Watch Big Town After Dark For Free

To me, this movie is perfection.

Am i the only one who thinks........Average?

A film with more than the usual spoiler issues. Talking about it in any detail feels akin to handing you a gift-wrapped present and saying, "I hope you like it -- It's a thriller about a diabolical secret experiment."

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

Phillip Reed, newspaper editor, gets himself sweet-talked into hiring the owner's niece, Ann Gillis, who supposedly is attending college and looking for a reporters job. She's not and instead dupes him into looking into the goings-on at a local gambling house, The Winners Club. Reed calls out one of the parlor's operatives for dealing from the bottom of the deck and is quickly overtaken by the club's thugs and drug into meet the owner of this seedy establishment, Richard Travers. After a beating by Travers' gang, Reed ends up hospitalized and wondering what happened to Gillis. Believing that Gillis has been kidnapped, the paper owner, Charles Arnt, is shaken down by Travers for $50,000. Reed then goes on a crusade to expose the gang and recover the $50,000. Hillary Brooke et al is called in to assist with the effort. The plot becomes obvious although the ending had a nice twist. It's pretty slow going overall with low production values. Just a time waster at best.

This was the first movie I watched in a DVD collection of 50 "Crime Classics" from Mill Creek that I found in Movie Stop for $6.99. At about 14 cents per movie, I thought it was a pretty good deal. I was glad to see that this was a good transfer and the black and white detail was sharp.This isn't quite film noir, but one can see a film noir influence. There are lots of night shots, characters who have psychological problems and a near femme fatale in Ann Gillis.This is a B movie with "C" sets and a "B" script. It moves well and has some unexpected and unusual twists. There's nothing to knock your socks off, but the dialogue is sharp enough to get you smiling here and there.Hillary Brook is her usual blonde ice self. She has an ephemeral presence, just floating through her scenes delivery her lines well, but without much thought or emotion.The story is gallant and savvy newspaper reporters battling crooks. Watch for a funny inside reference to the classic newspaper play "The Front Page" at the beginning.I understand from the reviews that there were three other Big Town movies. I am looking forward to seeing them, and looking forward to watching the 45 or so more movies in this collection that I haven't seen.

Although rather intricately plotted, "Big Town After Dark" finds itself in rather unbelievable territory for most of it's run. The appearance of some of my favorite character actors of the era saves the picture for me, with the likes of Hillary Brooke, Joe Sawyer and Vince Barnett on hand. I always enjoyed seeing Brooke in a bunch of those Abbott and Costello TV episodes playing the next door neighbor, but she also popped up in a fair amount of these 1940's programmers. In this one, she's a newspaper reporter with a recently published novel who gives notice to her editor boyfriend Steve Wilson (Phillip Reed) of the Illustrated Press. With no time to gloat over painting Wilson into a corner at the newspaper, she's immediately replaced by the niece of the publisher, who has a few secrets of her own. The rest of the story plays out in a gambling joint called the Winner's Club, with publisher Amos Peabody (Charles Arnt) suckered for a fifty thousand dollar stake in the club courtesy of his niece Susan's (Ann Gillis) elaborate scam. All of this would have been unbelievable enough, but the coup de grace occurs when it's revealed that Susan is actually married to the owner of the Winner's Club, Chuck LaRue (Richard Travis). Up to that point though, she'd been playing every guy who'd give her a tumble, including Wilson and Larue's own henchman Jake Sebastian (Robert Kent). Too bad little Suzie didn't think this one out far enough, she never got to spend her uncle's money.Somehow it didn't seem to be much of a prerequisite for these era films to maintain a semblance of real time continuity. Case in point - editor Wilson decides to run the full story on the fifty grand shakedown, and the very next minute LaRue calls to ask him why? How did he know? But I guess it's this kind of goofy stuff that keeps me coming back to these early flicks. That and getting a kick out of seeing which players eventually show up.

A typical reporter crime movie. As usual, there is a crack female reporter and her sidekick, the guy she loves, who's having to go it alone. Enter a little 21 year old femme fatale who plays the innocent and disrupts things. She is trouble from the start, but the blinders are on and she manages to work things up. She has connections to a gang that runs a gambling palace in Big Town. Anyway, this is pretty much what you would expect. There are misleading clues, bad judgments, sloppy reporting, just plain carelessness. It's interesting how these guys get themselves into life and death situations and don't bother to have any backup. Suffice it to say, even though the big lug has a fixation on this little woman, it's the rock solid older woman who pulls him back to his senses. Unfortunately, he ends up in the hospital in the process. A decent film, but no new territory.