Stage Struck

Monogram Pictures was a very prolific small studio that specialized in making B-movies. In general, their output was just fair...entertaining but also filled with cheaply made pictures with mostly second and third-tier actors. "Stage Struck" is pretty much average for the studio.

A hostess in a night club is found murdered and the cops seem baffled and unable to solve the crime. So, the dead woman's sister, on her own, decides to get a job with the agency that places these hostesses in various clubs in the hope she'll be able to dig up incriminating evidence. Unfortunately, she isn't particularly bright and she nearly gets herself killed playing amateur cop.

The acting in this one is purely adequate...and the story really lets you down near the end because the lady investigating seems a bit dim. She makes a lot of silly blunders and instead of being the smart, confident woman the film wants you to believe, she instead seems a bit dippy. A time-passer and nothing more.

"Stage Struck" is an excellent B crime story, with good script and great cast. It even attempts to provide a moral, especially to naïve young women. But it's in the very last words and I won't give it away here.

On 25 January 2023, TCM took a break from being "woke" and PC -- meaning preachy and racist -- and presented several movies about night clubs and singers and gangsters. All were generally unknown and might not actually be considered "classics," but all were much better than might have been expected.

This one has not only a good story, with many characters, all of whom have at least a moment to shine, but it has a cast of great talent if not a lot of fame.

Kane Richmond is usually considered a hero of thrillers and serials so perhaps that's why his performance here is, to me, extraordinary. It shows, again, just how little justice there ever was in Hollywood, when actors with far less talent got more acclaim and money.

I do recommend "Stage Struck."

This is a film about what you don't see and what they don't say. When one girl claims Nick is going to introduce her to theatrical producers another girl says "So that's what he calls them."

When the cops come to the club unannounced they're swarmed with 4 young ladies all anxious to get to know these total strangers. When the cops make it clear they are not interested in this bevy of beauties, the girls all slink away looking of greener pastures.

The word "talent" is used like a code, maybe for sexual availability: "He said I have a lot of talent," "They're looking for new talent," "that girl didn't have any talent."

I'm not sure what the latin guy is planning but it requires a truckload of friendly young females. We're just left to imaging this orgy.

I'm wouldn't call what's going on here sex trafficking. These women seem free to leave if they want. They don't have a lot of optional occupations in mind. Make a note, if you're a hot girl with no plan B, someone sleazy will have a suggestion.

SMOKING RITUAL

At times, Conrad Nagel is engulfed in a thick cloud of smoke. Imagine how he must have smelled.

Watch the conversation at the bar between the new recruit ("He's going to give me the lead part") as the seasoned escort handles a 4 inch cigarette holder. This trashy/classy accessory is one I've seen only in the movies.

Hostess Wanda McKay's corpse is found, and police Lt. Conrad Nagel is assigned the case, but Miss McKay's small-town sister, Audrey Long, grows impatient with nothing happening. She decides to go undercover herself at the suspects' talent agency, where Kane Richmond and John Gallaudet charge ridiculous fees to girls for dramatic training, feed them to their operations as b-girls at their club, and eventually into the white slavery trade.

William Nigh's last movie is filled with competent talent in a 1930s B movie plot. If you wish to play spot the performer, you'll have a good time seeing Ralph Byrd, Pamela Blake, Nana Bryant, Evelyn Brent, and Franklyn Farnum, and the dialogue is pretty good, but the story is tired.

Nigh had entered movies in 1913 as an actor at Keystone. By the next year he was directing, and by the 1920s he was directing for MGM. Like many directors, his career went downhill fast during the sound era, and by 1931 he was on Poverty Row. He was in charge of 121 movies in total. He died in 1955, shortly after his 74th birthday.

Structured much like an exploitation film, but minus any sleaze

or cynicism, this 1948 crime drama exposes the sordid world of "modeling agencies" set up to entrap and exploit lonely runaway young women from small towns who find themselves in the big city, waiting for some kind of "break" toward a career in modeling or acting. With a first-class supporting cast (Conrad Nagel, Evelyn Brent, Wanda McKay, Ralph "Dick Tracy" Byrd), the film pits Audrey Long--the sister of the young woman whose murder opens the film-- against the seedy yet suave Kane Richmond. Richmond, in one of his last roles before retiring from the screen and re-entering the business world, is best-known as leading man in many 1930s/1940s action films and serials, yet here he is the heavy, and he uses his personal charm to comfort then exploit the young women who are all to eager for a "break." Director William Nigh--whose last film this was and whose credits as director-writer-actor-producer date back to the mid-1910s--keeps the action moving at a brisk pace, but clearly worked with each actor to capture the right tone of performance, so that as "predictable" as the elements of the film may be to the genre-film fan, each character seems real. I first saw this film six or eight years ago and just watched it again, and it's just as solid and riveting as I remember it. Kane Richmond is especially memorable in a rare villain role, and the devoted fan of B-crime films of the 40s (this was a Monogram release) should search for a copy.