Roaring City

Hugh Beaumont is an unlicensed private investigator. He gets involved in a couple of murders, almost pulled in by police inspector Richard Travis, and investigates by getting his head pounded in and with the aid of alchoholic Eddie Brophy in this brisk film noir from Lippert.

It's based on a couple of scripts from radio's Pat Novak For Hire, a local show that starred Jack Webb at the beginning of its career before it went national briefly with another performer in the lead role. There's a lot of exposition, fancy metaphors, and a voice over by Beaumont explaining what's going on.

On the plus side, the copy was one of the few good prints of a movie shot by Jack Greenhalgh, and is quite lovely. It shows why he was for a long time, the youngest member of the American Society of Cinematographers. Despite the script not being opened up particularly for the movies, it has some striking images.

Hugh Beaumont who made an indelible impression on all kids as the world's greatest dad as Ward Cleaver on television will shock the fans of Leave It To Beaver when they see him play laconic private eye Dennis O'Brien, living on the San Francisco wharf with his research man Edward Brophy in Roaring City. Definitely not the Hugh we're used to.

You know he's got the dialog and the patter down straight, but as a detective he falls into the Miles Archer rather than the Sam Spade category. In this film which involves Beaumont in two separate stories in both cases he does a job which looks really suspicious from the start. In the first he lays down some bets for a fight manager against his own fighter under an alias. He looks real good for the homicides of both the manager and the fighter to detective Richard Travis.

The second one is even worse, he's asked to pose as the husband of one of a pair of women in a rendezvous and the real husband comes up dead with an unconscious Beaumont with the stiff in a trash dumpster. I mean this guy's radar is really on the fritz.

Still it's not a bad premise for a television show which it was for a brief time and it proves that Hugh Beaumont could be something other than the All American Dad.

Hugh Beaumont, who previous had played Michael Shayne for a series of detective movies at PRC in the 1946-47 season (entertaining films, but having little to do with the Shayne character as depicted in the Brett Halliday novels), put the trench-coat back on for a series of three hour-long feature films as detective Denny O'Brien, released in short succession through Lippert Pictures in 1951. One interesting element about these films is that each consists of two half-hour-long stories, almost as if one is watching back-to-back episodes of a television show. Another interesting element is that the films seem to have borrowed a number of elements from the radio show PAT NOVAK FOR HIRE, starring Jack Webb. Not only is O'Brien a man who rents a ship at the pier and does odd jobs, not only does each film start with monologues very similar to those of Webb, not only does O'Brien have a drunken ex-college-professor sidekick who does some legwork for him, but one of the three films has a plot line lifted directly from a Novak episode! (Perhaps other plots of these movies are lifted from Novak episodes I haven't heard) In any event, these three films are all enjoyable outings with Beaumont radiating the same kind of charm he always did, yet still being convincing as a tough PI spouting hard-boiled dialogue. This particular film has two stories: one of a fixed fight that O'Brien is hired to bet on, and the other where O'Brien is hired to pose as a woman's husband for an evening. Like the PAT NOVAK series, someone hires the detective to do something, he winds up getting beaten up or knocked out, and he wakes up with a dead body, and a police inspector who doesn't like him trying to pin the murder on the detective. That's the formula, and I like it. As often happens with Lippert films, there is a fine b-movie supporting cast, and there is no time wasted on non-essential items. I've owned this film for about 15 years, and I have no doubt watched it five times in those years. Beaumont fans will NOT be disappointed. The other two Denny O'Brien films are DANGER ZONE and PIER 23, both of which I also recommend to detective film fans who do not mind bargain-basement productions in the PRC/Lippert vein. These are directed by the ever-reliable William Berke.

Hugh Beaumont plays against what folks of my generation see him as: the perfect dad to a perfect family. He ain't no family man here. But, what is he? He seems to be a private investigator without a license holding down a day job as a renter/seller of old boats at the shoddy end of the San Francisco harbor. As Dennis O'Brien, Beaumont isn't exactly Sherlock Holmes (though he does have a low rent professor sidekick and go-fer), nor is he Sam Spade. He's a stupefyingly poor down mix of the two if you're generous.

Actually, with Beaumont there's something ,almost, to like as his charisma occasionally comes through. But, then there's the quirks that apparently the producer and director insert. For one, the "tough guy" dialog is downright laughable akin to the intentional use of such for comedic effect in the Steve Martin flick "Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid". Only it's unintentional here thus really bad without the comic relief. It's a big fail.

Also, because this isn't actually a feature B flick at all things never flow. The producer/director/writers have stitched together two segments that must have been meant for a TV pilot and first episode (that were not good enough even for that). So, it's a fledging wannabe movie. The word "clunky" comes to mind even if it was a money move to meet the demand for the double features of the day. Besides Beaumont there isn't much in the acting department either. It leaves one thinking even if there wasn't a financial loss careers were muddied. Somewhere in this mess something quite a bit better could have been crafted around Beaumont's character. It wasn't and instead this is the lame result. It's basically a waste, a which is a generous way to say it's laughably terrible. Don't bother with this one.

"Roaring City" (1951) was the second of three "Dennis O'Brien" mystery films starring Hugh Beaumont. Actually, each of the three has two parts, each a half-hour segment episode that somewhat obviously was supposed to be part of a planned television series which didn't materialize. They're all actually pretty decent little shows, though the dialogue is such that Dashiell Hammett would have had to use a sledgehammer to cut the radio-style gangsterese down to size. In this "feature", as in all of them, Ed Brophy is a drunken partner - a live-in - an ex-professor whose own dialogue is basically nothing but ten dollar gibberish to say anything. It's the humor of these pieces, and it's okay, but that's about it; and Richard Travis is a cop who constantly tries to pin the murders that ubiquitously occur on O'Brien, but in the end has to admit defeat and be "glad" O'Brien helped him - I guess. Joan Valerie, Wanda McKay, and Rebel Randall fill out the female bills in the two episodes which occur here. Bad girls, all of them. Valerie and McKay give rather poor performances. Randall is better. Anthony Warde, Greg McClure, William Tannen, Abner Biberman, and a couple of others are all complicit in being bad. Mediocre stuff, but easy to watch anyway. Directed by William Berke.