The Big Chase (Be Be, Lippert Pictures, 1954)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After the Grammy Awards I played through the Sonny Rollins: Volume 1 CD on Blue Note and then my husband Charles and I watched an odd little movie on YouTube: a 1954 film called The Big Chase. It was made at Lippert Pictures, which got its start distributing foreign films, and it apparently incorporated a good chunk of its car-chase footage from a previous Lippert production called Bandit Island. The Big Chase opened with a framing sequence featuring Los Angeles Police Department Lieutenant Ned Daggert (Douglas Kennedy) being interviewed by reporter Milton Graves (Joseph Flynn) about his history as a homicide detective. Graves is particularly interested in an odd combination of two objects on Daggert’s desk, a revolver and a baby’s rattle. Daggert tells him the story of the case that involved both those items: a young officer named Pete Grayson (Glenn Langan) and his wife Doris (Adele Jergens, six years after she played Marilyn Monroe’s mother in the 1948 Columbia “B” Ladies of the Chorus even though Jergens was only nine years older) are about to have their first child (though Charles complained that Adele Jergens did not look nine months’ pregnant). Pete has just graduated from the Police Academy when the film opens, and Daggert has arranged for him to train as a detective but Pete isn’t interested. Instead he wants to get into the juvenile division, because he was a juvenile delinquent himself until an older mentor reached out to him and helped him turn his life around. But the juvenile division has no openings, so Pete remains a uniformed patrolman and trains under an older partner. Within a few months Pete is experienced enough that he’s the senior officer in his patrol car and a young hot-shot is training under him. Meanwhile, two crooks are in prison (shown via a lot of stock shots from older, bigger-budgeted prison films) plotting what they’re going to do when they get out. They’re paying lip service to the idea of a law-abiding life from then on but really have a big job planned for Los Angeles, an armored-car robbery. As they make their way down the California coast from San Francisco to L.A. (presumably they were incarcerated in San Quentin), they steal a 1953 Chrysler convertible and stay at a number of motels, all of which the police get reports on.

The gang is led by Brad Bellows (Jim Davis, who’s easily the sexiest man in the film, dressed in skin-tight blue jeans that show off much more of a basket than most guys got to display in 1950’s films; apparently Lippert was anticipating Lifetime in casting the sexiest guys as the villains) and includes two other men, including Kip (Lon Chaney, Jr., who does little more than sit in the back of the convertible and scowl until he and the cops end up in a shoot-out at the end), as well as a woman, the ex-wife of a motel manager in L.A. The motel manager lets them stay there rent-free because he’s hoping his ex will reconcile with him, but what he doesn’t know until the cops tell him is that she’s already divorced him and married Brad Bellows. They hijack the armored car, all right, though they don’t seem to remember to take any of the money out of it. They just leave it all there except for a small satchel Brad carries off, a tiny fraction of the possible loot. Instead they shoot and presumably kill a security guard at the factory where they hijacked the armored car, and as they’re fleeing the cops chase them and the woman is fatally wounded. The men park the car and push her off an embankment, and that bit of information is what finally convinces her ex-husband to rat out the crooks to the cops. There’s a shoot-out at a train station and a final chase in which Brad and his crook partner try to get away in a rowboat to rendezvous to a speedboat that’s going to get them to Mexico, and they make it to the speedboat but the cops commandeer a helicopter. One of the crooks shoots Pete Grayson’s partner, who falls out of the helicopter and presumably dies, but Pete survives and takes out Brad. The Big Chase isn’t much of a movie, and the junctures between the new footage, the Bandit Island outtakes and the stock shots from other sources jar, but at a running time of just a shade under an hour at least it’s a pleasant enough time-filler despite – or maybe because of – the lack of any truly stand-out performances, though the actors carry off their stock assignments decently if not spectacularly.