Twelve Crowded Hours

I had a couple of Lucille Ball movies on my DVR for quite some time that I didn't watch and blog about yet because they don't seem to be on DVD. But with TCM having picked Lucy as this month's Star of the Month, both of them are going to be on, and this week. So you're getting a blog post already today for a movie that isn't coming up until Friday morning. That movie is Twelve Crowded Hour, at 10:15 AM Friday.

Lucy isn't the star here. That honor goes to Richard Dix, even if the movie was made in 1939, which is well past the time he was a real star. Dix plays reporter Nick Green. In the film's opening scene, he's going up to a school of dance to see his would-be girlfriend, Paula Sanders (that's Lucille Ball, as if you couldn't tell). They had met when Paula's brother Dave (Allan Lane) was the defendant in a vehicular manslaughter case, and Paula has always blamed Nick's articles for sending Dave to prison. He's just gotten out, however, and is living with Paula.

Meanwhile, we see a bunch of people getting a mysterious phone call to meet somebody at a certain place and time. That somebody is George Costain (Cy Kendall, looking vaguely like Laird Cregar). Costain runs the numbers racket in town, and all of these people are supposed to meet with him to discuss their takings. But one set of people has decided that they're going to take their share of the takings, amounting to $80,000, which was quite a bit back in 1939, and flee town with it.

Nick knows that Costain is a bad guy, and the newspaper has been printing enough articles about it that Costain is ticked off. So Costain calls up a truck driver he knows, who just happens to drive the same type of truck Dave Sanders was alleged to have driven in his crime, and tells the guy to ram the editor's car and cause a fatal accident. Unsurprisingly, the blame is going to fall on Dave, who will become a fugitive.

The two stories come together because Costain has discovered that somebody is on the train with "his" money, so Costain gets on the train, finds the guy, kills him, and takes the money. Nick runs into him at an el station, and creates a ruse that allows him to steal the money and put it in a locker for storage. Costain is chasing him, and the police are looking for Dave, ultimately also trying to get Nick after it transpires that Nick brings Dave to his apartment for safekeeping.

Twelve Crowded Hours is really one crowded hour, because this was a Lew Landers quickie at RKO, Landers being known for quickly churning out a whole bunch of short B movies (his output in 1939 was low, only directing six films, compared to eight the year before and nine the following year). For such rapid-fire production line work, Twelve Crowded Hours isn't bad, but at the same time it's nothing more than a throwaway B movie, complete with all the problems that merely competent B movies had. A dozen years later, and it's the sort of movie that would have been the plot for a TV private detective series.

Fans of Lucy will probably be disappointed that she doesn't get that much to do in the movie, either. Twelve Crowded Hours is really the sort of movie to watch more to see what Lew Landers did than for either Richard Dix or Lucille Ball.