Hard Boiled Mahoney (1947)
Sach just lost his job as an assistant to a private detective, but he wasn't paid. Slip goes with him down to the detective's office to demand payment, but finds the office empty. A woman enters the office and mistakes Slip for the detective and convinces him to take on a case to find her sister after offering a $50 retainer.
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the audience applauded
Simply A Masterpiece
This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.
Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.
With a plot gimmick borrowed from the Bob Hope classic My Favorite Brunette, the Bowery Boys get launched into the detective business in Hard Boiled Mahoney. If you remember Alan Ladd has a cameo appearance in the Hope film and Hope is minding the office when he's hired for a case. Here Leo Gorcey and Huntz Hall are trying to get some money owed to Sach by a detective who is out. A mysterious woman comes in to hire said detective to find her sister and what self respecting Bowery Boy ever could refuse a mysterious woman?There's a little more plot than usual in this Bowery Boy film and you will enjoy the climax involving the boys in eluding the bad guys taking up the guises of that band of professors from Ball Of Fire and going on an Information Please type show with Byron Foulger as the Clifton Fadiman type host. Even without most of today's audience knowing about Information Please or Clifton Fadiman it can still be enjoyed.Guaranteed laughs from Hard Boiled Mahoney.
Yes, the Bowery Boys crack down on the malapropisms here in one of their more plot driven entries. Lacking in the comedy that made the 11 year series more tolerable, this one is more of a fast-talking mystery. Yet, there are some amusing moments, but it appears that the writers diluted the delightfully dumb wise- cracks and raised the bar on action. The comic highlight occurs when the gang pretend to be highly regarded college professors.The basic premise has the idle gang following in Huntz Hall's footsteps by getting involved in his newly formed detective agency. Of course, Leo Gorcey ends up taking over and turns the case of searching for a missing beauty upside down. Those expecting a riotous collection of fractured English will be disappointed. This is closer to what they did as the East Side Kids rather than the well loved comedies that concluded their careers. Betty Compson, an early talkies star, is featured in a major part as the salty client who hires them.
***SPOILERS*** Slip and his Bowery Boys get themselves involved with this fortune teller ring when his friend Sach ends up getting fired from his job as as an assistant private investigator by his boss, who skipped town, Greg Grogan. Showing up at Grogan's office to get Sach his back pay Slip finds the door opened and Gorgan gone. Within minutes Selena Webster shows up with a $50.00 retainer to find her missing sister Eleanor not knowing that both Slip & Sach are just visitors not the persons who run the detective agency.Taking on the case and the $50.00 Slip and the boys start to follow Dr. Rolfe Carter a psychic whom Selena suspects in her sisters disappearance. Trailing Dr.Carter to his home away from home at the Wentworth Arms Apartments Slip ends up finding Dr. Cater shot dead and him, after being knocked out cold by the killer, the prime suspect in Dr. Carter's murder! Slip also finds Selena's lost sister Eleanor in the building who claims that she's not related at all to her! In fact she doesn't even have a sister!In trying to get to the bottom of this mystery Slip & Co. on a tip from gangster Lenny the Meatball end up tracking down master fortune teller Dr. Armard the master mind of the fortune teller ring who's been using his talents of telling fortunes to dig up very sensitive information from his clients, whom both Selena & Eleanor are, in order to blackmail them. In fact it was Eleanor's husband Tom who Dr. Armand and his hoods kidnapped when he was about to expose his fortune telling blackmail racket to the police!The usual slap sticks you've learned to expect from Slip & Sach and the Bowery Boys who end up trapping Dr. Amand and his hoodlums at Louie's Sweet Shop with the help of Louie's waitress, and Slip's girlfriend, Alice who together with the police comes to their rescue. Before that Slip and the boys in trying to escape from the Dr. Armand's Mob busted into the Prof. Quizard Radio Quiz show by impersonating the members, after knocking the out and tying them up, of the biggest brain trust that the world, or Prof. Quizad, could assemble! Slip and the boys proved to be anything but a bunch of academic geniuses by not being able to come up with the answer to who the Washington Monument was named after? George Washington you dummies!
"In order to be a detective ya gotta have a deductible mind. Ya gotta have the power of treason."Not one of the more agreeable Bowery Boys movies for me. The plot is bungled as Leo Gorcey (as Slip Mahoney) takes it upon himself to become a self-made private eye attempting to find a missing woman. Not much humor to howl about in the mix. Interesting note: Gabriel Dell, who as far as I've known up till this viewing had usually played the straight man against all the insanity, actually dons a pair of geeky glasses as one of the zanies in the group this time around. He looks completely forced and out of his element.