Wednesday, November 11, 2015

DICK TRACY VS. CUEBALL - "Inside The Dripping Dagger" (1946)

"Dick Tracy Vs. Cueball" is the second of two Dick Tracy films with Morgan Conway in the driver's seat! The first one was called strictly "Dick Tracy" and you can read all about it right here in a post from 2013!

I would have liked to meet Chester Gould, he had an amazing imagination!
His cartoon character Dick Tracy first appeared 1931, and is still in newspapers all over the world some 30 years after his death!

Dick Wessel is Cueball! Did you notice he didn't even get credits on the poster?
Between 1935 and 1966, Dick racked up some 301 acting credits as mostly a tough guy!
In 1963, he played Charlie in the "Twilight Zone" episode titled "A Kind Of A Stop Watch!"

This was Morgan Conway's second shot at being Dick Tracy, and the second to the last of the movies he would ever work on! He hung it up at 46 and never looked back!

Big Headlines! You get the picture! Diamonds, dead bodies, Cueball, and Dick Tracy trying to put the whole thing together!

I love the names of these old bars! It would have been so cool if the "Bucket Of Blood" was right down the street from "The Dripping Dagger!"

Esther (The Beautiful Blonde From Bashful Bend) Howard is Filthy Flora, the owner of "The Dripping Dagger!"

Ian (It Came From Beneath The Sea) Keith is Dick Tracy's eccentric pal Vitamin Flintheart! 

He's only been out of prison after a 10 year stay for a couple of days, but Cueball has been very busy!

What is this piece of leather they keep finding at the crime scenes?

Dick Tracy finds out from Junior, that genuine braided leather hatbands are all the rage with the kids! Tracy traces the hatband manufacturing operation back to a penitentiary, and the next thing you know, they have a suspect!

You have to love this headline! 
"Police Behind Eight Ball, 
Can't Find Cueball!"

Cueball has got a bad habit of spying on people and listening to their conversations!

The oh so lovely Anne Jeffreys is Tess Trueheart! Tess is part of a scheme to trick Cueball, but he turns the tables on them when he picks her up as a cabbie! Funny, all he has to do is put a hat on that chrome dome of his, and nobody recognizes him! Anne Jeffreys is still around today! We wish her well!

Skelton (House Of Dracula) Knaggs is pretty creepy as Rudolph!

Tess was acting like a rich socialite........but..........

.................It all goes wrong when Cueball rifles through her wallet looking for some cash, and finds this picture of her and Dick Tracy together instead! The jig is up!!

Tess almost becomes another victim of Cueball's hatband fetish, but luckily Dick Tracy gets there in time to break it all up!

After a fairly short chase, with Dick Tracy in hot pursuit, Cueball gets his foot stuck in a railroad track!

No delays here, the train is right on time!!

Want to see for yourself, well then you can find it for free at the Internet Archive right about
here!

2 comments:

  1. I thought Morgan Conway was adequate as Dick Tracy, but maybe a lot of fans did not agree. Ralph Byrd starred in the next two films in the RKO series. Byrd had also played Tracy in four serials between 1937 and 1941.

    Of course, it would have been impossible to find actors who looked exactly like the characters in the comic strip. But Mike Mazurki, Dick Wessel, Jack Lambert, and Boris Karloff looked about as close to comic strip villains as real people possibly could.

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  2. Couldn't agree more TC! I like the Dick Tracy films no matter who plays Dick, like you said, it was the villains that were important!

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