Blog Posts - Mystery Films

Take a gander at the movie still above and the pulp art below. Similar, ain't they? That's because the 1937 Columbia film Find the Witness was based on the 1935 Daffy Dill story "A Slug for Cleopatra." Sadly, the movie did not feature Daffy himself.

From the look of these lobby cards (and half sheet) from the first Dick Tracy feature, you'd think the star of the film was Mike Mazurki. Maybe he was. I invite you to see for yourself. Technically, though, top billing went to Morgan Conway in the ti...

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Mr. Wong, Detective was the first of a six-film series featuring a Charlie Chan-wannabe created by Hugh Wiley for Collier’s magazine. I have to assume the movies got a little better as they went along, because it’s hard to see how this one justif...

 1946 19411943More Boston Blackie posters HERE. ...

I haven’t read this book in a coon’s age, so can’t say how faithful the film is. But this movie, the second in the series, is at least more faithful to Gardner’s vision than the first, The Case of The Howling Dog (reviewed HERE).Perry’s spr...

When I posted a trio of Boston Blackie posters a couple of weeks back (HERE), Shay tipped me off that some of the films were on YouTube. That was good news to me, so I watched one. This one. Alias Boston Blackie was the third in this series with...

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Little Caesar and The Public Enemy, both released in 1931, have become linked in the public consciousness as the first great gangster films, and also as the breakthrough performances for two iconic gangster stars - Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney...

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I love all the Warner's Brothers cartoons lampooning movie stars of the day. They did a lot of those, and Edward G. Robinson was included in most. But in this one, whose title was obviously inspired by the non-Robinson film Angels with Dirty Faces, E...

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Suddenly caught my eye at the library because it looked like a noirish thing with Frank Sinatra. But I got REALLY interested when I saw that it was written by pulp writer and several-kinds-of-novelist Richard Sale. (For much, much more about Mr. Sale...

194319451946Stay tuned for more adventures with The Crime Doctor! ...

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The esteemed Mr. Richard Robinson, aka The Broken Bullhorn, has been reading Perry Mason lately, and that reminded me I had four old Mason movies waiting to be re-screened.First up is The Case of the Howling Dog (1934), Perry’s screen debut, and th...

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