ridiculous rating

Plot so thin, it passes unnoticed.

Load of rubbish!!

This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

But I'm holdin' on..... That's what Blondie sang and that's the advice that seems most relevant to the opening scene. Newspaper editor Lee Tracy (Fresnay) and private investigator Don Castle (Slade) are trapped in a car after an accident and can't get out with the tide rapidly coming in and threatening to drown them. It's an interesting start to the film and their story is recounted in flashback.Unfortunately, Lee Tracy has a comic voice - he sounds ridiculous although he is effective in his role. The dialogue is crisp and moves the film along at a quick speed so pay attention or you may get behind with the plot. It revolves around a newspaper breaking criminal stories and the ruthless manipulations that are necessary to be in control. You may not guess the outcome - I had it the other way round!The quality of the picture isn't great and unfortunately, you can't really make anything out in the night time scenes which loses the film a point. My wife thought this film was shit. I say it's ok.

...but then I always love watching Lee Tracy at work, so that does make up for the lackluster execution of what could have been a good little mystery.The film opens in an interesting manner with two guys at the site of a wrecked car with the tide coming in. They are both injured and sure to drown if something or someone does not intervene. It is obvious from the conversation that one of them is the bad guy but which one? This is to get your interest, then the film cuts to the back story which amounts to the entire movie.Lee Tracy plays Hugh Fresney, editor of a Los Angeles newspaper. Somebody takes a couple of shots at him and the owner of the paper, Clinton Vaughn, one night, and Fresney is not sure whether the shots were meant for him or for Vaughn, so he calls up an ex-employee of the paper (Don Castle as Tim Slade) to investigate the situation. However, the reason for Slade being an ex-employee is that he was in love with Clinton Vaughn's wife, and in fact, still seems to be so. There are lots of side spats and odd goings on that keep you guessing until the entire thing is unraveled in a monologue that is delivered at such a machine gun pace that you will have to rewind a couple of times to catch everything.Another problem is that just about every player in this film is so anonymous that it is hard to keep track of who is who, plus a couple of the players are so physically similar to one another that you won't be able to tell which character is actually on screen at the time. Then there are characters that show up, do or say something odd, and are never mentioned again. There is the question as to why Slade is so vital to solving this case when he was just a reporter before, not a P.I., and why the investigating police detective, played by the not so anonymous character actor Regis Toomey, seems so impotent and pig headed about everything. He's a great cartoon of a cop, but not much of a problem solver. Finally there is Julie Bishop as Julie, a secretary who only shares a couple of scenes and a couple of sentences with Slade, yet she seems to gather from him saying "You should see the lights of San Francisco some time" - Slade's new hometown - as a proposal...and she is right? Usually they have a name for girls who make such assumptions and that name is stalker, but here it is fiancée! I'd watch it for the weirdness of it all and for Lee Tracy, who gave every role his all. It's just too bad he blacklisted himself from A list productions back in 1934.

this is another nice lesson of the imaginative inspiring little movie,done away the assembly-line. it must be mentioned that part of the success really must be attributed to the author of the novel - Raoul Whitefield' a forgotten name' but a good artist of the tough-guy school. he was one of the stable-of-talents on a wonderful magazine,IT the 30th, called "the black mask" among them the legendary dash Hammett and Raymond chandler' but also wonderful talents like Whitefield and Horace McCoy(famous later for his masterpiece "they shoot horses don't they"). what a pity that all this is gone by now, in a world of cooperates and brainless big lush productions. its our loss and lets pray for some brave creative producer to save us...

"High Tide" is a totally obscure but wonderful B-movie film noir from the Monogram mill. It opens with a car careening off a desolate seaside cliff -- its two occupants (Lee Tracy and Don Castle) injured and trapped in the wreckage. As the turbulent tide quickly threatens to engulf them, the events leading up to their predicament are recounted -- a twisty tale of a cynical, crusading newspaper editor (Tracy, naturally) taking on the mob while the high-living owner frets. The latter has even more problems when Tracy hires his jaded wife's ex-lover (Castle) as a private investigator.Solidly directed by John Reinhardt (who also triumphed with another seedy, minimally-budgeted Monogram noir called "The Guilty"), the dialog is snappy but eloquent, there are plenty of venetian-blind shadows, silhouetted figures and moody low-key lighting, and the plot is nicely unraveled. Only the annoying library-style music lets the side down (lending it that inevitable "B" quality, of course). Tracy was playing out the string on poverty row at the time, but his wry staccato readings and weary-but-steadfast demeanor are a perfect fit here.