X Marks the Spot

X Marks the Spot is a pleasant but uninteresting B movie with nice leads. However it is a predictable thriller which is notable for featuring actor Neil Hamilton who would go on to play Commissioner Gordon in the Batman tv series.

Eddie Delaney is a private eye who is about to be commissioned to the US army. He meets his dad in a cafe, a veteran police sergeant. Later on his dad is killed when he sees some suspicious people at a warehouse. The bad guys were planning to steal two trucks to sell tyres on the black market.

Eddie is persuaded by lieutenant William Decker to work with the police to find out who killed his father. However at each turn Eddie finds that potential witnesses have died before he could speak to them. Soon Eddie is wanted for murder and he needs to clear his name.

An unpretentious quickie with a twist that is easy to predict.

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.

If you tend to like minor B-movies of the '40s, this is definitely one to see. Male lead Damian O'Flynn as a tough private detective and female lead Helen Parrish as a younger friend of his who tries to make sure her hero doesn't get hurt both have charisma. The editing never gets slow, and the script is delightfully jam-packed with classic cliché lines of the movies and of the era, but serving a watchable story.

Neil Hamilton, eventually of the Batman TV series, is effective in one of the supporting roles. Gaspere Biondolillo plays his usual straightforward heavy. The print available on the inexpensive Alpha DVD is good.

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.

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!