Pier 23

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.