Esclavos del deber

Frank Sheridan is a beat cop with two sons. One is Dick Purcell, also a beat cop. The other is Charles Quigley who works for a gangster, whose front is a trucking company. When he blows a racetrack bet for his boss, he panics and gets into a fight with one of his fellow crooks, and shoots him. Purcell brings him in. Although no one who knows him thinks he did it, he's convicted of murder.

It's a fairly good cheap Monogram programmer, with a nice twist and some proto-noir lighting by Harry Neumann. The director is William Watson, a short comedy specialist. He started directing in 1920 for Henry 'Pathe' Lehrman, and by the time he made his last short in 1944, he had directed almost 280 of them. Along the way he helmed four features. This is the third.

Watson is one of those unremembered names in film, but anyone in charge of vehicles for Lloyd Hamilton AND Danny Kaye is worth remembering. He died at the age of 71 in 1967.

The plot's familiar but pretty well done. Dad and one son Terry are cops, while the other son Joe is drifting into crime. Naturally, this sets up not only legal conflicts but family ones as well. I like that early scene around the breakfast table where the badinage flies thick and fast giving us a sense of the colorful Murphy family. From there, loyalties are strained as Joe, and Dad, get more involved with gangster Moran.

The acting is pretty good. As Terry, Purcell gets top billing, but it's really Quigley's Joe who gets more camera time and chance to emote. But then it's the old Murphy folks, actors Sheridan and Elliott, who steal the show in subdued fashion. Low-budget Monogram's cost cutting shows up in the many darkened scenes, especially the shortened city street where no cars pass. Nonetheless, it's a decent, if unexceptional, time-passer.

The Murphys of Heroes In Blue are closer to the old sod than the Reagans of Blue Blood. But I think these two Irish American police families probably have a lot in common though God knows the Murphys haven't disregarded the brogue.

One episode of Blue Bloods probably costs twice as much as this no frills programmer from Monogram did back in 1939. Frank Sheridan is retired and doing private security work in the warehouse district in Hell's Kitchen and he and Lillian Elliott raised two sons, Dick Purcell who's on the police force and Charles Quigley who works for a trucking company headed by Edward Keane.

But the company is a blind for a man with his fingers in a lot of rackets. One of them is fixing horse races and when Quigley fails to get down a bet for Keane that sets in motion a series of events that leads to tragedy for the Murphys.

This is Monogram from Sam Katzman so don't expect much. But between the bad editing and lack of direction this is not too bad a film coming out of that poverty schlock factory. It's a decent story and even Sheridan's brogue rings true.

Worse has come from Monogram.

HEROES IN BLUE is a standard Monogram programmer about a cop and his criminal brother. The plot sees the brother accused of murder thanks to the wiles of an evil gangland boss who seems to have his claws into most of the family. The cop strives to right these injustices but of course the cards are stacked against him.

There's little of interest in this production. The plot plays out in a familiar way and the characters are quite dull and uninteresting, failing to gain the viewer's interest at any point. Sure, the genre trappings are always fun, but HEROES IN BLUE is so cheap and lacking in thought that you won't remember it a day after watching.

Not much more need be said than that which has been said in previous reviews, except that it is utterly fascinating to see such a bare-bones production be done so well and hold so much of interest for the viewer. The production values of "Heroes in Blue" are so spartan it looks as though 10 sets were created for its production on one corner of a small sound stage, one constructed per day with the shooting completed in 10 successive days. Additionally, the street scenes are devoid of passersby (granted they are set late at night) and never show more than one vehicle in the scene. It's really fascinating that although the sets are so very spare, the characters' portrayals are earnestly acted with the dialog clearly delivered with rehearsed care. Lastly, the story is... yes, you guessed it, simple, but yet compelling in a basic sort of way. I actually enjoyed the film, oddly enough.