Lon Chaney, Jr. gets no lines in THE BIG CHASE, but he swings a mean hammer.
compromising picture to be used in a divorce action. Eventually, murder comes into it too and Dennis has to get out of the frame. In both cases, the hero is mixed up with low-rent venal charac- ters and sees things through to brisk solutions. The Spillane-ish tough talk (“You got a nice smile, Spadely—wonder how it’d look without teeth?”) and Chandleresque simile (“We’ve got you tied down better than a guy with eight kids”) is by-the- numbers, and unruffled Dennis O’Brien is too smug to rank even with midlist radio and TV de- tectives of the ’50s, like David Janssen’s Richard Diamond, Phil Carey’s Philip Marlowe or Richard Denning’s Michael Shayne. Blandly titled, THE BIG CHASE is hampered by the perfunctory direction of Arthur Hilton (CAT WOMEN OF THE MOON) and a nothing-special script from Fred Freiberger (THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS). Since BANDIT ISLAND—a 3D short alternate version which consists only of ac- tion scenes—was purportedly directed by producer Lippert, it’s likely that Hilton only handled the draggy, setbound police station, prison cell and domestic chat interiors. As in DAVID HARDING,
perhaps betraying the influence of the hosts who told stories on the radio or in the comics, a jo- vially paternal superior, Lt. Ned Daggert (THE LAND UNKNOWN’s Douglas Kennedy), lectures a journalist (McHALE’S NAVY’s Joe Flynn, here billed as Joseph Flynn) to set up flashbacks about a younger, brasher rookie who breaks a first case in trying personal circumstances. Grinning, uni- formed Officer Pete Grayson (THE AMAZING CO- LOSSAL MAN’s Glenn Langan) finds himself in hot pursuit of a band of vicious robbers while his wife (DAY THE WORLD ENDED’s Adele Jergens, in a rare non-tramp role) undergoes a difficult labor (like most pregnant women in 1950s films, she has such a small bump, her baby seems to be about eight months premature—which might ex- plain the complications). It’s clearly a cop-boost- ing propaganda piece in the manner of DRAGNET or HIGHWAY PATROL, especially in its depiction of snarling low-life hoods, but is padded out with the sort of domestic soap Jack Webb and others were stripping out of radio and TV policiers. The saddest aspect of this quickie is that, a decade on from his top-billed stardom at Universal
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