No Hands on the Clock

Chester Morris plays investigator Humphrey Campbell who searches for runaways and others for Flack's Missing Persons Bureau. As the film opens he has married a runaway woman who had just got bored with her home-life. They are in a bank while it is being robbed by the Red Harris gang. Campbell takes on another job while he is honeymooning in Nevada which leads him into all sorts of trouble.

Hal Benedict had gone missing for two weeks leaving his father and fiance wondering what sort of trouble he had got himself into. Campbell begins his search at the Nugget Room at a local club where Hal was known to frequent. Campbell gets involved with a fast blonde and the murder of an ex showgirl and the Red Harris gang show up again. Campbell's fingerprints found in the murder room and his identity confused with a lookalike informer means he is in trouble with people on both sides of the law.

This works well as a crime comedy but it is impaired as a mystery by having too many characters in it. We have to deal with characters who are spoken of but who never appear in the action. You will have to pay really close attention to fathom what's really going on. There are some novel ideas in this but some of these just get a brief mention.

I think there were plans to feature Chester Morris as the Humphrey Campbell character again but this was just a one-off. He had already done a Boston Blackie movie and that's the character that really proved to be a winner for him in the 1940s.