Dick Tracy! Calling Dick Tracy!
Long before Warren Beatty gave us his overblown, candy-coated adaptation of the long-running Chester Gould comic strip, Morgan Conway and Ralph Byrd donned the yellow fedora of homicide detective Dick Tracy in a series of four films, now rounded up, digitally restored and introduced by author Max Allan Collins on the DVD set DICK TRACY: RKO CLASSIC COLLECTION.
If there’s anyone who knows this territory well, it’s Collins. A true Gould fanatic, Collins wrote the strip for nearly two decades and has produced novels and short stories on the character, carrying the torch for the square-jawed detective well into today.
As he points out in his introductions — all of which begin the same before delving off to discuss the movie at hand — RKO Pictures was “true to the flavor” of the strip without resorting to camp. This is a kind way of saying that while the studio didn’t exactly nail it, it didn’t botch the job, either. Part of the reason, he says, is because in that era of cinema, comic properties weren’t readily adapted to feature films — they were the stuff of serials, TV series and radio programs.
Still, RKO did what it could, and did so quite nicely. Each film clocks in at one hour, give or take, which is just the right length for these none-too-complex crime dramas. The stories are simple, with Gould-esque villains making Tracy’s life troubled, but the most connection the flicks have to their source material is in the cartoon-laden opening credits.
From 1945, DICK TRACY, DETECTIVE was the first of these, with Tracy hot on the trail of the slasher Splitface, so named for his hideous facial scar. Two die before Tracy starts to get wise, nabbing the villain with the help of wannabe-private eye Junior, and rescuing love Tess Trueheart in the process.
Following the theft of a bunch of furs in an insurance scam, square-jawed Tracy is on the hunt for The Claw, a burly, hulking bad guy with a metal hook for a hand, in 1947′s DICK TRACY’S DILEMMA. It comes in handy for knocking people out and slashing up their faces. Meanwhile, Tess gets stood up repeatedly because the man’s priorities are all out of whack, and has to spend much of her time with a rather effeminate Vitamin, who likes to perform Shakespeare. But of course he does. All in all, it’s a painless hour of good-ol’-fashioned fun.
Essentially, it’s a carbon copy of the previous year’s DICK TRACY VS. CUEBALL, right down to the bumbling cop sidekick who gets hit over the head by the bad guy so often, it’s a wonder he’s alive, still on the force and without a cap in his ass. In CUEBALL, the main villain is the burly, hulking, bald bad guy Cueball, thick-neck-deep in a stolen-diamonds scam. Vitamin even shows up to make some remarks about wanting to be a woman. But of course he does.
Finally, in 1947′s DICK TRACY MEETS GRUESOME, ex-con Gruesome (Boris Karloff) leads a trio of bank robbers who commit their crimes thanks to a formula that causes people to freeze. As you would guess, GRUESOME is sillier than the others, filled with jokey names like Professor A. Tomic; his assistant, I.M. Learned; and the taxidermist Y. Stuffem. And if Tracy works homicide, what’s he doing investigating a bank robbery?
In all four films, virtually every man wears a hat.
Previous DVD releases exist for the Tracy films, but this one is the best. Not only are all included among two discs, but VCI includes several special features. Even without the Collins introductions, which ease you into the fun like good host segments should, the package still would be tempting with samples of two serials — DICK TRACY RETURNS and DICK TRACY’S G-MEN — and a few trailers and a photo gallery of poster art. —Rod Lott
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{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Every man should wear a hat. That’s just good sense.