Unmasked (Republic, 1950)

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

Last night (Wednesday, May 21) I showed my husband Charles an oddly compelling hour-long “B” thriller from Republic called Unmasked, which starred Robert Rockwell from The Red Menace (an oddly hunky and monotonal leading man whom Republic might have been grooming as the next John Wayne) as a crusading New York police lieutenant named Jim Webster who’s hot on the trail of New York Periscope editor-publisher Roger Lewis (Raymond Burr). Lewis started the Periscope in the first place with money he got from his sugar mama, actress turned socialite Doris King (Hillary Brooke, who was so fine as Professor Moriarty’s confederate in the Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes film The Woman in Green but here doesn’t make it out of the first reel, more’s the pity). Doris King’s acting career was launched in the first place by her aging husband, Harry Jackson (Paul Harvey), who pulled her out of the chorus, made her a major star, then suffered a series of flops and lost most of his money. Harry tries to take back the jewels he gave Doris when they were flush, which were collectively worth $100,000, but it is Lewis who kills her to avoid having to pay off the promissory notes she’s holding on him for the money she gave him to start the paper. Lewis intends to frame Harry Jackson for the crime and use the full power of his paper to get him arrested, convicted, and ultimately executed. Lewis also has a long-suffering secretary, Mona Durant (Grace Gillern), who’s in decidedly unrequited love with him. Webster teams up with Jackson’s daughter (from his previous marriage to a wife who died) Linda (Barbra Fuller – so Streisand wasn’t the first celebrity woman who decided that the middle “a” in “Barbara” was redundant!), to uncover the truth.

Alas, Harry Jackson gives the jewels to “Biggie” Wolfe (Norman Budd), a scapegrace private investigator who’s on Lewis’s payroll (though Lewis keeps stiffing him and he hints to Jackson that he’s disillusioned with Lewis and is no longer working for him) in order to pay for a hot-shot attorney who could help prove his innocence. (I couldn’t resist joking, “Why doesn’t he hire Perry Mason?” Indeed, in my mind I remixed this movie so Burr would play a dual role as the unscrupulous publisher and as Perry Mason, so Burr would prove Burr guilty of the crime.) When his daughter finally visits him, Jackson is so despairing of his likely future that as soon as she leaves, he kills himself. Biggie takes Jackson’s jewels to “Pop” Swensen (Emory Parnell), who runs a shop on the pier that’s really a front for Johnny Rocco (John Eldredge) – by coincidence “Johnny Rocco” was also the name of Edward G. Robinson’s gangster character in the last Humphrey Bogart/Lauren Bacall film, Key Largo, two years earlier – who offers to buy the jewels from Biggie if Biggie will in turn engineer the escape from prison of a bond forger named Mort Stone (Gil Frye), who unbeknownst to anyone but Rocco himself is really Rocco’s brother. Alas, the escape goes awry and Stone is shot and killed by prison guards, and Rocco is sufficiently angry he kills Biggie. The finale takes place at Swensen’s seafront establishment, where he plans to drive Linda Jackson in a boat and throw her overboard, only Webster figures it out, gets to Swensen’s and has a big fight scene in which he overpowers Rocco’s henchmen even though they outnumber him three to one. This was the kind of filmmaking Republic directors like George Blair, who helmed Unmasked, were most comfortable with: heroic leading men subduing baddies with their fists in scenes with lots of breakaway furniture. Ultimately Unmasked ends with Webster and Linda Jackson together in her car, apparently headed for real-life couplehood.

Though Unmasked was written by a committee (Manuel Seff and Paul Yawitz, story; Albert DeMond and Norman S. Hall, screenplay), and all its story elements are familiar crime-movie tropes, I nonetheless give it credit for deploying the clichés in new and different ways. The acting honors are easily taken by Raymond Burr, who in some ways is even more psychopathic than he was in most of his early villain roles, notably in an extreme close-up of his face as he’s actually strangling Doris King and then casually burning the notes he killed her to avoid having to pay. It’s true that the script improbably depicts him as a babe magnet – which seems weird not only because he’s not conventionally attractive but now that we know he was really Gay – but the cool professionalism with which he dispatches his fellow characters and plots his evil is chillingly effective. Unmasked is not a film noir either thematically (the characters are either all good or all bad – indeed, Lt. Webster and Linda Jackson are the only truly likable characters in the movie) or visually (except for one chiaroscuro scene from otherwise conventional cinematographer Bud Thackery, who seemed to have learned something from working at the same studio as John Alton!). But it’s one of those movies that tells a familiar story in new and engaging ways, and director Blair and the writers are to be congratulated for their ability to crowd this much plot into just 59 minutes of running time!