Very well executed

Good story, Not enough for a whole film

A Masterpiece!

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

The Falcon returns...sort of. Not really. Two years after the RKO Falcon series ended, Poverty Row studio Film Classics began their own series. There's not much this has in common with the George Sanders/Tom Conway films. The Falcon, now played by John Calvert, has a new name: Michael Watling. Gone is the comic relief sidekick. Here the Falcon has a dog he talks to. Also gone are charm, wit, adventure, and everything else that worked in the previous series. This is just a generic detective tale, made on cheap sets with a forgettable lead backed up by a cast of actors who had seen better days. The RKO series was great. Even if the plots weren't always riveting, you could always rely on Sanders and Conway to deliver and the production values were usually very nice. This is just a big nothing burger. Sadly there are two more 'fake Falcon' films after this.

The plot in Devil's Cargo (not sure why they went with that title - it has nothing to do with the movie) is easily the best thing the movie has going for it. There are a few nice twists and turns along the way. I'm not sure why I didn't see the end coming, but part of it really surprised me. Anyway, Ramon Delgado (Paul Marion) shows up one morning at Michael Watling (John Calvert) aka the Falcon's apartment to confess to a murder. He says he killed a man named Conroy who was cheating with his wife, Margo (Rochelle Hudson). Delgado claims he warned the man twice before shooting him during a struggle. He has a key he wants Watling to hold for him. He's convinced that once his story comes out, he'll be acquitted and he'll then come by to collect his key. But almost as soon as Delgado is in police custody, two things happen that rouse the Falcon's suspicion. First, there are a couple of hoods that desperately want that key. Second, Delgado is found poisoned to death in his cell. What's so important about the key and why did someone murder Delgado?But once you get past the plot, there's very little here I liked. First, and most obviously, what happened to the Falcon? This isn't the suave character played by George Sanders and Tom Conway. Calvert's Falcon is the kind of guy who I wanted to punch in the face for acting like an idiot one minute and overly cocky and smug the next. And his ever present and unwanted magic tricks serve no purpose - well, no purpose other than to annoy me. Calvert's attempts at humor are almost as bad as the magic bits. Again, it's just annoying. With a plot I enjoyed, a different actor in the lead might have made this a much better movie. The rest of the acting is generally abysmal. I'm not exaggerating when I say I cringed a few times at the poor delivery of some of the lines. And I was really disappointed in the way Rochelle Hudson was used. She's barely in the movie. Finally, I couldn't help but notice at times how bad the music was and generally inappropriate for the action on screen.As much as I enjoy the earlier Falcon movies, Devil's Cargo is a huge disappointment.

The 16 picture "Falcon" series which commenced so promisingly with RKO's The Gay Falcon in 1941, starring George Sanders in the title role, is now on its last gasp. Admittedly, it's not a total waste of time. Aside from its curiosity value, this fourteenth entry does boast an interesting support cast including comedians Roscoe Karns and Tom Kennedy in straight roles as a police lieutenant and a gangster, respectively. In the title role, John Calvert, a professional magician in real life, does attempt a few tricks, but in at least one of them he is obviously helped out by some clumsy special effects work. Although second-billed, the lovely Rochelle Hudson, not seen in movies since 1942, has not much of a role here. Blink, two or three times, and you'll miss her. The movie was directed with a bit more punch than his usual half-steam by slow-paced John F. Link, Sr., a Monogram editor who handled the elongated editing for the poor Charlie Chan entry, Meeting at Midnight. (By "elongated editing", I mean editing that purposely allows scenes to run far too long and well past their interest value, in order to spin out an otherwise too-short film to support feature length of around 60 minutes). This was Link's first film as a director. He followed up with Call of the Forest in 1949, then returned very briefly to the editor's bench in 1952. Devil's Cargo (the screenplay has absolutely nothing to do with either devils or cargoes) is available on a very good Alpha DVD. Rated "5" for its curiosity value!

Gay and Tom Laurence (real life brothers George Sanders and Tom Conway) were the Falcon in the early 1940s. So why is a guy named 'Wattling' now appearing in some poverty row series where HE is called the Falcon as well?! In addition to not being the Falcon, this guy acts nothing like the suave and sophisticated Falcon of old. The new guy has a cute dog(!?) and talks incessantly--and he's just nothing like the originals.As for the rest of the film, it's bizarre and nothing like the old Falcon plots either. Some knucklehead comes to Wattling and claims he murdered someone (so why didn't he just go to the cops first?!?!?). But, soon after, the admitted killer is himself murdered in prison--poisoned. So, Wattling appoints himself a some sort of avenging angel and spends the rest of the film trying to figure out who was behind all this--as well as to figure out what the man was REALLY planning before he died.While the plot has some nice twists, the characters are just all wrong, the acting is terrible and I wouldn't even recommend this to Falcon freaks--as he's just a shadow of the originals at best. Dreadful on many levels.