Arson, Inc. (Lippert Pictures, Exclusive Films, 1949)

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

After we watched the Lifetime movie Do Exactly As I Say on Sunday, August 24 my husband Charles and I watched another late-1940’s “B” cheapie on YouTube: Arson, Inc., a 1949 Lippert production directed by William Berke from an “original” story by Arthur Caesar and a script by William Tombragel. William Berke had an interesting career arc: he began in independent films (mostly cheap Westerns) in the 1930’s, won an RKO contract in the 1940’s and did most of the later Falcon-series films with Tom Conway, ended up working on TV series in the 1950’s and did a quick indie comeback with the first two Ed McBain 92nd Precinct novels, Cop Hater and The Mugger (both 1958) before his sudden death on February 15, 1958 at age 54. From the YouTube synopsis I’d assumed Arson, Inc. would be a film about a wide-ranging syndicate who hired itself out to start fires for people who wanted to commit insurance fraud, but the intrigue turned out to be considerably smaller-scaled than that. It was introduced in a narration by an authority figure sitting at a desk just like the old MGM Crime Does Not Pay shorts. Said authority figure is the Los Angeles Fire Department chief (William Forrest), who in the opening gives us some statistics about the value of property lost to fire every year and stresses the importance of the fire department’s arson squad. Then he introduces the film’s lead, firefighter Joe Martin (Robert Lowery, a year after he became the screen’s second Batman in the 1948 Spencer Gordon Bennet serial Batman and Robin), who’s just risen through the fire department and is being offered a chance to join the arson squad.

He got the job largely because he was on the crew that fought a fire in a fur warehouse whose owner, Thomas Peyson (Byron Foulger, who was a specialist at playing oily small-time villainy, as he does here), claimed to have lost $50,000 work of mink pelts – only Martin discovered scraps of fur that turned out to be just rabbit and muskrat. Deducing that Peyson first moved all his truly valuable furs somewhere else and then set the fire and filed a false claim, Martin is assigned to surveil Peyson’s insurance agent, Frederick P. Fender (Douglas Fowley, who usually played gangsters but turned in a marvelous performance as the male lead in Steve Sekely’s Lady in the Death House and got to be in a major movie as the harried director in Singin’ in the Rain). Later Martin discovers that Peyson filed another insurance claim for a fire, this one in his apartment, that supposedly destroyed his wife’s $30,000 fur coat. Martin goes to Peyson’s apartment and the Peysons are out, but their baby-sitter Jane Jennings (Anne Gwynne) greets him guardedly at the door and makes him show his firefighter’s I.D. before she’ll let him in. Of course, once they see each other it’s love at first sight, complicated by the fact that she rooms with her grandmother (Maude Eburne) and the first time Martin goes to see her at her place he runs into grandma instead and kisses and hugs her. Martin notices that Fender has assigned one of his gang, Pete Purdy (Ed Brophy), to tail him. Seeking to go undercover and ingratiate himself with the gang,

Martin befriends Purdy and they go to an underground bookie joint where horse races are broadcast on TV (still a relative novelty in 1949; the TV is a Stromberg-Carlson and I wondered if the company paid a product placement fee, a practice that was just starting in 1949). Martin is lamenting at how little he makes as a firefighter, and just then the joint is raided and Martin punches out the police officer who tries to arrest him. The incident is recorded by a newspaper photographer and published on the front page, which leads the chief to fire Martin – though, as anyone who’s seen the 1936 film Bullets or Ballots (or any ot the others who ripped off this gimmick, including
Across the Pacific and Desperate Journey) can guess, it’s all a ruse to make it look like Martin is disgraced and open to criminal employment. Fender offers him a heist job that involves stripping a warehouse of its valuables and then setting it on fire, but fortunately Martin is able to get word to both the police and fire departments in time. There’s a shootout in which the bad guys shoot and kill Martin’s contact on the police force, but in the end Fender and his vampy secretary Bobby (Marcia Mae Jones) are killed in a car crash on a darkened road with a police car chasing them, while the fire department successfully puts out the blaze and arrests the remaining bad guys. Though Arson, Inc. is a hardly original story – both the plot and the cast list seem like compendia of things that were already annoyingly clichéd in the 1930’s – it’s at least a coolly efficient one and quite a bit better than Fingerprints Don’t Lie, also a Lippert film. And at least it has an orchestral score instead of the dippy organ accompaniment of Fingerprints Don’t Lie; Raoul Kraushaar is credited with the score with our old PRC friend David Chudnow gets a credit as “music director.”