Overlooked Films: DICK TRACY MEETS GRUESOME (1947)
This 1947 brought out the big guns. The Dick Tracy most folks deem the best, and a co-star so famous he dumped "Dick" out of top billing. Got your popcorn? On with the show.
As it happens, the current DICK TRACY comic strip used Gruesome as the villain in a story a few months ago (I have the impression he'd not previously appeared in the strip). In the story, he wound up being cast (in the obvious role) in a revival of the stage play ARSENIC AND OLD LACE (mostly to keep an eye on the director, who owed him dirty money), but wound up killing a backstage guy who recognized him (and using the real corpse as a prop in the play). Unfortunately, Dick Tracy and his wife were in the audience at the time (to support their old friend Vitamin Flintheart, who was playing the Teddy Roosevelt character in the play), and things quickly devolved into gunplay and explosions. (Gruesome escaped the theater only to be captured a bit later in the burning windmill of a local closed-for-the-winter minature golf course, in a wink/nod to the conclusion of Karloff's FRANKENSTEIN movie. The current DICK TRACY comic strip team is very much into inside jokes and guest shots of characters from other comics. / Denny Lien
You can sometimes find this one on cheap public domain edition DVD in the dollar stores. It seems to be the best known in the movie series, obviously because Karloff is in it.
3 comments:
B-movie fare at its best! There have been a couple of other Tracys but Ralph Bird IS Dick Tracy, even in the series entries that aren't so hot.
As it happens, the current DICK TRACY comic strip used Gruesome as the villain in a story a few months ago (I have the impression he'd not previously appeared in the strip). In the story, he wound up being cast (in the obvious role) in a revival of the stage play ARSENIC AND OLD LACE (mostly to keep an eye on the director, who owed him dirty money), but wound up killing a backstage guy who recognized him (and using the real corpse as a prop in the play). Unfortunately, Dick Tracy and his wife were in the audience at the time (to support their old friend Vitamin Flintheart, who was playing the Teddy Roosevelt character in the play), and things quickly devolved into gunplay and explosions. (Gruesome escaped the theater only to be captured a bit later in the burning windmill of a local closed-for-the-winter minature golf course, in a wink/nod to the conclusion of Karloff's FRANKENSTEIN movie. The current DICK TRACY comic strip team is very much into inside jokes and guest shots of characters from other comics. / Denny Lien
You can sometimes find this one on cheap public domain edition DVD in the dollar stores. It seems to be the best known in the movie series, obviously because Karloff is in it.
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