Watch Boston Blackie Booked on Suspicion For Free

That was an excellent one.

Redundant and unnecessary.

A Masterpiece!

The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

I just chanced upon this Blackie episode without having seen others since I was very young. It is a cut above most of the series of its time. Chester Morris, not unlike his counterparts like William Powell, the Thin Man, had a sparkle that carried the series. He also has a set of quite funny sidekicks. In this one, a man creates a phony first edition of Dickens' "Pickwick Papers." It is auctioned off for more the 60,000 dollars and later discovered to be a fake. Blackie gets framed for the business. It's always interesting how a policeman like Detective Faraday can constantly assume that Blackie is responsible for every crime committed in the city. Even though he has apprehended numerous bad men. There is an interesting Femme Fatale in this one to keep things interesting. Pretty good work for Morris.

There are a ton of books pulled off the shelves of used book stores and thrift shops to be used as props in this intellectual entry of the "Boston Blackie" series. It's all about the theft of a first edition of Charles Dickens' "The Pickwick Papers" and a murder that follows. Blackie's in disguise for a great auction sequence, one of the best, along with 1941's "All Through the Night" and Hitchcock's "North by Northwest". Blackie is in cahoots with Richard Lane's inspector, losing the buffoonish quality of earlier episodes when they were more foes. George E. Stone and Lloyd Corrigan are once again featured, with Lynn Merrick an excellent femme fatale. Some clever use of shadows and very tight editing make this one of the better later entries in the series. This entry doesn't throw its intelligence in the viewer's face, but grabs them, pulls them in like a great novel, and keeps them involved. Is it any wonder that later screenwriters, directors and technicians point to the B films of the 1940's as to why they got into the film industry?

Chester Morris is the glue to the entire series and here is no exception as Morris is really solid as Blackie. In this case Lynne Merrick is excellent as the devious woman who seems to be smarter than everyone including Blackie. She actually has him snowed until he catches her with her crooked boyfriend late in the film.She outsmarts the cops and even late in the film appears that she might slip out of Blackies trap. Merrick is the major add in this movie that makes it above average.The ending is humor and the acting rises above a script with some major holes in it to carry the day.

I have seen nearly every Boston Blackie film they've made and while I really like Chester Morris' title character, the films suffered much more from repetition than other B-movie detective series films. Some of this could have been because they made so many Blackie films--other than Charlie Chan, I can't think of another series of the era that had as many films. But sometimes it was just sloppy writing. While this is generally an enjoyable film, there were just too many similarities to other films--the black-face scene (which is very tacky, I know), Blackie being stuck in the chute and is trapped by the police between floors in the apartment building, and the idiot Inspector and his even more imbecilic assistant--it's all rehashed.Now how much you enjoy the film really depends on your familiarity with the series. If you are new to it, then it you'll no doubt enjoy it immensely (maybe even giving it a 7 or 8) but if you've seen many of them, there just isn't enough new and worthwhile about this pretty standard film. At least, however, the main plot idea of a forged valuable book IS new and interesting.