Os Anjos e o Necromante

Relatively early in the Bowery Boys series of films. Leo Gorcey, Huntz Hall, and Leo's dad and brother of course, all meet up with trouble, with the usual mis-haps and word play. when a lady thinks her kid sister has been kidnapped, Slip and the guys decide to go into the detecting business. and naturally, they get caught up in a moidah. Fun Bonus: Dan Seymour as the evil Doctor Armand. you'll recognize his sultry, french accent from To Have and Have Not and Key Largo! scene stealer. and billy benedict was always the skinny sidekick in the 1930s and 1940s. he worked with Gorcey 34 times. this one is pretty good. the usual fare of bowery boys. getting in and out of trouble. Directed by Bill Beaudine, who had directed a TON of the bowery boys films.

Slip Mahoney (Leo Gorcey) is mistaken for an honest to goodness private detective and a lady asks him to find her lost sister. The trail leads to a phony psychic and it's soon apparent that this man, Dr. Carter, is a mobster with plenty of henchmen ready to kill Slip and the gang. Not surprisingly, much of the final half of the film involves these nasties chasing the gang. The highlight during this portion was when these six idiots appear on a game show, Dr. Quizard, and are thought to be geniuses in their respective fields. Overall, this film is exactly what you'd expect from a film in the series...corny jokes, Louie loaning the boys money and the gang managing to somehow survive and win the day by the end of the film. Not what anyone would call great entertainment but modestly entertaining. If you love these films, you'll like this one and if you hate them, it won't change your mind.

FOLLOWING THE TRADITION and almost obligatory foraying into the realm of the Detective Story, THE BOWERY BOYS made their contribution to the comic parody of the genre. To be sure, this sort of a send-up had been done before. Its history dates back to the days of the Silents with the likes of Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd and Laurel & Hardy. It continued with the advent of the "Talkies" with people like both the Brothers Ritz & Marx, the Stooges, Red Skelton and even Bob Hope.

IN TAKING THIS foray into these heretofore uncharted waters for the Bowery Boys series, all stops were pulled out. The story had the office of the gumshoe that would have doubled for that of either Sam Spade or Phillip Marlowe. A weeping and partially veiled, weepy female victim brings a sad story which is obviously not wholly the truth.

THE NOTION OF having Leo Gorcey's "Slip" Mahoney becoming the tough was not such a stretch. Anyone who's seen Leo's dramatic abilities as "Spit" in the film version of DEAD END certainly would not have been surprised. He possessed an intensity that was both totally believable and natural.

HOWEVER, WE DIGRESS, as we are supposed to be putting the comic aspects of the movie under a sort of microscope, OF COURSE, WE have rounding out the action sleuth spoofing from the boys (Bobby Jordan, Gabriel Dell, David Gorcey). Proper and atmospheric characters provided by the likes of Pierre Watkin, Dan Seymour, Byron Folger and Noble Johnson provide the necessary mysterious and menacing characters befitting a Dashell Hammitt or Raymond Chandler story.

OH, DEAR ME! How could we forget the 'subtle' performance of Huntz Hall, comic relief supreme. In this outing he sports a calabash pipe and a deerstalker hat. Now, Schultz, who do you suppose that he was lampooning here? No Schultz, Basil Rathbone is incorrect!

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.

"In order to be a detective ya gotta have a deductible mind. Ya gotta have the power of treason."

Not one of the more agreeable Bowery Boys movies for me. The plot is bungled as Leo Gorcey (as Slip Mahoney) takes it upon himself to become a self-made private eye attempting to find a missing woman. Not much humor to howl about in the mix. Interesting note: Gabriel Dell, who as far as I've known up till this viewing had usually played the straight man against all the insanity, actually dons a pair of geeky glasses as one of the zanies in the group this time around. He looks completely forced and out of his element.