by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The other 1950’s TV show I
ran was an episode of something called Front Page Detective which I suspect was an L.A.-area local show rather
than a network production since the sponsor was Feld Chevrolet, which judging
from their announcement seemed to be a local area dealership for Chevrolets
rather than an actual branch of General Motors, and the production company was
the L.A.-based Jerry Fairbanks Productions which supplied other local shows to
L.A.-area stations. The star was Edmund Lowe, who had become a major name as
Victor McLaglen’s partner in the 1926 Fox film of What Price Glory? but, as William K. Everson wrote in his book The
Detective in Film, aside from his What
Price Glory? role, “Lowe never seemed
to attempt an in-depth characterization. Whether he was playing Chandu the
Magician or Philo Vance, he was always exactly the same: the veneer was
polished but there was no subtlety or differentiation between roles beneath
it.” By 1952, when the Front Page Detective episode “Seven Seas to Danger” first aired, Lowe
had lost his former good looks, and whereas other Hollywood pretty-boys of the
1930’s — notably Robert Taylor, Tyrone Power and Errol Flynn — responded to the
loss of their looks by becoming richer, stronger actors, Lowe didn’t.
In the Front
Page Detective series he played David
Chase, a local newspaper columnist who solved crimes, and in “Seven Seas to
Danger” he gets mixed up with a gang of smugglers after his girlfriend, Sharon
Richards (Paula Drew), gets him interested in doing a human-interest interview
with Lil Carver (Kathryn Card), a waterfront character who runs a warehouse
where shipping companies deposit bits of cargo that have gone unclaimed. One
such piece of cargo is a bag containing abalone shells, and when David Chase is
investigating this as part of Lil Carver’s collection, someone shoots him in
the arm. He begs off calling a doctor and insists on reporting it to the cops
immediately, and the cops inform him that a well-known smuggler named Dutch
Schmidt (Otto Reichow) has been seen hanging around the Malay Prince, where the abalone shells were shipped (and
contrary to what you might expect from the overall premise there’s no
indication that the bag marked “abalone shells” contains anything else, like
jewels or drugs, that might actually be worth smuggling; these days, abalones
are sufficiently endangered one might make some money smuggling either the live
creatures or their shells, but in 1952 they were so ubiquitous you could
practically not walk across a beach without tripping over their shells).
Schmidt stowed away on the Malay Prince as it sailed across the ocean but bailed out, along with a British
confederate on the ship’s crew, swam to shore to avoid any legal complications
from disembarking normally, then tried to break back into the Malay Prince to recover the abalone bag. Chase, Sharon and Lil
confront the smugglers and get threatened but, with the aid of both local cops
and the Treasury agents called in when the U.S. government got word of a
smuggling operation based in a foreign country, tbey survive, the baddies get
caught and all ends happily. The quirkiest aspect of Front Page Detective is the script by Irvin Ashkenazy, who obviously thought he was Raymond Chandler; he not only gave Lowe’s
character a voice-over running through the episode, he had him say things like,
“The centipede of perception was crawling down my spine.” Huh? The centipede of perception? On its way down, does it encounter
the millipede of doubt crawling up the other way?
