hyped garbage

This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

There are better movies of two hours length. I loved the actress'performance.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

The first film was a full feature. This one is more the length of a B Double Feature under card. This one introduces George Sanders to the title role. It is interesting the control that even RKO had over casting.The creator of The Saint character did not like George Sanders playing the role of the character he created. Still, from this film forward, he would become the Saint for film goers everywhere.This edition has more action than the first film. It goes at a much quicker pace and plays like an early film noir detective film. It sold a lot of tickets and it even does a great job giving the series new star a lock on his role.Overall a smashing success for Saint fans everywhere. The plot twists are here for all to see, and the killers are caught with style. More films to come.

"Hondo" director John Farrow directed George Sanders' initial incarnation of British-Chinese author Leslie Charteris' suave sleuth in "The Saint Strikes Back," and "Band of Angels" scenarist John Twist adapted Charteris novel "The Saint Meets His Match" with many changes of locale. Incidentally, Sanders didn't originate the intrepid character; that distinction belonged to actor Louis Hayward. Hayward starred in the first movie, director Ben Holmes" "The Saint in New York." Interestingly enough, Hayward encored as the halo clad hero in the 1953 film "The Saint's Girl Friday," long after not only Sanders, but also Hugh Sinclair had impersonated the fictional Robin Hood character. Sanders starred in five "Saint" sagas between 1939 and 1941 for RKO Pictures. Charteris himself felt that Sanders was miscast as his debonair gentleman protagonist, but he applauded Roger Moore in the role as a better fit. Meantime, during his prestigious career, Sanders went on to play another legendary shamus "The Falcon," before he relinquished that role to his brother Tom Conway. "The Saint Strikes Back" is a rather straight-forward crime thriller with the Saint living up to his own self-proclaimed description of himself as "the man who knows everything-just the man who knows the important things." Indeed, our hero knows ahead of time that the heroine he must save is not guilty of murder.In "The Saint Strikes Back," our adventure-prone protagonist dispatches a New York cop killer, Tommy Voss, in the Colony Club nightclub in San Francisco on New Year's Eve and sets out to save Val Travers (Wendy Barrie of "Dead End") who has suffered a lot of bad publicity since her father was framed for police corruption. After the dead man is found, some of the patrons scramble to leave, and Val is one of several. She encounters Simon Templar (Oscar winner George Sanders of "All About Eve") who is awaiting her just outside on the sidewalk. "Cabs are scarce tonight, aren't they?" is Templar's first line when he meets her. Templar prevents Val from being taken in by the police. After he pulls this stunt, Templar flies back to New York City to meet his own friend, Inspector Henry Fernack (Jonathan Hale of "Son of Pale Face"), who has been assigned to find Templar, while Simon outsmarts Fernack during a stopover in Fort Worth, Texas, on their transcontinental flight to San Francisco. The unfortunate policeman goes on a wild goose chase when cannot find Templar aboard the aircraft,and winds up missing his plane. He is left standing in the airport terminal with nothing but his pajamas and a dressing gown. Incidentally, Hale co-starred in the first "Saint" escapade and he reprised his role here.This Saint outing is adequate, and Twist gave Sanders some good lines that he utters with aplomb. Since I've never read a Charteris novel, I cannot understand what the author objected to about Sanders' performance, but the British actor seems born to play the role, and he appears to have a grand time doing it, savoring each of his loquacious lines.

After Roger Moore, this was my very first SAINT film with George Sanders. Over the years, he's become one of my favorite actors, and there's quite a few other decent actors in this film. However, this gets my vote for the WORST Saint film ever made-- and let me tell you why.I sat thru this thing at least 3 times and could not make heads or tails of the plot at all. And then, not long after seeing Louis Hayward in THE SAINT IN NEW YORK, I started reading Leslie Chartis' books. Imagine my surprise and shock when I got to "ANGELS OF DOOM", on which this is VERY loosely based, and not only was it was straight-forward, easy to understand, exciting, entertaining and in places downright hilarious, it also became my favorite novel of all time. It also "explained" to me exactly what was WRONG with this movie!!!They took a story that by rights should have been done as a 3-hour film (2 at the absolute minimum) and crammed it into just about 60 minutes. Is it any wonder it makes almost no sense at all? Never mind that they also decided to set it in the WRONG country (San Francisco instead of London), they gutted the plot so much that in order to get even the basics across, about 95% of the film is just people standing around talk talk talking. So the plot structure is awful, the directing is appallingly bad, and half the acting in the film is stiff and lifeless, even from normally very talented actors. And then of course there's George Sanders, who's COMPLETELY miscast as Simon Templar. I never even really understood the whole aura of "The Saint" until I saw Louis Hayward in action; to date, NOBODY else has ever brought the character to accurate life before (NOT EVEN Roger Moore!! --who usually plays it too SERIOUS, which is mind-boggling when you consider he never took James Bond seriously). The dialog Templar spouts in much of this film would be impossible for ANY actor to deliver credibly, EXCEPT for Louis Hayward, and I doubt even he could have made the story in this one fly. Maybe it wasn't just RKO's low low budget that caused him to depart after only one picture-- maybe he read the script, too.In all fairness, and despite himself, the next 4 SAINT films all had the dialog tailored specifically to fit Sanders' personality. How else could he have done such an INCREDIBLE job in THE SAINT IN London, or THE SAINT TAKES OVER (the latter of which, an "original" story, is actually a thinly-disguised-- and BETTER-told-- remake of THIS mess! --and with the same 3 actors in the leads!).Half the actors in this I've seen in other "B" movies from this period, and most of them do far better jobs elsewhere. Truthfully, the only one who comes off unscathed is Jonathan Hale, and you can't help but feel sorry for his Inspector Fernack, for the dizzying way Templar leads him on a confused merry chase, on his way to becoming a "hero" at the end.As if everything else wasn't so bad, at the end of the film, the "big reveal" as to the true identity of the main villain ALSO is told entirely thru confused dialog, and we find that the baddie got KILLED-- off-screen! I just watched this again today, and the whole time, I wanted to throttle the person who wrote the screenplay! It's no wonder after 6 RKO films, series creator Leslie Charteris PULLED the plug and took back the rights. Ironically, RKO distributed the 2 British-made films that followed, and simultaneously did THE FALCON series, initially also with Sanders, which was based on a novel that was the subject of a plagiarism lawsuit brought against it by Leslie Charteris! I guess that didn't bother RKO any...Finally, allow me to recommend much better Simon Templar films...THE SAINT IN NEW YORK THE SAINT IN London THE SAINT TAKES OVER THE SAINT'S VACATION

Saint Strikes Back, The (1939) ** (out of 4) The second film in RKO's series has George Sanders taking over the role of The Saint. This time out The Saint helps a young woman who is trying to clear her father, a cop who was kicked off the force for apparently having connections to the mob. As The Saint gets deeper into the case it appears that the father might have more to hide or perhaps a cover up was done. I must say that this second film comes off very disappointing and is extremely watered down compared to the original, which I found very entertaining. The biggest problem is that the story is rather weak and instead of the ruthless killer in the first film here we are greeted to Sanders doing his womanizing. The film is mostly dialogue driven with only a few action pieces that stand out. Another problem is I think Sanders, a great actor, is too dry for the role and this eventually turns the character pretty boring. It's always fun to watch the actor but I really didn't buy him in this role. Several years after this film Sanders would make The Falcon series and I think he did a better job there, although looking at this film and those Falcon movies it's hard to tell which is which because Sanders plays the role the same way. Perhaps I wouldn't have been so hard on this film if I hadn't watched it so closely with The Saint in New York but where that film is original and entertaining, this one here just comes off rather bland.