One Mysterious Night (Columbia, 1944)

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

Last night I ran my husband Charles and I a YouTube post of the 1944 Columbia “B” thriller One Mysterioius Night. This was part of the “Boston Blackie” series Columbia made in the 1940’s along with the Lone Wolf and Crime Doctor films and adaptations of then-popular radio shows like The Whistler and I Love a Mystery. Boston Blackie was actually created by Jack Boyle, who was born in Chicago in 1881 and became a reporter in San Francisco in the early 20th century until he became addicted to opium, drifted into crime and started writing the Boston Blackie stories while serving a prison term at San Quentin. He even signed the first Boston Blackie stories “No. 6066” rather than use his name. The Boston Blackie stories first saw print in The American Magazine in 1914 and continued to appear until 1920, eight years before Boyle’s death. There were a number of silent films based on the Boston Blackie stories – or at least on the character – but after 1927 the character wasn’t used in a film until Columbia launched their “B” series in 1941.

Boyle’s stories had depicted Blackie as an active criminal who targeted other, deeper-pocketed criminals who had unjustly ripped off and exploited decent people, but with the Production Code in effect Columbia had to make him a reformed ex-con who’s perpetually being suspected of major crimes, usually by Inspector Ferriday of the official police (sort of Lestrade to Blackie’s Sherlock Holmes). Columbia’s executives made a superb choice for the actor to play Boston Blackie: Chester Morris, who in the 1930’s had just missed the brass ring of stardom. He certainly had the acting chops for it, and in 1929 he made the film Alibi for director Roland West. In his book The Detective in Film William K. Everson described Morris’s performance in Alibi as “Cagneyesque … well before Cagney,” and though it wasn’t that much before Cagney (Alibi was made in 1929 and the real Cagney’s first film, Sinners’ Holiday, was made in 1930), it had something of the same mix of toughness and offbeat charm. Like Cagney, Morris could play a gangster and make you feel at least some sympathy for him, or he could play a good guy and still give the character an “edge.” By 1941 Morris – unlike Cagney – had been relegated th the “B” ranks, but his rendition of Boston Blackie over 14 films from 1941 to 1949 tapped into his skill set and indicated a tough-guy image even while playing a misunderstood hero.

One Mysterious Night was made ini 1944, midway through the Boston Blackie series (it was the seventh of the 14 Boston Blackie movies in Columbia’s series) and it’s attracted more attention than it deserves mainly because of its director. His name was Oscar Boetticher, Jr. but on his later films he was credited as Budd Boetticher, and he achieved a reputation as at least a mini-auteur mostly on the basis of the Westerns he directed for Columbia and Warner Bros. featuring Randolph Scott in the 1950’s. It would be nice to report that Boetticher brought something special to this film that raised it above the run of the mill for the Boston Blackie series the way he would with nis next film, the non-series Columbia “B” The Missing Juror – but no such luck. This film is pretty much cut to the pattern of the previous ones: a priceless jewel is stolen (here itis called the “Star of the Blue Nile” and it’s the featured attraction on an exhibit of jewelry being run as a war benefit) and Boston Blackie is named as the one and only suspect at a press conference being given by Inspector Ferriday (Richard Lane).

The moment we see George Daley (Robert E. Scott, later known as Mark Rpberts), an employee at the hotel where the exhibit is taking place, hobnobbing with a couple of crooks with “roo” moustacnes we know he’s up to no good, and he shocks his sister by claiming to have the priceless diamond in his possession – only he’s lost it and it turns up the handbag of reporter Dorothy Appleton (Janis Carter) because she mistakenly grabbed Daley’s sister’s bag and Daley had stashed the jewel in it. (Carter de;ivers the best performance in the film, but it's still the clichéd hard-boiled woman reporter.) There’s no whodunit aspect to the story – a bit of a surprise in a “B” mystery of this vintage – and though Inspector Ferriday knows perfectly well that Boston Blackie didn’t steal the Star of the Blue Nile he announces that anyway in hopes of getting Blackie to come to headquarters and help solve the crime himself. One Mysterious Night isn’t an especially mysterious film; it rings the expected changes on the Boston Blackie formula but doesn’t do much of anything original with it – a real surprise coming from Boetticher, who as a director was well known for being able to take clichéd situations and do something new and different with them.