by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The Boston Blackie TV episode was called “Cop Killer” and it was the second
show aired when the show went on the air (September 27, 1951), a Ziv Television
production directed by Paul Landres (who later directed the Alan Freed rock ’n’
roll quickie Go, Johnny, Go) from a
script by Warren Wilson. The series star was Kent Taylor, playing Boston
Blackie, a former thief who had served a prison sentence, though he was still
suspected by the cops in general and Inspector Faraday (Frank Orth) in
particular — commenting on one of the “B” quickies from Columbia in the 1940’s
that also used the Boston Blackie character, I described Faraday as combining
the worst qualities of Javert and Ahab, but in this version instead of being
convinced that Blackie is still a crook, he’s merely irritated by the meddlings
of a private detective and even more irritated when the private guy solves the
crime (much like Holmes and Lestrade, and all too many detective/cop teams
since). What’s fascinating about this one is the sheer body count: it begins
with an armed robbery of an armored car which results in the murder of the
entire crew driving the armored car (including a very young and uncredited
David Janssen as the man behind the wheel) and the use of an anti-tank weapon
to stop the car — only the weapon also singes the money the crooks were trying
to steal, which becomes an important clue later when one of the bills turns up
in circulation despite the head crook’s instruction that his underlings not
spend any of the money until he figures
out a way to fence it and get “clean,” unmarked and unsinged, bills. Then the
crooks murder a rookie cop, Tommy Adams (Richard Crane), who stopped them for a
moving violation and who was a particular protégé of Blackie’s — whereupon
Faraday drops his opposition to Blackie’s participation in the investigation.
The big turning point occurs when Blackie gets caught — temporarily, of course
— in the villains’ trap when he realizes that the person he’s brought to the
villains’ hideout thinking he’s a witness is in fact one of the gang. It was an
O.K. crime show for the period, quite action-packed for its time and half-hour
time slot (the half-hour crime show seems to have died with the reboot of Dragnet in the 1960’s) but a bit disappointing, especially in the
car: one of the main attractions of this series was that incredibly long,
low-slung black sports car Blackie drove, but here he’s tooling around in an
ordinary white convertible that appears to belong to his on-screen girlfriend, Mary
Wesley (Lois Collier). — 11/30/11
I picked out the next episode in sequence on the discs I’ve
been burning of the Boston Blackie TV
show, “Inside Crime” from the second of the show’s two seasons (originally
aired December 19, 1952) and with Blackie driving that beautiful low-slung
black car (I’d thought it was a sports car but it appeared to be able to seat
four, though just how comfortable the two in the back would be is anybody’s
guess) that was almost as much a star of this series as the human male lead,
Kent Taylor, was. It was about a bank robbery in which the crooks wore gas
masks (for no apparent reason other than disguise, since they did not
use gas to incapacitate the people working
in the bank when it was robbed — they came in after hours so the only people
still there were counting the day’s receipts and putting them into the vault)
and clubbed the security guard on the head — only the robbery was witnessed by
a homeless man with a dog, and when the guard came to he was being
cross-examined by insurance investigator Hanlon (a quite nice tough performance
by one Clark Howat) and accused of being a co-conspirator. Hanlon actually gets
the guard to confess just to spare his wife from being arrested herself as an
accessory (this part of the story seemed contemporary now with the tactics used by police to browbeat suspects
into confessing having been the subject of investigative news stories and PBS
documentaries), but Boston Blackie is unconvinced and neither is Inspector
Faraday (Frank Orth), his nemesis in the 1940’s Columbia movies but here his
frequent, if reluctant, collaborator from the official police force. The story
by Buckley Angell and Donn Mullaly is based on too many improbable coincidences
— it just happens that the
security guard’s wife is a good friend of Boston Blackie’s girlfriend, Mary
Wesley (Lois Collier), and thereby is able to contact Blackie and get him in
the case; and it also just happens
that when Mary and the homeless witness are in a restaurant, two of the robbers
happen to show up at the same restaurant and are able to target the homeless
guy for elimination. As just about anybody could guess if they’d seen more than
one or two movies in their lives, the nasty insurance investigator and the
mastermind of the robbery turn out to be the same person, and Blackie busts him
and turns him over to Faraday. It was a nice show, beset by a poor (grey and
foggy) image from the archive.org download, but the show overall is appealing
(and that cool car is practically a character in itself!) and I’m looking
forward to the episodes we’ve downloaded (we have 20 in all, about one-third
the total). One oddity is the presence of Lee Van Cleef in a minor role as one
of the crooks — though his last name was spelled “Cleff” in the closing credits!
— 12/2/11
We screened the next Boston Blackie episode in sequence, “Queen of Thieves,” originally
aired December 5, 1952 as part of the show’s second season, directed by George
Cahan from a script by Herbert Purdom and Irwin Lieberman (and, peculiarly,
Frank Orth is still credited in the cast list as Inspector Faraday even though
it was quite obviously another actor filling in for that week’s episode). What
makes this episode particularly treasurable is the marvelous character of
Needles (Mary Young), the dotty old grandmotherly type who’s actually the
titular queen of thieves, as well as running a sideline making bets on
longshots at horse races. To place the bets she uses Archie (Skelton Knaggs), a
veteran pickpocket (Knaggs speaks with one of the worst fake British accents
I’ve ever heard) who doesn’t place the bets at all, confident that Needles’
horses will always lose — only one comes in and he now owes her $60,000 he
doesn’t have. Needless to say, he gets offed by Needles and her gang — only
he doesn’t quite get offed: he survives, but in a hospital, where he comes to
with amnesia (movie amnesia,
anyway) and can’t remember a thing about who he is or why he’s done anything.
Like Ma Barker, Needles has a gang of much younger men acting as her hit people
and thugs, and she’s naturally upset that the person she delegated to kill
Archie didn’t quite finish the job — though this was a relatively decorous
episode with much less of a body count than some of the ones we’ve seen — and
she has Blackie beaten to try to put him out of commission, but of course it all ends happily with Needles and
most of her gang being arrested. It was a fun show but it was Mary Young’s
delightful characterization that really “made” it. — 12/4/11
We watched a Boston Blackie episode from December 26, 1952 called “So Was Goliath,” the title
stemming from the remark Boston Blackie (Kent Taylor) throws towards attorney
and fixer Arthur Bishop (a nicely slimy Emory Parnell) when Bishop warns
Blackie he’s a “big man,” and Blackie fires back, “So was Goliath.” The two
cross paths when Blackie’s friend Sid “Legal Eagle” Capper (John Kellogg) is
shown in the boxing ring — he’s taken up prizefighting to work his way through
law school but the workouts and training sessions are cutting into his time for
schoolwork and threatening to lead to him flunking out. Blackie is enlisted by
Sid’s girlfriend Jenny (Anne Kimbell) — oddly the imdb.com listing for this
show gives her the last name “Capper” but she’s clearly not his sister and
she’s equally clearly not his wife (yet) — who, in a quite powerfully acted
scene, expresses her anguish that Sid is doing himself permanent physical and mental damage in the ring that will eliminate his
ability to become a lawyer. She expresses this to Blackie’s girlfriend Mary
Wesley (Lois Collier) when the two are watching Sid’s fight on TV — Jenny turns
it off when Sid is knocked down and doesn’t see that he got up before the count
was over, then turned the fight around and knocked out his opponent for the
victory — and Blackie himself gets involved and finds that Sid’s manager
(played by Allen Jenkins in a welcome return in all his Allen Jenkins-ness) was
successfully blackmailed into selling Sid’s contract to Bishop for $25,000, and
Sid can’t buy his way out of the contract unless he can raise that figure.
Blackie investigates and finds that the opponent for Sid’s next fight, Spoiler
Garrett (a nice Nat Pendleton-esque performance by John Indrisano), is managed
by Bishop — as is Sid, a bozo no-no according to Boxing Commission rules.
The
plot then takes a turn anticipating that of Humphrey Bogart’s last movie, The
Harder They Fall, in that Blackie learns
that — unbeknownst to Sid — all his fights since Bishop took him over have been
fixed: one of Bishop’s seemingly omnipresent thugs (at one point they kidnap
Blackie at gunpoint just as he’s getting into that monumentally cool black
sports car he drove, which practically qualifies as a character in itself,
leaving his girlfriend — to whom he has not given the keys — to figure out how to get home by
herself) has been bribing his opponents to throw the fights. Blackie turns the
plot around by briefing Spoiler that he knows about it and riling him up so
much that he fights the fight to the best of his potential — in fact, he gets
so riled that he and Sid start beating each other up in the locker room even before their scheduled bout begins — and Sid holds out for
eight rounds before Spoiler’s attack is too much for him, he loses the fight
but regains his respect and career direction, and with the case spelled out for
him by both Blackie and a sports reporter who was investigating the whole
thing, police inspector Faraday (Frank Orth) — Blackie’s bitter opponent in the
1940’s film series but his friendly rival and collaborator here — takes Bishop
and his whole gang into custody. Though a bit rushed towards the end — this is
one half-hour crime drama script that could have used a longer time slot — this is still one of
the best Boston Blackie TV
episodes, well written (by Oliver Crawford) and directed (by Eddie Davis) and
quite welcome for Allen Jenkins’ presence, a superb performance by Anne Kimbell
(quite better than the usual damsel-in-distress of these productions) and an
overall atmosphere that even on the limits of a Ziv TV budget approaches film
noir. — 12/17/11
For the last two nights in a row Charles and I screened
episodes from the
Boston Blackie TV
series, including “The Heist Job,” one which we’d already seen on a VHS tape
that contained single episodes from a number of 1950’s TV series, including Dangerous
Assignment and another crime show as well
as (a real “ringer” in this context!) Ozzie and Harriet. “The Heist Job” was an episode from late in the
series’ two-year run (originally aired February 6, 1953) and featured former
Dead End Kid Billy Halop as Johnny Evans, an ex-con turned cab driver who still
hates Boston Blackie (Kent Taylor) for having given the police the evidence
that sent him up in the first place. Halop turns in a good, if rather
predictable, performance in a role solidly to his usual “type,” capturing the
self-destructive arrogance that makes him an easy mark for a plot to frame him
for a heist. About the only “original” wrinkle in the script by John Loring (a
“front” for Robert L. Richards, according to imdb.com) is that the person
framing Johnny is his brother-in-law, Harry Webb (Peter Leeds) — who (falsely)
tells Johnny that his wife was in on the plot with him. It’s a workmanlike
episode but with little to recommend it but Halop’s performance (and a nicely
morally ambiguous one by Marge Evans, a.k.a. Jane Bryant, as Johnny’s wife),
some more glimpses of Boston Blackie’s incredibly cool black sports car, and a
final action climax (considerably less exciting than director Eddie Davis was
hoping for) set on a drawbridge and pretty obviously inspired by the Brooklyn
Bridge-set finale of The Naked City.
Last night’s episode was even later in the show’s original
run (April 17, 1953) but a good deal better written and more exciting. It was
called “False Face” and featured a quite inventive plot — this time Eddie
Davis, who usually directed, also wrote the script from a story by J. Benton
Cheney — in which Elizabeth Farrell (a marvelous femme fatale performance by June Vincent), a former plastic
surgeon who lost her medical license due to malpractice, seduces a man named
Dave (George Eldredge) whose only use to her is his striking resemblance to
banker Lawrence Stuart (also George Eldredge). For two years she slowly
remodels his face so that his natural resemblance to the banker becomes a
virtually identical “look,” then she kidnaps the real Stuart (she lures him
into an antique car she’s offering to sell him and then her assistant Slick,
played by Marshall Reed, drugs him and sends out the fake Stuart) and has her
double go into the bank and help himself to half a million in cash from the
vault. What’s more, she arranges for Boston Blackie to be her witness verifying
the false “Stuart”’s identity as the real one — only she’s undone when
Blackie’s girlfriend Mary Wesley (Lois Collier) snaps a photo of his dog
Whitey, with the kidnapping happening in the background — and after Stuart (the
real one) claims he was kidnapped and held while the embezzlement was occurred,
and police inspector Faraday (Frank Orth) is convinced he’s faking amnesia
while Blackie is convinced he really has amnesia, eventually the plot unravels when Dave insists that now that
they’ve stolen the money he wants Elizabeth to change his face back to his natural appearance, and Elizabeth decides to
kill him instead — only Blackie and Faraday arrive, not in time to save Dave’s
life (Elizabeth puts him into an hypnotic state and marches him off the side of
a building, much the way the villainess in the Rathbone/Bruce Sherlock Holmes
movie The Woman in Green tried to
do with Holmes) but in time to arrest Farrell and Slick and unravel the plot.
“False Face” was an engaging story and one of the episodes in this series that
might have been stronger in an hour-long time slot (an odd criticism for me since
I’ve often in these pages lamented the demise of the half-hour crime show and
wished modern police procedurals could use the shorter length instead of having
their scripts padded to fill hour slots) but was still exciting and inventive.
— 12/20/11
Charles and I didn’t have time to run a
Boston Blackie TV episode last night, but the night before we’d run
one that was labeled on archive.org as “The Blonde” but which appears to be one
called “Studio Murder” that aired on March 13, 1953, in which Blackie defends a
man accused of being a hit-and-run driver who killed a milkman by running him
over. He swears that while his car
struck and killed the guy, he wasn’t driving it at the time; instead he’d
picked up a brunette in a restaurant and she had driven the car while he slept.
Given that this was identified as “The Blonde” and yet the woman in the case
was identified over and over and over again as a brunette, I kept waiting for a twist in which she’d turn
out either to be a brunette wearing a blonde wig or a blonde wearing a brunette
wig to avoid capture. Instead she turned out to be a dark-haired movie star on
the Ziv TV lot, making a period Western — Blackie and his police-officer
friend, Inspector Faraday, trace her because the guy whose car she was driving
when she ran over the milkman remembered her wearing a silver-sequined dress,
and the snippy designer who made the dress recalled that he had sold it to a
film studio for use in a period film in which the star was obliged to have a
shoot-out with the baddies — only she’d already committed at least three
murders and was planning to eliminate the last people she wanted to get rid of
by substituting a loaded gun for the blank-filled prop gun she was supposed to
use in the final scene — only Blackie and Faraday were there and were able to
pick her off once they saw what was happening. It was a good show and I liked
the anticipation of the Law and Order gimmick of having a person in a public position being arrested in the
most “public” position possible — in this case, the murderous star being
apprehended while shooting the final scene of her movie. I also liked the idea
of a movie star being the killer — Hollywood didn’t usually draw on its own for
villains in those days, and even the film In a Lonely Place soft-pedaled the Dorothy B. Hughes novel that was
its source by copping out so that screenwriter Dixon Steele (Humphrey Bogart) wasn’t a serial killer in the film, as he was in the book —
after all, there’s not that much
of a difference between celebrity diva-hood and psychopathology! — 12/23/11
Charles and I watched a
Boston Blackie episode from the short-lived (two years) early
1950’s TV series, an intriguing little number originally aired January 2, 1953
called “Death Does a Rhumba,” in which Blackie ends up investigating a
smuggling ring masterminded by corrupt importer/exporter Latso (Maurice Jara).
He’s hatched a plot to sneak industrial diamonds in the U.S. by making maracas
containing them instead of the seeds that usually make the instrument’s rattling
noise, only a waiter named Fernando (Leo Penn, who looks convincingly Latino despite his Anglo-sounding name)
hijacks the shipment — apparently in the employ of some rival criminal who
offers him the job, which he takes so he can make enough money to marry his
girlfriend Valdita (Vicki Bakken), who dances at La Golondrina restaurant where
Fernando also works — and we get a long sequence of her dance just to satisfy
the cheesecake fanciers in the audience and to give Lois Collier, the actress
playing Blackie’s girlfriend Mary Wesley, a chance to make some jealous
remarks. The plot kicks off with one of those preposterous coincidences the
writers of these shows (Burt Sims got the teleplay credit on this one and the
intriguingly first-named Sobey Martin directed) relied on to get their stories
told in just a half-hour time slot (25 minutes when the time allotted for
commercials was removed — currently a “half-hour” commercial TV show is 22
minutes or even less!): Boston Blackie (Kent Taylor), Mary and their friend
Inspector Faraday (Frank Orth) just happen to decide to have lunch at La Golondrina at the time Latso murders
Fernando — at first it’s hinted that it was Latso’s thug Garrett (Richard
Reeves) who killed Fernando, but Garrett’s thing is shooting people (there’s a
nice scene in which he holds a gun on Blackie and Mary in Blackie’s apartment,
but eventually Blackie figures out a way to disarm him) while Latso collects
rare knives used by Mexican indigenous people in sacrifices, and since Fernando
was stabbed Blackie deduces Latso committed the crime himself. Eventually, of
course, Blackie figures out the scheme and the criminals are arrested. This was
a pretty good episode in the show, not one of the great ones but appealing (and
from my point of view any glimpse
of that incredibly cool low-slung black car Blackie drove in this series is
worth watching it for!) even though, as Charles pointed out, the characters of
Boston Blackie and his girlfriend Mary don’t have the chemistry of the actors
who played Mr. and Mrs. North in the contemporary series (Richard Denning and
Barbara Britton), nor do the writers give them the repartee the Norths had got (and Mr. and Mrs. Charles had
before them in the Thin Man
movies!); also Kent Taylor as Blackie, while decent looking and credible as an
action hero, is hardly at Denning’s level of drop-dead gorgeousness — but the Boston
Blackie series is still fun to watch. —
12/27/11
The only thing Charles and I had either the time or the
energy to watch was a
Boston Blackie episode,
“The Friendly Gesture,” towards the end of this show’s second and last season,
which starts with a lot of stock footage of a prison during the middle of an
escape, and then we get to see at least the crotch and legs of the escapee. He
turns out to be bank robber Barney Stevens (Ben Cameron), and he makes it out
of the joint and into the waiting station wagon of a former associate, Dave
Brubaker (“Dave Brubeck went really
bad!” Charles joked — to which I replied, “He had to. Jazz didn’t pay all that
well back then”), who wants to team up with Barney to rob a bank in L.A. Barney
had cased before he got popped. This being a half-hour crime drama (a form of
entertainment now utterly extinct), the plot has to bring the crooks and the good guys together in a
hurry, and so screenwriter Dennis Cooper (presumably not the man who’s written dark novels and poems with
Queer themes — who was actually born in 1953, the year this show first aired)
has Boston Blackie in the bank doing routine business when the teller who’s
waiting on him asks him, “Hey, isn’t that Barney Stevens, the bank robber, over
there?” Blackie goes up to the mystery man, and after a bit of banter the man
pulls out a gun and announces that he is Barney Stevens and he’s there to hold up the bank — only another bank
employee gets in the way and Stevens flees without getting any of the money.
One would expect Dave, who was waiting for him in the getaway car, to be upset
by this, but in fact Stevens gets cornered and arrested by the cops.
The bank’s
manager decides to go public with the story of how the courageous teller foiled
the robbery — and the teller’s wife receives a threatening phone call from Dave
announcing that her husband will be killed. When he takes the bus home from
work (which seems to stop right on their doorstep!) she gestures to him,
wanting to warn him of the threat, but too late — Dave is there in his car and
shoots and kills the poor guy on the spot. For some strange reason, the teller
uses his dying breath to swear his wife to secrecy about who shot him, and
Blackie and his girlfriend Mary Wesley (Lois Collier) try to get the widow to
talk to no avail. Eventually they show her some photos of suspected bank
robbers, which she squints at — except for one photo in the stack, at which she
widens her eyes when she sees it — and just then Dave makes another phone call,
warning her that if she ever identifies him she’ll meet the same fate as her
husband. Dave has overplayed his hand: the moment she gets his second call, she
abruptly changes her mind and decides she will identify her husband’s killer to Blackie and the
police after all. “You already have,” Blackie tells her — no doubt referring to
the way her eyes lit up when she saw the man’s photo in the stack. Eventually
he’s identified and caught. There have been better Boston Blackie shows in the package we downloaded from archive.org,
but this was a good one, suspenseful, well characterized and excitingly
directed by the oddly named Sobey Martin. — 1/2/12
Charles and I eventually watched a couple more
Boston
Blackie episodes as a nightcap. One was
called “Minuet for Murders,” which really doesn’t make much sense since the
story is really about a burglar who’s been striking various homes across Los
Angeles and sneaks in and out so quietly he is nicknamed “The Phantom Burglar”
by the media. He is Rainey (veteran sour-faced character actor Skelton Knaggs)
and he attempts to heist a drawer full of money from Madison (John Carson), a
disbarred attorney who catches Rainey in the act and instead of turning him
into the police, decides to use him in his own criminal schemes. Blackie gets
involved when Lenore Aldwin (Evelynne Eaton), a friend of Blackie’s girlfriend
Mary Wesley (Lois Collier), recruits him to recover papers Rainey stole from her
which she says are worth $500 to him and completely useless to anyone else —
only when Blackie contacts Rainey (at a miniature-golf course!) Rainey writes
him a note demanding $10,000 for them, and eventually another thug gets
involved in the case after Rainey is killed at the golf course — a police
officer shoots him in the leg, intending merely to wound him rather than kill
him, but he falls into a water hazard and hits his head on a rock, thereby
silencing him even more permanently than his disability did. Eventually — in
one of those twist endings that the writer, Robert C. Dennis, thought was a lot more surprising than it in fact turned out to be —
Lenore herself turns out to be the mastermind of the whole operation: she was
using the letters for blackmail, and Madison and Rainey had actually been hired
by her victim to recover them. Blackie tricks her by confronting her with the
package of letters, which she seizes and throws into her fireplace — and of
course those were merely a decoy; Blackie has the real letters and can therefore prove she was a
blackmailer.
The other show, interestingly, also revolved around a mute
who communicated with people by writing them notes — only in that case it’s
Blackie himself who’s posing as a mute.
It’s called “Red Hot Murder” because it deals with a gang of arsonists (making
it uncannily appropriate viewing given that for the first few days of 2012 Los
Angeles was plagued with up to 50 random arsons in which people’s cars were
torched; a suspect has been arrested and he turned out to be an undocumented
immigrant from Germany who was apparently doing it out of a hissy-fit because
his mom was about to be deported). Needless to say, the arsonists in this show
are considerably more businesslike: they’re hired guns for warehouse and
company owners looking to pull insurance scams — they secretly move goods out
of the warehouses, then torch them, so the people hiring them profit twice:
they file false insurance claims stating that the goods were destroyed in the
fires, then can resell them on the black market. (One of the RKO Dick
Tracy films featured a similar racket, only
with fake jewel robberies instead of arsons.) The gimmick is that Blackie and
one of the arson gang end up in a fight in one of the warehouses just before it
goes up; the gang member is killed but Blackie decides to report his own death
and impersonate the gang member to infiltrate the group and find out who the
mysterious “Big Man” (there’s always
a mysterious “Big Man,” it seems, at least in the movies!) is who’s running it.
To pull this off he wears a white hood, supposedly covering up either burn
scars or a plastic surgery job (though it looks less like authentic bandages
than a Muslim woman’s veil and he doffs it incredibly easily), and he pretends
that the fire injured his vocal cords and at least temporarily deprived him of
the power of speech. It was an interesting conceit — though writers J. Benton
Cheney and Milton M. Raison hit the “sentimental” stop on their typewriter
keyboard and had Blackie’s disguise “outed” by his dog Whitey, who chases his
master down and recognizes him at once — while he’s in the middle of a bunch of
arsonists trying to pass himself off as a heartless criminal. Still, it was a
fun show, and while I miss the antagonism between Blackie and Inspector Faraday
from Jack Boyle’s stories and the earlier films (the TV show made no mention of Blackie’s original background as a
reformed thief, or Faraday’s Javert-like disinclination to believe he’d really
reformed) — indeed, Faraday (Frank Orth) didn’t appear at all in “Minuet for
Murders” — the 1951-53 Boston Blackie TV show is well worth having. Charles and I have both done Web
searches trying to find out the identity of that fabulously cool black car
Blackie drives on the show — a low-slung sports car but one with accommodations
for four people, and three tails on the back — and none of the candidates offered by the various people
whose posts we’ve read on the subject look like the car on the show. (One
poster even said he e-mailed fabled custom-car designer George Barris — who
made the version of the Batmobile used on the late-1960’s TV series Batman — only Barris never replied.) — 1/3/12
Charles and I watched another
Boston Blackie episode from archive.org, “Shoot the Works.” Originally
aired March 27, 1953, this one begins in Las Vegas, where Blackie (Kent Taylor)
and his girlfriend Mary Wesley (Lois Collier) are about to leave when they run
into an old friend of theirs named Sam Acropolis (I’m not making this up, you
know!), who’s being targeted by a mystery man wearing coke-bottle glasses.
Acropolis wins over $1 million at a casino roulette table by repeatedly betting
the number 13, which comes up four times in a row (only in the movies!), and
then he’s suddenly killed by the mystery man, who flies back to Los Angeles
with Blackie and Mary. Police inspector Faraday (Frank Orth) is assigned to
investigate the case because, even though the killing occurred in Vegas, L.A.
has jurisdiction because the victim lived there. The victim also had a young
blonde trophy wife whose main interest is making sure she gets all her late
husband’s winnings at the casino (can you say “gold digger”?) and who is
superbly played by Barbara Knudson, and in the end Blackie traps the killer
— who’s played by Bobby Watson, the 1940’s movie actor whose stock in
trade was Adolf Hitler: he played serious Hitlers, comic Hitlers, fake Hitlers
in (alleged) newsreels and even after the war, in Billy Wilder’s 1948 film A
Foreign Affair, donned Hitler drag because
Wilder needed a scene of Marlene Dietrich’s character meeting and being warmly
greeted by Der Führer.
The Blackie episode
we’d watched the night before, “Hired Hand” — which originally aired a week
before this one, March 20, 1953 (for some reason far more of archive’s
downloads of this show are from the second and last season of it than the
first) — was considerably better, a great story about chicken ranchers Amos and
Rachel Hendrix (James Anderson and Lorna Thayer) and their hired hand, Gillian
(Walter Coy), who was paroled to them from a mental institution and is fearful
that if he screws up the job, he’ll be sent back. The conflict between the
Hendrixes is that Amos wants to sell the ranch to a developer, Rachel wants to
keep it, and Amos has hit on the idea of murdering his wife and framing Gillian
for it. At one point he actually takes a shot at her, then gives Gillian the
gun and tells him to clean it — and Gillian freaks out because even holding a gun is a violation of his parole — and at another
point he plants a bomb inside the ranch truck. Not surprisingly, this is the
sort of story where the suspense is over how the real criminal is going to get caught rather than
who the real criminal is.
It’s an excellent little suspense tale, with a
marvelous performance by Coy (who plays his role much the way Bruce Dern acted
in To Kill a Mockingbird a decade
later) and an overall atmosphere that reminded both Charles and I of Alfred
Hitchcock Presents — an especially
noteworthy comparison given that one of the most sinister Hitchcock shows (and one of the few Hitchcock directed
himself), “Arthur,” was also set on a chicken ranch and featured the owner
murdering his wife (though in that version it was because she wanted to sell the ranch and he didn’t), then putting her body in the chicken feeder
and giving the chickens so strong a taste for human flesh that eventually they
turned on him and killed him. (Arthur was played by Laurence Harvey — who,
unfortunately, never worked on a Hitchcock feature film — and the show convinced
me that nobody else needed to make a sequel to Psycho because Hitchcock already had, in The
Birds: Janet Leigh’s character in Psycho is constantly compared to a bird — her last name,
“Crane,” is the name of a bird; in her tight cinch skirt she walks like a bird;
Norman Bates even tells her, “You eat like a bird” — and in my reading, The
Birds is a Psycho sequel in which actual biological birds avenge
themselves against humanity for killing the birdlike Marion Crane.) Though
Blackie and Mary come off almost as extras on their own show — like some modern
devotees of farmers’ markets, Mary particularly likes the eggs from the Hendrix
ranch and makes it a point to go there for them rather than buy eggs at outlets
closer to home, which is what she and Blackie are doing there when the plot
heats up — “Hired Hand” is still effective drama and is one of the best
episodes of this compelling series. — 1/5/12 and 1/6/12
Charles and I didn’t get to watch a movie until almost 11
p.m., when we ran another
Boston Blackie
episode: “Oil Field Murder,” only the third show aired (and in which Boston
Blackie was driving an ordinary production Ford convertible instead of the
really cool custom job he drove in season two — Charles and I have read a
search page on the Web with a bunch of car nuts frustrated that they haven’t
been able to pin down just what this car was or, if it was a custom job, who
made it) in which a rather slatternly woman approaches Blackie in the hallway
of his apartment, another
slatternly woman turns up in
Blackie’s apartment and then gets herself killed by a shooter firing from an
open elevator into the room. It turns out the women were both mixed up in a
scam to sell presumably worthless oil-field stock — only the well they’ve been
drilling actually strikes oil. Charles recognized the ripoff of the Producers premise before I did — the gimmick being that
they’ve sold over 100 percent of the phony oil company and were just going
through the motions of actually drilling, only now that the well has struck oil
they owe over 100 percent of the
profits — and indeed the idea was nothing new: it had been an urban legend on
Broadway for decades before Mel Brooks got hold of it, Groucho Marx had wanted
to use it as the plot for A Night at the Opera, and it had already been done seriously in a mystery-thriller context in the 1944 film The
Falcon in Hollywood. It wasn’t one of the
better Boston Blackie episodes —
though it was nice to see Inspector Faraday (Frank Orth) arrest Boston Blackie
(Kent Taylor), thereby returning to the original conceptions of their
characters from Boston Blackie
creator Jack Boyle (i.e., that Blackie was a reformed criminal and Faraday was
a Javert-like cop convinced that he hadn’t really reformed and determined to
arrest him as soon as he could document that he was committing crimes again),
and not at all surprising to see that the slatternly woman that survived,
Brenda (Pamela Blake) — supposedly the secretary of the man who had disguised
himself as the foreman of the well crew but who was actually the owner of the
company (Blackie deduced that she wasn’t really a secretary from the length of
her fingernails) — turn out to be the killer. This show got better later in the
run, and though I usually don’t like the cutesy-poo plot lines involving
Blackie’s dog Whitey, this one had Whitey fall for a female dog owned by one of
the women and that was clever
(even though it was obviously a ripoff from Billy Wilder’s marvelous, and
woefully underrated, 1940’s musical The Emperor Waltz). — 1/8/12
Charles and I had run a
Boston Blackie episode the night before last: “Deep Six” (my cue
sheet had the title as “Blind Beggar” but that was clearly wrong), a nautically
themed episode in which Blackie (Kent Taylor) and his girlfriend Mary Wesley
(Lois Collier) are at a sleazy waterfront bar called the Spindrift Café
attending the engagement party of homely sailor George Mittner (Hugh Sanders)
and Louella (Tracey Roberts), gold-digger and former girlfriend of Mittner’s
shipmate Skip Clark (Clark Howat). It was an O.K. episode with a nice femme
fatale performance by Louella, who wasn’t
interested in Mittner but in the five-figure bankroll he’d saved up from his
pay — no suspense there; the question, once Mittner is found dead, was who was
her co-conspirator: Clark, Captain Jansen (Lee Van Cleef, though he was still
spelling his last name “Cleff” — either that or the Boston
Blackie credit-sequence creators were
unable to get the spelling right), Hayes (Peter Mamakos) or the true culprit,
Lang (William Bakewell, whom I’ve already commented on in terms of his downward
career trajectory from appearing opposite Joan Crawford and Clark Gable — and
actually being billed ahead of Gable! — in Dance, Fools, Dance at MGM in 1931 to making crap like the Republic
serial Rocket Men from the Moon
two decades later). This is one of the Blackie episodes that really suffers from being restricted
to half an hour’s running time (actually 25 minutes less the commercial
interruptions — today’s “half-hour” shows run only 20 to 22 minutes!): there’s
a plethora of suspects aboard Mittner’s ship and we never find out much about
any of them except Clark — indeed, we get the impression that Louella was so
“loose” that just about every
male in the episode cast except Blackie had had her — and it also doesn’t help
that it’s an unusually claustrophobic episode (virtually all of it takes place
either at that ratty bar or on board the ship all these sailors work on) and we
don’t get to see that incredibly cool mystery car Blackie drove during most of
the second season. — 1/14/12
The
Boston Blackie
episode we watched last night was called “Blind Beggar” and it had overtones of
The Beggar’s Opera about it: it
starts with a blind beggar being run down and nearly killed by a cab driver.
The beggar is taken to the hospital in an ambulance, only when it arrives the
beggar is gone and the orderly is missing. Boston Blackie and his girlfriend
Mary (incidentally in this first-season episode the Blackiemobile is a black
production Ford convertible: that incredibly cool sports car for which this
series is remembered came in its second — and, alas, last — season), who
witnessed the accident (in order to keep their stories within the half-hour
time frame, virtually all the episodes involved Blackie solving crimes he
personally witnessed) and ultimately traced the killer to a man who hired
people to pretend to be blind or
otherwise disabled so they could beg on the street and get money, which he then
split with them. Blackie discovers this when he apprehends one “blind” beggar
and finds his suit to be padded to make him look bigger than he is, and at one
point he gets locked in the cellar of the blind man’s apartment and notices
that his shaving kit is next to a mirror: something that would be routine for a
sighted man but not for a blind one. It was an O.K. episode of a show that got
better as it continued (this one originally aired October 8, 1951 and was only
its fifth episode) and was always engaging and entertaining, even though
virtually all mention of Jack Boyle’s original Boston Blackie’s past as a
criminal who had reformed — and police inspector Faraday’s (Frank Orth)
conviction that he hadn’t really
reformed and determination to nail him as a crook — was omitted for these
shows, and Charles said he expected this series to be a lot more noir than it was. — 1/24/12
I finished the fourth of my five discs of
Boston Blackie downloads from archive.org. A few days before Charles
and I had watched “The Gunman,” a quite noir-ish episode featuring yet another one of the plots
in which Blackie is propelled into the action by a friend of his girlfriend
Mary — in this case, Anne Morgan (Anne Kimbell), whose husband Barry Morgan
(John Kellogg) who’s a small-time crook who’s got into the orbit of a crooked
salvage dealer who does just enough legitimate business to stay on the right
side of the law (apparently) while making his real money doing not-too-carefully-specified (by writers
David Harth — whose last name is misspelled “Heath” on imdb.com — and Howard
Dimsdale) but nonetheless nefarious deeds. This is one of the most convincingly
noir episodes of this show, less
from visual atmospherics than from the overall plot line and in particular the
character of the corrupt salvage boss, who’s able to maintain the air of a
just-getting-by proletarian.
Last night’s episode was “Scar Hand,” based on the old
chestnut (also used in movies in the first episode of the Whistler “B”-series with Richard Dix for Columbia and a
stand-alone “B” noir called Strange
Bargain from RKO in 1948) of a man so
desperate for money for his family that he hires a hit man to have himself
killed so his survivors can collect on his insurance (which wouldn’t pay if he
committed suicide by his own hand but would if he were murdered). In this case the person wants
the $10,000 from his insurance because his son needs a life-saving operation
and the only person who can perform it is a New York specialist, and the fee is
needed not only for the doctor’s services but the hospitalization and other
recovery costs. The doctor actually agrees to do the operation for free, but
the killer (Karl Davis) is already on the loose and, of course, there’s no way
the would-be victim can contact him to tell him he’s changed his mind. Though
this was from the first season and therefore Boston Blackie is driving a
regular 1950 Ford production convertible instead of the really cool (and
bafflingly mysterious — even the contributors to a Web site for car buffs were
fooled!) black streamlined sports car he drove in season two — it also was one
of the most convincingly noir
episodes in the show and had a nice denouement in which Blackie, of course, was able to track down
the killer and stop him before he knocked off the no-longer-wanna-be victim. —
2/3/12
After a hiatus Charles and I picked up the last of the five
discs of
Boston Blackie TV episodes from
1951-53 we had downloaded from archive.org and ran the first of the six
programs on them: “The Devil’s Daughters,” a first-season episode which was
played mostly for camp — it had that dreadful comic tone I object to in a lot
of crime shows being aired now
(but which seems to be what audiences want these days; the campy crime shows
like NCIS and its spinoffs are
doing well while tough, gritty ones like Prime Suspect are getting canceled or else moved around in the
schedule so much it’s hard to find when they’re on if you want to watch them — this began when Brandon
Tartikoff was program chair at NBC and he moved shows around so much, and so
often, the joke was he should have been named “Random Tartikoff”!) — but which
had an interesting and chilling pair of villainesses: sisters Peggy (Christine
McIntyre, coming off her long career as ingénue lead in a lot of the Three
Stooges shorts) and Sandra, who do a lot of small holdups of grocery stores and
gas stations (though in the opening scene they’re robbing a jewelry store of
both money and jewels, the latter of which would require connections with
fences to turn into cash) and at one point one of the women shoots the hand of
a grocery clerk who’s actually cooperating with the robbery, apparently just
for the hell of it (and because it’s a convention in TV crime fiction that
things start to unravel for the crooks when they get trigger-happy and shoot
someone). It was an interesting show mainly for the device writers J. Benton
Cheney (story) and Eddie Davis (script) used to get Boston Blackie and his crew
— his dog Whitey, his girlfriend Mary (Lois Collier) and police inspector
Faraday (Frank Orth), essentially Lestrade to Blackie’s Holmes — on the trail
of the crooks. They turn out to be the wife and sister-in-law, respectively, of
the owner of a restaurant where Blackie et al. are “regulars” for lunch — indeed, so much so that
when an officious waiter tells Blackie that he can’t bring his dog into the
place because it’s illegal, Blackie says, “That’s not a dog, that’s a short
human with long hair,” and the owner backs Blackie up and allows the pooch to
remain — only the restaurant owner gets strangled in his back office (way bigger than any back room in a real restaurant,
Charles assured me) by the male confederate of our two devil’s daughters. The
show zips through the apprehension of the girls and ends with a nice shoot-out
on what looks like scaffolding to erect a billboard in which Blackie takes out
the bad guy who was working with the two bad girls and who killed the
restaurant owner — a lot of the
final sequences on this show seemed to go out of their way to emulate the
famous shoot-out on the Brooklyn Bridge that ended The Naked City — and it’s a nicely done ending to a show that
otherwise provided reliable entertainment but little more (and as our roommate
John pointed out, Kent Taylor was adequate as Boston Blackie but hardly in the
same league as an actor with Chester Morris, who’d played him in the 1940’s
Columbia “B” series!). — 3/14/12
I ran an unusually good
Boston Blackie episode called “Revenge,” originally aired January
23, 1953, in which the opening shot shows a man waking up from what looks like
a pretty deep bender, walking to the next room of his apartment and finding a
woman there, shot dead. It turns out the man is film director Lloyd Austin and
the woman is his wife Gail, and Austin’s agent calls in Boston Blackie because
he’s convinced Lloyd couldn’t
have killed his wife even though not only does the evidence all point to him,
he’s ready and eager to confess to it. In the opening we’ve seen Lloyd retrieve
a scarf monogrammed with the letters “E.A.” from the corpse and attempt to
dispose of it in his garbage disposal (it’s a bit surprising that they already had garbage disposals in 1953), only the blades didn’t
do a good job of chewing it and Blackie later retrieves it. It turns out that
Lloyd’s mother was the legendary silent star Estelle Austin, who has
continually got into trouble writing bad checks from which Lloyd has routinely
bailed her out, thereby feeding her delusion that she’s still rich — only John
Harrington, her co-star in her most successful film, Desert Symphony (which Blackie remembers seeing five times in his
childhood), has found out about this and seized on it as a way of blackmailing
Austin. Just where he got the idea of killing Gail Austin and framing Estelle
for the crime is unclear, but he did — and in order to assist him he hired a
former prizefighter named Rocky who also was an old friend of Blackie’s (like
Nick Charles, Boston Blackie — at least the TV version thereof — had quite a
lot of friends in low places), who joined the plot on the idea he was
protecting Estelle but in an exciting action climax turned against John when he
threatened to kill not only Blackie but Estelle as well. The Sunset
Boulevard parallels in this script by
Howard Dimsdale (directed by series regular Sobey Martin with a lot more creativity and commitment than he usually brought
to this series) are almost too
obvious — I joked at the end that Estelle was going to mention Lloyd’s father,
a funny-looking bald man with an Austrian accent who was the director of Desert
Symphony as well as being her first husband
— but they give this show a depth and power usually absent from the episodes of
this series, and some of director Martin’s compositions are surprisingly noir even though the camp interludes with Blackie’s dog
Whitey (who kibitzes as Blackie and Inspector Farraday play chess) I could have
lived without. And since this was a second-season episode we got some more
glimpses of that incredibly cool custom car Blackie drove (in season one he
just drove a normal everyday 1950 Ford convertible, but in season two he got a
unique sports model almost certainly built especially for the series, since
every guess I’ve seen online as to just what make and model the car is has been
proven wrong; the car’s streamlined look, unbroken by nameplates or hood
ornaments indicating what make it is, also adds to the impression that it was a
custom job). — 3/24/12
I ran the next
Boston Blackie episode in sequence, “Gang Murder,” about a gang of four criminals who
specialize in jobs involving opening safes — only their safecracker gets killed
in the opening scene by another gang member, a kill-crazy guy who breaks the
gang boss’s rule to avoid committing murder. He tries to conceal the body by
covering it in cement, but the police find it anyway and it turns out the man’s
younger brother is a young cop who quits the police force and goes out on his
own to find the killer and avenge his brother by killing his brother’s killer.
Not wanting to see a promising young cop blow his career by committing an act
of vigilante justice that would also be flagrantly illegal, Inspector Faraday
(Frank Orth) asks Boston Blackie (Kent Taylor) to investigate — which Blackie
does by posing as an ex-con from San Quentin (the real person he’s
impersonating is still safely in prison) with safecracking skills. Worried
about Blackie’s virtue with “all those gun molls” — including one who appears
to be the dead man’s and the live vigilante ex-cop’s sister — Blackie’s
girlfriend Mary Wesley (Lois Collier) impersonates a tough girl herself and
hangs around the gang, flirting with one of the members to get an “in.” Blackie
is tortured by a suspicious gang boss and locked in the gang headquarters until
they pull their next job — robbing a newspaper that’s been running a contest in
which readers mail in $1 each to enter (one would think a savvy gang of crooks
would not want to steal a whole
bunch of $1 bills, given the bulk involved in carrying and trying to conceal
them compared to the meagerness of the reward, but that’s what Herbert Purdom
put in his script) — though of course the police get there on time and there’s
a final scene in which the revenge-driven cop confronts his brother’s killer in
custody with a gun but can’t bring himself to fire (and a last-minute
revelation that Faraday made sure the gun was not loaded). There’s also a neat
reversal in which the moll, who may or may not be the victim’s and the cop’s
sister, first appears to be on the side of good but then holds the rogue cop at
gunpoint. This is one of the better Boston Blackie episodes — director Paul Landres keeps the action
moving and the suspense taut — and the only pity is it was still too early in
the run of the show for Blackie to be driving that incredible custom black
sports car he drove in season 2! — 4/12/12
When Charles got back, I showed him the next
Boston
Blackie episode in sequence, “Death by
Dictation,” episode 18 from the first season and noteworthy for some
particularly interesting writing by Bernard Ederer and Robert A. White and one
of the earliest appearance of Boston Blackie’s unusual car. In this version
it’s white instead of black, and the design is quite different — the hood has a
boat’s-prow point instead of a curve, there’s only one fin in the back and
there’s even less detail on the body than there was later — and what’s most
interesting about the way the car looks this time (in most of the first-season
episodes Blackie drove a highly non-unusual
production Ford convertible) is that it has the unmistakable contours of the
Jaguar XK 120, Jaguar’s main production sports car of the time. So was the
Blackiemobile a fiberglass custom body mounted on an XK 120 chassis and
essentially built around the overall shape of a normal XK 120? That makes as
much sense as some of the explanations that have been floated not only on
imdb.com but on car collectors’ sites as well, including offering suggestions
for the identity of Blackie’s car that don’t make any sense at all when they
post pictures of cars looking quite different from the one in the series.
The
story itself is also quite good: it begins in good film noir style with mystery woman Madeline Warren (Valerie
Vernon) bursting into Boston Blackie’s apartment with a story about how she’s
supposedly being blackmailed over some indiscreet letters she once wrote — only
Blackie gets suspicious, especially when Madeline insists that he accompany her
to the money drop and, when he declines, she holds a gun on him and forces him
into that cool white car. (Both Charles and I noted the similarity between this
story and the opening of Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely — all that was missing was the murder in a Black
bar.) At the drop point there’s a shootout between Madeline and a minor-league
thug called Shanks, and Madeline ends up escaping while Blackie takes the
wounded Shanks to a hospital, where he, his girlfriend Mary (Lois Collier) and
police inspector Faraday (Frank Orth) question him. The plot gets more
complicated than that but it ultimately turns out to revolve around a murder
that previously took place in an office, which Faraday investigated but never
solved, and Madeline was the secretary of the murdered man and she was the blackmailer, claiming to have recorded the
murder on a dictation cylinder. It ends up with an exciting shoot-out at a
miniature golf course (Blackie ends up on top of a windmill picking off the
thugs below in what seemed to me to be a visual quote of the ending of the 1931
Frankenstein), the sort of quirky
location Alfred Hitchcock liked to use for the climaxes of his movies. It was
an engaging little episode and Paul Landres’ direction and Valerie Vernon’s
acting were both better than what we usually got from this series. — 4/19/12
I ran Charles and I the last of
the 24 Boston Blackie episodes we had
downloaded from archive.org — actually quite a bit less than half the 58
episodes that were made (according to the imdb.com page on the show, 26
episodes were filmed in black-and-white and 32 in color — meaning that producer
Henry Ziv was anticipating Walt Disney in his idea of making TV episodes in
color because someday TV would be in
color even though it wasn’t in 1951 — but none of the downloads from
archive.org were in color) — one from early on in the show’s history (first
season, episode 11, first aired November 19, 1951) called “Toy Factory Murder”
in which the show opened with a lonely draftsperson doing art sketches of a new
doll for a toy company for an upcoming ad, when someone sneaks into the office,
shoots him dead and exits via the fire escape. Then the victim’s widow, Mrs.
Poole (Mary Kent), is tracked down by a couple of thugs named Giuseppe and
Fyodor, who sap her on the forehead to discourage her from talking to the police.
Of course, the treatment has precisely the opposite effect from the one the
crooks intended: instead of silencing her, it makes her quite talkative both to
Boston Blackie (Kent Taylor) and police inspector Faraday (Frank Orth).
Eventually Blackie and Faraday learn that the toy factory also had a sideline
making top-secret firing devices for artillery for the U.S. military — and in
order to preserve the secrecy of the design and keep enemy agents from getting
hold of it, the toy factory owner (suggesting he had seen the Basil
Rathbone/Nigel Bruce films Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon and Dressed to Kill)
divided the device into several parts and had a different team of workers make
each part, with only the draftsman who drew the entire plan knowing how all the
components fit together and having the information about the total design.
Alas, the plan fell awry when the baddies realized they could target Poole by
sic’ing a typical film noir femme fatale
on him — a rambunctious young woman (Christine Larson) who led him through a
joyride including hot music and hot sex. She got him to give up the secret, but
she didn’t kill him — she was too proud to wear low-heeled shoes and Blackie
found a low heel, detached from its shoe, on the fire escape on which the killer
fled (one watches old movies and TV shows in vain for any hint that fire
escapes were ever used for their alleged purpose of escaping from fires; they
seem to have been just a convenience
for fleeing criminals and a location for film and TV directors to stage
picturesque shoot-outs) and deduces that Mrs. Poole killed her husband because
she was jealous over his shenanigans with Christine — only it turns out she
killed him (in a confession scene magnificently delivered by Mary Kent) because
Christine had not been his first dalliance: he’d been cheating on her for all
30 years of their marriage and she’d just reached the breaking point. It was a
nice episode to leave this quite interesting series on — even though it was too
early in the show’s run to get another look at Boston Blackie’s cool custom car
(in this part of the run he was still driving a standard Ford convertible) —
especially since this was one of the most noir of the episodes, less in the photographic quality (which
was pretty plain) than in the scripting by Herbert Purdom, who gave Blackie
quite a lot of surprisingly world-weary Raymond Chandler-style dialogue and
also created some quite noir villains.
Overall the show lost something from the de-emphasis on Blackie’s criminal past
and the turning of Faraday from a Javert-like nemesis always convinced that
Blackie is returning to crime into a typical stupid comic-relief police
character, made far dumber than a real police official (especially one who’d
risen that high in the ranks), and it gained considerably from that incredible
car Blackie drove in the later episodes, but it also had three appealing
principals (Taylor, Orth and Lois Collier as Blackie’s girlfriend Mary Wesley —
interestingly, they’re drawn not only as unmarried but in no particular hurry
to “make it legal,” and the writers did not do the usual trope of having their wedding plans
interrupted by case after case after case), a wide variety of villains, some
clever plots and a wry understatement (just about any other U.S. filmmaker
shooting a script about military espionage in the early 1950’s would have
filled it with breathless defenses of The
American Way of Life and bitter denunciations of those enemy countries —
never named, not that 1950’s audiences couldn’t have guessed who was meant — committed to taking it away from us; not
Purdom and director Paul Landres, who treated the spy plot as just another
MacGuffin) that makes it hold up quite well today. — 4/21/12
