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!

A*P*E / Worldwide Entertainment Corp. - 1976

Now, here's a movie from South Korea with a $23,000 budget (WTF?!) trying to capitalize on KING KONG from the same year. It was seemingly commandeered by Jack H. Harris for American distribution. And, boy, does it suck!! Check the poster, it sez "Not to be confused with KING KONG!" although 'KING KONG' is in huge letters!

I have a sound clip for your approval, sooooo, you can push the big red 'GO' button located there by our other King Kong rip-offs, NOW, Ralphie The Tarantula!.. Here's a little sample from... A*P*E!

It kinda starts with the big APE wrasslin' with a giant shark! Poster fodder.

Joanna Kerns plays actress Marilyn Baker, there to star in a movie and ends up the big APE's main squeeze!

While loose in the countryside, he comes across these kids playing in a playground and gets fascinated with all the fun they're having. How cute!

See that little stuffed cow toy there?.. Well, it's supposed to be a real cow!

Col. Davis, US commander in South Korea, is the salty old crab you can hear in the sound clip giving orders.

Here's Marilyn getting ready for her big scene... Woo Woo!

Here's a shot of the big APE as he carries Marilyn in his smelly old hand! Looks real, right?!

Oh, and, here's a for real helicopter crashing and bursting into flames!

APE's big stinky hand invades an office space! Now, you have to agree the hand looks real in this shot, right?

The big dumb APE acts like this hang glider is a butterfly! So cute...

Welp, it's time to take down the big trouble maker, but, those damn crazy monkey boulders really make it hard on a guy!!

Goodbye, cruel world!.. Check out the arm and hand, clearly a crappy costume.

THE JOHNNY CASH SHOW - Derek And The Dominos - "It's Too Late" (1971)

I love music! And one of the reasons why is all the variety shows I watched on TV as a kid! 

The Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show, and The Rolling Stones on Hollywood Palace are a couple of good examples! Then there was American Bandstand, Soul Train, Where The Action Is, Shindig, Hullabaloo, Midnight Special, etc, etc, that were almost strictly all music! For a music lover, life was good!

The Johnny Cash Show ran for a couple of seasons from 1969 to 1971! Johnny had been working with people like Bob Dylan, and his unabashed appreciation of good music was reflected in a lot of the artists on the show! He was having guests like Dylan, Joni Mitchell, and The Monkees along with the Statler Brothers, and the Carter Family, and it was pretty awesome TV at the time!

Johnny Cash was, and still is, a trendsetter!

Super talented people will come and go, but I'll bet you, in the year 3000, they will still know who The Man is Black was!

Johnny's featured act on the night of season 2, episode 14 in 1971, was Derek and the Dominos led by Eric Clapton! "Layla" which had just come out a few months earlier was, and still is one of my favorite albums of all time! It's one of the records you just can't get tired of listening to. They've pounded the title song into the ground over the years on classic rock radio, but if that gets somebody to reach out and listen to the rest of the album, then it's worth it!

I could tell you exactly where I was the night this came on the television!

At the time, I thought it was the greatest thing I'd ever seen!

Derek and the Dominos were Eric Clapton on guitar and vocals, Bobby Whitlock on keys and vocals, Carl Radle on bass, Jim Gordon on the drums, and the extra kicker was the addition of the second slide guitar of Duane Allman! It was magic!

Bobby Whitlock's soulful vocals were perfect as the main voice or as backup harmony!

Bobby's vocals always pass the goosebump test!

So here's the song they performed that night! From the "Layla" album and one of my favorites,
 "It's Too Late!"

Jim Gordon and Carl Radle complete the package!

Just in case you don't know it, Jim Gordon gets credit for writing "Layla" and is also the one who plays the piano part at the end! Jim Gordon's is a sad story at best. He was one of the best and most sought after drummers for years, and he's played on many fantastic records with groups like The Beach Boys, Frank Zappa, Steely Dan, Alice Cooper and so much more, and he was responsible for the drum solo in one of my favorite songs of all time, "Jump Into The Fire" by Harry Nilsson, but shit got ugly in the 80's, and he developed schizophrenia, got misdiagnosed as being an alcoholic, and ended up killing his Mother! To this day, he is still serving time in a California facility! WTF!?? You know, sometimes life just ain't fair! That whole story is wrong!

Equally talented, Carl Radle died at 37 in 1980 from a kidney infection, most likely accelerated by alcohol and drug use!

I think if I was stranded on a desert island with a turntable and one record, and I had a choice, it would have to be either "Layla" or "London Calling" by The Clash!

Eric looks like he was either really stoned, or just really having a good time being up there with Johnny Cash, or maybe both!

This particular show also featured two of my favorite folksingers, Eric Anderson, and Ramblin' Jack Elliott! If all that wasn't enough, they brought out Carl Perkins to play with Eric and Johnny on "Matchbox!" Damn, that was a good show!!!