Blake of Scotland Yard

This is the dire feature version of what I imagine is an equally dire serial. Ralph Byrd has invented a "death ray" that can blow up battleships more than a hundred miles away. He wants to give it to all the members of the League of Nations, which he imagines will bring world peace, but a criminal gang has stolen it and plans to sell it to a foreign power. Byrd goes searching through the dives of Paris under the direction of his uncle, Herbert Rawlinson, the eponymous Blake etc., instead of releasing the blueprints or building another.

The group of criminals is led by the Scorpion, a stooped figure in a slouch hat and cape who holds a lobster claw over his face as a disguise. This goes on for 70 minutes without much happening except a badly executed Apache dance or two.

How does the death ray work? It doesn't matter, because it's a Maguffin. A Maguffin derives from a story that Alfred Hitchcock liked to tell. A man gets on a train with a contraption, which he stows in the overhead rack. "What's that?" asks a fellow passenger. "It's a Maguffin." "What's a Maguffin?" "It's a device for trapping tigers in the Scottish Highlands." "There are no tigers in the Scottish Highlands." "Then that's never a Maguffin."

Maybe it was Hitchcock writer Angus McPhail who told the story, but in the movies a Maguffin is something people want desperately. It sets the plot in motion. It doesn't really matter what it is. Hitchcock liked Maguffins, from the secret plans in THE THIRTY-NINE STEPS to whatever it was that James Mason stole in NORTH BY NORTH-WEST. Film makers still use Maguffins. Remember the briefcase in PULP FICTION? Whenever the briefcase was opened, a light illuminated the face of the actor looking into the case. What was in the case? A light bulb.

Which is more than you get in this badly written, poorly executed, worse-printed movie.