Confessions of Boston Blackie (Columbia, 1941)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After the Lifetime movie I ran a YouTube post for my husband Charles of the 1941 film Confessions of Boston Blackie. Boston Blackie was one of those oddball characters, probably inspired by E. W. Hornung’s Raffles (Hornung was the brother-in-law of Sherlock Holmes’ creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) and Louis Joseph Vance’s The Lone Wolf. Boston Blackie was created by Jack Boyle in 1914 and he wrote 23 short stories about him until he stopped in 1920, nine years before his death. Like his predecessors (as well as later characters like The Saint) Blackie was supposed to be a super-criminal, specializing in spectacular jewel robberies, until he reformed – though the police would see him show up at the scenes of major crimes and assume Blackie was up to his old tricks and suspect him. Though Boston Blackie films were made during the silent era, the series we’re concerned with here was started by Columbia Pictures in 1941 (14 years after the last silent Boston Blackie movie, The Return of Boston Blackie) and lasted until 1949 – arguably the second-longest run of a detective series character in Hollywood’s classic era (next to Charlie Chan,who continued for 18 years, 1931 to 1949, at two different studios, Fox and Monogram).

For the first film in the series, Meet Boston Blackie, Columbia hired a great if somewhat mercurial director, Robert Florey, and put together a top-tier cast including Chester Morris as Blackie (Morris had had a brief run at stardom at MGM in the early 1930’s – critic William K. Everson called his role in Roland West’s 1929 thriller Alibi as “a Cagneyesque performance, well before Cagney,” which is more or less true even though Cagney’s first film, Sinners’ Holiday, was made in 1930, just a year later), Rochelle Hudson (former sidekick of Mae West and W. C. Fields) and character actor Richard Lane. Confessions of Boston Blackie was the second film in the series, and though Florey had left the studio by then, they gave the directorial assignment to the young Edward Dmytryk, who three years later would make possibly the greatest film noir ever made, Murder, My Sweet (an adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely that strikes me as the definitive Raymond Chandler film the way the 1941 The Maltese Falcon is the definitive Dashiell Hammett film).

Given that background, I was looking for film noir elements in Confessions of Boston Blackie, and there were certainly some chiaroscuro shadow shots even though much of it was pretty light-hearted and it’s actually a throwback to the comedy-mysteries that dominated the 1930’s but got phased out in a hurry when the noir cycle began. Charles didn’t remember having seen this film before, but we had: about 10 to 15 years ago Turner Classic Movies was running a lot of the Columbia “B” detective series on weekend mornings and I was recording them back when I still could, The first thing I recognized about this movie was a 10-foot-high statue of the Roman Emperor Augustus, which has been consigned to the Allison Art Gallery by its owner, Diane Parrish (Harriet Hilliard, Mrs. Ozzie Nelson and the mother of Ricky and David; also later co-star with her husband and children of the long-running TV sitcom The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet). It seems that Diane has a brother named Jimmy, and in order to save him from a terrible respiratory disease she wants to get him out of New York City and into a warmer, more hospitable client – only she’s broke and the only way she can get the money to save her brother’s life is to sell the statue, which her dad excavated from the bottom of the Tiber during an archaeological expedition to Italy.

Unfortunately the gallery she’s consigned the statue to is run by crooks Buchanan (Ralph Theodore) and Caulder (Kenneth MacDonald), who first made a hollow plaster copy of the original statue and then kill gallery owner Eric Allison (Walter Sanderling) in a gun battle in which Diane is grazed. She ends up in a hospital (given my recent experience in such places, it struck me as odd that the hospital room had a normal doorknob instead of one of the quick-release levers I was used to seeing), where Boston Blackie, having previously passed himself off as an ice-cream salesman to get away from the cops determined to arrest him for Allison’s murder, uses the same white jacket to bluff his way into Diane’s hospital room as one of her doctors. (She “outs” him when she notices the name of the ice cream company embroidered on the end of his jacket sleeve.)

Meanwhile, Blackie and his servant, “The Runt” (George E. Stone) are trying to get rid of Mona (played by the marvelous Joan Woodbury, heiress to the Woodbury Soap fortune and a remarkable actress who nails her performance as a woman of ambiguous morals and loyalties in the 1941 PRC “B” variously called Paper Bullets and Gangs, Inc., which stayed in circulation because a young actor billed fourth and playing a police informant who turns out to be a federal agent, Alan Ladd, erupted into stardom after playing a psychopathic killer in This Gun for Hire at Paramount in 1942; she’s nowhere nearly as good here as she was in Paper Bullets, but she’s still an electrifying screen presence and I suspect only the oddly bony structure of her face kept her from stardom), who Blackie said was his wife just to get her out of a jam in South America. Only she decided to hold on to their (nonexistent) nuptials and demand a settlement from him. Blackie’s rich friend, art collector and comic-relief “type” Arthur Manleder (Lloyd Corrigan) gives Blackie the money, but then Blackie gives it to The Runt intending him to pass it along to Diane Parrish, who since the insurance company is stiffing her for the money on her claim for the theft of the real statue is still broke and awaiting the money she needs to save her brother’s life.

It all comes to a head in the underground vault of the art gallery, where Blackie, the cops, the crooks and Diane all converge and get themselves locked in by the location’s self-sealing doors – until Blackie hits on the idea of starting a fire in one of the air vents in hopes someone will call the fire department, who will have the equipment to open the doors and free everyone, The bad guys are taken into custody and police inspector Ferraday (Richard Lane), who was basically to Boston Blackie what Lestrade was to Holmes (except Lestrade never thought Holmes was actually a crook) reluctantly concedes that in this instance, at least, Blackie was one of the good guys. One of the film’s weirdest but funniest gags is when the real ice-cream vendor is finally freed from the freezer in the back of his truck – and he’s supposedly frozen solid. Confessions of Boston Blackie – a misnomer because Blackie never actually confesses to anything – is actually a quite nice entry in a series that never promised more than it delivered, which was quality entertainment with a light touch despite the body count (and at least in this one there was only one murder victim).