Here's the second and last volume of the Warner Archive collection featuring the final Wild Bill Elliott detective mooms made for the long-missed Allied Artists studios, the same stroonads who gave us both the Bowery Boys and Bomba! And like the first two in the series these crankouts have everything you like in those fifties films guaranteed to have made your tee-vee viewing all the more pleasurable, that is if these films were being aired on your local station back then (forget about now!) and you didn't have anything better to do that stay plopped in front of the boob tube on a nice day when you shoulda been outside riding your bike and doing alla that normil kid stuff like your parents wanted you to. But then again, what could be more normil'n watching mooms like these?
CALLING HOMICIDE's a good 'un where this nice looking gal is found mauled to death and, as usual, there are 'bout a few dozen people who would have liked to have done the doody including none other than Lyle Talbot as a lush who worked for the bitch at her modeling school. Of course there's more to it that mere hatred of the victim, something to do with a black market baby ring considering that them wuz the days when having a bastard was a shame-filled event unlike now when they're popping outta orifices faster'n blackheads offa my nose. Look out for longtime tee-vee/film regular James Best as a deputy as well as THREE STOOGES/BOWERY BOYS mainstay Edward Bernds not only directing but writing the screenplay.
CHAIN OF EVIDENCE stars an all grown up Jimmy Lydon as this seemingly innocuous hothead guy who gets sent to the work farm for beating up none other than Timothy Carey! When he gets out Carey's right there waiting for him ready to give Lydon his what-for to the point where the kid gets the memory knocked outta his skull. After awhile of drifting, he gets a job working for a wealthy businessman and takes the rap when the captain of industry gets 86'd by wifey's boyfriend. It's up to Doyle (with the help of none other'n Dabs Greer) to cure Lydon if only to get to the bottom of the case and they have to resort to some pretty outlandish ways to shock the guy back into realitysville which in many ways makes me wanna stay as long in etherland as I could possibly stand!
In FOOTSTEPS IN THE NIGHT, some guy with a gambling problem gets into a game of all night poker with none other Lt. Henderson from THE ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN himself Robert Shayne. Shane loses heavily and starts getting uppity, and when his partner returns from the kitchen with a nice cold 'un he finds Shayne dead onna floor! What does the guy do??? What any normal BLOG TO COMM reader would, mainly run and hide!!! Of course with the heavy breath of the law exhaling down your neck that's nearly impossible, and considering that Doyle's a good cop type he's out to find who the real murderer is and the results he comes to, while seemingly as far fetched as my kiddoid plan to turn tooth powder into a nice minty drink, actually work showing that sometimes these long shots do pay beaucoup dividends!
All three are what I'd call top notch BTC-approved viewing, and I must admit that each 'n every one are what I would have preferred watching on the tee-vee these past three or four decades 'stead of the new 'n relevant quap that keeps getting force fed down our unrepentant provincial throats like so much Play Dough. However, I must admit that when I was watching these I was not fantasizing myself as being some young-ish workaday slob watching 'em on some UHF station late movie back 1962 way...this time I pretended I was the same guy watching 'em onna same station a good six years later on a yukky Sunday afternoon. Can't say that I haven't progressed since then, eh?
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