***Out In The 1950s B-Film Noir Night- William Berke’s Roaring City

DVD Review

 From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Roaring City, starring Huge Beaumont, directed by William Berke, 1951       

 

Not every Frisco private detective got the high profile, potentially lucrative, cases a shamus like Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade got chasing skirts, fists and bullets, and some damn bird, a bird who turned out to be the stuff of dreams. Or had Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles Philip Marlowe’s luck  wrapping himself around some wild twist of a General Sternwood’s daughter while trying to placate an old man’s shattered dreams, and bringing a little rough justice to this wicked old world by bringing one gangster Eddie Mars down to the ground. Some operatives like our gumshoe Dennis O’Brien in the film under review, Roaring City, got the leavings, the stuff Spade (and even the late Miles Archer, his partner) and Marlowe left for the amateurs and part-timers.

 

Yes, O’Brien was spending most of his waking hours trying to make his coffee and cakes on the side by renting out boats in the Frisco Bay day when he got a couple of calls, a couple of cases, for cheap dough, a couple of skirt chases and plenty of fists in the face for his efforts. Let me tell you about them.   

 

First off our boy grabbed a couple of hundred buck (well only a hundred since the rest was supposed to be paid on completion, a completion that never occurred once the client turned up dead, very dead) for a case he really wanted no part of but the rent was due, he was bored, or some other reason known only to him.  The client; a local boxing promoter who just for that cheap dough wanted O’Brien to place some bets with the bookies against his “champ.”

 

Now nobody over the age of twelve believes that the pugilistic arts are anything but rigged but it was pretty raw for a guy to bet against his own man so openly (it seemed everybody in the Bay Area knew what was going down-except the cops). And naturally the promoter got his just rewards in the end for sullying the name of the game. Of course, as well, a twist was in the way working for a low-down bookie looking to make a big score. No dice. But along the way to “no dice” O’Brien suffered multiple fists, murders done (with him as the fall guy to take the rap), and an off-hand kiss or too from that twist (don’t worry our boy unlike Sam Spade will not go through hoops for a dame, no way, although he can handle that kissing part just fine). No question though this is one key-hole peeper who earned his damn one- hundred dollars.

So did our shop-worn private eye learn anything from that cheapjack experience.  No.  Next up O’Brien tangled with a scheme hatched up by a couple of femmes, Irma and her step-daughter Sylvia, for cheap dough (a measly one-hundred bucks). Tangled up too with fists, bullets and piled up bodies. But what can a guy, any guy and not just low-rent private detectives, expect when he tangles with femmes. The idea was that O’Brien was paid to be “married” to Sylvia to avoid retribution from an old gangster lover who was now back in the country after being on the lam for a while. Said Sylvia had fallen in love with another guy named Fallon and she doesn’t want him hurt.

 

Of course that is just the cock and bull cover story. The real deal was if that gangster lover went to his final reward before the femme then she got to cash in thirty-thousand dollars’ worth of bonds that he has stashed away (yeah, I know, tip money today and not really much then either-no enough to get three guys killed over). That is where the second femme, Irma, came in and gummed up the works. She was just a greedy little hustler who killed Fallon, the lover that O’Brien was standing in for. In reaction Sylvia killed her gangster lover and his gunsel thinking they had done her beau Fallon in.

Yes a mess, no question. And the fall guy all set to take the frame. Well, you know who. But you also know Mrs. O’Brien did not raise a fool and so he was not ready for any big step-off just because of some daft scheme by some chiseling femmes and so he walked away clean after delivering the ladies to their just step-off rewards. Leaving O’Brien, well leaving O’Brien wishing like hell that Sam’s Brigit had showed up at his door looking for a jewel-encrusted bird. Or maybe Philip’s leavings, twisted Carmen Sternwood maybe, showed up looking, well, looking for a man.