In 1947, movie mogul Robert L. Lippert decided to “liberate”
Hal Roach’s “streamliner” concept—very short features running anywhere from
40-50 minutes—by producing a pair of detective films starring Tom Neal, the
doomed protagonist of the B-noir classic
Detour
(1945). Neal played would-be gumshoe
Russ Ashton, who takes over an investigative agency that’s down on its uppers,
hiring Howard “Harvard” Quinlan (Allen Jenkins) as his partner (though “Harvard”
seems to be around mostly for sh*ts and giggles) and Susie Hart (Pamela Blake)
as his gal Friday. Susie is the focus of
the first entry,
The Hat Box Mystery (1947), in which she’s hired to
take a candid of a philandering wife…and winds up involved in
murder!
Hat Box also introduced
Harvard’s girlfriend, Veronica Hoopler (Virginia Sale), who runs a nearby diner
and feeds our sleuthing trio until they can make their bidness a resounding
success.
The quartet returned that same year in
The Case of the Baby Sitter, which finds Ashton and Company hired
to look after the infant scion of the Duke and Duchess of Leradia (George
Meeker, Rebel Randall) while the royals attend a function. The task of keeping an eye on the nipper
falls on the dimwitted Harvard…but what our detective heroes do not know is
that a) there is no such place as Leradia, and b) the Duke and Mrs. Duke are
actually a pair of jewel thieves, Phil and Mamie. They’ve pulled a double-cross on a
safecracker named Silk (Keith Richards—and no, not the Rolling Stones guy) in a
heist involving the famous LaPaz diamond…and now Silk, with the help of his
moll Maxine (Lona Andre), is going to retrieve the stolen gem while double-crossing
his boss”—a gangster appropriately nicknamed
“Diamonds” (Ed Kane).
 |
| This kid gets his own credit, by the way. I wish I had his agent. |
“Murder Stalked the Nursery...With Diamonds as the Pay-Off!”
the promotional material for
The Case of
the Baby Sitter hyperbolizes,
because there isn’t any murderer…and even the (always reliable) IMDb credits
the child thespian pictured above as “The Kidnapped Baby”—the little rugrat
never leaves his freakin’ crib, ferchrissake.
There isn’t any time in
Baby
Sitter for this kind of interesting plot development, because most of its
40 minutes has been assigned to the comic relief provided by Jenkins, who is
apparently in this vehicle only because Sid Melton had not yet been
invented. The rounding up of the jewel
scofflaws is very quick—it’s almost like the filmmakers looked at their watches
and remarked: “Geez, this thing is about over…we need to wrap this up pronto.”
My esteemed ClassicFlix colleague—and the man who makes
doubly certain the boxes of Goobers and Raisinettes are stacked neat and pretty
at
In
the Balcony—Cliff Weimer has a slightly higher opinion of
The Case of the Baby Sitter than I do…though
having Allen around is always a plus (he gets more screen time than “star” Tom
Neal, interestingly enough) as is the small contribution of
Thrilling Days of Yesteryear fave Tom
Kennedy as a dumb cop (there’s a stretch) and easy-on-the-eyes Rebel Randall as
one of the baddies. (Kennedy was also
present and accounted for in
The Hat Box
Mystery—though I don’t know if he played the same character he did in
Baby Sitter; I haven’t seen
Hat Box yet.) The mercifully short running time of this
movie is its chief saving grace, because the script is pedestrian and the
production values slightly above that of a set for a dinner theater production. (Cliff wonders if these two films were
planned as episodes for early television…though I tend to agree with him that
since they were produced in 1947 that seems awfully early for TV.)
The Case of the Baby
Sitter is the second “co-hit” on VCI’s
Forgotten
Noir Volume 9 set…and
at the risk of going off on a rant, there’s nothing remotely “noir” about this
entry (though its “Forgotten” status is never without question). The debate about what constitutes “film noir”
rages on in salons and saloons even today; my definition is not unlike that of
Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s explanation on what defines pornography:
“I know it when I see it.”
But with Baby Sitter,
that’s the last of the Forgotten Noir releases from the
dusty TDOY archives—this feature will
continue on Fridays for a couple more months (because I rented some of the
later volumes from ClassicFlix), and when I’m done with that—I’ll re-launch the
snarky Crime Does Not Pay write-ups
that I did previously on an intermittent basis.
If I’m absent from the blog for a couple of days next week, it’s because
I will probably be performing in the annual Christmas with the ‘Rents
here at Rancho Yesteryear (with special guest stars Sisters Kat and Debbie) …but
I’ll try to check in to make sure those dang neighborhood kids haven’t swiped
the wreath off the front door. Happy
Holidays, cartooners!
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