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)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 freeBut 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.

This is actually two stories in one film, two days in the life of detective Hugh Beaumont whom you all remember as daddy Ward of "Leave It to Beaver". He first must solve the mystery of a murdered cop whom he believes to be an escaped prisoner from Alcatraz, then crooked goings-on in the boxing ring. Both episodes are tied together with the help of alcoholic Edward Brophy who appears to be an informer along the lines of Thelma Ritter in "Pickup on South Street". It all has the makings of early TV crime drama, but has the crispy hard dialogue of noir, as well as some great period info on San Francisco's docks in the early 50's. In the first segment, there is savagely dangerous blonde Ann Savage (of "Detour" fame), her dark haired sister Eve Miller and a blonde waitress (Joy, aka Joi Lansing) that it might be difficult not to confuse with Savage. Both Savage and Lansing get some good lines (although Lansing's participation is nothing more than a well written walk on), and Beaumont's first person narration is very interesting as well. There is a good payoff for Savage at the end of the first half that wreaks of irony. The second half isn't as interesting. I noticed that the dirty man who sits next to Beaumont at the Boxing match looks almost like Joe E. Brown. Mike Mazurki is the heavy, and Margia Dean is the bad girl here. She is made dark haired, probably not to confuse the viewers with the two blonds from the first half. Edward Brophy, a veteran character actor, changes his voice from his usual squeak to more theatrical. As a drunk who intends to be drunk when he enters the next world, he is the archetype classic film drunk that is good natured and silly rather than dangerous or pathetic. The fadeout with Brophy will either make you laugh or groan, but he milks it for all it is worth as if he was John Carradine spouting Shakespeare up and down Hollywood Blvd. Far from perfect, but filled with bits that make film noir today probably the most sought after classic genre to be released on DVD.

*Spoiler/plot- 1951, Pier 23, The famous detective, O'Brien gets mixed up with crooked wrestling referee, an equally corrupt area owner, and a murderous wrestler over some lost prize money stolen and hid away. Second O'Brien case involves a murdered cop, and a ultimate film noir major element a double-crossing 'dame' play for keeps.*Special Stars- Huge Beaumont plays hard bitten detective Dennis O'Brien. Mike Mazuki plays the grappler wrestler baddie. Ann Savage plays the fem-fatal in the second case.*Theme- Life can throw you some curves and some of them are on a bad tempered dame.*Based on- Radio play of Louis Morheim.*Trivia/location/goofs- Takes place in San Francisco. Some lost seldom seen film noir of the early 50's. DVD has some nice special features on film noir.*Emotion- A fun and quick paced detective film in the noir style. Interesting to see and hear the dead-pan but colorful dialog of the detective story. Very reminiscent of TV's fast talking cynical SGT. Joe Friday of "Dragnet'. Lovely to see some of the ladies of these stories get some real meaty roles for them to chew-up-the-scenery over. Fun to see early film of the consummate late 50's TV's sitcom calm dad, Huge Beaumont play another wise-guy character role not seen before but thoroughly enjoyable to watch.