Steven Geray holds Marguerite Chapman at gunpoint in MR. DISTRICT ATTORNEY (1947)— not to be confused with Dennis O’Keefe’s other movie titled MR. DISTRICT ATTORNEY (1941)!
and only two or three years after holding his own in major suporting roles opposite Gary Cooper, Lon Chaney, Jr. is reduced to industry fringe gigs less prestigious than he had in the early ’30s be- fore he changed his name. Chaney plays Kip, a minor thug who gets no lines and sits in the back of the car looking mean, though he pulls cave- man faces before he’s gunned down in a rail-yard. He isn’t even called on to perform the gang’s most memorable atrocity, tossing a wounded female confederate out of the car to roll down an em- bankment so they can make a quicker getaway— this honor goes to Jay Lawrence. Living up to its monicker, a full third of the film is chase—in- volving patrol cars, footwork, boats and a air power, though the moment in which the LAPD deploy a helicopter to pursue two hoods in a rowboat suggests overkill. In a climax which dis- turbed few in the they’re-guilty-so-the-hell-with- ’em ’50s, the hero cop shoots dead a fleeing, gunless robber (MONSTER FROM GREEN HELL’s Jim Davis) without issuing a warning or
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command to surrender. When, a scene later, his wife purrs “They say after the first one, the rest are easy,” she means having babies; cynics might wonder if she also means killing unarmed perps. The disc’s extras include trailers for MOTOR
PATROL (“A blistering exposé of the stolen car racket!”), PORTLAND EXPOSE (“My models and escorts are all ladies—no dipsos, no hopheads!”) and TERROR STREET aka 36 HOURS (“He hunted the man who turned the woman he loved from a saint to a sinner to a corpse!”). Also, Part One of Richard Roberts’ interview with Jean Greenlaw, the daughter of Phillips H. Lord, and a re-enactment, complete with bleeps, of Tom Weaver’s talk with Lippert about the making of BANDIT ISLAND and THE BIG CHASE.
MR. DISTRICT ATTORNEY is another radio lift, and another movie in which a deskbound mentor talks up the early troubles of a more hot-headed junior. Committed, workaholic, genially slave-driv- ing DA Craig Warren (Adolphe Menjou) recruits idealist lawyer Steve Bennett (THE LEOPARD
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