Irving Reis, you’ve done it again! Said no one, ever. Gay Guy Laurence Lawrence again promises his harridan fiancée to knock off the crime-solving + dame-snogging only to realize FALCON movies make certain demands of the genre people showing up early for George Stevens’ WOMAN OF THE YEAR wanted addressed. The FALCON formula congeals if not coagulates; the FALCON cinematic universe continuity strains so much already that it makes the PLANET OF THE APES franchise look like paragons of fastidious hard SF rigorousness. Synthetic diamonds! Exotic-ish jewel thieve-esses! And twiiiiiins! I fucking love these dumb movies and will fight you.

George Sanders talks like Scotch tastes, so if you like Scotch, good news: he did 4 FALCON movies [of 13] [before tagging out w/brother Tom Conway, talking like Scotch smells]. Not quite serials, not quite movies; like THE SAINT x THE THIN MAN if nobody gave a shit. These RKO programmers/TCM schedule fillers fulfill daily requirements for studio-system junk food: extensive RKO stagework? √ The RKO playhouse of “stars”? √ Main character’s name changing 3 times in 3 movies? √ Jean Brooks? √√√√√ And you can’t beat the sense of satisfaction that comes from watching a whole movie in 67 minutes.

Deeply Catholic cop Tony Lo Bianco confronts a wave of mass casualty events connected only by their savagery and the perpetrators justifying their actions by saying the same words: "God told me to." Shot run-and-gun across a 1975 Manhattan [through both the St. Patrick’s Day parade and the San Gennaro festival...!] so grimy you’ll want a tetanus shot and backstopped by a treasure trove of That Guy New York actors, what starts as a gnarly exploitation procedural becomes something much much more. Does reach exceed grasp? Yeah, sure -- in the very best ways. The less you know about it the better.

If trench coats and bared midriffs spell S-P-Y to you then holy shit are you in luck. Fernando Luján looks like Peter O'Toole and Dean Martin but acts like the horny-coded dweeb from a Disney show about Business Tweens. The titular Agente doesn't show up until 25 minutes in, but don’t worry! There are three whole songs in the meantime. Amadee Chabot acts like Anna Nicole Smith got kicked by a horse and speaks Spanish like she learned it in East Spencer North Carolina from a white woman named "Jackie." Her Cuban-Snuff-Film-Catwoman outfit may have been worn upside-down and backwards.