Big Town Czar

Big Town Czar is a B picture gangster film with the sole distinction of having been written by Ed Sullivan who at that time was not the host of America's most successful television variety show. Instead he was a newspaper gossip columnist, one of the rivals to the number one New York columnist Walter Winchell.

Barton MacLane plays the lead and we first see him pulling a palace coup against racketeer Walter Woolf King with sidekick Frank Jenks. He's on top of the world now, but he's got a kid brother in Tom Brown who wants to leave college and follow him into the rackets. That's a prospect that will break his parents, Oscar O'Shea and Esther Dale's hearts. It's not sitting well with his girlfriend Eve Arden either.

I'm guessing the original story that Sullivan wrote is better than how it was translated to the screen. The characters seem poorly motivated, a lot of their actions make no sense. Brown comes off as such a punk, I can't believe that MacLane just didn't slap some sense into him.

Ed Sullivan wrote himself and played himself in the film. He also narrates portions and while it's a good ten years earlier than I remember him from television in the Fifties, he looks about the same.

The cast from Barton MacLane, Eve Arden on down just go through their paces and collect a check. Sullivan looks the most animated of the lot and that's saying something if you remember him from television.