As best as I can tell this was the first film produced based on the character of Lemmy Caution from the novels of English author Peter Cheyney. Cheyney wrote ten of them in the 1930's and 40's as well as a bunch of other detective novels. Poison Ivy was Cheyney's second Caution work from 1937. The film is quite good. Surprisingly so after having seen a few of the other Caution films. It appears that as time went on they made Caution more and more of a parody of himself with his cocksure approach and girls dropping at his feet. There is some of that here - as in the novels - but it is kept in check. It is overall a reasonably serious detective/pulpy noir film with a dose of betrayals, shoot outs and a shimmering femme fatale. For reasons only the French can explain this character became iconic in France but nowhere else.


Bernard Borderie who was the director of most of the Lemmy Caution films into the 1960's must have been the man who picked the totally inexperienced American Eddie Constantine to be Lemmy Caution; mainly for his tough guy bad skin look. Up till then Constantine was a singer under the guidance of Edith Piaf and rumored to be her lover as well. It is hard to gauge how good an actor he is since all these films I have seen are dubbed into English but he is definitely a presence. All the dubs seem to have the same voice for Caution so I wonder if it is Constantine's voice. Some day I should watch one of Constantine's American films to do a comparison.


We first catch up with Caution at FBI headquarters in New York where he is told an agent has disappeared and Caution needs to go find him in Casablanca (where the French still ruled the country when this film was made). He finds him alright - dead in a phone booth in a nightclub where the nightly entertainment is the singing of Carlotta (Dominique Wilms) known to her friends as Poison Ivy for good reason. She screams out femme fatale from the next country - a sultry sex laden caricature of Veronica Lake - slim like a lonely lamp post with curves where they should be and a constant mile long cigarette drooping from her lips like a long lost lover - even when she kisses. Dominique has kind of an off-beat slight Picasso look to her but you can't keep your eyes off of her. She is the moll of the kingpin criminal (Howard Vernon) and never even bats one of her long eyelashes when Lemmy tries to flirt with her. Caution is trying to protect an incoming gold shipment from the US Treasury and dead bodies begin to pile up as well as attempts on his life. It is well-paced with a lot of turns and plenty of action (though badly choreographed by today's standards) for its time. It was hard not to think that one can see the seeds of the early Bond films here in Caution - cool as a cucumber and in and out of jams like a gigolo. This was a big hit in France and led to all the other Lemmy Caution films.