The Phantom Thief (Columbia, 1946)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, July 18) my husband Charles and I watched a YouTube post of a movie called The Phantom Thief, made at Columbia in 1946. It got my attention when the post was marked “Free with Ads,” a qualification YouTube usually puts on either relatively new films or acknowledged classics like Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). Later I was able to find another YouTube post of The Phantom Thief that allowed us to watch it without ads – or at least with just one ad we were able to skip past after five seconds. The Phantom Thief turned out to be another in the Columbia Boston Blackie “B” series, directed by D. Ross Lederman – a journeyman hack who had exactly one truly great film on his résumé: End of the Trail (1932), an incredible movie about a U.S. officer who is drummed out of the service for allegedly selling guns to the Native Americans and responds by joining a Native tribe. It’s essentially Dances With Wolves 48 years early – I’ve posted about it before at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2012/02/by-mark-gabrish-conlan-copyright-2012.html – and its star, Tim McCoy, had got interested in the subject when in the late 1920’s he interviewed Native survivors of the Battle of the Little Big Horn for an oral history project. With that one shining exception (and it’s clear that, though Lederman directed, McCoy was the auteur), Lederman’s work reached a level of pleasant hackiness, always entertaining but rarely sounding any depths even within the limitations of the material he got. The Phantom Thief is a haunting title that deserved a better movie.

Written by the usual committee (Jack Boyle gets credit for creating the Boston Blackie character, a reformed jewel thief who crosses paths with the police as he solves crimes that stumped them; G. A. Snow wrote the “original story,” Richard Wormser and Richard Weil wrote the script, and Malcolm Stuart Boylan got an “additional dialogue” credit), The Phantom Thief is a well-trod tale. Horatio “Boston Blackie” Black (Chester Morris, older and seedier than he was in his early 1930’s films but still an authoritative actor) gets mixed up in a crime scheme when Eddie Alexander (Murray Alper), an old friend of Blackie’s sidekick “The Runt” (George E. Stone), is assigned by his employer, Anne Parks Duncan (a woman named Jeff Donnell who figured in a lot of mid-1940’s Columbia “B”’s), to steal a mystery box from phony psychic Dr. Nejino (Marvin Miller, who was a quite good villain in RKO noirs at the time but here is saddled with a supposed “Asian” makeup that makes him look like a more heavy-set Turhan Bey). Alexander and The Runt bring the mysterious box to Blackie’s apartment. Alexander was told the box only contained papers, but when it’s opened a valuable necklace is inside, and just then the police come knocking on Blackie’s door. Realizing that if they catch him with the necklace, they’ll assume he stole it, Blackie hides it under an armchair cushion. The three decide to go to Dr. Nejino’s live-work space and attend one of his séances to give him back the necklace, no questions asked. Nejino sees them arrive via a closed-circuit television that’s essentially the 1940’s equivalent of a Ring camera and sends out his assistant Sandra (Dusty Anderson, who quit the business that year to marry director Jean Negulesco and made just three more uncredited bit appearances – a pity, because she was really pretty good even though she and Jeff Donnell look too much alike to make the film credible) to greet them. Unfortunately, Eddie is killed in the middle of the séance – which goes the whole nine yards in terms of mysterious skeletons, disembodied hands, and horns that play music without any visible person playing them.

Once I watched a movie with Charles that used these gimmicks to depict a phony séance and lamented that modern-day psychics don’t use them and only do so-called “cold readings” (the sorts of things in which the alleged psychic says things like, “I see a woman in a red dress … no, it was a blue dress,” and the mark says, “You’re right! It was a blue dress!”). Charles explained that most modern-day psychics are angling to get on TV, and you can’t do those on TV because the lights needed for television would show the wires and expose them. Anne is married to Rex Duncan (Wilton Graff), who represents himself as being one of the “Carolina Duncans,” but when Blackie sees his friend, pawnbroker “Jumbo” Madigan (Joseph Crehan) – who presumably he got to know when he was still a jewel thief and Madigan was his fence – he learns that Rex has no money at all. Instead he’s living off the money his wife inherited on the death of her father, and constantly pawning items from her collection. Rex also formed a corrupt partnership with Dr. Nejino in which Rex steered Anne to Nejino’s operation and got a share of the money Nejino extracted from her. The business of the phony psychic using his “spiritual services” as a front for blackmail had been used in much better films than this, including Murder, My Sweet, made at RKO in 1944, based on Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely and the movie I’d name as the quintessential film noir. Ultimately, after another murder, Rex lurks outside a window and takes a pot shot at Anne. Blackie and the police work out a plan by which Anne will pretend to be dead and “play” her own spirit at yet another Nejino séance, where Rex loses it completely and shoots at Anne’s “spirit.” All he hits are a series of mirrors Nejino uses in his act, but when Rex confesses to Anne’s murder, the police arrest him for it and also arrest Nejino for fraud and as Rex’s partner in crime. The Phantom Thief is a pretty good movie on its own, but we get the sense a lot more could have been done with the plot. It’s also the sort of film in which everyone looks tired, as if cranking out these formulaic movies had worn them down and left them disillusioned with what level to which their careers had sunk.