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.

Hugh Beaumont starred as private detective Denny O'Brien in three short features in 1951: "Pier 23", "Roaring City", and "Danger Zone". The three were all set in San Francisco, ran about 60 minutes, and had two plot lines, thus could be used for television episodes.

Beaumont had had a fairly long career in B detective movies when he made these films, and was certainly at ease in front of the camera. The plots were all pretty much the same: 1. O'Brien would be called upon to do an unusual job (placing a bet on a fixed boxing match, bidding on a mysterious package at an auction, etc.); 2. Some tough guys would rough up O'Brien and he would awaken next to a dead body; 3. SFPD inspector Bruger (Richard Travis) would suddenly appear and grimly accuse O'Brien of murder; 4. O'Brien would have to somehow exonerate himself. Along the way O'Brien was assisted by his drunken roommate Professor Shicker (Edward Brophy) and would tangle with snarling gangsters and hard-boiled "dames".

The supporting casts were mostly unknowns, although sharp viewers will spot Joy Lansing, Mike Mazurki, Ann Savage, Tom Neal, Raymond Greenleaf, Ralph Sanford, and others. The acting was typical of the era, with the smart, fast-talking private eye, cynical cops, and tough blondes. The primary appeal of these films is of course the presence of Hugh Beaumont, who would become legendary as the benevolent dad Ward Cleaver six years later. Brophy's never-ending eloquent speeches get a little irritating at times, and the presence of Richard Monahan (from the turkey "Untamed Women" a few years later) as a bartender is a plus.

None of the Denny O'Brien films is bad, it's just that they're ordinary. I've watched all three and they are predictable and typical of the era, but they're undemanding and fairly entertaining. You may want to watch to see the Beav's dad before he became a sitcom legend.

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.

Hugh Beaumont is adequate here as private investigator "O'Brien" in this really rather procedural crime drama. Indeed, it comes across as two separate episodes rather clunky joined together. What does link the themes though, is that he always seems to find himself in the wrong place at the wrong time and usually ends up trying to convince folks that he isn't the criminal that all fingers seem to want to point to. This rather dry feature sees him embroiled in a wrestling cover-up for a murder which is completely devoid of jeopardy because that story concludes with half an hour to go! The next sequence sees him trying to persuade a convicted felon not to try to escape from Alcatraz, only to - yet again - get all caught up in some shenanigans that could see him in the "chair". What really doesn't help is the annoying narration - peppered with what they must have hoped were witticisms - that describe what he is about to do before he does it. It is almost as if it were made by a production team with a radio background less used to the audience being able to see what action (activity may be better) is actually going on. Kills an hour, but then so does the hoovering.

In the early days of television (circa late-40s to early 50s)the makers of many of the cheapjack, poverty-row syndicated series---Guy Madison's Wild Bill Hickock, Reed Hadley's Racket Squad, others) would take two or three of the 30-minute television episodes, stitch them together and peddle them to the small-town and/or b-feature theatre-exhibitors as a "NEW" feature-length film. The film-exhibitors knew better, but most of these films were booked into towns and areas of the country where television coverage was, at best, spotty and often non-existent. Basically, a large percentage of the audience that saw these "films" in a theatre didn't own a television set or live in an area that had a television station. Plus, there was the large-and-profitable overseas market to be tapped.

Exhibitor-producer-distributor-showman Robert L. Lippert took this concept in another direction; his plan was to make three feature films, each of which had two separate 30-minute plots with continuing characters, book them into theatres and, after, they had exhausted the B-feature theatrical-circuit, cut them in half and sell the six 30-minute segments to television. Either as a series or a stand-alone 30-minute gap-filler.

Thusly was born "Pier 23", "Roaring City" and "Danger Zone." Three films in six segments featuring a San Francisco, hard-boiled private-eye named Dennis O'Brien. Made for theatres with intent-to-sell-to television. William Berke---has anyone actually ever seen a billing credit for him as William A. Berke...don't bother, the answer is no---directed and produced all three films with screen plays credited to Julian Harmon and Victor West on all. And each carried a "based on a story by Herbert H. Margolis and Louis Morheim" credit. And where did these "based-ons" come from? Well, each and everyone of them had been "heard" before when they were used on a syndicated radio-series called "Pat Novak, For Hire." Mr. Novak was a hard-case, San Francisco private-eye who averaged getting knocked-out twice in every 30-minute radio episode. Dennis O'Brien maintains that average when he gets his about four times in each of these three films.