This tenth in the Falcon series is watchable enough - a few dead bodies and
a few warm ones in Barbara Hale, Veda Ann Borg, Jean Brooks and Rita Corday.
The actresses were all veterans of the Falcon series except for Borg. RKO
must have had a fairly small pool of B actresses on their payroll since the
same ones keep showing up in these films. Which is fine. At least I know
who they are. We feel like old friends by now. Veda is the standout here
as a spunky taxi driver who sticks to the Falcon throughout - sometimes with
the meter still running.
Things move fast in B movies or they should. This one does. Tom Lawrence
aka The Falcon (Tom Conway) chases after Barbara Hale who has mistakenly
taken the purse of Rita Corday, an actress, at the race track. His taxi driver
is Veda, who does driving stunts for the movies. They end up on a studio
lot and the rest of the film basically stays there. The Falcon finds a dead
body that disappears and then reappears. Throw in a gangster from the east
(Sheldon Leonard who always seems to play a hood with a very distinct voice
- he did better as a producer of TV shows later on - Gomer Pyle, I Spy, The
Andy Griffith Show, Dick Van Dyke, Danny Thomas), an ambitious starlet in
Hale, a nervous producer (John Abbott), a rattled director and a few other
potential killers. And it feels like the two bumbling cops (Emory Parnell
and Frank Jenks) arrest all of them at some point.
Nothing special here but Conway is always good to watch. He has the charm
of his brother George Sanders without the acid smugness. But it was that
smugness that made Sanders the bigger star. One of the murders takes place
in the empty Los Angeles Coliseum which is pretty cool. It feels so huge
with over 100,000 empty seats.
