As San Francisco antiquities dealer Philip Dressler (Raymond Bailey) disembarks from a cruise ship, a porter snatches one of his valises and tosses it into a waiting cab. The driver speeds off…directly into an eighteen-wheeler. After pulling away from that smash-up, he hits and kills a uniformed policeman. The cop does manage to fire a […]

Jewel thief “Diamond” Ed Barnaby (Walter Baldwin) has just been paroled from prison, and his loving daughter Betty (Ann Savage) is anxious to make a new life with him…but “Diamond” Ed has a few loose ends to tie up. His last job netted him a nice little haul of diamonds that he feels rightly belong […]

Though the title of the fourth entry in Columbia’s Boston Blackie series—which stars Chester Morris as reformed safecracker/jewel thief Horatio Black, the hero created by pulp fiction author Jack Boyle—affirms that Blackie and his sidekick The Runt (George E. Stone) are headed for the motion picture capital…it’s technically not the original destination on their itinerary.  […]

Character great Jack Joseph Kruschen was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba on this date in 1922.  A dues-paying member of the “Hey!  It’s That Guy!” show business fraternity, you’ve seen Jack in scores of films and TV shows.  Modern audiences remember him fondly as George “Papa” Papadopoulos, Sr. from the popular family sitcom Webster, which starred […]

It’s Christmas Eve, and reformed safecracker Horatio “Boston Blackie” Black (Chester Morris) has arranged for a vaudeville troupe to entertain the prisoners at his “alma mater” in the spirit of fellowship and good cheer.  One of the dancing girls in the company, Eve Sanders (Adele Mara), risks violating the prison rules by coming along.  She’s […]

The birth of one of radio’s most prolific and celebrated writers occurred on this date one hundred and two years ago.  David Friedkin, whose ambitions of being an actor-musician (he studied violin at the famed Julliard School) eventually took a back seat to writing for radio…and later television and movies as well.  It’s a little […]

By the beginning of the 1950s, radio crime drama began to develop a new breed of program that, in the words of old-time radio historian Jim Cox, “witnessed a forbidding side of law enforcement in the harsh realities of an urban backdrop.”  Jack Webb’s seminal police procedural Dragnet is considered by many to have been […]

Diane Parrish (Harriet Hilliard) has commissioned art dealer Eric Allison (Walter Soderling) to sell a valuable statue at an auction…but has no inkling that Allison and two of his confederates (Ralph Theodore, Kenneth MacDonald) are actually going to fob off a copy of the art treasure and keep the original for themselves.  She learns of […]