Boston Blackie Booked on Suspicion

For a relief from the real world which seems full of suicidal terrorist savages, I turned to this one out of the Boston Blackie series.

A simple plot: Counterfeit Pickwick Papers bought for $62,000 at auction, Blackie goes into overdrive after the thieves especially because, as usual, Inspector Farraday believes he's at the bottom of it all. With a few neat twists and turns and plenty of wisecracking it reaches a logical and satisfying conclusion - unless in error you thought you were watching Fellini - and in fact fits together like a done jigsaw puzzle. No big surprises then, but I'll have to leave you to guess whether Blackie gets his...person or not - no spoilers!

Good bits: Trussed up Blackie + cigar untying himself in hoodlum's den; Steve Cochran alternating as usual between a Tough Cookie and a Poodle; the scenes inside the hotel's dumb waiter. At this point my daughter insists Steve was gorgeously handsome and a Man! Bad bits: Too many forced laughs by the main characters, it was pleasant enough without that.

One of the more enjoyable Boston Blackie entries with CHESTER MORRIS disguising himself as a bookseller and getting mixed up in a murder case right under Inspector Farraday's eyes. The story centers around a counterfeit first edition of Charles Dickens' "The Pickwick Papers" sold for $50,000 at a book auction. LLOYD CORRIGAN is his usual bumbling self as Blackie's friend.

"I'm in trouble and I'm the only one who can get me out of it," says Blackie--and therein lies the nub of the plot. When Blackie turns up at the murder scene just as Inspector Farraday arrives, he has to spend the rest of the film eluding the police until he can pin the crime on the guilty ones. STEVE COCHRAN is Merrick's accomplice/husband.

LYNN MERRICK is the pretty blonde bookseller who turns out to be not quite the helpful innocent she pretends to be. The story is more smoothly written than most of the Blackie films and moves at a fast clip at an hour and six minutes.

Merrick makes an attractive femme lead and Cochran struts his tough guy stuff showing why it became his screen persona.

Summing up: As a straight crime drama, it's not bad at all.

It's murder, this time, of which Boston Blackie is suspected—though, not surprisingly, Inspector Farraday never does get Blackie to the station to actually book him. Caught practically red-handed on a murder scene, Blackie has to resort to the old hiding-under-the-camera-hood gag, pretending he's the police photographer and backing slowly out of the room while the cops stand by watching. (Note to self to do some research: Did they still use those tripod cameras with the hood over the photographer's head in 1945?)

The story involves a counterfeit first edition of Dickens' Pickwick Papers, with Blackie in disguise early on as an elderly whiskered book dealer. Chester Morris is his usual breezy Blackie self, with Richard Lane as Farraday as determined as ever to pin something on Blackie. Lynn Merrick and Steve Cochran seem more unstable and thus more frightening than many of Blackie's villains; they both give performances that are somewhat more serious than the good-natured bantering of Morris and Lane and the other regulars.

Favorite scene: Farraday brushing off a gang of reporters by shouting, "I'm not Superman, I'm just a human being!" –and the reporters rushing out sarcastically shouting it as a scoop: "Oh-ho, he's not Superman!"

Suspicion is something that Chester Morris as Boston Blackie lives with as a given. Inspector Richard Lane books him on suspicion of murder when he accidentally sells a forged first edition of the Pickwick Papers. Charles Dickens who zealously fought for his copyrighted material his whole life would not have been pleased.

But Dickens might have been pleased at the way Boston Blackie works himself out of this frame. He would have been pleased at the way Morris disguised himself as a rare book dealer who actually has been ill and bedridden while all kinds of bad things are going on in his shop.

The villains are a husband and wife pair of crooks Lynn Merrick and Steve Cochran. Cochran who played slick villains in his prime gets a good showcase in Boston Blackie Booked On Suspicion. But the film really belongs to Lynn Merrick. She's one cool piece of work if there ever was one and a worthy antagonist for Morris.

Merrick is who you will remember if you see Boston Blackie Booked On Suspicion and you should see it.

Is there no end to the suspicions of "Insp. Farraday" (Richard Lane)? If he could, he'd probably have "Blackie" (Chester Morris) down for the Lincoln assassination! Anyway this time around, it's a valuable Charles Dickens first edition that sells at auction for a whopping great $62,000. It turns out, though, that this is a fake folio - and naturally, our deductive genius concludes that it must be our erstwhile thief. As usual, "Blackie" and his long-suffering factotum "Runt" (George E. Stone), alongside his wealthy but rather bumbling friend "Manleder" (Lloyd Corrigan) have to get to the bottom of a scenario where a criminal network doesn't just stop at forgery, and the outwardly butter-wouldn't-melt " bookseller "Constance" (Lynn Merrick) is maybe not just as sweet as she seems. It's quickly paced, if predictable, and en route we have some fun in a dumb-waiter, some slapstick fisticuffs and a few red herrings before a denouement that is hardly a shock to anyone. One of the better films from this series, I think.