r>by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night (March 8) at 9 my husband Charles and I watched a cou9pl,e more items from the “Crime Wave” 50-DVD boxed set, both the last films in relatively long-running series and both long-time personal favorites of mine. The first was the 1947 film Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome, fourth and last of the Dick Tracy “B”-movies made by RKO between 1945 and 1947. It’s actually a well-done mix of comedy and thrills, and I suspect it came about because RKO had signed Boris Karloff to a three-film deal in 1944 and assigned him to Val Lewton’s horror unit. Lewton and Karloff got along surprisingly well and became lifelong friends until Lewton’s death in 1951. Determined to break out of the “B” ranks and do a major-budget production, Lewton signed Karloff for a fourth film, which was to be Blackbeard, a movie about the exploits ot the notorious real-life pirate Edward “Blackbeard” Tench. Then Lewton did his usual historical research and discovered that pirates of Blackbeard’s time hadn’t sailed in large,ungainly vessels. Instead, like the more recent pirates of Somalia with their speedboats, they worked from fleets of small, maneuverable cutters with which they would surround the ship they intended to rob. Lewton rewrote the script for Blackbeard accordingly and RKO said no, we’re not going to give you an “A” budget to make a movie with Boris Karloff commanding a flet of fishing boats. Lewton left RKO and six years later the studio made Blackbeard their way, with Robert Newton sailing a big, ungainly ship and overacting so relentlessly one aches for the relative subtlety Karloff would have brought to the role.
In the meantime, RKO was stuck with a contractual commitment to Karloff, so they cast him in the fourth and last of their Dick Tracy “B”’s, gave him the character name “Gruesome,” and had writers William Graffis, Robert E. Kent, Robertson White and Eric Taylor (the first two are credited with the “original” story and the last two with the screenplay) concoct a mix of comedy, crime drama, horror and science fiction. It seems that noted scientist Dr. A. Tomic (Milton Parsons) has invented a strange gas which renders its victims paralyzed for about 15 minutes or so. They freeze in place for that time and are helpless. Dr. Irma M. Learned (June Clayworth), Dr. Tomic’s assistant, steals the precursor chemical for this gas and gives it to her no-good boyfriend, Dr. Lee Thal (Edward Ashley), who’s organized a gang of bank robbers to set off gas bombs filled with this substance and use it to rob banks. Since the gas dissipates in a minute or two, the gang – Gruesome (Boris Karloff), Melody (Tony Barrett) and X-Ray (the marvelously queeny character actor Skelton Knaggs, a “regular” in the RKO Tracys, who would have made a superb Riff Raff in The Rocky Horror Picture Show if it had existed yet, and it’s possible Rocky Horror’s creator, Richard O’Brien, who played Riff Raff himself, modeled the character on Knaggs) – can just walk into the bank and steal whatever they can grab before the effects of the gas wear off.
The scene in which they target the First National Bank (just about every movie bank that got robbed in classic-era Hollywood was named “First National”) and everybody exposed to the gas literally freezes in place – and the even more entertaining scene in which they come out of it again, especially one of the customers who was caught in mid-sneeze – are some of the most delightful moments in the film. Also among the film’s more charming elements is the sleazy lowlife bar where Melody works until Gruesome first recruits him to the gang and then leaves him to die – it’s called the “Hangman’s Knot” here but the same set was used in at least two of the earlier RKO Tracys, albeit with a different name and neon-sign logo – and the chase scene in which Tracy’s partner Pat Patton crashes his car ito the shop of “Y. Stuffum, Taxidermist” and thinks he’s being menaced by a stuffed ape. (When the Tracy films were released in Britain – where the Tracy comic strip was unknown, and indeed according to Charles almost no British newspapers print comic strips as we know them – critics reviewing the films questioned why so many of the supporting characters had such stupid names.) Dick Tracy learns of the gas only because his girlfriend, Tess Trueheart (Ann Gwynne), happened to be in the First National Bank when the gas bomb went off but was in a phone booth at the time, so she was unaffected.
There are some nice bits of "business" showing her having to rush back and pose as if he’d been caught by the gas while using the phone, then leaving the phone booth to call the police on another phone (presumably one that wouldn’t charge her to make the call). Midway through the movie Dr. A. Tomic turns up missing and no trace of him, alive or dead, is ever heard from again. Later Dr. Learned, who in some ways is the most complex and potentially interesting character in the film – a professional woman who’s risked her life, liberty and career for the love of a no-good man – is off-handedly shot in the back by Gruesome just as she’s about to go to the police and give herself up. The climax takes place at an industrial furnace in which Gruesome has ordered Dr. Tomic’s notebooks and leftover papers to be burned – and Tracy, who had taken the place of the dead Melody in the hospital bed so the crooks would kidnap him and lead him to their hideout, nearly gets incinerated in the furnace. (Both Charles and I noted that the actors were handling the big metal doors to the furnace with their bare hands – which would be impossible because the doors would be super-hot.) Eventually Gruesome gets knocked out with some of his own gas and ends up on the conveyor belt to be thrown into the furnace – only Tracy pulls the lever to stop the belt at the last minute because as a good cop he wants Gruesome alive and legally punished, not dead. Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome is hardly a great film, and the shadow of what might have been if he’d been able to make Blackbeard instead hangs heavy over it, but on its own terms it’s marvelously entertaining and the comedy and thriller aspects of it are well mixed.
