Waterfront Lady

Charles C. Wilson has just promoted Frank Albertson to partner on his gambling yacht. With no time wasted on screen, the cops raid the joint, Wilson gets into a fight with a rat with a gun in the dark -- when the lights come on, the rat is dead and Wilson is holding the gun. He hands Albertson the gun, and everyone tries to make a break. Wilson is captured. Albertson escapes into the tangle of shacks at the waterfront. Up comes J. Farrell MacDonald in a marvelous drunk act, with his daughter, Ann Rutherford in her first credited role. Albertson hides out, romances Rutherford despite the objections of seaman Grant Withers and.... well, it's just the sort of movie I enjoy, lots of funny incidents in the Thimble Theater world of the docks amidst the gangster melodrama. It plays with genres in ways that kept me guessing, thanks to a fine script by Wellyn Totman and Joseph Fields, fast direction by the under-rated Joseph Santley, excellent camerawork by B Western specialist Ernest Miller and crackerjack editing by Ray Curtiss under the supervision of Joseph H. Lewis. A couple of montages near the end are as good as anything Don Siegel did.

It's one of those surprisingly good B movies that the Majors would turn out when no one was looking. That makes it all the more amazing that it's a Nat Levine production for Mascot; usually that would be a warning, and that's undoubtedly why you haven't heard of it. And now you have.