City of Missing Girls

I've mentioned before that of the FAST platforms, TubiTV has a whole lot of Poverty Row B stuff that presumably fell into the public domain at some point and wound up obscure as a result. But the plots sound interesting enough and since many of the movies are short, it doesn't matter that much if they're not all that good. Another one that I watched recently is City of Missing Girls.

The movie begins with one of those old tropes in B movies, the montage of headlines telling us how a bunch of young women, in this case the sort of girl who'd try out for the chorus line with dreams of something bigger, have gone missing and in many cases found dead. The police in the form of detective McVeigh (H.B. Warner) are investigating, as is assistant DA James Horton (John Archer). Reporting on it and needling the authorities for the lousy investigating, is Nora Page (Astrid Allwyn), who is also liable to become a love interest to Horton. (Obviously not to McVeigh, who is much too old for Nora.) Anyhow, one obvious place of suspicion is the Crescent School, which teaches dancing and acting for the sort of woman who wants to get into it. In fact, the owner, King Peterson, also owns a nightclub and funnels some of the women there.

Another woman, Pauline Randolph, goes missing, and Nora starts investigating the case herself. Thankfully she's got a bit of an in as her father Joe Thompson is a theatrical booking agent and can get information on the sort of women who show up at these places. But it's only after Nora talks with Dad that we see him having another conversation, with Mr. Peterson, and that the two are in cahoots. Peterson is obviously involved in some sort of trafficking that Thompson doesn't want to be on the hook for, while Peterson intends to make certain that Thompson is held equally liable.

Pauline actually show up, much to her grandmother's relief, although Nora isn't able to get an interview with her as Pauline goes off with a friend just as Nora arrives. Nora, being an intrepid reporter, takes down the license plate number. As you can guess, this is going to be important later in the movie. Pauline is later found murdered. The other woman in the car is playing hard to find, until King Peterson gets an idea as to how to use her to his benefit, which involves framing Horton in this other woman's murder! Of course, even though this is a Poverty Row movie, it still has to follow the strictures of the Production Code, so we know that the bad guys are going to get caught.

City of Missing Girls has the sort of plot that you could easily see having been used in a Torchy Blane movie a few years movie. But here it's done on a much lower budget with the concomitant lower production values. It's not as bad as some people might have you believe, but at the same time there's a lot of good reasons why the movie isn't remembered beyond it having fallen into the public domain.

I'm glad that City of Missing Girls is now available on a FAST platform, and if you're looking for a way to spend 75 minutes, it'll do.