Dick Tracy

The Psychotronic Zone

By Ed Garea

Dick Tracy (RKO, 1945) – Director: William Berke. Writers: Eric Taylor (s/p), Chester Gould (comic strip). Stars: Morgan Conway, Anne Jeffreys, Mike Mazurki, Jane Greer, Lyle Latell, Joseph Crehan, Mickey Kuhn, Trevor Bardette. Morgan Wallace, Milton Parsons & William Halligan. B&W, 61 minutes.

In 1931 Chester Gould’s unique comic strip, Dick Tracy, first appeared in the pages of the Detroit Mirror. A few years and many newspapers later, it became a pop culture phenomenon, with handsome heroes fighting grotesque villains. Names such as Pruneface Boche, Flattop Jones, B.B. Eyes, Lips Manlis and Itchy Oliver became familiar in almost every household. At its height, the strip was carried in more than 800 newspapers with an estimated readership of 100 million. 

Eventually, it wasn’t long before Hollywood got in on the act. Republic Pictures was the first with its 1937 multi-chapter serial Dick Tracy. It proved so successful that the studio followed it up the next year with Dick Tracy Returns. Then followed Dick Tracy's G-Men in 1939 and Dick Tracy vs. Crime, Inc. in 1941. All of the serials starred Ralph Byrd as Tracy. 

In 1945 RKO decided to do its own take on the detective. The studio paid Gould $10,000 for the rights to make the film and brought in character actor Morgan Conway from Broadway to play Tracy. The choice of Conway was somewhat ironic as his fame in Hollywood came from playing heels.

The film opens with schoolteacher Dorothy Stafford alighting from a bus near her home. As she walks to her home in the seeming tea of night she suspects that she is being followed. She is, by a hulking man in the shadows whom we quickly recognize as Mike Mazurki. Needless to say, she never makes it home, her body found on the street by a passerby. 

Dick Tracy and his right-hand man, Pat Patton (Latell), are assigned to the case. In Stafford’s purse Dick finds a note demanding that Dorothy deposit $500 in a trash can located at a street corner near the murder scene. The note is simply signed “Splitface.” 

Shortly after, the mayor (Halligan) receives a note from Splitface. This time the demand is that $10,000 be deposited in a trash can the next evening. Dick, puzzled by the disparity in the amount of the extortion demands, examines Dorothy's records and finds the name Wilbur Thomas. Dick and Pat drive to the Thomas home, only to discover Thomas' body in the driveway, his throat slit in the same manner as Dorothy's. 

Following the murderer's footprints, Dick sees a man enter the backyard of Thomas' neighbor, Steven Owens (Wallace). As Dick questions Owens, Pat slips into the house through a rear window, later telling Dick that he found bloodstains on the carpet. Now suspicious of Owens, Dick learns that he is the owner of the Paradise Club. After finishing at Owens' house, Dick and Pat return to inspect Thomas' body. They find a business card from the Paradise Club lying next to the corpse. 

The following evening, a trap is set with the extortion money, but no one shows to claim it. Dick begins to suspect that the victims were targeted by a killer and must share some common thread. Following the obvious lead, Dick invites his sweetheart Tess Trueheart (Jeffreys) to accompany him while he checks out the Paradise Club. There, Dick is greeted by Owens' daughter Judith (Greer). She tells him that she saw a strange man in the garden and gives Dick a key to the house. At the house, Dick and Tess discover that the electricity has been turned off, and while Dick goes to look for the fuse box, Tess sees a man with a hideous scar across his face run out of a closet and speed away in his car. 

Dick jumps into his car and trails the man to a brownstone. Dick climbs to the roof, where he finds Professor Linwood J. Starling (Bardette) looking at the stars through a telescope. When questioned, Starling denies seeing Splitface and Dick insists on searching his room. Finding a knife under Starling's mattress, Dick questions the professor about the weapon. Starling just gazes into his crystal ball, then goes into a trance and tells Tracy that 14 will die and there are 12 more to go. Just then, the police break down the door to the professor's room, awakening him from the trance and hauling him to headquarters for further questioning. This is all watched from the roof by Splitface. 

Thinking that the scar may be a mere disguise, Dick takes Tess back to the Paradise Club to see if she can identify Owens as Splitface. Judith informs them that her father has disappeared, hinting the reason has something to do with him owing large gambling debts. Dick becomes suspicious of Judith's jittery behavior and takes her into protective custody. Meanwhile, Pat has traced the knife found in Starling's room to a surgical supply store, where he learns that an undertaker named Deathridge (Parsons) purchased three of the knives. Dick goes to question Deathridge, who claims that the knives have simply disappeared. But when he asks about Starling, Dick’s suspicions are aroused and he believes there is a connection between the undertaker and the professor.

At headquarters, Dick tricks Starling into revealing what he knows about Deathridge. Dick's plan is to bring Starling and Deathridge face to face. But he is thwarted when Deathridge is found murdered, his throat slit like the others. When he returns to headquarters from investigating the undertaker's murder, Dick learns that Starling has been released on bail. Starling hurries home and begins packing his suitcase when he hears a rapping on the window. It’s Splitface, who calls the professor up to the roof, where he accuses Starling of drawing police attention by sending extortion demands to Splitface's victims. Starling tries to explain his actions, but Splitface  slits the professor's throat. When Dick arrives at Starling's apartment, he finds the extortion money on the professor's body and realizes that Starling has been extorting money from Splitface's intended victims and that Deathridge was  killed because he knew too much.

Mulling over Starling's prediction about 14 victims, Dick concludes that 14 is the number of people that serve on a jury. Dick questions the mayor about any jury experience he might have had, and the mayor remembers being a juror at the trial of Alexis Banning. After being convicted of murdering his wife, Banning swore revenge on the jury. A check of the records reveals that Banning is at large. Learning that Banning was scarred across the face in prison, Tracy identifies him as Splitface. With the murderer identified, Judith decides to leave the Tracy house, even though her father is still missing. When Tess calls Dick to inform him of Judith's departure, Splitface breaks into the house and takes Tess hostage, grabbing the phone to warn Dick to call off the police. 

As Splitface speeds away in his car with Tess, Tracy Jr., Dick's adopted son (Kuhn), jumps onto the back of the car, throwing off pieces of his clothing along the way to create a trail. Dick follows Junior’s trail to the docks and an abandoned riverboat where Splitface is holding Tess and Junior. After subduing Splitface, Dick promises to take Tess to dinner, but is called away to solve another crime.

Afterwords

Dick Tracy makes for an excellent debut film in a series that eventually reached four films before the studio pulled the plug. Conway reprised his role as Tracy in the sequel, Dick Tracy vs. Cueball (1946), but though his Tracy was praised by critics and Gould himself as the closest to the original concept, exhibitors complained. To them, Byrd was Dick Tracy, and only Byrd would do. RKO acquiesced and hired him to finish the series: Dick Tracy’s Dilemma and Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome (both 1947). Unfortunately for Byrd, because of this he spent the rest of his career typecast as Dick Tracy.

Dick Tracy is a fast-moving film, even given its running time of only 61 minutes, barely giving the audience a chance to rest. Director William Berke and cameraman Frank Redman make good use of the sets, giving the film a noir flavor, especially evident in the neighborhood (RKO’s back lot in Encino) scenes at the beginning of the film. These lend the picture an eerie sort of noir atmosphere. Other sets used include the riverboat from Man Alive (1945) and the brownstone from The Magnificent Ambersons and Cat People (both 1942).

The film is also faithful to the source material. Though the villain, Splitface, was created by screenwriter Eric Taylor, it fits the classic mold of Gould's villains, often named for their physical attributes or deformities, and is even seen by some bloggers as an actual villain from the comic strip.

The performances are uniformly good. Conway makes for an excellent Tracy, though Jeffreys has little to do in her role as Tracy’s long-suffering sweetheart. Her only highlight is when she crosses swords with Jane Greer’s Judith Owens. Speaking of Greer, this was her film debut. She followed the usual path of young actors who were first tried out in B’s to see if the public liked them before being pushed into A-films. Likewise, Kuhn, whose career highlight until then was as Beau Wilkes in GWTW, has little to do as Junior, aside from fingerprinting Dick to see if he had raided the fridge the night before and following Splitface to his hiding place. Lyle Latell does a fine job in the comic relief role of Pat Patton and Joseph Crehan provides solid support as Chief Brandon, who always has Tracy’s back.

Like all the movies in the series, it’s the villains who move it along, and Mike Mazurki is excellent as Splitface. An actor who originally moonlighted in Hollywood from his regular job as professional wrestler “Iron” Mike Mazurki, he made enough of an impact in Tinseltown to be employed for over 50 years, usually in character roles as dimwitted muscle, which belied the fact that he graduated with honors from Manhattan College in New York with a B.A., where he also starred on the wrestling team, and earned a law degree from Fordham. However, wrestling paid more than being a lawyer and Mazurki opted for the mat. He broke into movies in 1934 with help from Mae West, and his best known role was as Moose Malloy in the 1944 classic Murder, My Sweet. Offstage, he founded The Cauliflower Alley Club in the mid-60s, a fraternal non-profit organization for retired wrestlers, boxers, actors and stuntmen. Mazurki passed away in 1990. His daughter, Michelle Mazurki, carries on the thespian tradition.

Mazurki is aided in his villainy by the underrated Trevor Bardette, who had been playing heels since the silent days, and Milton Parsons, who somehow made everyone he played a bit creepy.

How We Know It’s Low-Budget, Department: When Tracy arrives at the Professor’s place and finds his body, he goes through the pockets and removes the $1,000 that the Professor had extorted from Thomas. Upon closer inspection, it seems to be money from the game of Monopoly.

Trivia

After the RKO series ended, Gould and the Famous Artists Syndicate were interested in resuming the series in 1948 with the specification that Conway be restored to the title role, but the series was not revived.

According to the TCM essay on the film by Roger Fristoe, Gould himself was asked to review the film for the Chicago Tribune. "The gentleman with whom I had shared sweat, blood and tears for almost 15 years – Dick Tracy in the flesh – Morgan Conway's flesh, to be exact – [is] right on the screen at the Palace," he wrote. "And for once he did the talking and I listened. I felt pretty helpless, too, because I couldn't use a piece of art gum to change his face or hat, and what he said came from a script and not from a stubby old lead pencil held by yours truly." 

The movies were not the only Tracy vehicle outside the comics. There was a radio show, which ran from 1934 to 1948; a 30-minute television show, Dick Tracy, which starred Ralph Byrd and ran on ABC from 1950 until the star’s untimely death from a heart attack in 1952; a dreadful cartoon show, The Dick Tracy Show, produced by UPA from 1961-62 with Everett Sloane (Citizen Kane, The Lady From Shanghai) wasted as the voice of Tracy; and the famous 1990 Touchstone film with Warren Beatty as the detective. Filmed in loud primary colors to emulate the feeling of the comic strip, Beatty, who was reluctant to take on the role, but acquiesced when shown the money, insured there would be no sequels, no matter how popular the movie proved to be, by wiping out all the villains.

In 1961 the Chants had a hit on Verve with the doowop/R&B “Dick Tracy.”