Ronald Colman does comedy

Another of the movies that's been sitting on my DVR for quite some time was My Life With Caroline. Recently I finally got around to watching it so that I could write up a review before it expired.

Although Ronald Colman is the star, or at least the male lead, we meet several of the other characters first, at a ski resort in Idaho that's running some sort of charity function. Argentine rancher Paco Del Valle (Gilbert Roland) is at the charity kissing booth with Caroline Mason (Anna Lee) making money for charity. After this, Paco wants to talk to Caroline's father Bliss (Charles Winninger), to tell him that he plans to ask for Caroline's hand in marriage, but that since this is the era when it was common to ask a father for that, well, Dad ought to know.

Of course, there's a minor complication. Caroline is already married, to Anthony (Ronald Colman), a successful publisher in New York City. Obviously the only way Caroline would be able to marry Paco is if her first marriage were dissolved, and Anthony has to be consulted on that matter. So a telegram is sent to Anthony, who has his own plane and is able to get to Idaho. You can see the sort of rich set this movie is about. Anthony gets to Idaho, but doesn't tell any of the other main characters that he's arrived, instead preferring to watch the three surreptitiously. Anthony then breaks the fourth wall, telling us in the audience that he's seen this all before. Caroline is just such a lovely person that other men can't help but fall in love with her. Anthony, however, understands that it's him who Caroline truly loves. And, to that end, Anthony tells us he's going to relate a very similar story that happened a few years back....

Flash back a couple of years, and Anthony is returning from another business trip. His wife and father-in-law introduce him to Paul Martindale (Reginald Gardiner), a sculptor who is "struggling" on $100K a year, and not from the earning of what his sculptures bring in. It's already implied at this first introduction that the relationship between Caroline and Martindale has progressed far enough that he's going to ask her to marry him and that the two might just run off together. And the way the story continues, you get the impression that this one wasn't the first time some guy showed interest in Caroline as Mrs. Mason either.

Eventually, Anthony figures out that Paul and Caroline are going to go off on the same train together, so Anthony maneuvers things so that at least one of them misses the train, which will give Caroline the chance to realize that yes, it truly is Anthony that she loves. And in the final scene, we'll go back to Idaho to see that Caroline and Anthony will live happily ever after, for some values of "happily ever after".

I have the feeling that a director like Preston Sturges would have had a field day with the material. Instead, this being co-produced by RKO, directorial duties were given to Lewis Milestone. The result is a movie that feels off somehow, as though it's all a bunch of conventions that somehow don't work together in the final product. What's supposed to be funny is mostly exasperating, and the characters don't feel like real people.

I guess I can see why somebody like Ronald Colman might want to try his hand at comedy, but My Life With Caroline doesn't do him justice.

Three years before, and a century after, Becky Sharp

TCM ran a night of movies dedicated to the UCLA Film and Television Archive, and I've already written about several of the movies that I recorded that night. One that I haven't mentioned yet is the 1932 version of Vanity Fair.

The interesting thing about this version of Vanity Fair is that it takes Thackeray's story and moves it to contemporary times, more or less, since it doesn't really mention the Depression. Myrna Loy plays Becky Sharp, and as the movie opens she's going to celebrate the holidays with school friend Amelia Sedley (Barbara Kent) who is much richer, never mind having a family unlike poor Becky. Becky is going to be going to a job as a governess, something Amelia absolutely doesn't have to do.

But Becky has ideas of getting rich by marrying up, and immediately starts putting the moves on Amelia's brother Joseph (Billy Bevan). Worse, she also starts putting the moves on Amelia's fiancé George, which causes Amelia's none-too-stupid mother to take notice. She sees what a threat Becky is and tells Becky in no uncertain terms that perhaps she should go become the governess for the Cawleys like she was supposed to.

When Becky gets to the Cawley place, what does she do? You guessed it: she immediately starts putting the moves on yet another man, young Rawdon (Conway Tearle) who is the son of Sir Pitt, the head of the Cawley family. Rawdon actually seems to like Becky, but Dad isn't happy with the relationship. So when Becky and Rawdon tell his dad that they've eloped, Dad cuts them off financially.

It's the start of the downward spiral for Becky, which you knew was coming if you've read the book or seen Miriam Hopkins in Becky Sharp. She and Rawdon try to continue living in a glamorous part of London, but that's going to require more money than they have, and more than they can earn through legitimate means. So they start cheating people at cards and through blackmail, while Becky continues trying to seduce legitimately rich men. This last move unsurprisingly ticks off Rawdon, who basically kicks her out once his Dad dies so he can inherit what is supposed to be him.

As Becky's downward spiral continues, she eventually runs into both Joseph and later Amelia. Joseph informs Becky that Amelia's husband George died tragically and that Amelia can't bring herself to remarry. Not that this is going to make Becky's life any happier, as the movie continues to the inveitably unhappy ending.

This version of Vanity Fair runs a brisk 75 minutes, which means that there's a lot that's going to be excised from an 800-page novel, which I'll admit I haven't yet read. Myrna Loy is unsurprisingly good, or at least as good as possible since this version wasn't made by a major studio and feels like a lower-budget movie. Director Chester Franklin tries some interesting directorial touches, especially for the finale, but the movie doesn't really rise above adequate. It's not terrible, by any means, but it's definitely not great.

Southside 1-1000

Another of the little-known movies that Eddie Muller selected for Noir Alley was Southside 1-1000. As always, not having heard of it but it sounding reasonably interesting, I decided to record it in order to be able to watch it and put up this post on it.

The movie opens up with expository narration and scenes of Washington DC telling us about the importance of sound money, especially in fighting the war on Communism. The movie was released in late 1950, not long after the start of the Korean War, and this introduction really seems tacked-on since the Korean War and Communists don't really have all that much to do with the movie. Counterfeiters, well yes those do.

Indeed, one of the best counterfeiters, Eugene Deane (Morris Ankrum), has been making his plates while holed up in San Quentin and hiding the prints in a bible. (This wouldn't be the first movie to have a theme of counterfeiters working behind bars; one of the Ronald Reagan Brass Bancroft movies had a similar premise.) In those days, it was the job of the Secret Service to find counterfeiters -- remember, before the Department of Homeland Security the Secret Service was part of the Treasury Department. They don't know who got the plates, so the attempt is made to figure out who's distributing the bills produced, and suspicion falls on a traveling salesman named Bill Evans (Barry Kelley).

Unfortunately, both he and the actual people running the counterfeit ring get the impression he's being watched, which results in his getting defenestrated for his trouble. The Secret Services realizes they need an undercover agent involved in getting the bills distributed, in the hopes that this will lead to whoever is actually running the ring. John Riggs (Don DeFore) is selected for the part. He goes to the Los Angeles hotel where Bill was last known to be staying, run by Nora Craig (Andrea King), in the hopes that he'll be able to meet the person running the outfit. The people running it are of course smart and make Riggs bide his time.

Eventually Riggs does get to meet a man who isn't the actual ringleader, but a representative, which is another sign of just how clever these criminals are. John's story is one that it's been a bit tough for the Secret Service to manufacture, leading the counterfeiters to wonder whether or not Riggs is who he says he is. Things gets much more complicated, however, when Deane escapes. He'd been ill enough that the warden wants to transfer him to a prison on the outside, but on the train journey there he overpowers his guard and makes his way to Los Angeles. This leads to the finale, although as you can probably guess considering the opening narration -- and never mind the Production Code -- the good guys are going to win this battle.

Southside 1-1000 is a low-budget movie that certainly betrays that low-budget nature. It does so in large plot by having a plot that feels completely unoriginal and taken from plot elements that had been recycled from a bunch of counterfeiter movies before it. The plot twists aren't particularly surprising either, and Don DeFore isn't exactly the most hard-boild person to be playing a Secret Service agent. The idea is OK, but the execution could be better.

The Working Man

TCM's schedule for tomorrow, July 8, is a series of films directed by John G. Adolfi. One of them happened to be on my DVR, so once again I decided that I would watch that upcoming movie in order to be able to write up this post. That film is The Working Man, and you can see it at 5:15 PM.

The titular working man is played by George Arliss, as a man named John Reeves. As the movie opens, he's the head of the Reeves Shoe Company, headquartered in Buffalo, NY. There's a Depression on, of course, since the movie was released in 1933, but Reeves is a hard worker and sound businessman, so his company is doing moderately well. Not that his nephew Benjamin (Hardie Albright) would have you believe. He believes his uncle is getting past his prime and that perhaps it would be time to take a well-deserved retirement. After all, Benjamin has been groomed to run the company since Reeves doesn't have any kids of his own.

So Reeves goes on a vacation to Maine with old friend Davis (J. Farrell MacDonald). There, their smaller fishing boat gets boarded by a couple of swimmers from the yacht nearby. Those swimmers happen to be a brother and sister, Tommy (Theodore Newton) and Jenny (Bette Davis) Hartland, children of Reeves' rival who has recently died. Reeves doesn't tell them his true identity, but claims to be a bookkeeper named Walton. Tommy and Jenny are trust-fund babies who know nothing about the business, and when Reeves hurts his hand aboard their yacht, they give him a job at the shoe factory just to keep him quiet.

What Reeves finds shocks him. The manager Tommy has installed, Fred Pettison (Gordon Westcott), has been running the factory into the ground. Meanwhile, the siblings have been spending like there's no tomorrow, so if they're not careful they're going to go bankrupt. Meanwhile, it's revealed that the reason Reeves has no family of his own is that Hartland was once Reeves' romantic rival and won the girl they were both wooing. So Reeves begins to see Tommy and Jenny almost as foster children of his own.

Reeves finds out that one of the Hartland trustees is permanently in Europe, which would in theory give the remaining trustees the right to replace him with somebody else. Reeves reveals his true identity to the trustees, but not to the Hartland siblings, and comes up with a way to get them to have him become one of the trustees thinking it was their idea all along. Of course, this is all part of Reeves' plot to show his nephew that he can still run a business: Benjamin still thinks his uncle is in Maine with Davis.

Reeves' time as trustee starts out badly, since he dumps all their bootleg liquor down the drain and fires most of the servants, the two kids not being able to afford all this. Jenny has a bit more sense in her head than Tommy, so she's willing to try to get a job at the Reeves shoe factory to find out how things are run efficiently. That, and when the two kids see just how badly in debt they've gotten, she's able to help convince Tommy to go back to the factory to do the director's job that he's been neglecting.

Now, as you might guess, everything works out all right in the end. So a lot of the fun is in seeing how it works out, because frankly the plot is kind of nonsensical. But with George Arliss as the protagonist, you also know you're going to get a good performance that by itself makes such material worth watching. I think I've more or less mentioned the same thing regarding two other Arliss movies that are on tomorrow's schedule: The Millionaire (9:30 AM) and A Successful Calamity (1:45 PM). Indeed, I see in my post on The Millionaire that I made a comparison to A Successful Calamity.

So regardless of how grounded in reality it is or isn't, The Working Man is another good reason to see just what an entertaining actor George Arliss was.

Roast-Beef and Movies

A short that TCM ran as a TCM Extra in a time slot after something else that I watched recently was Roast-Beef and Movies.

A movie studio that's fallen on hard times is looking for new ideas and offers up to $100K for a movie they use. With that in mind, a would-be producer called Gus Parkyakaruks (George Givot, who is not the same actor who would be billed as "Parkyakaruks" in a string of movies from the late 1930s and 1940s) shows up together with two partners, one of whom is played by Curly Howard of the Three Stooges although none of the other stooges are here. Neiter is Ted Healy, who in this time frame would have been the "manager" of the Stooges, the short having been made in late 1933 and released to theaters in early 1934.

Most of the rest of the short is a sort of revue that shows the sort of "movie" that the producers wanted to make, although there's more to it than that. Eventually, the studio boss likes the idea behind the movie and offers Gus and his two partners a contract, but there's a catch that forms the humorous finale of the movie.

There are two things that are mildly interesting about Roast-Beef and Movies. One is the presence of Curly Howard (billed as Jerry Howard) without anybody else related to the Three Stooges. The other one is that the movie is in two-strip Technicolor. Now, Disney had already made a couple of animated shorts in three-strip. I'm not certain how much later the live-action three-strip shorts came out, although I've mentioned Warner Bros.' Service With a Smile from 1934 as a three-strip short with pretty vibrant color.

In any case, the reason for the two-strip Technicolor is because TCM wanted to reuse some musical dance numbers from a couple of earlier movies that had been filmed partially in two-strip. Something that was done in several movies in the early sound era was to have most of the movie in black and white, with Technicolor mostly for a musical finale; it's those numbers that are reused in Roast-Beef and Movies. Other than the Technicolor and Curly Howard, however, this short isn't particularly good.

Roast-Beef and Movies did, however, get a release to DVD as part of one the Classic Shorts from the Dream Factory box sets.

TCM "Star" of the Month July 2026: Singers in the Movies

Now that we're in the first full week of a new month, it's once again time for a new Star of the Month. This time out, we don't get a traditional one person as star. Instead, TCM has decided to do a spotlight on singers who decided to try their hand in the movies. Every Monday in prime time, leading into the daytime hours of the Tuesday schedule, there will be movies featuring people who, when they first appeared in the movies, were mostly known as singers.

Now, some of them became famous for their acting, such as Bing Crosby, whose early appearance in Going Hollywood is getting an airing at 7:15 AM July 7. Rudy Vallee is another such instance, as is, I would argue, Barbra Streisand. Streisand shows up in the 1976 version of A Star Is Born at 9:45 PM on July 13.

But some of them are certainly people best known as singers who didn't make very many movies in part because some of them aren't exactly good actors. Johnny Cash in Five Minutes to Live (July 14, 6:15 AM) would certainly be an example of that. Willie Nelson is basically playing himself in Honeysuckle Rose (12:15 AM, July 14), so he's not exactly bad, but I'm not certain how much talent he would have had in other roles.

There are also some movies I'm interested to see that I haven't seen before. I think I've only seen a bit of Ruthless People (July 20, 10:30 PM), probably back in the late 1980s when my parents would have been watching it on the VCR. Overnight, at 4:30 AM on July 21, is Paul Simon in One Trick Pony. I only know of that one because of the song from the film that was a commercial success as a single. I would have been much too young to have seen the movie in the theater, and it's not the sort of thing that shows up regularly.

Jazz Heaven

I think it's been a while since I've done a post on a movie from that year when Hollywood finally completed the transition from silent movies to sound: 1929. This time, the picture in question is one that I have to admit was new to me the last time TCM showed it: Jazz Heaven. But since I'm always interested in such early sound movies, I recorded this one and eventually got around to watching it to do this post.

In a rooming house in New York City, Barry Holmes (Johnny Mack Brown) lives with his piano. That's because he's an aspiring songwriter, trying to make it in the then musical capital of America. Unfortunately, he plays his piano all night long trying to figure out the last few themes to the melody of the song he's currently working on, and this pisses off a lot of the other roomers and especially his landlord, Mrs. Langley (Blanche Friderici). She wants to throw him out right now since he's also four weeks behind on his rent, but Mr. Langley (Clyde Cook) intervenes much to his wife's consternation. It doesn't help Mr. Langley that he only works as a night watchman in a piano factory.

Quite stupidly, Barry keeps striking away at his piano even after being told to wait until 10AM. His playing wakes up his neighbor in the next room, Ruth Morgan (Sally O'Neil). She works for a pair of music publishers, Kemple and Klucke, both of whom seem to have the hots for Ruth even though they're much too old for her which provides a bit of ick factor. But more importantly, when Ruth is awakened, she goes about her morning routine by humming along to Barry's music, eventually giving Barry that last theme he needs and causing him to invite her over to help him by continuing to hum that theme.

Mrs. Langley shows up just as Ruth and Barry are talking about what a blankety-blank she is, so she gets angry enough that she decides to evict Barry right then and there and not renewing Ruth's month-to-month lease. She also plans to keep the piano since Barry owns back rent. Mr. Langley knows the rooming house across the stree takes people evicted by the Langleys, which will give Barry a place to stay, but when Langley tries to help out by moving the piano for Barry, he destroys it.

Barry needs a piano to finish up his work on the song, while Ruth is trying to get it sold to her bosses. Mr. Langley takes a risk by offering Barry and Ruth a room on an upper floor which is normally used as a remote broadcast location where the piano company airs a radio show they sponsor. Thanks to a totally coincidental mix-up, Ruth and Barry accidentally send a feed of their practice session to the radio station, with the two board ops at the station (as we'd call them today) deciding to broadcast this since it's more interesting than the lecture on birds that's supposed to go on air. The song becomes a surprise hit, and the owner of the piano factory gets a bunch of letters about it, causing him to want the two unknowns to reprise their song the next time the piano factory's show is scheduled to go out. Getting the two lovers together, however, is going to be a bit difficult because of the sort of complications you can probably predict if you've watched enough movies from this era.

By the standards of 1929, Jazz Heaven is an interesting enough movie if not spectacular by any stretch. Sally O'Neil is quite appealing here, with Johnny Mack Brown adequate. The plot, however, is fairly creaky and definitely the sort of thing that most people watching it nearly a century later would find it hard to get into. I mostly liked Jazz Heaven, but can easily see why it won't be a movie for everyone.

Born Free

Even though it's the Independence Day holiday in the United States, this being a Saturday TCM is continuing with the Two for One programming in prime time. Tonight's guest is songwriter Diane Warren, and the first of her selections is Born Free, at 8:00 PM.

Born Free is one of those movies where you probably know the basic plot synopsis already. And, to be honest, there's not a whole lot more going on in the movie beyond a basic synopsis. In the 1950s in what is now Kenya, George Adamson (Bill Travers) works as a game warden working to keep the national parks safe from poaching and keeping the locals from being harmed by wildlife rampagaing outside the parks. He lives in one of those well-appointed lodge-type houses together with his wife Joy (Travers' real-life wife Virginia McKenna) and a bunch of people working together with the responsible department for wildlife management.

One day out on patrol, George and some of his crew are attacked by a lioness and are forced to shoot in self-defence. Unfortunately, they discover the reason the lioness attacked was because she was a mama lioness defending their three cubs. It would be inhumane to shoot the cubs, so they take the cubs back to the lodge and start caring for them in the expectation that one or more zoos are going to come along to take the cubs when the time comes.

Everybody becomes attached to the cubs, whom Joy has named, with Joy becoming most attached of all. And then a zoo does come, but can only take two of the cubs. So the Adamsons keep the youngest and smallest cub, named Elsa, and continue to raise it. Elsa is relatively tame, but the freedom that the Adamsons give Elsa is the sort of thing that's bound to cause problems of mistaken identity. Worse, Elsa's lack of interest in hunting the other wild animals is going to disrupt the local balance of nature such that the wild animals can predate against the villagers.

After one such incident where Elsa more or less incites an elephant stampede, the government really starts to tighten the screws on the Adamsons giving Elsa over to a zoo. That, and there's policy that George is supposed to take a mandatory sabbatical away from his current posting. The fact that he's already survived a bout of malaria is another indication that the government policy might in fact be the right one. But in any case, it puts a pretty hard deadline on the question of what to do with Elsa.

Joy is horrified at the idea of Elsa in a zoo, so she comes up with the crazy idea that Elsa can be taught to hunt in the wild, and dammit, she and George are going to do just that so that Elsa can be integrated into a tribe. This is pretty much what the entire final third of the movie deals with.

Born Free is, as you probably know, based on a true story, with the book and movie coming out before the end of the Adamsons' story, which doesn't quite have a happy ending. The movie was filmed on location, which is a big plus, as the cinematography is mostly quite lovely apart from a few insert shots of wildlife on stampede. As for the story, a lot of people have called Born Free a family movie, a designation with which I'd largely agree. But at the same time, the story feels like one of those things that's clearly simplified like a young person's guide to history. Some people will find the story in Born Free to be a bit too pat and simple, although those people will probably not be children. Well, that is the children who can handle the fact that there are predator and prey animals and that this is shown about as explicitly as one could do in a mainstream movie of the 1960s.

Judge Hardy and Son

There were 16 movies made in the MGM Hardy family series, if you count the one from the late 1950s after Lewis Stone died. Surprisingly, I haven't done posts on all that many of them. But one of them aired on Father's Day and is getting another showing tomorrow since the plot nominally deals with July 4. That movie is Judge Hardy and Son, on TCM on July 4 at 6:30 AM.

Lewis Stone is once again Judge Hardy, who shows up at court only to find that there are no cases on the docket. That tranquility is interrupted by an immigrant couple, the Volduzzis (Maria Ousepnskaya and Egon Brecher), who have been served with a writ that they're going to have to leave their house for being unable to pay the mortgage, which seems like a surprise since Mr. Volduzzi has only been out of work for three weeks and you'd think he's old enough to receive Social Security which had been in place four four years by the time the movie was released. If they have any surviving children, perhaps she could be imposed on to do something to help them. But Mrs. Volduzzi claims their daughter is dead. Judge Hardy suspects this is a lie.

Andy is at home getting ready for the Independence Day celebrations, except that all of the innertubes in his car's tires keep bursting, leading to a bunch of financial issues yet again. He's already borrowed money from Beezy, and now he's going to borrow some from big sister Marian (Cecilia Parker) before she heads off to a cabin with friends for the holiday. Mom (Fay Holden), meanwhile, and Aunt Millie (Sara Haden) are planning to head off to their parents' house for their parents' 50th wedding anniversary.

Andy needs to do something to get more money before Polly Benedict (Ann Rutherford) returns for Independence Day. One way he hopes to do so is to help his father find that Volduzzi daughter, which involved interviewing everyone in town who has the middle initial V because a grandkid would have the middle name Volduzzi. (It wasn't uncommon in those days for people to get their mother's maiden name as a middle name.) The other idea is to win the public oratory contest by writing a speech on Alexander Hamilton. Unfortunately, he misreads the contest rules and discovers that the $50 first prize is for the best speech by a girl. A boy gets a 20-volume set of biographies of great Americans. So Andy both sees a bunch of girls his age with the middle initial V, while trying to get them to read a speech he'll write in exchange for splitting the prize money. They, not being stupid, try to blackmail Andy by making him take them to the big July 4 shinding. When Polly returns and find this out, she's going to be none too happy.

And then things take a surprisingly dark turn for a Hardy Family movie. Mom gets off the train and returns home claiming to feel unwell. The doctor diagnoses her with pleurisy, which would certainly cause her a fair deal of pain. But the the pleurisy progresses into pneumonia, which is a much more serious illness with the rest of the family worried she might die. But then, this being a Hardy Family movie, you have to expect a happy ending.

There's surprisingly a lot going on here for a 90-minute movie. Also surprisingly, it mostly meshes well. There's nothing particularly groundbreaking about Judge Hardy and Son, but watching a movie like this you can see why the series was so popular back in the day. With the lingering effects of the Depression and the war going on in Europe, something like this was just what was needed to take audiences' minds off of their daily problems. Definitely worth a watch for MGM's rose-colored view of 1939.

FBI Girl

George Brent was TCM's Star of the Month back in March, and I recorded a bunch of his movies that TCM ran. One that they didn't show was a public domain movie from late in his movie career: FBI Girl.

Now, obviously, Brent is not the title character here. In fact, you could argue that there isn't one title character, as there are multiple "FBI girls" here. In the context of the movie, they're women who work in the fingerprints divison of the FBI, pulling the cards for various law enforcement agencies that need to match prints to identities, as a brief opening narration informs us.

Cut to a generic southern state. Governor Grimsby (Raymond Greenleaf) is the governor, giving a live speech on TV to the people who are interested in the new US Senate crime committee that's coming to the state to investigate corruption. Grimsby says he looks forward to the commission since he's got nothing to hide. Now, for a movie like this, that's an obvious clue that the governor does indeed have a lot to hide, as he informs his chief advisor Blake (Raymond Burr in his bad-guy pre-Perry Mason phase). The thing is that some 20 years ago Grimsby was involved in a murder, when he was going by the name John Williams. If the crime committee suspects anything, he'll be fingerprinted, those prints will be sent to Washington, and Grimsby will be found out as Williams, ending his career. But then he's to the point where he would be relieved to get this off his conscience.

Blake, however, is having none of that, and decides that the best thing to do would be to get one of those FBI girls to remove the Williams fingerprint file. Blake knows just the girl, as Natalie Craig's brother Paul is a small-time crook who has to repay some favors. Natalie does get the file, apparently not wanting to put her brother in danger, but she screws things up just enough that one of the male employees will be able to implicate her in the subsequent investigation. Except that the investigation is into her death, as Blake has her killed in a road accident to prevent her from talking.

Worse for Blake and Grimsby is that Natalie doesn't have the file on her when she's killed. They have to come up with another way to get the file, and FBI agents Stedman (Cesar Romero) and Donley (George Brent) are on the case and begin to suspect things. They talk to Natalie's roommate Shirley Wayne (Audrey Totter), who agrees to help, although things get much more complicated when Stedman and Donley reveal that one of the people who's going to be implicated in the case is the lobbyist Chercourt (Tom Drake). That's because Chercourt is engaged to Shirley. She doesn't realize how much danger even a lowly FBI girl like her can get into in the pursuit of justice.

FBI Girl is one of those low-budget movies that, a few years later, probably would have been the subject for an episode of one of those TV shows that glorified the work of the FBI. It's not a bad movie, although it does strain credulity in a few places -- there are just too many coincidences for the case to be wrapped up so neatly and quickly. And for as ruthless as Blake is, he's also surprisingly incompetent at times.

FBI Girl is perhaps a bit more interesting as a time capsule into the way people looked at the FBI back in the early 1950s, as well as the appearance of a very young Peter Marshall back when he was still paired with Tommy Noonan. Entertaining, but there's a good reason the movie fell through the cracks.