Last night we watched "Narcotics Squad"(1957), a "drug warning" flick aimed at teens and parents in the late 1950s, when a postwar heroin craze swept the country. The film is low budget but decidedly realistic, showing junkies withdrawing and pushers hitting high schools. As it opens, an undercover cop has just landed at an unnamed airport and is calling his captain when he's shot dead in a phone booth.
The captain rebuilds the investigation with a new, reinforced undercover team, led by two officers, a male and a female, who is set to infiltrate the local high school, posing as a student. The male officer will haunt the town bars and dance clubs, looking for pushers to "score" from. They have a surveillance team behind them, using wiretaps and telephoto lens cameras. One surveillance officer also doubles as another heroin "client", new in town and looking for a fix.
At the high school, the football coach (Outregis Toomey) is concerned about one of his players, "Roger Bowman" (uncredited) who's stopped coming to practice. In fact, he seems to have disappeared. The aunt he lives with hasn't seen him either. According to the coach, the boy is a "sugar diabetic"; that's how he explains the hypodermic needle he carries. Police lieutenant "Lacey" (Paul Kelly) suspects otherwise. There's an influx of "junk" in the area. A narrator informs us of the telltale signs of heroin addiction: runny nose, constant yawning, arm tracks. In trying to track down Roger Bowman, the female undercover officer makes friends with a student named "Julie" (Sheila Urban), a brash-but-sweet Southern gal. Julie is new to the school. She's been dating "Jimmy" (Larry Getz), a slick-suited 21 year old. Jimmy is also a regular at the local jazz club. If you wanna see where David Lee Roth got his live spiel from, this is it, from jazzbo hipsters who jabber away incoherently, just like he does. The movie seems to take place somewhere in the Midwest, or even Texas, judging by a licence plate on one of the cars, and the forests of small ash trees that dot the landscape. There's also the flatness of the land and the old stone buildings, the clapboard houses. I'd guess Texas. and, apparently in the mid-50s, they had jazzbo hipster clubs there.
Sassy southerner Julie is also dating nice guy "Dick Williams" (Cullen Wheelas), who works at his Dad's gas station. Dick's Dad has money. He invites Julie to a party but she thinks he's square. She prefers the more dangerous Jimmy, even though she doesn't use heroin. The coppers use her as a pivot between Jimmy and whoever is supplying him, the unknown big shot. The whole thing plays like an abstract, extended Dragnet episode, with Paul Kelly in the Jack Webb role. Kelly did time for manslaughter himself (we've written about him before), and it should've been 2nd degree murder because he beat a smaller man to death over a love triangle. Kelly was horning in on the guy's wife. He was lucky to get a manslaughter deal, but he was a straight-up murderer, though a good actor. Like Tom Neal, who beat up Franchot Tone and later shot his own wife, Kelly resumed his acting career after he go out of San Quentin. Tom Neal was a good actor, too.
But anyhow, in the movie they're trying to do two things: shut down the heroin operation at the high school, and find out who shot the original undercover cop at the airport.
Meanwhile, Coach Toomey organizes a PTA group to educate parents and students against narcotics, because many don't know the effects or the warning signs. Godawful scenes of heroin withdrawal are interspersed with other scenes of a junkie begging Jimmy for a fix, even though he has no money. Sitting in the jazzbo cafe, Jimmy tells him "no, not until you pay what you already owe me." The junkie tells him, "Jimmy man, I need a fix. I'm sick. If you don't give it to me, I'll go to the cops and take you down with me."
Jimmy says, "Okay, alright, settle down," and he gives the guy his fix....laced with strychnine. The junkie dies, and that's the end of Jimmy's problem. It's a hard core flick, showing the reality of heroin addiction, much more "street" than a bigger-budgeted flick would be. The script meanders, and has ad-libs like Paul Kelly demanding cream in his coffee: "Not sugar; I said cream!" Coffee is a mainstay, because the narcotics squad often has to work long hours straight through, and stay up all night, to keep up with the pumped-up addicts, who never sleep until they crash.
Two Big Thumbs Up, but I wish there was more info available on the filming. I'd love to know where this movie was shot. Initially, I kept wondering "what part of Los Angeles is this?", because most low-budgeters are filmed here, but the old buildings and houses didn't resemble anything in L.A., nor the trees. In any case, it's definitely worth a view. The picture is soft but watchable. ////
The previous night's movie was "Mystery Broadcast" (1943), a whodunit enacted as a radio play, in which the writer/host of a popular crime-solving show gets a real murder dumped in her lap. Intrepid "Jan Carroll" (Ruth Terry) tackles cold cases the cops have given up on. Live on air, she promises next week to solve the coldest, most notorious case of them all, the Kendall murder, also known as "The Case of the Crying Pines." Her producer begs her not to: "The Kendall case is dangerous, Jan. You'll be opening a can of worms." But her sponsor, a cigarette manufacturer, whose smokes are gifted to the live audience, thinks it's a great idea - good for business, good for truth and justice; all-American values both.
To solve it, she starts by writing the details she already knows for next week's script. Then, one of the supporting actresses on her show calls to ask out of the performance, claiming illness. Jan discovers the real reason: the actress is scared. She knew Beatrice Kendall, the murder victim, and she later calls Jan to say she knows the identity of the murderer, too: "But I can't reveal the name over the phone." When Jan goes to her apartment, accompanied by her stuntwoman "Smitty" (Mary Treen), they find the actress dead. A man shows up while they're still on the premises, claiming to be a police detective, but he's really "Michael Jerome" (Frank Albertson), a radio star who plays a Private Eye. "I'm just seeing what the competition is up to," he tells Jan. He doesn't wanna be left out of the scoop, and Jan agrees to let him tag along because he's helpful and handsome.
Their investigation takes them to the city morgue, where a creepy old night clerk named "Mr. Crunch" (Francis Pierlot) lets them examine the body of the dead actress. They also look at the morgue file on Beatrice Kendall to check for similarities. Finally, they decide to visit the scene of the Kendall murder, the Crying Pines Lodge, to look for any clues the police could've missed, even though the case is years old. "At the very least," says Smitty, "we'll get some new sound effects out of it. I wonder what a crying pine sounds like?" Smitty is also the show's recording technician. The trio head out there with a record cutting machine, a precursor to tape recorders. Their plan is to record the crying pines and gather any info they can on a case as dead in the water as this one. But someone has followed them to the lodge and plays havoc with their recording equipment. However, he or she may have left a sound clue that can be examined once they take the record back to the studio. If they make it back alive, that is, because another party, a veiled woman, accosts them at gunpoint before they can leave.
The way all of this plays reminds one of a live murder mystery, the kind they act out on the Queen Mary, with the audience as captive participants. What I really liked was the radio show aspect, because my Mom was a radio show host, and a popular one, on the biggest (at the time) radio station in the world, WLW in Cincinnati, and while Mom's radio career was brief, and the show she took over was pioneered by another woman, Mom was nonetheless the host for about two years, and during that time she was heard by many thousands of listeners as far away as Australia. The station was powered by a 500,000 watt transmitter, ten times more powerful than any other at that time. Here's an ad for it, though you may have to copy-and-paste rather than click:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f8/Mabley_and_Carew_advertisement_congratulating_WLW_Cincinnati_Ohio_radio_%281934%29.jpg
Also of interest in the film is the technical aspect of a live radio show; how special sound effects are done live, including sounds involving physical stunts. Mary Treen as Smitty is great in comic relief, and the murder mystery involves the usual soupcon of suspects.
As "Jan", Ruth Terry holds it all together. She's in every scene, looking sharp with her upswept hair. Two Big Thumbs Up, the picture is very good. ////
And now we're all caught up and back on track. My blogging music tonight was "Trespass" by Genesis. My late night is "Parsifal" by Richard Wagner, conducted by Herbert von Karajan. I wish you a nice weekend and I send you Tons of Love, as always. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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