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Ron Miller's DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 9, No. 19 |
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THE STRANGE STORY OF PIER 23  From left, Tom Neal, the B-movie star of "Detour"; Pamela Blake, Virginia Dale and Hugh Beaumont of TV's "Leave It To Beaver" in "Danger Zone," first in a curious early 1950s movie series based on a Jack Webb radio series. |
How Webb's radio show became a movie series
of TheColumnists.com
In 1951, movie producer Robert L. Lippert had a sudden inspiration: He decided to launch a series of low budget mystery movies about a part-time private eye who ran a boat supply business out of Pier 23 along the Embarcadero in San Francisco's waterfront.
Now, when I say "low budget," I mean really low budget. Lippert, in 1951, was the reigning king of Grade Z schlock movies and he held that crown until Roger Corman seized it a few years later with films like "Monster From the Ocean Floor" and "Day the World Ended" that didn't even use up the whole shoestring they were made on.
To play Denny O'Brien, his cynical gumshoe hero, Lippert hired small-time B-movie actor Hugh Beaumont, who had been in pictures since the early 1940s, but wouldn't even begin to have any nationwide name recognition until he was cast as Ward Cleaver, the quintessential American TV sitcom dad in CBS' "Leave It to Beaver" in 1957.
To fill out the cast, Lippert Pictures checked around to see which low-rent character actors listed in the Academy Players Directory were currently looking for work and not being too particular about how much they might be getting paid over the union minimum. He hired Ed Brophy, Richard Travis, Tom Neal, Ann Savage and others like them. You know, people who look awfully familiar, but you're not sure if you saw their faces in the movies or on WANTED posters in the post office.
Lippert had this brilliant concept working. He would make several films of about 60 minutes duration each, but would have Denny O'Brien solve TWO cases per movie, each in about 30 minutes. Then, when the movies had finished their brief, but hopefully profitable run in theaters on the bottom half of double bills, he would cut each movie in half and then sell them all as a half-hour TV series for syndication to local TV stations.
But Lippert wasn't content to just squeeze all the profit juice out of these movies once they were made. He wanted to economize as much as possible before going into production. That's apparent when you realize the movie series was nothing more than a thinly-disguised rehash of a radio series called "Pat Novak For HIre" that Jack Webb had created, along with writer Richard Breen, in the late 1940s, some years before Webb had created the radio series--later a TV series and movie-- that made him famous: "Dragnet."
In Webb's radio series, Pat Novak was a part-time sleuth who also ran a boat supply business on San Francisco's Pier 19. He was a cynical, film noir sort of gumshoe in the Raymond Chandler/Dashiell Hammett hardboiled tradition. The local police detective bureau man he dealt with each week was played by Raymond Burr, long before his "Perry Mason" days on television. Webb played Pat Novak with the dry, "just the facts" style he made famous as Sgt. Joe Friday on "Dragnet."
Webb's radio series was produced at KGO Radio in San Francisco and was heard only on the West Coast until ABC Radio picked it up and turned it into a national series for a one season run of 26 weeks.
Apparently Lippert Pictures just adapted several "Pat Novak For Hire" radio plays for the screen. Whether or not Jack Webb or anybody else were paid for the rights to those stories remains to be seen. The characters and situations in the three movies Lippert finally produced--"Danger Zone," "Roaring City" and "Pier 23"--were virtually copies of episodes from the Pat Novak radio show.
To even further blur the lines between the Pat Novak/Denny O'Brien similarity, you should know that Jack Webb also produced yet another San Francisco-based detective series for radio, still years before "Dragnet," which he called "Johnny Madero, Pier 23." It ran as a series on the Mutual radio network from April 24-Sept. 4, 1947. And, you guessed it, Johnny Madero was a part-time sleuth and boat supply dealer operating, this time, from Pier 23.
Lippert's master plan to make a series of detective movies he could later convert to a television series probably didn't really work too well. Hardly anybody saw the three feature films that came from the deal--they were strictly bottom-of-the-barrel in terms of public awareness--and I see no signs that anybody ever embraced the idea of a six-episode TV series or that Lippert even got around to slicing the movies up and even trying to make that happen.
But I must say I retain a certain affection for the "Pier 23" movies. I saw them in my junior high school days when they played The New Santa Cruz Theatre in my hometown of Santa Cruz, CA, and rather liked them. Though it may seem difficult to imagine Hugh Beaumont as a cynical private eye these days, after knowing him so well as the "suit-and-tie" father of Beaver and Wally Cleaver, I thought he made a pretty good detective when I saw those movies. I was then about Wally's age andn I think my own little brother, who was The Beaver's age, saw them with me and liked them, too.
Those three movies have languished in vaults somewhere for more than half a century. I went looking for them a couple of years ago when it seemed almost everything was coming to home video, but I never found them. I did learn, however, that the home video rights to them were held by Kit Parker Films, which has acquired a lot of 1950s sci-fi and mystery films for TV and home video distribution.
But this month two of those films-"Danger Zone" and "Pier 23"--were included in a new DVD boxed set from VCI Entertainment and Kit Parker Films, the latest in the series of boxed sets called "Forgotten Noir." I had ordered the set in order to get two rare films based on radio programs--"Mr. District Attorney" (1947) with Dennis O'Keefe and Adolphe Menjou and "David Harding, Counterspy" (1950) with Howard St. John and Willard Parker. I was surprised to find the two "Pier 23" mysteries in the same package, along with "Scotland Yard Inspector" with Cesar Romero, a British film based on a BBC radio serial called "Lady in the Fog"; "The Big Chase," with Glenn Langan, Jim Davis and Lon Chaney, Jr., which is almost entirely a chase sequence; "Hi-Jacked" and "Ringside," both Lippert pictures, and a 1947 picture called "Case of the Baby-Sitter," which is only 43 minutes long.
Watching the two Denny O'Brien waterfront mysteries again after so many years was certainly interesting. They are both very flat-looking early 1950s TV-style with none of the camera angles and dark shadows typical of films noir. They radiate the cheapness of Lippert Productions. But I still like Hugh Beaumont in the leading role, even though the cynical lines he speaks often feel kind of like they were written for somebody who would never have a kid named The Beaver.
If I saw these films for the first time today, I doubt if I'd feel quite as good about them. But they've lingered in a kind of nostalgic place in my mind for more than 50 years and it felt good to revisit that time again when almost everything in my young life seemed flatter, lighter and not so filled with shadows as life is today.
©2008 by Ron Miller. This column first posted May 12, 2008.
Ron
Miller is a former nationally syndicated television columnist
and the author of "Mystery! A Celebration," the official
companion book to PBS' "Mystery!" series. He currently
writes about television mysteries for MYSTERY SCENE magazine.
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