Thrilling Days of Yesteryear

“Ladies and gentlemen, in exactly 57 seconds, Dr. Ordway will be back to tell you the piece of evidence overlooked by the suspect…”

About five years ago, the Encore Mystery Channel ran some of the old movies series cranked out by Columbia Pictures during the 1940s—many of them based on old-time radio crime dramas like Boston Blackie, The Whistler and I Love a Mystery.  These features, most running barely over an hour, were modest and unassuming B-picture fare; while I was disappointed in the I Love a Mystery entries (they’re just incapable of capturing the magic of the original series) I thought some of The Whistler and Boston Blackie efforts were pretty good.  Encore Mystery also aired those movies from the Crime Doctor series—ten respectable quickies produced between 1943 and 1949 starring former Oscar-winning actor as Dr. Robert Ordway, an ex-gangster turned psychiatrist who specialized in analyzing the criminal mind.  Earlier today, I sat down and watched the first entry—titled, appropriately enough, Crime Doctor (1943)—while I dubbed it onto a DVD.

Dr. Robert Ordway is in actuality a criminal mastermind named Phil Morgan—but Morgan is suffering from amnesia, sustained when some members of his gang attempted to rub him out after they successfully pull off a $200,000 robbery.  Morgan is treated by Dr. Carey (Ray Collins), who tries to assist him in regaining his memory—but when their efforts prove futile, Morgan adopts the name of “Robert Ordway” (a renowned but now deceased physician who built the wing in which Morgan convalesced during his hospital stay) and devotes himself to the career of medicine.  Eventually, his old gang turns up—led by Emilio Caspari (John Litel, in a change of pace from his role as patriarch Sam Aldrich in Paramount’s Henry Aldrich movie series)—and Morgan’s memory is restored; he captures the gang and turns himself in, and although he’s convicted of robbery the judge grants him clemency after taking in consideration the straight-and-narrow he now travels.

The remaining entries in the Crime Doctor series downplayed Ordway’s past history, turning him instead into a physician-criminologist whose keen insight into the criminal mind assisted him in his various investigations.  Two of the films in the series are particularly noteworthy: Shadows in the Night (1944) find the crime doc assisting a woman named Lois Garland (Nina Foch) who’s bedeviled in an eerie household filled with alleged ghosts and eccentric humans, and Crime Doctor’s Man Hunt (1946) tells how Ordway solves a mystery involving a woman named Irene Cotter (Ellen Drew), her murdered fiancé, and the sudden appearance of her “twin” sister.  (Man Hunt also provides future I Love Lucy player William Frawley with a nice meaty role as a wisecracking police inspector.)

The Crime Doctor movies should be of particular interest to old-time radio fans because the radio series offers very few episodes for modern-day listeners; there are about three shows in circulation, and unless some private collector is sitting on a stack of transcriptions there doesn’t appear to be the likelihood of additional broadcasts surfacing anytime soon.  It’s a shame, really; Crime Doctor became a highly successful crime drama shortly after its debut over CBS Radio on August 4, 1940.  Produced and written by Max Marcin (who enjoyed the distinction of having the series briefly retitled Max Marcin’s Crime Doctor in 1945), it was sponsored by Philip Morris and ran on Sunday nights for seven years, ending October 19, 1947.  On the radio series, Ordway’s first name was Benjamin, and he was first played—ironically enough—by the aforementioned Ray Collins.  (House Jameson, John McIntire, Hugh Marlowe, Brian Donlevy and Everett Sloane were also at one time or another heard as Ordway.)  Another way the radio series differed from the film adaptations was that Ordway had several regular police contacts in the form of Inspector Ross (Walter Greaza) and District Attorney Miller (Edgar Stehli).  Other actors heard on the show included Walter Vaughn, Edith Arnold, Elspeth Eric, Jeanette Nolan and Vicki Vola.

Originally, the series concentrated on Ordway’s appointment to the parole board (this is also a sequence in the 1943 film), whereupon each week he would listen to the case of a convict, and the fate of the prisoner would be decided upon by a “jury” composed of members of the studio audience.  The format changed a few years later as Ordway retired from public service and began to be consulted—a la Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons—by the police for special cases.  Still later, Ordway’s appearance would be delayed until the second half of the program; the first act would dramatize the crime and motive—and reveal just who the guilty party was—setting the stage for Ordway trapping the evildoer (not so much a “whodunit” but a “how’z-he-catch-‘em”) and foiling his nefarious scheme.

Since Crime Doctor’s running time is an hour and six minutes, I was able to squeeze in a second feature—an underrated mystery-western (with a few noir touches) entitled Station West (1948), starring Dick Powell as a sort of “Richard Diamond Out West” as he plays an Army undercover officer investigating the murder of two soldiers in addition to a slew of gold shipment robberies.  Jane Greer (yowsah!) is the femme fatale in this little goody; she’s a saloon owner/chanteuse who swaps some witty banter with Powell throughout.  There’s some really snappy dialogue in this one, particularly this choice exchange which is one of my all-time movie favorites:

STEVE BRODIE (as a 2nd Lieutenant): If I weren’t in uniform, I’d teach you a few manners…

POWELL: If you could teach me anything, you wouldn’t be in uniform…

The supporting cast is pretty swell, too: Agnes Moorehead, Raymond Burr, Tom Powers, Guinn “Big Boy” Williams (he engages in an eye-popping knuckleduster with Powell), Regis Toomey, Olin Howland and Johnny Berkes—plus an uncredited Burl Ives in one of his early film roles as a desk clerk-balladeer.  I loved the film, but my father had a dissenting opinion; he never cared much for Powell, wisecracking that “he’s as tough as Alan Ladd.”  (That’s gotta hurt.)

- Posted by Ivan G. Shreve, Jr. - 9:44:23 PM - comment []