Friday's Favorite OTR

 Nick Carter: "The Haunted Rocking Chair" 5/20/45

Nick is asked to investigate a rocking chair that seems to rock by itself. This, of course, soon evolves into a murder case.

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Friday's Favorite OTR

 Nick Carter: "The Case of the Devil's Left Eye" 1/4/48

It's not that unusual for Nick to have to solve a locked room mystery. That the murder weapon is a flintlock pistol does add a unique touch to the case.

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Friday's Favorite OTR

 Nick Carter: "Strands of Murder" 12/17/44

The lead actor in a play is stabbed to death... and every woman in the cast wears a dagger as a part of her costume. So there is no shortage of suspects.

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Friday's Favorite OTR

 Nick Carter: "Murder in a Decanter"  12/31/44

Nick is attending a boring dinner party. The boredom is lifted, though, when someone is murdered and the murder weapon is mysteriously missing.

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Friday's Favorite OTR

 Nick Carter: "The Corpse in the Cab" 2/5/44

A strangled body is found in the back of a taxi and the driver, who has a record, is afraid the cops will pin the murder on him. Fortunately, his friend Nick Carter agrees to look into the case.

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Friday's Favorite OTR

Nick Carter: "The Case of the Red Goose Murder" 9/1/46

Nick Carter is actually absent from this episode. Nick is out of town, so his Lovely Assistant (tm) Patsy has to take the lead in figuring out who strangled a nightclub singer with a guitar string.

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Friday's Favorite OTR

Nick Carter: "Echo of Death" 7/6/43

A financial expert disappears just before exposing a big stock fraud scheme. Nick tries to find him and the trail leads to two murders and a classic locked room mystery.

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Merely the Comedic Sidekick? I Don't Think So!

Read/Watch 'em In Order #85

I have, by the way, been reviewing the Nick Carter films in the order they appear on the DVD menu (they are all on a single disc). Phantom Raiders (1940) is the third movie on the disc, but I have just run across a reference online to this one being the second film. The latter two films were both released in 1940. Sure enough, a little extra checking showed that Phantom Raiders was released on June 7 of that year, while Sky Murder hit the theaters on September 27. So I'm afraid I have been out of order in my In Order reviews. Hopefully, civilization will survive this error, though it will be a close thing.

Anyway, this time out Nick Carter is on vacation in Panama, where he reluctantly agrees to work for an insurance company and look into the recent sinkings of several cargo ships--all from the same shipping line.

The movie actually shows us the bad guys right off and lets us in on how they are sinking the ships. Bombs are hidden aboard the ships' radios, then set off via remote control. With the help of several corrupt shipping company executives, the main villain is shipping worthless cargo that was insured for a lot of money.


So the movie isn't a whodunit, but rather a how-will-Nick-catch-them. Nick suspects the main villain right from the start--a crook named Al Taurez (Joseph Schildkraut) with whom Nick had tangled back in the States. But proving this, as well as figuring out how Al is blowing up the ships, will take some doing. Al is also a knife-throwing expert, which makes it particularly dangerous to get on his bad side.






Schildkraut's suave but ruthless turn as the villain is a good one--he really does exude menace. The rest of the supporting cast--as is so typical with the best of the B-movies from that era--is a lot of fun. Nat Pendleton, for instance, plays Gunboat Jacklin, an ex-boxer now working as Al's bodyguard. Pendleton--an ex-wrestler in real life--was never in danger of having to write an Oscar acceptance speech, but his career playing often likable thugs and tough guys in B-movies is an honorable one. Even when he is one of the bad guys, you always kind of like him and think its nice to have him around.

I also particularly like the performance of Cecil Kellaway as a corrupt shipping exec who is having a crisis of conscience over the men who have died on the sunken ships.

Special mention, though, has to go to Donald Meek, who played Nick's sidekick Bartholomew ("Beeswax," as Nick calls him) in all three films. Meek is the comic relief and his slightly manic turn as Bartholomew is funny. But though he started as 90% comic relief & 10% useful in Nick Carter, Detective, he turns out to be quite awesome in the remaining two films.

In Phantom Raiders, he saves Nick at least twice. After one of these occasions, Nick has decided the money he's being paid isn't worth the risk and plans to quit. It's Bartholomew who eggs him into continuing by delivering an "anonymous" threat to Nick's room, thus playing on the detective's pride. Bartholomew also does some clever work in luring Al out of his office so Nick can search it. Heck, he's more co-hero of the film than sidekick. When I finally get around to my career of solving crimes, I'm going to be on the look-out for an assistant just like "Beeswax!"


All three Nick Carter movies are great, but Phantom Raiders is my favorite, both in terms of good story construction and fun characters.


That finished up the Nick Carter films and brings us up-to-date in the current batch of In Order reviews. As of my writing this post (about a month before it posts), I am undecided on what to do next for this series. But I'll think of something before long. Civilization isn't going to collapse on my watch.

Friday's Favorite OTR

Nick Carter: "Death Plays the Lead" 12/3/44

Nick investigates the murder of an actress playing in an U.S.O. show. This leads to a case which, as Nick says, "has too many suspects and two few clues."

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Nick Carter Really Should Avoid Airplanes

Read/Watch 'em In Order #83

If Nick Carter is ever sitting next to you on a airplane, try to get your seat assignment switched. Because, inevitably, someone is going to get murdered or the plane is going to be hijacked or something bad is going to happen.

Nick Carter, Master Detective, the first in the three movie series starring Walter Pidgeon, began with an attempt to steal secret plans out of a plane Nick was riding in. In Sky Murder (1940), Nick agrees to investigate reports of homegrown spies working for a foreign country. This leads him to be on a plane with a guy who is probably one of the heads of the spies; a pretty female private eye named Chris Cross, and a half-dozen beautiful fashion models. This actually makes sense in context, by the way.

By the way, this is yet another case in which the foreign power is supposed to be Germany, but the country is never overtly identified. It's also clear that the spies are the American Bund (and the movie makes no bones about portraying them as the brutal thugs they were in real life), but they are also never identified by name. Still, few people watching the movie would have missed the intention. I've always given the pre-war movies of Warner Brothers a lot of credit for openly identifying the Nazis as bad guys. The Nick Carter films were produced by MGM and I'm happy to see another studio going after the Nazis as well, even if they didn't do so quite as openly.

Anyway, the guy suspected of being a Nazi is murdered on the plane, despite being alone in a sleeping cabin that no one else appears to have had access to it. The only other person who had been in the cabin with him was a woman named Pat, who is a refugee from Germany. But, despite being the only possible suspect, Nick doesn't think she did it. When they land, someone kills the co-pilot and tries to run the plane into a hanger, killing everyone on board--including the woman refugee.




Pat, by the way, is played by Kaaren Verne, who actually fled Germany in real life and played another refugee a year later in the excellent Bogart picture All Through The Night. Type casting, I suppose, but she's very good in both films.

Anyway, it's soon apparent that Pat is being targeted by the Bund to prevent her from spilling information about them. (She's not a member, but had been pressured to join.) What follows is Nick, his sidekick Bartholomew, and Pat dodging machine gun bullets, time bombs and lethal items while trying to figure out who the Bund's head man is and how the murder on the plane was committed. The resultant story is fast-moving and a tremendous amount of fun.

I particularly enjoyed Donald Meeker as Bartholomew. In the first film, he came across as a little nuts as he simply started showing up and helping Nick even though Nick clearly didn't want him along. But Bartholomew actually helped save Nick's life at the end of that one.

In this one, he's still popping up even though Nick clearly doesn't want him around. Soon, Nick is making use of him apparently because he just won't go away. But over the course of the movie, Bartholomew comes up with an idea to save everyone when they are trapped in a jail cell with a ticking time bomb right outside. He later proves surprising adept at fighting a couple of Bund thugs, and proves equally useful in the end when Nick carries out a scheme to catch the main bad guy. Along the way, he still comes across as a little nuts and sometimes a little annoying from Nick's point-of-view, but he certainly earns his sidekick cred and, as I watch the Carter films in order, he's quickly becoming one of my favorite B-movie characters.

I don't know why the Nick Carter series came to an end after just three films--whether they had tepid box office or Walter Pidgeon was moving up to A-movies or what--but we are lucky to have the ones we do. They are gems. We'll be taking a look at the last one in the series soon.

Friday's Favorite OTR

Nick Carter: "Monkey Sees Murder" 1/7/45

An old friend of Nick's is murdered and the solution to the case may involved a stuffed monkey.

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Gee Whiz, Flying is DANGEROUS!

Read/Watch 'em In Order #80

Nick Carter pre-dates Sherlock Holmes by 2 years, first appearing in the dime novel The New York Weekly in 1886. His career as a private eye was incredibly successful, with over 1000 dime novel appearances, followed by pulp magazine stories, an 11-year run on radio and over 100 appearances in comic books. In the 1960s, he was reinvented as a James Bond-esque clone in a men's adventure paperback series.

So it's a little surprising that Nick's foray into B-movies lasted only three films made in 1939 and 1940.

Walter Pidgeon plays a laid-back but capable Nick in all three films. The first was Nick Carter, Master Detective, In this one, spies are somehow making off with blueprints out of a high-security airplane factory. Every worker in the factor is required to change clothes when they go in, they walk through a shower-bath before getting their original clothes back at the end of their shift. So how anyone gets blueprints out is baffling.

Nick makes no claims to have a talent for deductive reasoning. His methodology is pretty much suspect everyone, then apologize afterwards to whomever he was wrong about. But he is a keen observer and soon spots the probably method the enemy spies are using to sneak information out of the factory.

Along the way, Nick meets a strange little beekeeper named Bartholomew (Donald Meek), who fancies himself a great detective, jumping wildly between being in the way and being useful. Meek obviously have fun in this role and would end up fulfilling the role of comedic sidekick throughout the series.

The fun of the movie is highlighted by action set-pieces involving airplanes. There's an attempt to
steal plans from an airplane when the pilot fakes engine trouble as an excuse to land near a car-full of armed confederates. But Nick is on board and, with the help of the aforementioned nurse (who flies well enough to take over for the traitorous pilot), manages to fight off the bad guys long enough to make a getaway with the plans.

The climax is even more fun. Director Jacques Tourneur makes effective use of aerial photography and miniatures to give us an exciting sequence in which Nick, in a small plane and armed with a tommy gun, makes strafing runs on the cargo ship in which the enemy spies are escaping with stolen plans and a hostage.

Nick wraps up the case involving planes, but it won't be long before he's on a case involving sunken ships. We'll take a look at those soon.

Friday's Favorite OTR

Nick Carter: "Funeral Wreath" 10/29/44

A wreath of flowers and an undertaker's business card provide the clues to tracking down an escaped killer. This is a very tightly written episode, with Nick combining deductive reasoning with more mundane legwork to solve the case.

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Friday's Favorite OTR

Nick Carter: "The Case of the Demented Daughter" 5/28/46

A woman with a family history of insanity seems to be sliding off the deep end herself. But Nick thinks there's something more nefarious going on.

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Friday's Favorite OTR

Nick Carter: "The Man Who Lived Too Long" 7/1/45

A man frantically reports his own murder--except he's not dead yet and he's apparently worked enough hours over the last week to account for one day too many.

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Friday's Favorite OTR

Nick Carter: "Death After Dark" 2/19/44

The mystery here is fairly straightforward, but a sequence in which Nick's lovely assistant Patsy plays decoy to trap a gang of apparent vampires is very intense.

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Friday's Favorite OTR

Nick Carter: "The Mystery of Hangman's Woods" 5/20/45

Nick is asked to find a rational answer for a supposedly supernatural apparition. This investigation soon evolves into a case involving stolen gunpowder and a ruthless criminal.

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Friday's Favorite OTR

Nick Carter: “A Cat Brings Death” 4/15/44

Nick takes on the apparently banal task of finding a stolen cat, but that case snowballs into a dangerous hostage situation. Despite at one point depending on a coincidence rather than Nick’s detective skill to move the plot along, this episode is unusual and fun.

Besides, Nick Carter was a consistently well-written show, so they could get away with tossing in an occasional coincidence.

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Friday's Favorite OTR

Nick Carter, Master Detective: “The Case of the Little Old Ladies” 4/23/46

A law firm that keeps Nick on retainer has a boring and routine job of finding a witness. Nick assigns an operative to the task. Going door-to-door, the operative meets a pair of sweet little old ladies—WHO PULL GUNS ON HIM!!!

This odd twist soon has Nick looking into the case personally. But when the master detective ends up personally held hostage by two sweet little old ladies—well, that’s just plain embarrassing. 

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Friday's Favorite OTR

Nick Carter, Detective: "Eight Records of Death" 4/6/46


Someone buys a package at an unclaimed package auction. Inside, he finds eight record blanks--small wax discs that people could use to make their own recordings at home.

What he hears on those discs makes him immediately speed to Nick Carter. A woman apparently held hostage in her own home by greedy relatives secretly made the recordings, which were then later somehow shipped to New York City.

I love the way this episode is constructed. Each record gives just a little bit more information as the woman refuses to sign over her property to her captors. She grows more and more desperate on each successive recording, often with her being forced to stop before she can say everything she wants to. It's an innovative and effective way of presenting the case to us.

Nick methodically investigates, trying to learn the identity of the woman and her evil relatives. The episode ends with Nick tied up and seemingly doomed. But Nick Carter rarely fails to think his way out of danger.


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