The Big Tip Off

Richard Conte stars in The Big Tip Off, featuring Bruce Bennett and Constance Smith, two fascinating Hollywood stories I will get to later.

Conte is a columnist for a low level newspaper. A break comes to him in the form of a gangster, who will give him an exclusive on mob goings on in the city - as they're happening. Things like murder.

Around the same time, Bennett and his assistant Smith come to town. Bennett is an old friend who has become a major fundraiser. Conte suggests a Catholic school. The nun he deals with, however, is suspicious of Bennett. Did both the mob and fundraising enter Conte's life at the same time coincidentally?

This is average fare.

Constance Smith was a beautiful woman who was getting the star buildup at one point. However, she was difficult to work with and eventually rejected by Hollywood. Sadly at one point she was jailed for murder. After several suicide attempts and forays into drugs and alcohol, she took work as a cleaner. She died, very unwell, at the age of 74.

Bruce Bennett's real name was Herman Bix. He was an Olympic silver medalist for shotput. After making dozens of films, including Mildred Pierce and Treasure of the Sierra Madre, he retired, dying shortly before his 101st birthday.

Richard Conte's 'journey down Twilight Avenue' (which presumably crosses Sunset Boulevard) begins with a couple of coincidences. (Or are they coincidences?) He's a human-interest columnist on a '7-cent newspaper' who's barely making ends meet. First an old chum (Bruce Bennett) from high-school days resurfaces after 10 years; he says he's inherited a million and now works as a charity fundraiser. Then Conte's told that, in repayment for an old favor, he'll receive anonymous tips from a source deep in the underworld. When he follows up his first lead, he finds a gambler just shot dead in front of his own home. But a story's a story, and Conte runs with it, incurring the displeasure of the police.

Meanwhile Bennett and his – assistant? protegee? mistress? – Constance Smith urge Conte to make use of their skills to benefit a cause dear to his heart.

And so the annual bazaar at a Catholic school rakes in oodles of dough despite the misgivings of skeptical nun Cathy Downs, who presses Conte on how much he really knows about Bennett and his organization – questions that he shrugs off.

The next tip and consequent story (the slaying of a prominent gangster) land Conte a month in stir for refusing to reveal his source. But the notoriety gains his column a syndication deal. Now a household world, Conte emcees a late-night telethon organized by Bennett and Smith to raise big money for a new charity hospital. (We get to hear snatches of numbers by bandleaders Chuy Reyes and Spade Cooley.) It's a triumph, except that Bennett has already thrown Smith into the drink at his Malibu beach house (which looks curiously like an old motel) and framed Conte with some of the money skimmed off in a grift. Conte busts out of custody to seek redress....

There are promising elements – the journalistic ethics, the phony charity racket – in the story by Steve Fisher, either a writer of variable talents or a writer whose talents were variably served. (He wrote the novel on which both I Wake Up Screaming and Vicki were based, and the screenplays for several noirs, from the highs of Dead Reckoning, Lady in the Lake and Roadblock to the low of Las Vegas Shakedown before moving to television – Peter Gunn and Cannon among many more.)

The Big Tip-Off is just so-so, compromised by limp direction, a frugal budget and merely passable performances by its two women (one of whom makes a recovery little short of a miracle). Its chief surprise is Bennett, a solid actor who endures the misfortune of being remembered mainly as Mr. Mildred Pierce.

There is a minor rip off of DOUBLE INDEMNITY in the initial and final sequences, when the central character tells his story into a recording device's microphone. It is a tip off to the mediocrity that ensues.

I know precious little about Director Frank McDonald, but it is obvious that THE BIG TIP OFF cannot possibly rate an inspired bleep on his career chart.

The acting, especially by James Millican, Bruce Bennett, and Cathy Downs as Sister Joan of Arc, saves the film from the trashcan. Conte is not bad but there is not a great deal you can do when you are supposed to be a savvy journalist and you do not even know that your best friend is a crime kingpin who has moved from Chicago - long known as the US crime capital of the 1920s and 1930s, so a place that should immediately make an attentive reporter prick his ears - to Conte's home town. Poor Conte does the best he can with a thankless task which becomes painfully clear when you realize that even a nun who teaches children and lives in the seclusion of her convent suspects and knows more about the villain than Conte does.

Constance Smith has lovely eyes and shows off her legs, but her part and her acting are just as thankless.

Shoddy photography and a poor script do not help this little rip off of ideas you see in other films noir of the late 1940s, and early 1950s.

Richard Conte is a columnist on a small newspaper: charity events, gossip, that sort of thing. One day a hoodlum sort of guy walks into his office; a guy Conte once lent a couple of bucks to when he needed it wants to do him a favor. Soon Conte is given a tip that a gangland rub-out will take place at a particular place and time. Tip off the cops, it won't happen. Show up or lose the scoop. So he does. And winds up famous and the center of controversy and deception.

It's not the sort of movie you'd expect to see directed by Frank MacDonald, a competent but usually uninspired director of comedies. This time, however, he has a movie with some real issues beneath its skin, and some good players to perform in it: Constance Smith, Bruce Bennett, Cathy Downs, and James Millican show how simple performances can illuminate issues of greed, ambition, and morality, just like a good film noir should.