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Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome
USA 1947
produced by
Herman Schlom for RKO
directed by John Rawlins
starring Boris Karloff, Ralph Byrd, Edward Ashley, June Clayworth, Lyle Latell, Tony Barrett, Skelton Knaggs, Anne Gwynne, Milton Parsons, Jim Nolan, Joseph Crehan, Bert Roach, Tom Keene, Phil Arnold, Jason Robards sr, Lex Barker, Robert Malcolm, Harry Harvey, William Gould, Sean McClory
screenplay by Eric Taylor, Robertson White, based on a story by William Graffis, Robert E.Kent, & the comic strip by Chester Gould, music by Paul Sawtell
Dick Tracy, Dick Tracy (Ralph Byrd), RKO's Dick Tracy
review by
Mike Haberfelner
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The National Bank is robbed in a most peculiar manner: by some poisoned
gas, all the customers, & personnel alike, are frozen stiff for a
quarter of an hour, enough time for robbers Melody (Tony Barrett) &
Gruesome (Boris Karloff) to waltz in & empty it of its money. but
since Melody loses his nerves anyways 6 shoots a securtiy guard just for
good measure, this becomes a case for Homicide ... & for Dick Tracy
(Ralph Byrd). At first though, Tracy has very little to go on, merely a
stiff his partner Pat Patton (Lyle Latell) has brought into the morgue,
& who soon got better & walked away - the stiff was of course
Gruesome who did some involuntary self-tests on the gas he later used in
the bank robbery -, & the case of missing scientist Dr A.Tomic (Milton
Parsons), whose assistant I.M.Learned (June Clayworth) uses just one
excuse too many explaining his disappearance ... & of course, Miss
Learned is the lover of Dr Lee Thal, for whom she stole a certain gas from
A.Tomic that can instantly freeze people stiff, & Lee Thal in turns is
in cahoots with Gruesome & Melody. But when Gruesome finds out that
Learned was followed, he shoots her, & an ensuing carchase ends in a
carwreck, where Gruesome has to leave his colleague Melody behind badly
injured. Melody is of course arrested, but dies before he can be
questioned. So Tracy comes up with one of these B-thriller plans: he has
his own face bandaged & poses as Melody, in hopes that he is
eventually broken free by Gruesome & company (that consisting in this
case of X-Ray [Skelton Knaggs], Lee Thal's assistant), which is of course
happening before you know it ... but unfortunately Gruesome is clever
enough to shake his pursuers, & he almost puts Tracy to death in his
incinerator, but after a fight is knocked out & almost lands in there
himself ... The last of the RKO-Dick Tracys did
somewhat leave the boring police drama/murder mystery-formula behind for a
more fantastic, comicbook-style, anything-goes story, which gives some
freshness to the rather dull series, & of course Boris Karloff is
great as usual. Still, even despite the fantastic plot, the in-your-face
character-names (with doctors A.Tomic, Lee Thal & I.M.Learned, &
taxidermist Y.Stuffum) the film still fails to really take off, basically
because it just takes itself way too seriously, & much of the story
still follows overused genre-routines. RKO dropped the Dick
Tracy series for good after this one, & maybe it was for the
best.
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