As a PI, Beaumont's (O'Brien) got all the macho moves and snappy rejoinders down pat. In fact, dialog may be the programmer's chief asset. The movie's really two separate half-hour stories in a single one-hour package, but don't bother with the plots. They're too complex for brief run-times, and really just an excuse to move the cast around cheap apartment sets. I'm just sorry we don't see more of atmospheric San Francisco where the shenanigans ostensibly occur. I could also have used more of the stately blonde (Valerie) instead of guys in trench coats threatening one another. Seems like O'Brien's main purpose is to get slugged and then wake up amid dead bodies. Nothing special or unusual here, except for Ward Cleaver making a pretty darn good tough guy. Trouble is the blended half-hours are more unwieldy than satisfying.

Hugh Beaumont who made an indelible impression on all kids as the world's greatest dad as Ward Cleaver on television will shock the fans of Leave It To Beaver when they see him play laconic private eye Dennis O'Brien, living on the San Francisco wharf with his research man Edward Brophy in Roaring City. Definitely not the Hugh we're used to.You know he's got the dialog and the patter down straight, but as a detective he falls into the Miles Archer rather than the Sam Spade category. In this film which involves Beaumont in two separate stories in both cases he does a job which looks really suspicious from the start. In the first he lays down some bets for a fight manager against his own fighter under an alias. He looks real good for the homicides of both the manager and the fighter to detective Richard Travis.The second one is even worse, he's asked to pose as the husband of one of a pair of women in a rendezvous and the real husband comes up dead with an unconscious Beaumont with the stiff in a trash dumpster. I mean this guy's radar is really on the fritz.Still it's not a bad premise for a television show which it was for a brief time and it proves that Hugh Beaumont could be something other than the All American Dad.

As noted elsewhere, this film bears a strong resemblance to the Old-Time Radio program, PAT NOVAK FOR HIRE. The setup is virtually identical. The protagonist (calling him a hero is a tad generous) has a shop on a pier in San Francisco, is 'for hire" for any odd job that he feels comfortable with, legal or otherwise. As with the radio show, he has an intelligent, though alcoholic, helper who can do leg offstage to get him the data he needs to put the pieces of a caper together. Also like the radio show, he gets knocked out a lot.The radio show had a lot of colorful similes, verging toward purple prose, that's diminished in the films, but then, Dennis O'Brien is no Pat Novak. (Only Jack Webb could deliver the lines the way they would work.) But, like Novak, O'Brien has a nemesis on the police force, an inspector (Hellman for Novak, Briger for City). The inspector in the film is played by Richard Travis; in the radio show, it was played by Raymond Burr.That aside, the stories were structured like the radio show. Most of the women were, well, far from innocent victims or bystanders. This is clearly evident in both stories.One thing in the first story that is bemusing. Toward the end of the story, Inspector Bruger becomes convinced about the guilt of the villain, gawking the heat off O'Brien. He holds the guy at gun point as O'Brien decides to call it a day. Exiting the apartment, O'Brien casually walks between Bruger and his prisoner, right through the line of fire! But nobody reacts. Criminals must have been a lot more cooperative in those days! The film is abstaining, but nothing special. A pale echo of PAT NOVAK FOR HIRE to that show's fans, though.

Hugh Beaumont, who previous had played Michael Shayne for a series of detective movies at PRC in the 1946-47 season (entertaining films, but having little to do with the Shayne character as depicted in the Brett Halliday novels), put the trench-coat back on for a series of three hour-long feature films as detective Denny O'Brien, released in short succession through Lippert Pictures in 1951. One interesting element about these films is that each consists of two half-hour-long stories, almost as if one is watching back-to-back episodes of a television show. Another interesting element is that the films seem to have borrowed a number of elements from the radio show PAT NOVAK FOR HIRE, starring Jack Webb. Not only is O'Brien a man who rents a ship at the pier and does odd jobs, not only does each film start with monologues very similar to those of Webb, not only does O'Brien have a drunken ex-college-professor sidekick who does some legwork for him, but one of the three films has a plot line lifted directly from a Novak episode! (Perhaps other plots of these movies are lifted from Novak episodes I haven't heard) In any event, these three films are all enjoyable outings with Beaumont radiating the same kind of charm he always did, yet still being convincing as a tough PI spouting hard-boiled dialogue. This particular film has two stories: one of a fixed fight that O'Brien is hired to bet on, and the other where O'Brien is hired to pose as a woman's husband for an evening. Like the PAT NOVAK series, someone hires the detective to do something, he winds up getting beaten up or knocked out, and he wakes up with a dead body, and a police inspector who doesn't like him trying to pin the murder on the detective. That's the formula, and I like it. As often happens with Lippert films, there is a fine b-movie supporting cast, and there is no time wasted on non-essential items. I've owned this film for about 15 years, and I have no doubt watched it five times in those years. Beaumont fans will NOT be disappointed. The other two Denny O'Brien films are DANGER ZONE and PIER 23, both of which I also recommend to detective film fans who do not mind bargain-basement productions in the PRC/Lippert vein. These are directed by the ever-reliable William Berke.