Roaring City

Hugh Beaumont who made an indelible impression on all kids as the world's greatest dad as Ward Cleaver on television will shock the fans of Leave It To Beaver when they see him play laconic private eye Dennis O'Brien, living on the San Francisco wharf with his research man Edward Brophy in Roaring City. Definitely not the Hugh we're used to.

You know he's got the dialog and the patter down straight, but as a detective he falls into the Miles Archer rather than the Sam Spade category. In this film which involves Beaumont in two separate stories in both cases he does a job which looks really suspicious from the start. In the first he lays down some bets for a fight manager against his own fighter under an alias. He looks real good for the homicides of both the manager and the fighter to detective Richard Travis.

The second one is even worse, he's asked to pose as the husband of one of a pair of women in a rendezvous and the real husband comes up dead with an unconscious Beaumont with the stiff in a trash dumpster. I mean this guy's radar is really on the fritz.

Still it's not a bad premise for a television show which it was for a brief time and it proves that Hugh Beaumont could be something other than the All American Dad.

This poverty row noir starring Hugh Beaumont as Dennis O'Brien, San Francisco boat salesman and traveler through the back alleys of life, is hilarious. There wasn't enough money to give it atmosphere nor any big names. It distinguishes itself in three areas - a cast now known or remembered for things not noir, how it is actually two independent storylines glued together, and that concentrated noir dialogue that sounds like something out of the satire "Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid".

I wonder if this wasn't supposed to be some kind of TV pilot, because it is divided into two thirty minute tales in which the main character, O'Brien, agrees to do something for money for some shadowy or unknown character, gets double crossed, and then has to solve what happened or take the fall. A police detective, inspector Bruger, who seems to know him always shows up to accuse him of murder. So we have a protagonist who makes bad decisions and a police detective who always draws wrong conclusions. I can see why the networks thought this might not work out in the long term.

Of course, most people know Hugh Beaumont as TV dad Ward Cleaver in Leave It To Beaver, and I have to think that gig worked out better than had he played O'Brien in a TV series knock off of this film. O'Brien's roommate and partner is "the professor" played by an out of place Ed Brophy. Brophy was an assistant director who became, after sound came in, a supporting player portraying various barely literate lugs and thugs. Here he is portraying a somewhat alcoholic intellectual who talks of Shakespeare. If you know him from any of his earlier film roles, it is a sight to be seen.

Finally, let me get to that dialogue. Absolutely do not play a drinking game every time you hear a line of over done noir dialogue that sounds like satire rather than the way actual people - hard boiled or not - would ever talk. You'll be dead in twenty minutes.

Recommended for the fun of it all.

Hugh "Leave it to Beaver" Beaumont stars in "Roaring City," from 1951. The film also features Edward Brophy and Richard Travis.

This was apparently one of three feature films that combined two half-hour stories, which answers the question as to why these stories weren't connected. Denny O'Brien (Beaumont) is man with a ship he rents, but he also does odd jobs. He rooms with an alcoholic ex-professor (Brophy) who does some work for him.

The first story concerns a fixed fight that O'Brien is hired to bet on; in the other one, he is hired to pretend to be a woman's husband. These jobs are not without problems. In the fight story, it doesn't go the way it was supposed to; in the other -- well, it's not as straightforward as it first seemed.

Denny usually winds up unconscious or beaten and in hot water with a police inspector. Hugh Beaumont does a good job in the role - he's natural and charming.

I'm not exactly the audience for these low-budget Bs, but I appreciate that they have their place in the noir canon.

Hugh Beaumont, who previous had played Michael Shayne for a series of detective movies at PRC in the 1946-47 season (entertaining films, but having little to do with the Shayne character as depicted in the Brett Halliday novels), put the trench-coat back on for a series of three hour-long feature films as detective Denny O'Brien, released in short succession through Lippert Pictures in 1951. One interesting element about these films is that each consists of two half-hour-long stories, almost as if one is watching back-to-back episodes of a television show. Another interesting element is that the films seem to have borrowed a number of elements from the radio show PAT NOVAK FOR HIRE, starring Jack Webb. Not only is O'Brien a man who rents a ship at the pier and does odd jobs, not only does each film start with monologues very similar to those of Webb, not only does O'Brien have a drunken ex-college-professor sidekick who does some legwork for him, but one of the three films has a plot line lifted directly from a Novak episode! (Perhaps other plots of these movies are lifted from Novak episodes I haven't heard) In any event, these three films are all enjoyable outings with Beaumont radiating the same kind of charm he always did, yet still being convincing as a tough PI spouting hard-boiled dialogue. This particular film has two stories: one of a fixed fight that O'Brien is hired to bet on, and the other where O'Brien is hired to pose as a woman's husband for an evening. Like the PAT NOVAK series, someone hires the detective to do something, he winds up getting beaten up or knocked out, and he wakes up with a dead body, and a police inspector who doesn't like him trying to pin the murder on the detective. That's the formula, and I like it. As often happens with Lippert films, there is a fine b-movie supporting cast, and there is no time wasted on non-essential items. I've owned this film for about 15 years, and I have no doubt watched it five times in those years. Beaumont fans will NOT be disappointed. The other two Denny O'Brien films are DANGER ZONE and PIER 23, both of which I also recommend to detective film fans who do not mind bargain-basement productions in the PRC/Lippert vein. These are directed by the ever-reliable William Berke.

"Roaring City" (1951) was the second of three "Dennis O'Brien" mystery films starring Hugh Beaumont. Actually, each of the three has two parts, each a half-hour segment episode that somewhat obviously was supposed to be part of a planned television series which didn't materialize. They're all actually pretty decent little shows, though the dialogue is such that Dashiell Hammett would have had to use a sledgehammer to cut the radio-style gangsterese down to size. In this "feature", as in all of them, Ed Brophy is a drunken partner - a live-in - an ex-professor whose own dialogue is basically nothing but ten dollar gibberish to say anything. It's the humor of these pieces, and it's okay, but that's about it; and Richard Travis is a cop who constantly tries to pin the murders that ubiquitously occur on O'Brien, but in the end has to admit defeat and be "glad" O'Brien helped him - I guess. Joan Valerie, Wanda McKay, and Rebel Randall fill out the female bills in the two episodes which occur here. Bad girls, all of them. Valerie and McKay give rather poor performances. Randall is better. Anthony Warde, Greg McClure, William Tannen, Abner Biberman, and a couple of others are all complicit in being bad. Mediocre stuff, but easy to watch anyway. Directed by William Berke.