El cadáver secuestrado

Fast-moving mix of comedic nonsense and creepy thick-ear, of the sort popular at the time. Seems everybody's trying to find the corpse of gangster Wells and hold onto it. Competing reporters Willis (gargan) and Gallagher (Savage) are trying to out-scoop one another, that is, when not romancing. At the same time, bad guy Jelke (Zucco) wants to hide the body to cover for his stolen jewels, while the cops are trying to figure things out and poor Miggs just wants some sleep. Complicated? Yes, but in an entertaining, if crowded, programmer style. It's not a whodunit, rather we wait to see how all the conflicting interests will play out.

Apparently Gorcey's on leave from the East Side Kids, while furnishing his impudent brand of fractured English. Now if he can just figure out how to be a cool guy and light a cigarette. The wax museum setting is inventive, but someone should tell director Thomas that wax figures are not limber. Note too how much of the proceedings are filmed in half-light, probably to cover for the budget sets. For fans of statuesque Ann Savage, she shows a different side here from her definitive Detour (1945) spider woman. Happily, she also shows a lot of shapely leg near the end.

Overall, it's a fairly nifty little programmer with a brisk pace and a number of 40's familiar faces.

Ann Savage and William Gargan star as rival newspaper reporters in this wild murder comedy complete with wax dummies, a wandering corpse, dumb cops, and George Zucco at his sinister best.

Leo Gorcey is very funny as a helper and general chatterbox at the Last Gangster Wax Museum. He toys around with the electric chair exhibit and tosses off a fair number of Bowery Boys-style malapropisms ("It's an optical delusion").

Zucco opens the picture by creeping into a hotel room, shooting a man and stealing a small case of diamonds; besides the mysterious Zucco and the adventurous reporters, police detectives Paul Hurst (dumb flatfoot) and Don Beddoe (harassed and exasperated lieutenant) are soon also attempting to track down the murdered man's body, which appears then disappears more than once.

A silly subplot concerns Savage and Gargan—a onetime romantic couple for whom, as Gorcey puts it, "the milk of romance slightly curdled." Gargan persists in disrupting Savage's efforts toward solving the case and landing the big story, for reasons that are less than clear; their conflict is supposed to be cute but is instead mildly irritating.

Overall, it's predictable but still very enjoyable; while the dialog may be lowbrow, it's still moderately clever, and good humor and energetic performances make up for lack of suspense and surprises. Good fun for fans of B movies—or any of these stars.

There's no denying that this B-feature has its flaws, but it's kind of fun to watch. It's a crime drama with plenty of comic relief, with a solid cast that does pretty well with a story that could easily have fallen apart. The production is strictly low-grade, but they tried to make up for it in part with a lot of offbeat sets and dimly-lit scenes.

The story reminds you of Hitchcock's "The Trouble With Harry", since most of the plot concerns the trouble caused by an inconvenient corpse. It's not, of course, as good as a Hitchcock movie, and its implausible aspects are not masked the way they would be in a better production, but it still gets some decent mileage out of the premise.

Ann Savage does well as a young reporter trying to sort things out. She has the strong presence that she showed in noir features like "Detour", while this time being much more sympathetic. George Zucco strikes an appropriately menacing tone, and Leo Gorcey adds some entertaining comic relief.

This is a good movie to watch when you just want to pass a pleasant hour or so with something entertaining that does not demand careful attention, and when you are prepared not to be too critical. With the right expectations, it actually works pretty well.

***Major Spoilers*** With free-lance hit man Jelke, George Zucco, tracking down his quarry diamond thief Peter Bernett, George E. Stone, from Uruguay South America to a mid-town Manhattan hotel he surprises and guns him down when he answers the door. Taking $250,000.00 in diamonds that Barnett had on him Jelke goes to call a cab to have Barnett's body taken and later dumped, by Jelke, in the East River.

There's also an alert for a New York gangster Joe Wells who's been either dead or on the lamb for five years and the state is willing to pay $5,000.00 to find and prove who he is, dead or alive. You see both Peter Barnett & Joe Wells are one and the same person. Wells badly hurt from being shot by Jelke struggles to his feet and staggers across the street from his hotel to the Last Gangster Wax Museum and collapses and dies.

Later girl reporter Sue Gallagher, Ann Savage, finds the dead Wells on the museum staircase and hides it so that she can later get the reward for proving that the elusive Joe Wells case has finally been solved. Unknown to her and the police and Sue's friends Jelke has a lot more to gain if Joe Wells stays lost then they do in having him found. Humorous crime/drama about a stiff, Joe Wells, who stiffed everyone looking for him by getting stiffed and hidden in the car trunk of police let.Max Hurley,Don Beddoe, who's been in charge of finding the stiff for five years.

George Zucco seems too refined and sophisticated to be a hoodlum in the movie, he's much better playing mad doctors and scientists. There's also that expert in the proper use of diction in the English language Leo Gorcey, Clutch Tracy, in the film playing an attendant at the wax museum who shows us how he can magically make a lighted cigar butt last for over an hour which was the length of the movie.

There isn't much to say about this one. It involves a body (which should be decomposing) being dragged around by a series of people. There are a couple of reporters who use absolutely no common sense in the process of trying to use the body to get a scoop. There's Leo Gorcey, playing the Bowery Boys character, with the malapropisms and the general insensitivity. George Zucco is running around, trying to get his hands on the body. Keeping a low profile probably would have protected him, but this doesn't occur to him. Everything is silly and far fetched and probably played well in a theatre on Saturday afternoon as a bit of escapist drivel in the forties.