Danger Zone

Long before he was Beaver Cleaver's father, Hugh Beaumont had an earlier television series in TV's infancy where he played a private detective complete with Raymond Chandler patter. Lippert managed to get three feature films from this series by stringing two of the half hour episodes together.

Beaumont works out of San Francisco where he lives on his charter boat when he's not sleuthing for a fee. This episode concerns him getting in trouble twice because a woman asked him for a favor. The man is not Sam Spade he's more like Miles Archer.

Favor one is Virginia Dale who asks him to bid on a suitcase at a public auction. That gets him involved with a smuggling racket and a saxophone. Favor two is when another private eye Tom Neal gets him to 'escort' a young lady to a private party on a boat. That gets him involved with a murder and a divorce. Is anyone sensing a pattern here?

Nothing special here though Beaumont is good in a part that's a quantum leap from Ward Cleaver.

Expendable junk, that's what I have to say about this awful William Berke's feature. OK, I know that the latest was not ambitious at all, only a fast paced film maker, good worker, chain director, no matter the quality. I heard he was half blind by the end of his career. Maybe this explains that. I had the greatest difficulties to make it till the end. It was very hard for me; I did not feel this for the other Berke's stuff. It remains bearable though, because it is light hearted, agreeable. If you are a thriller, rare gem thriller searcher, do not waste your time. Choose another film from William Berke. There are batches available on You tube.

Hugh Beaumont is Dennis O'Brien, a guy who lives on the docks of San Francisco with drunkard Eddie Brophy. O'Brien makes most of his living renting out boats, but he has a sideline as an unlicensed PI, available for quick jobs for small sums. Unfortunately the jobs always wind up involving corpses, and police lieutenant Richard Travis is always anxious to put him in the hot seat. This means Beaumont must solve the case for him. In the first one, there's a murder over a saxophone. In the second, he's framed as a co-respondent in a divorce, only for the husband to turn up dead.

It's a typically cheap Lippert production built off scripts from the Jack Webb radio show Johnny Madero, Pier 23. Lippert followed this up with two more movies much like this, talky and full of people speaking like they should be talking out of the sides of their mouths. Still, director William Berke keeps things moving along like the B movie director he was, and the cast includes Tom Neal and Pamela Blake. If you want to know what Old Time Radio would have been like as TV, this is a movie for you.

Danger Zone is an odd little double-truck of a movie; it tells two entirely independent stories, one after the other, though with three recurring characters. The only plausible explanation is that the stories were pilot episodes of a television series that never got picked up, but were salvaged by packaging as a twofer and farming out as a programmer to theater chains.

A troubleshooter who earns his keep renting boats on the San Francisco waterfront, O'Brian (Hugh Beaumont) picks up spare change by taking on freelance assignments; his usual fee is $50, for which he is usually set up. He shares his nautical digs with an old souse called (of course) The Professor (Edward Brophy), a Runyonesque character with a Thesaurus instead of a voicebox -- he never says "I had the chance" if he can proclaim "The opportunity befell me." Then there's the dim-witted and antagonistic police detective (Richard Travis), always ready to clap the cuffs on Beaumont just before the truth emerges.

Neither of the stories -- the first about a woman who pays Beaumont to bid an exorbitant amount on a locked suitcase that turns out to contain a saxophone, the second about a private detective (Tom Neal, of Detour notoriety) who sets up Beaumont as correspondent, and murderer, in a society divorce case -- gets worked out in any satisfying way. The half-hour allotted to each allows little room for extra characters or unexpected bends in the road (television was to prove that the most successful mystery/detective shows thrived in a hour format). Danger Zone, viewed as early television, is perhaps a tad better than such pioneers as Martin Kane, Private Eye -- at least it's filmed, not done live in studio -- but was nonetheless passed over by the networks in 1951. Beaumont would have to wait six more years, until Leave It To Beaver, to hit his personal jackpot.

Hugh Beaumont starring in this film might surprise many viewers today. After all, he's known to most as the sweet father of the Beaver on "Leave it to Beaver". However, before he appeared on this show, he appeared in many B-movies...many of which are crime films. He often played private detectives, though he sometimes played villains or cops...hardly the Ward Cleaver sorts of characters! Here in "Danger Zone" he plays a cheap private eye.

When the story begins, Dennis (Beaumont) is at an auction when a woman approaches him and begs him to be the highest bidder for an unopened suitcase. He agrees and wins it for $1000....a princely sum for 1951. But after buying it, the lady disappears and Dennis takes the case home. After opening it, he finds there's just a sax inside...and soon the losing bidder shows up to buy the sax. But before Dennis can make a deal, he gets slugged...and awakens much later. Why?? Why did the guy slug him and why did the lady insist he buy it?

Now all this sounds very interesting, right? Well, that's only HALF the movie. As it consisted of a couple TV episodes edited together to make a full-length film, there's a second story.

In this second part, Dennis is hired to use one of his boats to take some socialite to a party on a yacht anchored off shore. It's an odd job...and it's not surprising that just like the sax, there is MUCH more to the story...including murder and Dennis being left holding the bag!

The oddest thing for me isn't seeing Beaumont in such a role but seeing Eddie Brophy as "the Professor'...an overly erudite guy with a strong penchant for the bottle. Seeing and hearing him talking like some out of work Oxford professor was indeed odd, as he normally played a dopey New York hood or the like.

So is it good? Well, it's not bad but it also feels rushed. Stretching out each story into its own movie would have helped. I mostly recommend it because of its interest as a curio...evidence that Beaumont was more than just some nice-guy TV dad.