Um Grito na Noite

Up until yesterday, I thought all of Tim McCoy's films were westerns. After all, he was a famous trick shooter and Indian translator and this is what got him work in films. But apparently, Columbia Pictures also made a few non-western B-movies with McCoy...and I found three of them on YouTube. "Voice in the Night" is one of these non-westerns.

When the story begins, Tim is an executive with a large phone company. He orders his men to cut a telephone cable when one of the workers is trapped and dying. Later, his father (who runs the company) and Board are upset that he ordered this. Their reasoning is that other lives could have been lost trying to save this one man. In disgust, Tim quits and spends time trying to find himself. Eventually he ends up in a small town where a tiny phone company is having big problems. It seems some rich jerks are trying to destroy the company so they can buy it up cheaply. On hand are a few of Tim's friends from his old job (including Ward Bond) to help him fight these jerks.

In many ways, the plot to this one is pretty much a western...but without horses and the other elements you'd see in the old west. In other words, guys using their thugs to harm this phone company so they can buy them out is a VERY familiar plot to B-westerns...probably the most common plot. In the westerns, some big, bad bossman uses his thugs to chase away farmers or ranchers in order to control everything.

So is it any good? Well, yes and no. It clearly is a B-movie and so it's not intended to be a work of art...just solid and simple entertainment...and it fits that bill.

McCoy is the son of the president of a big-city telephone company and quits his job following a dispute with his father over company policy. He takes up polo playing and plays, with the aid of a few sound-stage insert shots, in the same game of polo seen in every film of the decade, since this archive footage must have been the only polo game ever filmed in Hollywood.

Circumstances force him to give up his polo-playing and take on the job of helping a small-town telephone company overcome a plan by a gang to force the company out of business. He calls in his pals Ward Bond and Kane Richmond to aid him against the crooks led by Frank Layton and Francis McDonald, working for crooked lawyer Guy Usher.

The presence of Billie Seward makes it all worth while for McCoy...and the audience. A chase scene with McCoy riding tandem behind a motorcycle cop doesn't quite scan.