Silly Berke

When we queued up Treasure of Monte Cristo/Roaring City/Sky Liner (1949/1951/1949), I didn’t realize that we were getting a short seminar on director William Berke. It turns out he was one of those B movie masters who just cranked them out. According to Wikipedia, he once got a big budget and relaxed shooting schedule, and still turned the picture around in 12 days. He also seemed to go for real fun rousing adventure movies.

Treasure of Monte Cristo is a great example. It starts with a little narration about the Edmund Dante’s treasure, now lost. Then we meet Dante’s modern day descendant, Glenn Langan (The Amazing Colossal Man), a sailor on shore leave in San Francisco. He hears a woman in trouble and goes to her rescue. When he drives off her attackers, she (Adele Jergens) tells her story: She is an heiress, but her people control the money until she is 25 or married - but if she dies, they get it. She finally begs Langan to marry her, in name only, so she can get control. When he marries her, she disappears, leaving a note letting him know where she is being held. When he gets there (climbing the building into an upstairs window, a man is murdered, and he is left to take the rap. Crooked lawyer Steve Brodie defends him, but actually throws the case, leaving him on Death Row.

I’m sure you can see where this is going - he was framed so that she, his widow, can get the treasure he didn’t know he had. There are intrigues, courtroom scenes, fist and gun fights, prison escapes, and everything you could want from a B movie adventure.

Roaring City also set in San Francisco. Hugh Beaumont has a place on the docks where he rents boats and does favors. A man comes in and asks him to place a large bet on a has-been boxer, so that word won’t get around that the fight is fixed. But the boxer drops dead, the young defender is found murdered, the bet was placed in the name of... Actually, I couldn’t follow this one. But it was full of exciting stuff. Also, it seems to be based on the old Jack Webb radio shows “Pat Novak for Hire”/“Johnny Madeiro”. There’s even the old drunk professor that does some legwork. There isn’t a lot of Webb’s poetic hardboiled dialog, but there’s enough.

In Sky Liner, FBI agent Richard Travis must retrieve stolen top secret papers from an airplane going from Washington DC to the west coast, aided by stewardess Pamela Blake. The movie isn’t set 100% on the plane, but a good amount is. Of course, since it is the 40s, they land several times, and also, there’s a lot of room to wander around. This may not have been the best of the batch, or maybe it’s just that we were getting Berke fatigue. Still a fun B if you like that kind of thing.

And that concludes by movie blogging for 2018. I’ll try to do a wrap up - after resisting for years, I now embrace the year-end post. See you in the new year.