Chick Carter, Detective

The Blue Diamond is stolen from Joe Carney's Century Club. It seems Joe was to hand it over to Nick Pollo to pay off a debt, but Joe wanted it stolen on purpose so he could collect on the insurance. Nick had singer Sherry Martin toss him the diamond, while she wore an imitation during the number, but when it comes to finding the real diamond, Detective Chick Carter is at a loss since there are so many factions involved: Joe's bodyguard Mack (who is using the diamond as bait to save his neck), Pollo's henchman Lasky (who didn't stop at murder to get his hands on the stone), and Ellen Dale, a new cigarette girl at the club who has taken more than a passing interest in the diamond. For 15 chapters Chick, newspaper reporter Rusty Farrell, and photographer Spud Warner have to follow every clue, analyze every false lead, and still wonder if they have the real or fake Blue Diamond. This serial is a B mystery that was bad enough to begin with but was stretched over 15 seemingly unending chapters. Talbot is too old to play Chick, but Fowley and Acuff are the real stars here. After about chapter 7 this was getting repetitive enough, but the last couple of episodes were quite good. Terrible cliffhangers where we have cheats, the people in peril actually dying, and one where a henchman is in peril. Terrible. Rating, based on serials, 2.

...how I ever got through this serial. It's a mystery why the main character is in it less less than half the time. There are worse serials but this one's really long and boring. I love the genre but even the cliffhangers aren't that exciting (maybe one good one in the whole lot) there's just not a lot of motivation to keep watching. There's too much repetition even for a Katzman flick. The cast isn't terrible but they do very little to even justify their being a part of the story. Stretching out a 55 minute movie to 15 Chapters without some good fight scenes or suspenseful moments is like having a root canal that lasts 3 hours too long. I'm not one of those who dislikes Columbia's serials but it's ones like this that gets most of them stamped as garbage. It would have been more fun to watch Talbot, King, Fowley, and Acuff pass around a whiskey bottle and tell anecdotes about the crap films they had been in. At least there would have been laughs.