I'm much too strong not to compromise

[austin_dern]

After Midnight With Boston Blackie wastes no time introducing Barnaby, who looks like Ray Walston three years after he died, being released finally from prison so he can violently cough into a handkerchief. Meanwhile Inspector Farraday intercepts a train porter's message for Blackie, and to show that Blackie somehow handcuffed the inspector's ankle to the train seat regardless of how impossible that would be. Farraday stops in to deliver generic warnings to Blackie. This all ought to set up needed exposition but it more kind of fills time while stuff gets going. It doesn't get going until the train ride is over and Blackie learns from Barnaby's daughter that Barnaby's gone missing.

The street scenes, and they are on the street, look like Los Angeles location footage, so by fifteen minutes in they've already spent more time in Hollywood than Boston Blackie In Hollywood has. Meantime Runt has got himself a dame all fixed up to get married --- there's no other way to put it and be accurate --- so it's a matter of waiting to see what happens first, we get fed up with the comic flirtation, the movie forgets about the subplot, or the punch line gets her out of Runt's life in time for the end-of-film return to status quo.

The key points are, the diamonds are in a safe-deposit box, Barnaby's kidnapped, and Farraday suspects Blackie of ... getting a telegram on the train, apparently. Barnaby is shot while he attempts to make a phone call, and Farraday arrests Blackie in front of Barnaby's safe-deposit box. (Farraday figures Blackie shot Barnaby for the deposit box's key, and Blackie inexplicably says, ``television has certainly made terrific strides. It's got to the point when police inspectors can see things that never happened''.)

One of the elements of the series is that Farraday's sidekick, officer Matthews, may be dopey but he usually notices the important stuff. This lets the movie turn every discovery of data by Farraday into a double-take by Farraday, but it also raises the question of why all the characters look down on Matthews's observational abilities. For the comic value, I suppose, and also that Matthews doesn't display any particular sense of judgement, blurting out anything he spots even if the scene calls for being more discrete. The implication I suppose is that while he does observe the important things, he's also always going on about the unimportant things and there's a boy-who-called-wolf effect. But when half the things he says are plot-significant, it's harder for the viewer to feel like Matthews is quite the dope he's supposed to be.

A lot of the plot here is given over to characters running in and out of sets, including at one point a horribly uncomfortable moment where Blackie hides from the real bad guys by donning blackface, getting a cab driver's permission to go into his apartment, washing that off and ducking out once everyone's lost his trail because, sure, it was the war years and taxi drivers' wives were perfectly understanding of strangers in blackface coming in and washing the coal black off their faces. Of all the uses of blackface in the movies, this was indeed one of them.

There's a couple recurring elements here: a chase across the rooftops within the set, and then another bit where Blackie takes the bad guys on a ride in a stolen police car with the radio just happening to be left on 'transmit' --- that whole idea of a radio in a police car really wowed B-movie makers, didn't it? --- although I have to admit not a whole lot stands out in the production.

Runt's fiancee's serial bigamy is given away in a scene midway through the movie that we're supposed to not notice, as it's padded in a bunch of cop scene talk, but it's brought back for the closing scene as it breaks up Runt's marriage, to Runt's glee, even though he seemed quite happy at the prospect of getting married.

Some folks are fickle.

Trivia: To defuse the tension in the White House while waiting for the returns from the state elections of 11 October 1864, Abraham Lincoln read aloud from a pamphlet with the latest writings of humorist Petroleum V Nasby. Source: Team of Rivals, Doris Kearns Goodwin. (And apparently he drove Stanton crazy by doing so.)

Currently Reading: The First Space Race: Launching The World's First Satellites, Matt Bille, Erika Lishock.

Somebody must have written the alternate history where Lincoln goes into the humor business, instead of politics, possibly as a Nasby-like writer, possibly as a Dan Rice-like superclown. Mustn't they?

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[c-eagle.livejournal.com]

It's a movie?