don Siegel, 1971), Magnum Force (Ted Post, 1973), and The Enforcer (James Fargo, 1976). 

Doctor X (Michael Curtiz, 1932)

Lionel Atwill in Doctor X

Cast: Lionel Atwill, Fay Wray, Lee Tracy, Preston Foster, John Wray, Harry Beresford, Arthur Edmund Carewe, Leila Bennett, Robert Warwick, George Rosener, Willard Robertson, Thomas E. Jackson, Harry Holman, Mae Busch, Tom Dugan. Screenplay: Robert Taskner, Earl Baldwin, based on a play by Howard Warren Comstock and Allen C. Miller. Cinematography: Ray Rennahan. Art direction: Anton Grot. Film editing: George Amy.

In Doctor X, Lee Tracy is called on to do two incompatible things: serve as comic relief and play the romantic lead. He succeeds at the former more than he does at the latter, which is not saying much.  (The comic shtick involves things like joy buzzers and exploding cigars, which gives you a sense of the level of humor Tracy is asked to participate in.) The film is a whodunit horror about a serial killer who strikes at the full moon and who leaves his victims mutilated. (The movie calls it cannibalism, but I don't recall any evidence that the killer actually ate the people he murdered.) The chief forensic clue is that the victims were sliced up with a particular kind of scalpel, used only by one facility in the city: a research institute headed by Dr. Jerry Xavier (Lionel Atwill). When the police detectives call on Xavier, they are introduced to his research staff, each of whom becomes a suspect in the killings. Meanwhile, Lee Taylor (Tracy), one of those anything-for-a-story reporters Hollywood was fond of, is snooping around too, trying to uncover the Full Moon Killer before the police do. This involves Taylor breaking and entering at not only the institute but also Dr. Xavier's creepy gothic mansion on a cliff in Long Island, where he lurks around in some skeleton-filled closets. (Cue the obvious gags.) He also meets Dr. Xavier's lovely daughter, Joanne (Fay Wray), and they inexplicably (at least where she's concerned) hit it off. Naturally, Joanne has to be put in jeopardy and Taylor has to rescue her. Doctor X is mostly remembered for its experiment with two-strip Technicolor, which yields some interesting if washed-out looking images, but also seems inappropriate for the film's sinister old dark house setting. There are a few nice scares among all the goofiness and pseudo-scientific poppycock -- the usual foaming and smoking beakers and flasks and some sparking and arcing electric apparatus -- but in a golden age for horror movies, Doctor X is decidedly second-tier.