Chester Morris as Boston Blackie, Part 1

Chester Morris as Boston Blackie, with George E. Stone as his neurotic sidekick, The Runt.

Today marks the 118th anniversary of actor Chester Morris's birth, so I've decided to launch my Boston Blackie series overview a couple of days earlier than anticipated. I hope you enjoy it - I certainly did.

According to the old TV listings archived at www.newspapers.com, I must have made my original Beta recordings of Columbia's "Boston Blackie" series with Chester Morris when TCM first aired them, back in August 1990. In the intervening years, I copied most of these onto DVD-R - and I'm still meaning to do the remaining few. Because I'm lazy and susceptible to that dream of having them all in one place, I actually once bought a set of all 14 films in the series from an online vendor, but found them of poor quality, minus any footage that said "Columbia" (hence sudden credits and no Columbia logo at the end), and annoyingly out of chronological sequence.

It occurred to me recently that I loved these films but hadn't actually revisited them in toto since the time I recorded them initially, so I started up a nightly film festival in my living room, watching them all again, in the proper order, in the wee hours when movies seem to play the best. I began compiling my notes on them over at Facebook, but as the project began to develop in size and length, I decided it would be wise to archive them here in more definitive drafts.

The character of Boston Blackie was introduced in a series of short stories published in THE AMERICAN and RED BOOK magazines, written by Jack Boyle. Blackie was an expert safecracker who turns his talents toward solving crimes, a logline that makes him comparable to a tradition of such characters that would encompass Arsène Lupin, Raffles, Rocambole, and Michael Lanyard, the Lone Wolf. The stories, eventually 14, began appearing in 1917 and were adapted to silent films within the following year. Between 1918 and 1927, 11 films were made. Boyle eventually collected and reorganized his RED BOOK stories into a proper chronology that was published as a hardcover novel, BOSTON BLACKIE, in 1919. He subsequently wrote additional stories that appeared in THE STRAND Magazine as well as the early incarnation of COSMOPOLITAN but he didn't live long enough to push the character further. He died in October 1927 at the age of 47.

In 1935, Columbia Pictures initiated a successful series of mystery-adventure programmers based on Louis Joseph Vance's character The Lone Wolf - which itself was a character inspired (as openly admitted in Vance's first novel) by Maurice Leblanc's Arsène Lupin. The Lone Wolf, also known by the name Michael Lanyard, was initially played by Melvyn Douglas, then by Warren William, and finally (in the late 1940s) by Gerald Mohr. (Louis Hayward - who had incidentally played another role incestuously related to the Lone Wolf and Lupin, namely Leslie Charteris' hero Simon Templar, a.k.a. The Saint - subsequently took on the role for television.) The Lone Wolf had been around in movies since the silent days, mostly played by a now-mostly-forgotten actor named Bert Lytell. When Columbia began looking for a complementary property they might spin off into a parallel series, someone noticed that Lytell had also starred in some silents as Boston Blackie - beginning with BOSTON BLACKIE'S LITTLE PAL (1918), a pre-SCARFACE reference to his gun.

Chester Morris from his MGM days.

In 1941, Columbia Pictures renewed the character's popularity with his first talkie, MEET BOSTON BLACKIE, which was entrusted to director Robert Florey after the success of his first picture for the studio, THE FACE BEHIND THE MASK (1941). As with their companion mystery series The Whistler and The Crime Doctor, Columbia began looking at durable actors established since the silent days for their star. Soon cast in the title role was Chester Morris, who had the distinction of being nominated for a Best Actor Academy Award for his first screen role, in 1929's ALIBI. He had a successful run during the 1930s, beginning with his lead role in Roland West's THE BAT WHISPERS (1930); he generally specialized in roles as adventurers and roguish leading men, and the role of Blackie - not unlike an amalgam of all the roles he'd played, with livelier banter - came along just in time to help buoy his 1940s. A good deal of the series' charm is due to Morris' jaunty, playful, snappy personality and resilient wit, and his banter with co-stars George E. Stone (as Blackie's "little pal" and valet, The Runt) and future roller-derby announcer Richard Lane (as his hard-nosed nemesis, Inspector Farraday). Since he was a boy, Morris had been enamored of practicing magic and he grew up to become a recognized, award-winning magician in his own right. As the series went on, Morris' interest in magic was granted opportunities for expression and Blackie's mostly untapped talents for safe-cracking were supplanted with a mastery of disguise and prestidigitation.

Columbia sweetened their contract with Chester Morris by promising him non-Blackie vehicles to supplement the work he put into the series, predominantly wartime romances and the odd noir thriller, but soon audiences only wanted him as Blackie. His popularity in the role spread to other media: in 1944, BOSTON BLACKIE became a summer replacement for radio's AMOS AND ANDY, also starring Morris and Lane. It was picked up as a regular radio program the following year, but with different actors in the roles. Columbia's film series ended in 1949. The fact that Chester Morris had little time to do anything else while the series was in production had its toll on his career; he was thoroughly typecast. Television and theater work thereafter became his main bread-and-butter, though he would also memorably appear as the hypnotist Dr. Lombardi in Edward L. Cahn's THE SHE-CREATURE (1956). His next and final screen role was in Martin Ritt's THE GREAT WHITE HOPE (1970). He died in September of that year, due to an overdose of barbiturates while on the road doing dinner theater. He had earlier been diagnosed with stomach cancer, and the pain was getting worse.

But all that was a long way off from 1941, when Columbia first introduced Morris as Hollywood's favorite safecracker turned wise-cracker. The story begins - as it often does with long-running series - with a movie that got it all right and set the bar respectively high. Its fourteen sequels would span a period of eight years.

MEET BOSTON BLACKIE (1941)

The series hits the ground running with this tightly-wound thriller, directed with style and economy by Robert Florey (THE FLORENTINE DAGGER) and featuring lots of snappy, wonderfully hard-boiled dialogue by Jay Dratler, later the screenwriter of LAURA (1944) and CALL NORTHSIDE 777 (1948). It introduces Blackie - a five-star safecracker who has gone straight since paying his debt to society - as a passenger traveling with his valet, a redeemed jail acquaintance known as The Runt (Charles Wagenheim), aboard a steamer. As soon as they arrive back in New York, Blackie gets into hot water when he discovers a man's corpse (CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON's Nestor Paiva!) planted in his stateroom. His only visible path to clearing himself is to follow the quickly exiting woman seen previously in the company of the dead man (Constance Worth), which he does after leaving a soap-on-mirror message to Inspector Farraday (Richard Lane), his constant nemesis - the Javert to his Valjean, you might say. The suspicious lady unwittingly leads our heroes to Coney Island, where a spy ring is hiding out, but she ends up murdered in the dark of a Tunnel of Horrors ride as she begins to tell all. Blackie nearly meets the same fate, but he and the Runt are able to make their escape from certain death with the help of an innocent bystander (Rochelle Hudson). Blackie can always rely on his charm to gain some timely female assistance.

As would become standard in the series but plays quite originally here, Blackie's methods of crime-solving are reliant on his past history as a criminal; we see him breaking lots of little laws and interfering with the police throughout the adventure, but always in ways that are ultimately forgivable considering the major crimes he is able to thwart. The one standing peculiarity of the series is that Inspector Farraday is given repeated evidence of Blackie's turnabout as a responsible and helpful American citizen yet, despite their established friendliness at the end of each picture, he continues to think the worst of him at the outset of the next. The carnival setting of this adventure recalls Florey's earlier work on Universal's MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE (1932) and features some memorable attractions, including Michael Rand as a "Mechanical Man" and a rare cameo appearance by none other than Schlitzie of FREAKS fame as "Princess Betsy, the Bird Woman."

It should be noted that George E. Stone had been signed to play The Runt from the start, but was unfortunately side-lined by a viral infection shortly before filming was set to commence. He was quickly replaced by Charles Wagenheim, a forgettable but certainly not ruinous substitute, but Stone could have only raised this film's stock by being aboard. 

TUNE IN TOMORROW FOR PART 2!


(c) 2019 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.