Pier 23

Pier 23 (1951)

There are so many holes in this film, the best thing about it is it's less than an hour long.

It is set in a unique place, on the docks of San Francisco across from Alcatraz. And the entertainment wrestling is a fun addition, though it comes just a year after Dassin's "Night and the City" which does everything, including the wrestling, that this movie wishes it did. (I saw "Night and the City" last night, purely by coincidence. There is even one actor carryover, the wrestler/thug in both movies played by Mike Mazurki.)

But the man who wishes he was Robert Mitchum (or Bogart, or Widmark) is a clumsy, clunky Hugh Beaumont. Even his role in the movie is nebulous. He seems to just work in a boat shop, and yet shady characters keep coming to him and getting him involved in shady things. He resists, and then agrees, again and again. And he's given a continuous stream of film noir phrases, those clipped comebacks that are great when they're original, and terrible when they are imitative. There are night scenes, guns, and several femme fatales.

But I'm not sure there's a plot to speak of. Rather, there is a series of little incidents that get explained from one to the next, with an occasional smack on the head between. It's patched together and weirdly dull, partly because it was intended to be second string fare right from the start, and constructed so that it could be broken up for shorter television episode broadcast, too. One script fits all? This was a Lippert Pictures strategy, and Robert L. Lippert managed to have a full fledged career doing bottom level movies like this (eat your heart out Ed Wood) and is maybe most famous for helping get Sam Fuller's career going. Fuller directed three films for Lippert for free

But that's "history," and this is a movie, flesh and blood. And you know, writing, camera-work, acting, directing, a lot of things are required to make either a good movie or a good television show, and when you don't have any of them quite right, or to put it another way, when you have all of them only half right, it's rough going. I'd skip it.

In the early days of television (circa late-40s to early 50s)the makers of many of the cheapjack, poverty-row syndicated series---Guy Madison's Wild Bill Hickock, Reed Hadley's Racket Squad, others) would take two or three of the 30-minute television episodes, stitch them together and peddle them to the small-town and/or b-feature theatre-exhibitors as a "NEW" feature-length film. The film-exhibitors knew better, but most of these films were booked into towns and areas of the country where television coverage was, at best, spotty and often non-existent. Basically, a large percentage of the audience that saw these "films" in a theatre didn't own a television set or live in an area that had a television station. Plus, there was the large-and-profitable overseas market to be tapped.

Exhibitor-producer-distributor-showman Robert L. Lippert took this concept in another direction; his plan was to make three feature films, each of which had two separate 30-minute plots with continuing characters, book them into theatres and, after, they had exhausted the B-feature theatrical-circuit, cut them in half and sell the six 30-minute segments to television. Either as a series or a stand-alone 30-minute gap-filler.

Thusly was born "Pier 23", "Roaring City" and "Danger Zone." Three films in six segments featuring a San Francisco, hard-boiled private-eye named Dennis O'Brien. Made for theatres with intent-to-sell-to television. William Berke---has anyone actually ever seen a billing credit for him as William A. Berke...don't bother, the answer is no---directed and produced all three films with screen plays credited to Julian Harmon and Victor West on all. And each carried a "based on a story by Herbert H. Margolis and Louis Morheim" credit. And where did these "based-ons" come from? Well, each and everyone of them had been "heard" before when they were used on a syndicated radio-series called "Pat Novak, For Hire." Mr. Novak was a hard-case, San Francisco private-eye who averaged getting knocked-out twice in every 30-minute radio episode. Dennis O'Brien maintains that average when he gets his about four times in each of these three films.

Director William Berke - an illustrious unknown to ignorant me - does a good job of keeping this B picture ticking and riveting. To that end, he is ably assisted by Hugh Beaumont, who posts perhaps his finest performance ever.

Beaumont plays a laidback private detective off the Embarcadero in San Francisco, and initially he meets two suspicious sisters, but later he finds out that the real femme fatale is another one, who hangs about with the nefarious Mamakos, alias Garrison, and has in fact taken out a marriage license without anyone - even her hubby! - knowing.

Good and unusually long supporting role for Edward Brophy as the ever philosophizing varsity prof who doubles up as snitch for Beaumont.

The great lumbering Mazurki puts in an appearance on the ring and at Pier 23, the latter proving decisive for the denouement.

Very good cinematography and sharp dialogue for a B pic. 7/10.

I like Edward Brophy. He was best playing a mug with a twinkle in his eye. But he is miscast here as the "intellectual who likes the sauce". He just can't make it work. He sounds cardboard trying to play the professor. Likewise, I enjoy Hugh Beaumont. To me Beaumont was similar to Alan Ladd, great in the right role, but with a rather cold screen persona.

Let's be honest, these were made on the cheap and relied heavily on the stars to bring life to very average scenarios. Personally, I think the Brophy/Beaumont team fails. I like them both, but it doesn't work here. Compared with the TV detectives series of the era the Dennis O'Brien mysteries are fine, but if you are looking for a lost gem from the detective genre you won't find it here.

"Pier 23" (1951) was the third of three Dennis O'Brien mystery feature films released the same year with Hugh Beaumont, each separated at one-half hour so that two episodes of O'Brien solving cases could be had in a quick hour. These were obviously originally planned as a television series of half-hour shows which didn't happen. Beaver's father gets to be almost tiring, watching him get beat up in every episode, chase after broads that nobody would dare have, even as left-over fodder, because they're so duplicitous, fend his way through his live-in whatever ex-professor Edward Brophy's lexicographical bull, and fend off Richard Travis's bad-ass detective cop who always thinks him guilty of murder twice or more during each show.

This one is the best of the three. It's dialogue sounds like an old radio program, though thirties dime novels did it better. Beaumont is still Beaver's dad, and watching him do these is like genuinely trying to make Groucho be Clark Gable. Can be done in a comedy routine, but if played seriously sounds like Groucho playing Carole Lombard and not her husband. This one has Ann Savage, Margia Dean, and Mike Mazurki. Mazurki makes this one definitely worthwhile. I got to see Mazurki two nights in a row. I'd seen him the night before in another film. Now that's good watchin'. He's so good when he's bad, and combine him with Ann Savage and that's some detour. I know: ta-dum.

Average at best. I'm glad I've seen all three and can now give these away. Hey, the three altogether were less than $5. For a Scotsman, that's a bargain with butter.