LouHomey From my favorite movies..

AutCuddly Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

Anoushka Slater While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

Billy Ollie Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

mark.waltz Now this the way to start a long running mystery series! Superb in every way, this B thriller introduces Chester Morris in the role of the already popular pulp novel series, a precursor to film noir, filled with shadowy locations, sinister men and mysterious women. Like other series, it didn't get any better (often a lot worse), and by the time the writers threw in the towel or moved it to radio and eventually TV, it was showing its age. But back to the beginning, long after the sophistication of Nick and Nora, and just as America was heading to war. Audiences really needed villains to hiss, and the antiheroes like Boston Blackie, the Saint, the Falcon, the Shadow, the Whistler and a few others who were actually given names, not adjectives.Already notorious with the police for alleged crimes, Blackie is on the run for two murders, one committed on a cruise ship, the other in the tunnel of love. Being there makes him automatically guilty in the eyes of the law, and when Rita Hayworth lookalike Rochelle Hudson ends up accompanying him, he finds an all too convenient accomplice. Together, they truly are dynamite, but like another popular film detective, the Lone Wolf, he's better off on his own, giving a ton of starlets the opportunity to get their feet wet in leading roles. With Richard Lane as the perplexed lieutenant desperately trying to find something on him, this moves at a speedy space, making me looking forward to what comes up next.

Charles Herold (cherold) This is pretty typical of 40s b movies. The pacing is good, the acting is breezy and there's some nice light patter. At the same time, the movie doesn't even attempt to give characters believable reactions to events and no one does anything any real person would do. Which to some extent is just how movies are, but I thought this one is at least a little more absurd than many of its fellow movies. The worst examples I list as spoilers below.**************** BEGIN SPOILERS ********************* I think the oddest thing is Cecelia's reaction to being kidnapped by a strange man. She's pretty darn calm about it. Never panics, never gets upset; it doesn't even pop into her head that this guy could be dangerous and might hurt her. And after spending 20 minutes with him she is smiling and flirting and totally invested in helping him even though she thinks he might be a murderer. Realistically a character that reacted like this would have to be pretty emotionally damaged and have a history of abusive relationships; at least that's the only explanation I can think of that would make any sense. Hitchcock used to like a similar scenario but he would always work to have it make at least some vague sort of sense.The relationship between Blackie and the cop is similarly peculiar. He takes Blackie's word for it that he won't run for it but after he does the cop doesn't call out an all-points bulletin but instead goes to wait for him at his apartment. A real cop would be fired for this sort of thing (at least today; perhaps they had lower standards in the 40s.There was some other absurdity I noticed during the movie but it's slipped my mind. Basically this is a movie in which the scriptwriter wanted certain things to happen and didn't care if it made any sense or not; pure hack work. ******************END SPOILERS **********************

whpratt1 Always like Chester Morris, (Boston Blackie) who made sixteen (16) of these films and also was Boston Blackie on the radio during the 1940's. In this film Boston Blackie takes a cruise and winds up with a corpse in his stateroom and finds himself being arrested many times by Inspector Farraday (RIchard Lane) and also handcuffed over and over again. In one scene Boston Blackie takes the driver's seat of an auto owned by Rochelle Hudson, (Cecelia Bradly) who is very attractive and proceeds to drive the car onto a train traveling to Valley Stream, Long Island, New York. In the next scene he winds up in Coney Island in Brooklyn, N.Y. where he gets involved with a spy ring with Inspector Farraday always trying to arrest poor Boston Blackie who was an ex-con for being a safe cracker years ago. These Boston Blackie films were usually shown as a double features in the movie houses on Saturday nights during the 1940's. Enjoy

netwallah The first installment of a third-rate detective series, featuring a former safe-cracker, Blackie (Chester Morris), his sidekick the Runt (Charles Wagenheim), and the impatient Inspector Farraday (Richard Lane). Crimes get pinned on Blackie so he has to sort them out. This time he acquires a pretty lady (Rochelle Hudson) when he commandeers her car, and she's almost a match for him. With a modicum of witty repartee, some excellent carnival locations, and an unusual villain (a master spy whose cover is playing a sideshow mechanical man), this one might have ascended from third to second rate, were it not for Morris's acting (mostly a matter of flashing a grin that looks too wide for his face) and his hat (its too-small brim accentuates his big square face and makes him look stupid amongst all the elegant, wide-brimmed hats worn by everybody else, even the weaselly villains).