Dick Tracy

If you're expecting MALTESE FALCON you're in the wrong place. This first in the RKO Dick Tracy movies based on Chester Gould's hardboiled policeman is very faithful to the source material and a LOT of fun.

The cast is well chosen and Morgan Conway looks like he stepped right off the comics page.

What is unexpected is the inky black noirish camera work, something that was very rare for a B-picture. The entire series was entertaining, with Ralph Byrd replacing Conway for the third and fourth installments, and the two earliest entries were geared towards an adult audience as shown in the violence depicted.

Pull the stick out of your crack, sit back and enjoy some very entertaining little films from a more innocent time, when our good guys were someone to look up to.

Better than I expected. The little flick's stylishly done, with atmospheric dark shadow, eye-catching set-ups and strong character close-ups. The storyline's sometimes hard to follow, but maybe that's just me. Then too, there's more to the mystery than just who baddie Splitface really is, such as the deadly significance of the number '14' or the apparently needless money payoffs. And catch that grabber opening, worthy of the best noir - (so why is a sexy woman walking down a dark street in the middle of the night, alone? Good thing it's only a movie.)

Sure, the production's still a cheap programmer, while the acting is just routine. But the flick does have quality background, namely RKO during that studio's noirish 1940's. So give it a try, even if you're not especially a Tracy fan. And even though they don't always blend, the good touches do add up.

(In Passing - Growing up in a small mountain town in the '40's, the Tracy cartoon strip really stimulated my imagination, what with sinister deformed types like Flat-Top, Pruneface, Littleface, and Breathless Mahoney, all pictured here in the opening credits. I guess I've never outgrown them, even as a now geezer. Anyway, thanks again to strip creator and screenwriter Chester Gould for his own contagious imagination that still shows even here.)

Don't expect elaborate make-up effects or musical numbers from this installment in the original Dick Tray series, and you won't be disappointed. The plot is a whole lot goofier and creepier than Warren Beatty's version and the villains are just as perverse. Tracy's refreshingly pedestrian approach to crime-solving and his bizarre domestic situation add quirky appeal to this film.

Despite a rather routine production, this B-mystery is worth watching for the story, which is not bad. The beginning sets things up rather well, with Tracy trying to figure out both who the elusive 'Splitface' might be, and how he chose his apparently unconnected victims. There are several fairly interesting characters that he encounters along the way, and things move at a good pace most of the time. With a bigger budget and perhaps a little better writing here and there (in particular, to give poor Tess some better lines), it could be quite good. But there's no reason to quibble too much with it the way it is, since it's more than enough to provide decent entertainment for an hour or so.

If you had given Dick Tracy's name to any police type in any movie of the forties, it would be indistinguishable. The fact is that while this is a modestly entertaining movie, the comic strip being of it is just not there. Where is the technology, the distinctive sense of the comic strip? It's just not there. There is some semblance of humor, the byplay among the other detectives and Tess's frustration with dating the great detective (she never gets to go to dinner), but it still doesn't reproduce the comic strip. All that considered, it's a decent movie with an interesting plot. Like so many Tracy characters, Split Face is carrying around his angst, wanting to get back at those who convicted him. He is nasty, but has the fatal flaw of carelessness. Tracy is pretty dull, but I was a religious reader of the comic strip as a child and liked his silence. His romantic relationship always seemed forced to me. A real comic book hero shouldn't have time for women, right.