Pier 23

I like Edward Brophy. He was best playing a mug with a twinkle in his eye. But he is miscast here as the "intellectual who likes the sauce". He just can't make it work. He sounds cardboard trying to play the professor. Likewise, I enjoy Hugh Beaumont. To me Beaumont was similar to Alan Ladd, great in the right role, but with a rather cold screen persona.

Let's be honest, these were made on the cheap and relied heavily on the stars to bring life to very average scenarios. Personally, I think the Brophy/Beaumont team fails. I like them both, but it doesn't work here. Compared with the TV detectives series of the era the Dennis O'Brien mysteries are fine, but if you are looking for a lost gem from the detective genre you won't find it here.

Hugh Beaumont starred as private detective Denny O'Brien in three short features in 1951: "Pier 23", "Roaring City", and "Danger Zone". The three were all set in San Francisco, ran about 60 minutes, and had two plot lines, thus could be used for television episodes.

Beaumont had had a fairly long career in B detective movies when he made these films, and was certainly at ease in front of the camera. The plots were all pretty much the same: 1. O'Brien would be called upon to do an unusual job (placing a bet on a fixed boxing match, bidding on a mysterious package at an auction, etc.); 2. Some tough guys would rough up O'Brien and he would awaken next to a dead body; 3. SFPD inspector Bruger (Richard Travis) would suddenly appear and grimly accuse O'Brien of murder; 4. O'Brien would have to somehow exonerate himself. Along the way O'Brien was assisted by his drunken roommate Professor Shicker (Edward Brophy) and would tangle with snarling gangsters and hard-boiled "dames".

The supporting casts were mostly unknowns, although sharp viewers will spot Joy Lansing, Mike Mazurki, Ann Savage, Tom Neal, Raymond Greenleaf, Ralph Sanford, and others. The acting was typical of the era, with the smart, fast-talking private eye, cynical cops, and tough blondes. The primary appeal of these films is of course the presence of Hugh Beaumont, who would become legendary as the benevolent dad Ward Cleaver six years later. Brophy's never-ending eloquent speeches get a little irritating at times, and the presence of Richard Monahan (from the turkey "Untamed Women" a few years later) as a bartender is a plus.

None of the Denny O'Brien films is bad, it's just that they're ordinary. I've watched all three and they are predictable and typical of the era, but they're undemanding and fairly entertaining. You may want to watch to see the Beav's dad before he became a sitcom legend.

Pier 23 (1951)

There are so many holes in this film, the best thing about it is it's less than an hour long.

It is set in a unique place, on the docks of San Francisco across from Alcatraz. And the entertainment wrestling is a fun addition, though it comes just a year after Dassin's "Night and the City" which does everything, including the wrestling, that this movie wishes it did. (I saw "Night and the City" last night, purely by coincidence. There is even one actor carryover, the wrestler/thug in both movies played by Mike Mazurki.)

But the man who wishes he was Robert Mitchum (or Bogart, or Widmark) is a clumsy, clunky Hugh Beaumont. Even his role in the movie is nebulous. He seems to just work in a boat shop, and yet shady characters keep coming to him and getting him involved in shady things. He resists, and then agrees, again and again. And he's given a continuous stream of film noir phrases, those clipped comebacks that are great when they're original, and terrible when they are imitative. There are night scenes, guns, and several femme fatales.

But I'm not sure there's a plot to speak of. Rather, there is a series of little incidents that get explained from one to the next, with an occasional smack on the head between. It's patched together and weirdly dull, partly because it was intended to be second string fare right from the start, and constructed so that it could be broken up for shorter television episode broadcast, too. One script fits all? This was a Lippert Pictures strategy, and Robert L. Lippert managed to have a full fledged career doing bottom level movies like this (eat your heart out Ed Wood) and is maybe most famous for helping get Sam Fuller's career going. Fuller directed three films for Lippert for free

But that's "history," and this is a movie, flesh and blood. And you know, writing, camera-work, acting, directing, a lot of things are required to make either a good movie or a good television show, and when you don't have any of them quite right, or to put it another way, when you have all of them only half right, it's rough going. I'd skip it.

"Pier 23" (1951) was the third of three Dennis O'Brien mystery feature films released the same year with Hugh Beaumont, each separated at one-half hour so that two episodes of O'Brien solving cases could be had in a quick hour. These were obviously originally planned as a television series of half-hour shows which didn't happen. Beaver's father gets to be almost tiring, watching him get beat up in every episode, chase after broads that nobody would dare have, even as left-over fodder, because they're so duplicitous, fend his way through his live-in whatever ex-professor Edward Brophy's lexicographical bull, and fend off Richard Travis's bad-ass detective cop who always thinks him guilty of murder twice or more during each show.

This one is the best of the three. It's dialogue sounds like an old radio program, though thirties dime novels did it better. Beaumont is still Beaver's dad, and watching him do these is like genuinely trying to make Groucho be Clark Gable. Can be done in a comedy routine, but if played seriously sounds like Groucho playing Carole Lombard and not her husband. This one has Ann Savage, Margia Dean, and Mike Mazurki. Mazurki makes this one definitely worthwhile. I got to see Mazurki two nights in a row. I'd seen him the night before in another film. Now that's good watchin'. He's so good when he's bad, and combine him with Ann Savage and that's some detour. I know: ta-dum.

Average at best. I'm glad I've seen all three and can now give these away. Hey, the three altogether were less than $5. For a Scotsman, that's a bargain with butter.

Here's the second of three movies starring Hugh Beaumont as Dennis O'Brien, a guy who makes his living running a bait-and-tackle shop on the San Francisco harbor, and by doing odd, sketchy jobs. Basically they took two scripts for the Pat Novak For Hire radio show, changed the names and hey presto, you've got a second feature from Lippert. This explains the fact that the same things happen in both segments: Beaumont is hired for a sketchy job, finds himself knocked out to wake up with a corpse and homicide cop Richard Travis ready to fit him for a frame. This impels Beaumont to do Travis' job for him, using drunkard buddy Eddie Brophy to phone him with key plot points.

The changes to the scripts are minimal; Beaumont even does a voice over. There's fun with the casting, talent available on the cheap, including Ann Savage, Mike Mazurki, and Joi Lansing. But it works better as radio.