Sisters In Crime, a.k.a. Roaring City (Sigmund Neufeld Productions, Spartan Productions, Lippert Pictures, 1951)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, December 24) I spent an hour between the Christmas Eve church service and the Turner Classic Movies showing I wanted to watch by screening a film off YouTube. I’d noticed this one as Sisters in Crime (1951), an hour-long “B” starring Hugh Beaumont (later of Leave It to Beaver fame), which from the title I assumed would be a film about women gangsters whom Beaumont, as either an official cop or a private detective, was out to bust. It turned out to have had an alternate title, Roaring City, and to be a boxing movie. It was directed by William Berke (late of the RKO “B” detective series The Falcon with Tom Conway) from a script by Julian Harmon and Victor West based on “stories” by Lou Morheim and Herb Margolis. Hugh Beaumont plays Dennis O’Brien, who runs a fishing boat out of Pier 23 in San Francisco and does occasional odd jobs of various levels of seediness. (Apparently the same company, Lippert Pictures, shot a similar film called Pier 23 with some of the same cast members and locations, but they’re different films with different plots.) O’Brien is hired by a crooked gambler and fight manager named Ed Gannon (William Tannen) to place bets on an upcoming prizefight between Vic Lundy (Greg McClure) and Harry Barton (Stanley Price). Though Gannon manages Lundy, he’s secretly betting on Lundy to lose because he’s told Lundy to throw the bout in the first round – only the signals get crossed and Lundy holds out until round six, in which he legitimately knocks out Barton. What he didn’t know was that Barton had a blood clot that would kill him, and indeed he dies as a result of his injuries in the ring. Barton was out of shape but agreed to fight this one last time so he and his girlfriend Gail Chase (Rebel Randall) would have enough money to buy a chicken farm and retire to it.

Only what Barton didn’t know was that Gail was a classic film noir femme fatale who was involved with Gannon and at least one of the other male cast members – and at one point we see her make a pass at O’Brien as well. When O’Brien places the bets for Gannon against Lundy, he’s told to put them under the alias “Steve Belzig” – which raises eyebrows among three bookies with whom he places the bets because, it turns out, “Belzig” is Vic Lundy’s real name: he changed it when he was released from prison to avoid having his convict past interfere with his new career in the ring. It also turns out that Gannon was secretly betting even more money on Lundy to win the fight; Gannon gave instructions to Lundy to hold out until round seven, knowing that if he fought legitimately he’d beat Bannon before that. Then he murders Lundy after Lundy wins the fight against Bannon, and sets up O’Brien to take the fall. O’Brien also has to deal with his middle-aged alcoholic roommate, “Professor” Frederick Simpson Schicker (Edward Brophy, in an odd role for him because he doesn’t get any slapstick or action scenes); and Inspector Bruner of the San Francisco Police Department (Richard Travis), who’s determined to arrest somebody for murdering both Lundy and Gannon (who also is found dead in a room in which O’Brien was incapacitated and found the corpse when he came to). O’Brien also has run-ins with Irma Rand (Joan Valerie) and her sister Sylvia (Wanda McKay). Roaring City a.k.a. Sisters in Crime is an O.K. movie, attempting to be film noir and qualifying thematically (it’s about unscrupulous criminals inhabiting an amoral underworld) but not visually: cinematographer Jack Greenhalgh (a PRC veteran, like producer Sigmund Neufeld) shoots almost all of it in bright light and he and director Berke go for the most ordinary Wonder Bread compositions imaginable.