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.

Director William Berke - an illustrious unknown to ignorant me - does a good job of keeping this B picture ticking and riveting. To that end, he is ably assisted by Hugh Beaumont, who posts perhaps his finest performance ever.

Beaumont plays a laidback private detective off the Embarcadero in San Francisco, and initially he meets two suspicious sisters, but later he finds out that the real femme fatale is another one, who hangs about with the nefarious Mamakos, alias Garrison, and has in fact taken out a marriage license without anyone - even her hubby! - knowing.

Good and unusually long supporting role for Edward Brophy as the ever philosophizing varsity prof who doubles up as snitch for Beaumont.

The great lumbering Mazurki puts in an appearance on the ring and at Pier 23, the latter proving decisive for the denouement.

Very good cinematography and sharp dialogue for a B pic. 7/10.

Dennis O'Brien (Hugh Beaumont) is a private detective in San Francisco. A priest comes to him with a strange request...to meet a man who will be escaping from Alcatraz Federal Prison and convince him NOT to commit murder! Apparently, the priest heard this plan during a confession and cannot tell the police. Unfortunately, the plan goes completely haywire...folks die and the story gets a bit convoluted.

The plot is a bit tough to follow unless you pay close attention. However, I still recommend you see it because this B-noir picture has great style and it's nice to see the Beaver's dad being a glib toughie. It's also unusual and interesting to see Eddie Brophy playing so far against type. Instead of the usual somewhat dimwitted mob-type, here he's an erudite alcoholic professor...with a cool patrician accent! Well worth seeing.

"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.

Hugh Beaumont is adequate here as private investigator "O'Brien" in this really rather procedural crime drama. Indeed, it comes across as two separate episodes rather clunky joined together. What does link the themes though, is that he always seems to find himself in the wrong place at the wrong time and usually ends up trying to convince folks that he isn't the criminal that all fingers seem to want to point to. This rather dry feature sees him embroiled in a wrestling cover-up for a murder which is completely devoid of jeopardy because that story concludes with half an hour to go! The next sequence sees him trying to persuade a convicted felon not to try to escape from Alcatraz, only to - yet again - get all caught up in some shenanigans that could see him in the "chair". What really doesn't help is the annoying narration - peppered with what they must have hoped were witticisms - that describe what he is about to do before he does it. It is almost as if it were made by a production team with a radio background less used to the audience being able to see what action (activity may be better) is actually going on. Kills an hour, but then so does the hoovering.