Customer Reviews

Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome [VHS]

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Boris Karloff certainly looks the part as the recently released convict named Gruesome. The nerve gas story is corny as is the bank robbery scene especially when one bloke is frozen just as he is about to sneeze. Ralph Byrd returns as Dick Tracy and he later starred in the early 50's TV series. People who are familiar with the B movies of the 1940's will recognise character actors Milton Parsons and Skelton Knaggs as a professor and his assistant respectively. If you feel like going on a nostalgia trip watch this.

In DICK TRACY MEETS GRUESOME the famous detective is able to trick Gruesome by placing a false story in the newspapers about another criminal who is going to squeal on Gruesome. Boris Karloff plays the part of Gruesome and he dominates the movie. Ralph Byrd has the role of Dick Tracy and Anne Gwynne is Tess Truehart.

The film was a big success for a "B" movie in both the United States and in Great Britain.

Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome, 1947 film

The film begins at night, outside a bar called "Hangman's Knot". A man enters, a couple dances. Gruesome meets Melody. They go to a business "Wood Plastics". Gruesome inspects the safe, he was warned about the contents. The police pick up his body. Dick Tracy is called. A scientist tells of his fears. That body comes to life and slugs Pat. Where is he? The gang watches the bank. The gas bomb goes off, people are frozen in place. [But the villains are not affected!] Tess Truehart is unaffected and calls Dick Tracy about the bank robbery. A guard is shot. The police question the people. This news must be censored to prevent bank runs! News reporter Dan agrees to delay his report. This gas has unknown chemistry.

Physicist Dr. A. Tomic has disappeared. His assistant Professor Irma M. Learned helps Dick Tracy. "X-Ray" meets Gruesome and Melody, but Gruesome wants a bigger cut. "It's him, Dick!" The villains escape, a car chase provides action until the car crashes into the "Y. Stuffum" taxidermy shop. [Comic relief.] Gruesome escaped. The witnesses are questioned. We learn about another villain working with this gang. "We can't risk being seen together." Dick Tracy has a hunch about Prof. Learned, and warns her. She calls her friend and leaves. Gruesome meets her, she won't talk. "What would you do without me?" Gruesome can't be easily fooled. "They're on there way up." [Was that Lex Barker in that white coat?] "Start up the fire." Can Dick Tracy escape? Shots are fired. Gruesome falls. The last scene provides some comedy.

Note the cast of villains in this film. The criminals in the cartoon all had some distinctive feature, a fantasy from some criminologist that is long out of date. [This was copied in some of the "James Bond" stories.] This cartoon strip appealed to adults like some cartoons on TV today. Some claimed the character and face of "Dick Tracy" was based on Eliot Ness. The background of these stories show life in the 1940s.

Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome is one hour and five minutes and was released in theaters on September 26, 1947 and of the four Dick Tracy's movies, this is the longest one of them all. Also, this movie has some fun with some of the characters names like: Dr. A. Tomic, Professor I. M. Learned, and X-Ray. When Pat Patton is in a taxidermy store, there is a sign on the wall that says Y Stuffem. Also Junior and Vitamin Flinthart are not in this one. The Pat Patton character provides some comic relief, but is not dim witted as in the last two films. Basically the plot reviles around Gruesome, who just escaped from prison and is hooked up with his old crime buddy Melody, a piano player. To make a long story short Gruesome steals with the aide of a scientist formula to freeze people for a short amount of time while they rob a bank. Dick Tracy finds out and tries to save the day. The in the final battle between Dick Tracy and Gruesome is play out like one of the cliff hanger chapters in the Dick Tracy Republic Pictures serials. This movie marks the fourth and final installment of the Dick Tracy movies. Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome gets an AAA+++.

This is a fine and fast-moving B-movie with no pretensions and a running time of 1 hour and a little change. Ralph Byrd does his good old dependable Dick Tracy, which is a darn sight better than the Warren Beatty version, and Anne Gywnne is a sexy and spunky Tess Trueheart, but the villains are the real show. The guy playing X-ray is really creepy and looks like a true degenerate, and Boris Karloff does an expert turn playing a sociopath. This villain is a little more subtle than your typical Karloff character, and if you watch him, you really can see what a pro the guy was, how deftly he could go from mood to mood, making it look easy.

The strange names of the characters and the freezing gas are the tribute this film pays to its comic strip origins, but there is also a strong noir influence, which makes perfect sense, being as this flick was made at the height of the film noir period. The Karloff character, Gruesome, is a classic film noir sociopath. Too bad Karloff didn't more gangster roles; it might have been a second career for him.

An interesting note: the villians' plot involves paralyzing bank employees and customers while they loot the joint. One of our heroes proclaims that this scheme has the potential of completely devastating confidence in the banking system and could cause a run on the banks, a 1930's type bank panic. Thus the villians' plot is called a "war on small investors." Writing this review in November, 2008, about 1 month after Congress gave over $700 billion to a banking industry that squandered the nation's money, I am tempted to draw some kind of analogy or make an ironical statement. But for some reason, it seems unnecessary.

The only real flaw in this movie is the seemingly obligatory corny joke at the end, which clashes badly with the overall tone of the movie, and is pretty lame in its own right. That said, the otherwise excellent execution of this vehicle and my fondness for a Hollywood that made comic strip adaptations that were neither campy nor bloated, overdone pieces of self-indulgent narcissism, leaves me inclined to forgive the director.

Originated by Chester Gould's syndicated comic strip, Dick Tracy has been a durable cinematic character with appearances ranging from 1930s serials to an over-hyped 1990 blockbuster-style motion picture starring Warren Beatty and Madonna--but the character's film appearances are perhaps most fondly recalled from the 1940s RKO Pictures series. Written with stacco dialogue and seldom running more than an hour, they were welcome "B" movies at almost every matinee.

The 1947 DICK TRACY MEETS GRUESOME is very typical of the series in terms of style, plot, and Ralph Byrd, who frequently played the character; it is atypical in the sense that it also features a major star, none other than Boris Karloff, who appears as Gruesome. In this particular tale, the criminal Gruesome is taken to meet a mysterious professor--and through him stumbles onto a chemical that makes people freeze in their tracks for several minutes. It's an ideal weapon for a bank heist, but Gruesome runs afoul of Tess Trueheart (Anne Gwynne, popular WWII pin-up and "B" actress in such titles as FLASH GORDON CONQUERS THE UNIVERSE and HOUSE OF FRANKENSTEIN), who is on the scene and unaffected. Tess manages to alert Tracy and the manhunt is soon underway.

The film makes use of cartoonist Gould's knack for odd names--on this occasion including Dr. A. Tomic--and shoot-'em-up action, and Karloff scores a particularly menancing turn with, of all things, a furnace. No one would accuse it of being high-end or particularly inventive, but it is a fun little flick of its time; while casual viewers will find it very slight, Tracy fans will have fun.

GFT, Amazon Reviewer

I don't know what the prints from other "public domain" labels (Alpha, Brentwood, etc.) look like, but you can't beat this one for this low price. While you certainly have to lower your expectations whenever you get one of these public domain titles, this is much better than average ("average" being washed out and grainy), so it's good enough for me. (All the Digiview titles read "Digitally Remastered" on the packaging. Ha!) This is an entertaining entry in RKO's short-lived Dick Tracy series, and a good example of efficient B-movie filmmaking.

In days of old, a B-movie did not arrive with high expectations. It had to not distract from the main feature and be decent enough that the audience not demand their money back. Pretty low goals.

Now that these films have remained around and available to buy, we still don't expect much. All I hope for is that they won't cost a lot (they don't), and that training my eyes on the television screen while they're playing ends up being more entertaining than if I had shifted my gaze a meter to the left and watched the wall for the ninety minutes instead.

By these admittedly low standards, DICK TRACY MEETS GRUESOME succeeds. But it gains as much value from its ineptitude as it does from its genuinely good points. This is not a problem if all you seek is bare entertainment.

As you may have guessed, given that this is a crime/thriller based on a pulp comic strip, there are a huge number of familiar clichés present. There's tough guys, see? And wise-guys, see? And classy broads, see? And heels who turn their sentences into questions by sticking the word "see" at the end of them, see?

This makes the movie fun on one level, though if you're not in the mood for this, each successive stereotypical touchstone makes the movie that much more tedious. However, you really should be in the mood for this -- or at least expecting this sort of thing -- just by looking at the title.

Let's keep talking about the title, because that allows us to discuss the main characters: Dick Tracy and Gruesome. Dick Tracy is ostensibly the star of the film, but Gruesome gets top billing in the cast list. Understandably, this is because Gruesome is played by Boris Karloff and Dick Tracy is not. I'm no great expert in Dick Tracy lore, but I was slightly disappointed by the character in this movie. Tracy is one of the blandest detectives I've ever seen. He's not a smooth talker; he's doesn't posses a formidable mind. In fact, he doesn't even have any cool gadgets (at least not in this movie).

That said, Gruesome isn't particularly interesting, either. If he wasn't played by Boris Karloff, I'm sure he wouldn't have appeared in the title. He's an ordinary thug, who's a bit more cruel than the other villains in this movie, but nothing compared to classic baddies in other films. (To be fair, there is one thing that distinguishes him. He accidentally dies and then comes back to life early in the movie. But that has nothing to do with his character, and everything to do with the mysterious chemical he ingests. You may think that dying and coming back to life would add a supernatural flavor to the film, but it doesn't. Gruesome dies horribly, is rescued from the afterlife, and then it's never ever mentioned again.)

The story involves Gruesome and a band of very generic bad guys. They use a factory called "Wood Plastics Inc." as their hideout. That name must be nicely inconspicuous, as it should blend in with all the other plastic companies that make their product out of wood. Gruesome and his gang obtain a chemical gas that induces paralysis. Naturally, they use this gas to rob a bank. As an aside, I must point out that this is a seriously powerful chemical. It paralyzes everything! It freezes a man who's about to sneeze, causing him to be stuck with his nose in the air and a pained expression on his face. It freezes gravity and stops the fabric on people's clothes from moving.

I'm joking, of course. What the gas actually does is to nip outside the film projector and hit the pause button. This allows the criminals to sneak around the paused footage and help themselves to the bank's contents.

Since it's up to Tracy to solve the crime, he turns to the police detective's secret weapon: SCIENCE! These scenes are the most entertaining moments in the film. The screenwriters were obviously aware of this thing we humans call "science", but were a bit confused as to how it actually works. For example, a physicist's job is to create experimental chemicals, presumably just to see what will happen (apparently chemists do not exist in the Dick Tracy universe). When a smart detective is confronted with a new, strange, unknown chemical compound, his initial method of determining its properties is to eat it.

Still, one gets the idea that scientific accuracy was not high on the priorities list. And the writers take the opportunity of inventing appropriately goofy names for the science folks. The physicist is named Dr. A. Tomic and is assisted by the able Professor Learned, who is -- shock -- a girl! (A broad that digs science, see?)

The plot moves in very expected motions. The only thing that makes this movie in any way unpredictable is the fact that pieces of it don't make any sense and therefore defy prediction. I think the best way to enjoy this film is to take it as a series of individual scenes. Don't worry how the current scene will affect the next one and don't worry about how the last scene affects this one. Broken into pieces this way, the movie hangs together fine.

I'm reviewing the Digiview Productions version and the picture/sound quality are surprisingly good. There are no extras, but since they only charge you a buck, the fact that you can use the movie side of the DVD disc as a shaving mirror is more bonus than you should expect.

Although this is the only Dick Tracy movie I've seen, I'm guessing there are better ones out there. That said, this movie will have you laughing at it as often as you laugh with it. And if all you're looking for is a laugh, then you should be at least satisfied with this.