Iron Glove, The (1954)
* 1/2 (out of 4)
Incredibly silly production by Sam Katzman with director William Castle trying to keep everything together. Depending on the scene, Scotish or Irish accents are full speed ahead as an adventurer (Robert Stack) is hired to find a bride for James Stuart, the son of King James, so that the crowd of the country can be returned to the Stuart family but there are others who don't want to see that. If you're looking for a history lesson then I'm sure you're going to be disappointed as the director couldn't even keep up with what type of accent the actors should be speaking so it's doubtful he or Katzman were paying too much attention to history details. In his autobiography Stack was pretty hard on this film and for good reason as it's obvious very little time or effort went into making it. Both Castle and Katzman put their names on a wide range of "B" movies but this one here gets off to a bad start and really never picks up any steam. It appears everything from the music score to the cinematography are just going through the motions and for the life of me I couldn't figure out what they were trying to do with this thing. Everything you look at are obviously sets so you never get any sort of epic or realistic feel. Another problem is that the actors seem to either be drunk, don't care or are trying to re-enact their styles when they were in high school productions. All of the actors are incredibly wooden and poor Stack looks incredibly uncomfortable in his role. As mentioned before, his accent is constantly going in and out from one scene to the next and there are moments where the American voice comes through.Ursula Thiess, Richard Stapley and Alan Hale, Jr. round out the supporting cast but none of them inject any life to the picture. At 77-minutes the movie feels twice as long and in the end this is just a very cheap production that I'm sure was sold as the bottom half of a triple-feature. Either way, only those, such as myself, who must see all of Castle's films should bother with this.
