Hugh Beaumont’s smug Dennis O’Brien strikes back in PIER 23, this time against popular movie thug Mike Mazurki.
It’s a formula programmer, and there’s a run- ning joke about a travel agent which will test anyone’s patience, but there’s some historical in- terest in the use of a British film industry milieu— with a climax that features a chase through a movie studio. In an intriguing in-joke, one of the villains is cigar-smoking, starlet-fondling, ferally grinning producer Frank Hampden (TASTE THE BLOOD OF DRACULA’s Geoffrey Keene), who professes to know nothing about making movies—Keene seems to be delivering a double-edged carica- ture of mogul James Carreras, which producer Anthony Hinds must have enjoyed sneaking past his boss. Katie Johnson, of THE QUATERMASS EXPERIMENT and THE LADYKILLERS, does one of her patent daffy old lady acts as a frustratingly unreliable witness; Lila Lee, leading lady of the talkie THE UNHOLY THREE, has a nice moment as a screen diva struggling with terrible dialogue and an unwieldy costume, and there are bits for familiar British film faces like Bill Fraser (THAT’S YOUR FUNERAL), Mary Mackenzie (STOLEN
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FACE), Robert Dorning (CUL-DE-SAC) and Peter Swanwick (THE PRISONER).
Hugh Beaumont’s tough operator Dennis O’Brien is back in William Berke’s PIER 23. Hav- ing seen off one of the stars of the classic noir DETOUR in DANGER ZONE, O’Brien takes on the other, Ann Savage, in the first and thinnest of his cases here—enlisted by a priest (Raymond Greenleaf) to look out for an escaped convict who is out to collect on a debt and winds up dead be- fore it turns out he’s not who O’Brien thought he was. The second story involves a murder commit- ted in a wrestling ring and winds up with a low- rent reprise of MURDER, MY SWEET, with Mike Mazurki, the one-time Moose Malloy, cast as wres- tling goon Ape Danowski, who is hung up on manipulative dame Flo Klingle (Margia Dean). Again, Edward Brophy’s Professor Shicker provides assistant sleuthing while Richard Travis’ cop keeps trying to pin murders on his supposed friend O’Brien. On the whole, it’s even more ordinary than DANGER ZONE—but Mazurki lumbers
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