Hard Boiled Mahoney

The Bowery Boys try their hand at detective work in this breezy sixth entry in the Monogram series. Slip Mahoney is mistaken for a private detective and, naturally, uses it to his advantage to try and earn fifty bucks investigating a missing girl. With help from his friends, of course. It's a good one with hilarious malapropisms from Leo Gorcey, rubberfacing goofiness from Huntz Hall, and wacky support from Bobby Jordan, William Benedict, and David Gorcey. Gabriel Dell is also part of the gang, taking a part in the slapstick more than he has been in the series so far, where he's mostly been playing it straight. Teala Loring and Patti Brill provide the pretty. Brill also has a funny bit at the end. Bernard Gorcey is fun as Louie the Sweet Shop owner. I never get tired of the Bowery Boys, particularly Leo Gorcey and Huntz Hall. I'm not sure what some other reviewers were complaining about. I thought this one was very funny with a quick pace and many great lines. Love the trivia contest bit!

With a plot gimmick borrowed from the Bob Hope classic My Favorite Brunette, the Bowery Boys get launched into the detective business in Hard Boiled Mahoney.

If you remember Alan Ladd has a cameo appearance in the Hope film and Hope is minding the office when he's hired for a case. Here Leo Gorcey and Huntz Hall are trying to get some money owed to Sach by a detective who is out. A mysterious woman comes in to hire said detective to find her sister and what self respecting Bowery Boy ever could refuse a mysterious woman?

There's a little more plot than usual in this Bowery Boy film and you will enjoy the climax involving the boys in eluding the bad guys taking up the guises of that band of professors from Ball Of Fire and going on an Information Please type show with Byron Foulger as the Clifton Fadiman type host. Even without most of today's audience knowing about Information Please or Clifton Fadiman it can still be enjoyed.

Guaranteed laughs from Hard Boiled Mahoney.

Slip (Leo Gorcey), Sach (Huntz Hall), Bobby (Bobby Jordan), Gabe (Gabriel Dell), Whitey (Billy Benedicy) and Chuck (David Gorcey)---the gang's all here---accidentally enter the detective business with the disappearance of a beautiful girl, Eleanor Williams (Teala Loring), as their first case to solve.

They are retained by Selena (Betty Compson), who says she is the missing girl's sister but, at this stage in her career, Betty Compson characters were sometimes less than truthful. The disappearance is doubly puzzling because Eleanor has just learned that her long-lost husband, Tom Williams (Bob Faust), is returning from South America. Slip and Company trace Eleanor to the apartment of Dr. Rolfe Carter (Pierre Watkin), to whom she first went when Tom was reported missing three years earlier. Slip witnesses the doctor's murder, but does not know who fired the fatal shot.

Slip and his friends learn that Dr. Carter (no relation to the Little Liver Pills guy)was a pseudo-psychic (there are real ones?), who was into blackmailing his clients. He is linked with syndicate-chief Armand (Dan Seymour).

The latter, and his henchies, knowing that Slip has information regarding Carter's murder, set out to kill the boys.

Patti Brill, as Slip's girl friend, doesn't hurt this one any, either. Monogram was very good at rounding up lovely little de-icers to populate their films.

Hard Boiled Mahoney (1947)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

Weak sixth entry in the Bowery Boys series has Slip (Leo Gorcey) pretending to be a detective and getting hired to locate a missing girl. Soon him and the gang are in over their heads as they must go up against a psychic who holds a lot more secrets than the boys realize. This here is (so far) the weakest of the series as we get very few laughs and enough bad plot for three different movies. There's no question that this here is a take off on the film noir genre that was big at the time but the screenplay is so lazy that we don't get any good jokes aimed at the genre and even the main cast members seem to be overlooked. The biggest problem here is the screenplay because there aren't very many good jokes written. The type of humor they go for here is incredibly lazy and the perfect example of this is a scene where Sach is told to "hold onto your hat" until the boys can meet up with him. The joke? Sach holds onto his hat until they arrive. The film is all over the place and there's way too much attempted plot. There are a few twist and turns but everything is so muddy that you really won't care about the actual mystery going on. The film actually runs out of steam around the thirty-minute mark and it's pretty bad when it's hard to get through 63-minutes. It seems even the actors are bored here as Gorcey doesn't have any energy and even his line-delivery seems to be slow as if he was wishing to be somewhere else. Huntz Hall is also pretty quiet here and the rest of the boys are so far in the background that they might not have even been in the picture (especially the wasted Bobby Jordan). In the end, the lack of laughs really kill this one and the sluggish running time doesn't help matters.

Even though the story of this film is serious, we are witnessing the evolution of the Bowery Boys. Gorcey and Hall are becoming comic actors. After their debut in "Dead End", the kids appeared at Warners in serious crime melodramas. By the end of their Warners' tenure, they became respectable. The early Monogram East Side Kids films and the Universal Dead End Kids films had them in teary melodramas, where they were supposed to provide comic relief.

By the time they became the Bowery Boys, the comedy was beginning to overshadow the melodrama. "Hard Boiled Mahoney" is still an over-plotted crime melodrama, but the comedy of Gorcey and Hall was beginning to take center stage. Hall now refers to Gorcey as "Chief" more often than not, and Gorcey hits Hall with his hat constantly. The story still centers as Gorcey, as most of the previous efforts had, but Hall is almost his equal. Unfortunately, the other boys suffer because of this. Jordan was terrific as the leading man in the early East Side films, but he has been relegated to background boy. What a shame! Billy Benedict had some good moments in the past and will have some good moments in future films, but he is definitely subordinate to Leo and Huntz. David Gorcey was always a background boy. Surprisingly, Gabe Dell is just one of the gang in this picture. He had had that role in the Warners and Universal series, but even in the early Monogram films he had varied roles. After this point, Dell would play the mature member of the gang, sometimes on the right side of the law and sometimes on the wrong side of the law. The character he plays here is reminiscent of the one he played in the East Side film "Come Out Fighting". He is a bi-speckled stooge.

This is not a bad Bowery Boys film, but Ed Bernds was really needed to later turn Gorcey and Hall into comedy stars.