Dan Turner, Hollywood Detective

Back in the era of pulp fiction magazines, Robert Leslie Bellem wrote stories about a private eye with his offices in Hollywood, Dan Turner. This was Bellem's finest effort: the stories were popular enough to spawn a pulp magazine, Dan Turner, Hollywood Detective.

The stories were written first person, and Turner had an unusual turn of phrase, something that didn't translate too well to the film. Turner is hired to check to see whether a glamorous star, Vala DuValle, is being blackmailed. Naturally, Turner witnesses a murder, and becomes the number one suspect.

The film has some interesting characters, and Marc Singer makes a credible Dan Turner. But the story won't likely stick with the viewer. More a film for nostalgiaphiles.

Marc 'Dan Turner' Singer is hired by Hollywood studio exec Danny Kamin to keep an eye on his wife, movie star Tracy Scoggins, who's being blackmailed. At a set for her latest movie, directed by Brandon Smith whom she has an affair with, he hooks up again with an old flame. But as they're kissing, someone shoots and kills her, with his gun. Everybody on set thinks Singer did it, and he runs off, wanting to find his old flame's killer himself. But when someone takes another shot at him at his apartment, he realizes the killer's after him, and he suspects the reason might be linked to the blackmail case...

I've read a bunch of uber-prolific pulp author Robert Leslie Bellem's stories including a couple of Dan Turner, Hollywood Detective ones and they're a hoot, a lot of fun. Crazily enough this is only the second Dan Turner movie, the other being 1947's 'Blackmail'. So I really wanted this to be a pleasant surprise... But the acting is pretty mediocre and Scoggins doesn't even get to that level. The directing and lighting is pedestrian and flat. The script is a toned down version of Robert Leslie Bellem's original hard-boiled character and racy stories (but at least the dialogue and one-liners are not too modernized and still contain plenty of old school words).

At the same time tho, despite its obvious low budget, the producers and people responsible for the sets and props performed quite a bit of magic. They managed to come up with a decently convincing recreation of the mid to late 40s, which looks quite nice. And purposefully or not, this movie has an equally spunky and bubbly female cabby as those from 40s noirs 'The Big Sleep' and 'Two O'Clock Courage', esp the latter, who ends up playing a big part in the movie. The opening credits make it seem like this was meant as some sort of feeler/pilot for a potential TV movies series, but if so, that never materialized as this movie went straight to video. I can't say Singer makes for a convincing Dan Turner, but I also wouldn't've minded seeing more Dan Turner, Hollywood Detective movies. Not recommended but I still had some fun with it. 6/10

A prolific writer of detective pulp fiction during the 1930s and 1940s, Robert Bellem, created a quipping private eye, Dan Turner, in 1934 and he was featured in over 300 Bellem stories extending over thirteen years, being first-fiddle in his own periodical for eight of them, and being awarded cinematic recognition in the 1947 Republic Pictures BLACKMAIL, William Marshall performing as Turner and Grant Withers as Inspector Donaldson, this 1990 release only the second film appearance for the tough-talking detective whose milieu was tucked away within Hollywood's bustling motion picture industry. For this latter-day melodrama, Marc Singer creates a distinctive Dan Turner, albeit the original's inventive use of slang is toned down, while amid the usual predictable sequences and cardboard characters are the sleuth's to-be-expected troublous relationships with the police and with a filming cast and crew, including a profusion of willing, when not actually insistent, women, a philandering director with a hidden agenda, and a jealous producer with his faithless movie star wife, and other types familiar to readers of Bellem's tales. The setting is 1947 Hollywood, although the footage is shot in Tulsa where less than convincing locations within the Oklahoma city are meant to be southern California sites such as night clubs and an amusement park. Turner is framed for murder, actively trying to clear himself of the false charge while on the lam, still eager in spite of his less than bright future to earn a large retainer fee tendered him by a studio bigwig who hired Dan for the purpose of discovering the identity of a blackmailer preying upon his wife, she acted with her customary lack of skill by Tracy Scoggins. Shown on more than 200 cable and prime time stations, this work was then released to video with a title of THE RAVEN RED KISS-OFF, and additionally there was talk of a potential television series; however, a misguided attempt to combine slapstick with detection taints the film, and since it therefore must rely upon its value as entertainment, it must be stated that such is not at hand here. Direction is weak throughout and, as a result, so is most of the playing while, despite sincere efforts to recreate an accurate period feeling, largely successful with production design, costumes and vehicles, in addition to black and white stills displayed as backdrop during the opening credits, anachronisms abound, notably with men's hair styles, and accents and dialects are flagrantly uneven. If more of Bellem's outrageously original slang had been utilized, its verbal dexterity would possibly have served to offset, to a degree, the lifeless helmsmanship.