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PETE HARRIS
MOVIE CRAZY: At a recent session of the BMovie Wing of the Vast Whizzbang Organization, the features included Escape To Glory, a 1940 Columbia that could be classed as a Bplus or Aminus because of its cast: Meet Boston Blackie (1941), first in the series starring Chester Morris, and Blind Spot (1947) with Morris as a drunken writer accused of murder,
An early-day Ship Of Fools directed by John Brahm, Escape To Glory, also known as Submarine Zone, has Pat O'Brien, Constance Bennett, Alan Baxter, John Halliday, Edgar Buchanan, Melville Cooper, Frank Sully, Francis Pierlot and Marjorie Gateson as a cross-section of characters caught aboard a freighter at sea when war breaks out in September, 1939, O'Brien is the cynical adventurer who says he'd fight for whichever side paid best, Constance Bennett is the (ahem) companion of Halliday, a district attorney with some skeletons in his closet, and Baxter is a wanted gunman with a grudge against Halliday, Bruce Bennett has a small part as the ship's gunnery officer and Hans Schumm shows up as (what else?) the U-boat captain, Escape To Glory deserves a niche in the Movie Hall Of Fame for a single line of dialogue, worthy of the Harry Purvis Trophy: at one point, O'Brien says to Constance Bennett, "You're a four-alarm fire wasting your time lighting five-cent cigars, "
There's another choice line in Meet Boston Blackie, directed by Robert Florey. The Runt, played by Charles Wagenheim, says after seeing Blackie put out his hands for Inspector Faraday (Richard Lane) to put on the cuffs:
"I saw you giving him the Sing Sing salute." Don Miller describes this movie as the most entertaining in the Blackie series which ran from ‘41 to ‘49 and consisted of 18 entries, Also in the cast are Constance Worth and Rochelle Hudson,
Blind Spot, directed by Robert Gordon, is quite simply a Cornell Woolrichtype yarn that wasn't written by Woolrich (or William Irish, for that matter) but rather is from a story by Barry Perowne. Chester Morris stars as a drunken impoverished writer who goes to see his stingy publisher (William Forrest) about getting an advance on a locked-room murder mystery he has concocted. Constance Dowling (say, I never really noticed her before) appears as Forrest's secretary, Steven Geray is another, more successful writer whose favorite saying is, "Holy Toledo, " and Sid Tomack is a bartender who figures in the case, The publisher is murdered in a way that matches Morris's murdermystery plot, so naturally he becomes a prime suspect in the case, And, because he was drunk at the time, he isn't sure whether he did it or not, I won't violate the movie-reviewers code and tell you whodunit, just in
case somebody gets around to showing it sometime. * * %
SERIAL NOTE: The Original 99-Cent Roxy, at Danforth and Greenwood, has scheduled a showing of all 15 chapters of Republic's Dick Tracy (1937), with Ralph Byrd, on Thursday, Nov. 27, starting at 7 p.m.