This time, we've got a Lippert Pictures double feechum, starting with "Tough Assignment"(1949), which stars Don "Red" Barry as "Dan Riley" a hotshot L.A. newspaper reporter out to bust up an illegal beef racket. Have you ever heard of bootleg beef? I had not. It's explained to us by the Department of Agriculture's livestock inspector. All livestock is federally inspected to prevent disease. That's why you get that USDA sticker on your package of Top Sirloin. Bootleg beef, on the other hand, is not inspected. It's a racket in which mobsters use cattle rustlers to steal from a rancher's herd, usually in the middle of the night. They butcher it through their own clandestine slaughterhouse, then sell it to local meat markets using strong arm tactics.
We meet Dan Riley and his new wife "Margie" (Marjorie Sreele) just as they're returning to San Fernando from their honeymoon. Margie can't wait to get home and cook Dan his first "married" meal. Being a news photographer herself, she wants a souvenir picture in front of Schultz's Meat Market on Maclay Street (where much of the movie was shot). "Just a quick snapshot, honey, to remember our first homecooked dinner." But just as he's snapping the photo, three hoodlums walk out of the market. They've just beaten up Pop Schultz for disobeying the rules. Pop's an old man. Dan and Margie find him on the floor and call the cops. But the hoods know their picture was inadvertently taken, and when Dan convinces his editor to let him run an expose series on bootleg beef, they discover it was he who took their picture. They find his address, beat him up and threaten to kill him if he doesn't stop the expose.
Being an intrepid reporter, Dan doesn't scare easily. The intimidation does no good. He and Margie decide to go undercover, to get closer to the operation. By following the hoodlums, they locate their cattle rustlers, out on a ranch in the Valley. Posing as itinerant farmworkers "Don and Amy Hill", they knock and ask for jobs. "Please mister, we're hard up. Haven't eaten in three days. My wife's a good cook, though, and I'm an experienced cowhand." The rancher hires them on her looks. "Yeah, we could use a good cook around here, and you can help her with the dishes." Margie/Amy gets harassed by a big, drunken henchman to create tension within the ranch house. She and Dan know they could be discovered at any moment. Comic Sid Melton, who we've seen in many a low-budget western, is on hand as a steer wrangler. He's not doing his schtick this time, which is somewhat of a relief. The leader of the rustling outfit likes Amy and her cooking, and treats her like a lady, protecting her from the big burly drunk, and he gives Dan a job rustling cattle in the Santa Susana Pass. But Dan, as a reporter, has made a discreet phone call to his editor, setting up a fake ambush, in which the "cattle owners" will surprise them while they're rustling. But it's a setup. The cattle owners are fellow reporters. Dan will "shoot and kill" one of them, then the "killing" will be on the front page in bold headlines: "Bootleg Beef Gang Kill Rancher!" It's an entrapment hoax and Dan's gun is loaded with blanks.
When the mob boss (Steve Brodie) hears about the shooting, which he doesn't know was faked, he's furious. "Why'd the new guy shoot him?", he demands of the rancher. "We don't need the attention, especially with this newspaper breathing down our necks." Brodie doesn't know that "the new guy" and the reporter are one and the same. "The Hills" are treading a fine line on their undercover work, because the mobsters are looking for Dan Riley the reporter, whom they already know from beating him up earlier, and they keep coming out to the ranch to confer with the rustlers. Sooner or later, they're gonna recognize Dan or Margie. Then their gig will be up.
This is a great movie for locations. Much of it was shot on Maclay Street in San Fernando, but we also get to see Agoura when it was little more than a strip in the road! There are many country lanes that I'd love to know the locations of. This is only four years before my parents moved to the Valley, and the surrounding area looks as remote as Alabama. When I was very small, we had a big DeSoto my folks called "Big Red". It looked like the Riley's car in this movie. There's also a super cool Woody and several Dick Tracy-lookin' sedans. "Tough Assignment" gets Two Huge Thumbs Up for preserving all of this on film. Agoura isn't a big town even to this day, but you'll never see it again as a mere intersection. Wow! And who knew there was cattle rustling going on in the Valley, right up to 1950? This one's a must-see and the picture is very good. ////
Our second Lippert Picture, viewed the previous night, was "FBI Girl"(1951), in which a politician, the subject of a Senate investigation, tries to cover up his criminal past. They should've call the character "Trump". A narrator introduces us to the young men and women who clerk the massive filing department at FBI Headquarters in Warshington DC. Most are in their early 20s, some barely out of their teens. We then meet "Blake" (Raymond Burr), who's conferring with the pol in question, "Gov. Owen Grisby" (Raymond Greenleaf), who needs a fingerprint record the FBI has on file - his own, under a different name: John Williams. Williams is his real name, and long ago, before he changed his life, he was wanted for first degree murder! It's never made clear what went down, or how it was resolved, but at some point John Williams slipped through the cracks, changed his identity, and became Governor Grisby.
But now, under investigation by the Senate for corruption, he needs to get rid of that fingerprint file. If it should somehow be discovered, and he is found out to be John Williams, he will go to prison for the rest of his life. Trump should go to prison for the rest of his life, but will he? Or is all of this a sideshow? For sure he's a lifelong criminal, but because he's serving a purpose for the much bigger and more powerful criminals who run the news media (which runs the country and serves not only as the major distraction to actual Truth in America, but also promotes comic book villains like Donald Trump) I wonder if he'll really go to prison, because he's doing such a good job for CNN, who got him elected in the first place. To quote the fallen actor Russell Crowe, "are you not entertained?"
But in the movie, Governor Grisby, who used to be a murderer (the details of which are never explained), needs his fingerprint file back before the Senate digs their claws in. Blake is the Governor's PR man, and as played by Raymond Burr, he's Evil on Ice. If you only know Burr as Perry Mason or Ironside, you should see him as a villain. As a villain, Raymond Burr was so stone cold you'd have to dunk him in molten lava to bring him even one degree above absolute zero. Few cinematic bad guys, if any, were worse, including George Zucco (though if it came down to a cage match, I'd still take Wilford Brimley or Brian Dennehy). But for cold-bloodedness, it's Raymond Burr all the way, and he's gonna get that fingerprint file back no matter how many people he has to have killed.
The first to die is FBI girl "Natalie Craig" (Margia Dean), who is pressured into removing the file by her brother, who owes money to a bookie, who knows Raymond Burr. This shows the reach and power a Governor has, and Natalie is scared to death, because removing a file without clearance is a big time prison sentence. But she does so to help her brother, and gets run off the road for her trouble. The file is not found in the wreckage, however, sending Burr back to Square One. He also has an assassin working for him, a knife killer named "Georgia" (Alexander Pope), who starts eliminating witnesses right and left until he's cornered in a hospital and jumps out a top-floor windum to avoid capture.
With Natalie also dead, Burr needs another FBI girl to get that file, and he chooses "Shirley Wayne" (Audrey Totter), whose fiance, "Carl Chercourt" (Tom Drake) is part of Gov. Grisby's campaign team. Chercourt has no idea that Grisby is a former murderer named John Williams. Burr figures he can pressure Shirley into getting the fingerprint file by driving a blackmail wedge between her and Carl. But by now, FBI Special Agent "Glen Stedman" (Caesar Romero) and has closed in on him. Burr was dumb enough to sit next to Agent Stedman on a flight, to probe him for investigative info. You might be Raymond Burr, but you don't try to outsmart Caesar F. Romero (who will always be The Real Joker).
This is one of those movies that plays like a study film or a training manual for the FBI, as they slowly pare down the ten thousand John Williamses on file, and figure he must be someone prominent. Then they use Shirley Wayne as bait, giving her a high tech walkie-talkie that was years ahead of it's time.
It's another great movie from Lippert, so Two Bigs and a high recommendation, but with Trump? Two Thumbs Way Down. CNN got him elected in the first place. He should spend several lifetimes in prison, even if he never committed a crime (which he has done, in spades) just for being The Biggest A-Hole Who Ever Lived. If there was justice, he'd already have been in prison, but "Judge" Cannon, a flunky, will try to make sure that never happens. Ah, ya can't win. Biden sucks too, and Kamala Harris makes Dan Quayle look like Albert Einstein. Bring back Dick Cheney, or Liz. ////
And that's all I know for tonight. My blogging music was "Green" by Steve Hillage and "Abbey Road" by The Beatles. I also listened to "Kodama" by Alcest, a tremendous album, and it made me wonder what the heck happened to Elizabeth? She's disappeared. We need her back! She's a great artist just for The Red Dress series alone. Her Red Dress photographs are incredible! On top of that, there's her original piano music, her cover songs, all the videos she made for her bands, and the short subject films she created as festival entries, her concert and fashion photography, her pencil drawings, the list goes on. I mean, she is so great, and she needs to be able to work full-time as an all-around artist. Elizabeth, I hope you are still doing what you do. If so, you will have success, so please, never ever give up. You are an Original.
My late night is Rienzi by Wagner. I hope your week is off to a good start and I send you Tons of Love, as always. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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