BOSTON BLACKIE BOOKED ON SUSPICION (1945)
Sometimes one wonders where these titles come from, in this case because Blackie is never actually booked or apprehended by the police - in fact, they can’t even find him because he spends much of the picture in disguise, another variation on the old man makeup he’s used before. He hauls out the blackface makeup once again too. Strangely enough, the milieu in Arthur Dreifuss’ BOSTON BLACKIE BOOKED ON SUSPICION is a rare and antique bookstore owned by Arthur Mangrave (a welcomely returning Lloyd Corrigan) that hosts monthly auctions. (The setting of this story unmasks a pun in the film's title.) Though our only close-ups of the shop’s shelves show categories like Medicine, Astronomy and Botany, which would hardly command much public interest or big bucks, it auctions a first edition of Dickens’ THE PICKWICK PAPERS that fetches $62,000 - only for the buyer to promptly notice from a misplaced comma that it’s a forgery! Blackie poses as the store’s elderly manager (whose doctor has ordered him to bed) to find out who is behind the old switcheroo, only to once again become embroiled in the suspicions of Inspector Farraday (Richard Lane), who immediately jumps to the conclusion that he must must have stolen the McCoy. The real crooks in this case, revealed early on, are a young criminal couple played by Steve Cochran and Lynn Merrick - the latter, in a startling surprise, turning out to be the more cold-blooded and crafty of the two. There’s a cleverly filmed sequence as Blackie attempts to elude capture by climbing into a building’s incinerator chute, but ultimately Merrick’s characterization is the only other fresh point of interest.
A CLOSE CALL FOR BOSTON BLACKIE (1946)
This one is another directorial return for the ever-capable Lew Landers. No stolen diamond, no safe-cracking this time, but we do have the usual character ingredients, this time up against an unscrupulous young couple who are using a borrowed baby to squeeze support money out of its supposed grandfather, a man of wealth. Blackie and The Runt get involved because the woman (Lynn Merrick, the bad girl from the previous film) was once involved with him and, through somewhat unbelievable circumstance, leaves the baby in his apartment for safe-keeping while he’s out. (This baby gets left alone by adults a lot!) Make no mistake, the emphasis here is on cute comedy, with many shots of the baby making faces and the Runt recruited as a baby sitter who must take to the street in drag to beg a bottle of milk from a delivery truck. Blackie once again dons his by-now-much-overused old man disguise, gruff Inspector Farraday is knocked down by a dozen affectionate dogs, and we’re left with a thin collision of comic situations in which some characters actually die for their efforts. Charles Lane (middle-aged here, he lived well into his hundreds) appears briefly as the baby’s actual father, for whom things do not end well. The film - earning its B-movie stripes at a mere 57 minutes - is actually stolen by Claire Carleton, a comedienne reminiscent of Judy Holliday who carries much of the film as the Runt’s new girlfriend Mamie; incredibly, she received no screen credit.
THE PHANTOM THIEF (1946)
Here, the Boston Blackie films fall into the hands of director D. Ross Lederman - not really a cherished name among B-directors but a guy responsible for TARZAN’S REVENGE, THE GORILLA MAN, and THE BODY DISAPPEARS, and dozens of Western programmers - and would you believe it? He serves up what is a strong and oh-so-welcome return to form, certainly one of the best films in the series, and arguably the best.
After at least one too many adventures in a comedy vein, this one returns our heroes to mystery, to stolen jewels, and adds for the first time some exotic, even mystic atmosphere. In this moodily photographed adventure, Blackie and The Runt are involved by a double-crossed old acquaintance in a supposed jewel robbery that escalates into murder... but this is just an oblique route into the real mystery, which involves the ties between a neurotic young woman of some wealth (Jeff Donnell) and the all-knowing swami she is consulting, a Dr. Nejomi (Marvin Miller). Naturally, Nejomi’s supernatural racket is just a front for criminal activities but his stagy entranced summonings of the spirit world are great, spooky fun - along the lines of Cesar Romero’s routines in CHARLIE CHAN AT TREASURE ISLAND (an obvious model for this story), not to mention William Castle’s HOUSE IN HAUNTED HILL. I’ll bet Castle would have loved a crack at this one, but I doubt he could have done a better job.
TUNE IN TOMORROW FOR PART 5!
(c) 2019 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.
