X Marks the Spot

There is the thrill of low-budget film noir. And there is the frustration of meandering, uninteresting movies made on the cheap. This one falls into the second category.

The Spot is the name of a nightclub. The film is about a policeman whose father has been killed by gangsters. He heads out to track them down.

Maybe it was the bad print. Maybe it's me. But I felt I'd seen this a hundred times, most of those times better than it is here.

It has promise, too: The cop is fascinated with a woman who plays records she introduces over juke boxes. They then meet. Now, though this was made well before I was born, I have seen that kind of juke box. And it is incredibly fascinating: When I was a teenager, I wandered into a bar that still had such a device. I always liked juke boxes, in bars or diners. But this one was different. You talked to it and a sultry sounding female voice talked back to you! That is addressed here but dropped into the general, uninteresting stew.

The movie has one thing going for it: In a small role, it features the very young Anne Jeffreys. What a beauty she was, and doubtless still is!

In the forty-height hours before joining up, Irish private dick Damian O'Flynn encounters a corrupt cop, a businessman on the take and takes in his stride the cold-blooded killing of someone very dear to him before retreating to the security of military service in the Pacific. As you do.

A private detective about to enter the Army investigates the murder of a cop by gangsters who are in the stolen tires racket. Along the way he is helped by Helen Parrish the pretty girl who plays records by request. I remembered her from You'll Find Out, a great old movie with Kay Kyser & Co.

The cast does a good job and there are some recognizable faces. You will recognize Neil Hamilton who played Comissioner Gordon on the 1960s Batman series and Anne Jeffreys who played Marion Kirby in the Topper TV series. Also Esther Muir who was the blonde Groucho pursued in A Night At The Opera and Dick Wessel who was in many many old movies. Of course there are a few times when things don't exactly make sense but it's entertainment. A nice little B movie that moves along well and wraps everything up in under an hour. It captures the feeling of movies made around that time. Worth watching!I gave it a 6.

I loved this - it was so of its time.

The story of 1942's X Marks the Spot concerns the smuggling of rubber - a valuable commodity in World War II. During the rubber being moved, a police officer is killed. His son Bill (Dick Purcell), a private detective, is determined to find out who killed his dad. As he's leaving for the army in two days, he doesn't have much time.

His investigation leads him to an old-time liquor racketeer Marty Crane (Jack La Rue) and the club The One Spot. Someone calls in a fake blackout order, during which Crane is killed.

Nothing special about the story except the rubber angle and the juke box. I've seen hundreds of old films but never this. You put a nickel in this tall thing, and a woman asks for the song number, then plays the record.

It features into the story - the women running it were able to order the blackout as they were connected to all the clubs. Not only that, Linda (Helen Ward) who worked there, flirted regularly with Bill over the wires and could recognize the voice who ordered the blackout.

Can't beat the old movies for these touches. Look for Batman's Commissioner, Neil Hamilton, in the film.

One thing I would never do, so I could never understand it if someone else did it, is to start whistling just after your father has been shot to death. But that's what happens pretty early on in X, and I'm afraid it proved to be the fly in the ointment, the spanner in the works, or the ice in the rubber for me.

The script is strictly B standard, photography likewise, editing tries to keep motions fluid but the frozen rubber/tyre angle just leaves this vehicle wheel-less, and it comes down with a crash in the indifferent ending, which sees P.I. Delaney leave gorgeous disc jockey Linda Ward behind to go fight in WWII.

Marty Clark and Underwood prove rather weak villains in short roles in a short film. That said, Hamilton is clearly the better actor of the two. Then again, that's no achievement coz Jack La Rue's face and eyes convey no emotion to which you can relate (perhaps if you're a murderer - I'm not, so his constantly mean mug means murder most mind-numbing to me).

O'Flynn rates a forgettable male lead, Purcell an unbelievable police lieutenant who might be on the level - or not, and for the life of me I could not see the point of that uncertainty - so the real saving graces and the reason for the five stars are the eternal elegance and beauty of Helen Parrish, and the film's thankfully short 55 minutes.