Thursday, November 15, 2012

Baby Face Morgan (1942)


Baby Face Morgan is a crime comedy Producer Releasing Corporation (PRC) that isn’t half bad.

The plot has a bunch of aging con men, crooks and gangsters being called together by one of their own played by Robert Armstrong (aka Carl Denham in King Kong). It seems that their ‘gang” has gone to hell since the big boss “Machinegun” Morgan died several years earlier. They have been limping along but are facing the danger of getting swallowed up by other gangs. Armstrong has discovered a way of returning the gang to power. They plan on recruiting Morgan’s son as a figurehead for a shell company, an insurance company, that Morgan had set up years before as a cover. The plan is to keep the kid in the dark and use him as a fall guy if the police try to bust them. Morgan’s son is talked into taking what is the supposed to be a do nothing gig, however bored by not doing anything the kid goes out and begins selling insurance policies to the very people Armstrong are strong arming…

Inconsequential and inoffensive this is a breezy time killer. It’s the sort of film that if you stumbled upon it you’d probably get hooked in if you stopped on it while channel surfing. That’s what happened, after a fashion as I was going through a collection of PRC films that I picked up from Sinister Cinema. Each disc was a double feature, so when I popped in a dic with a movie I wanted to see, this was on the disc as well. I figured I’d give it a go. I liked what I saw and kept watching.

I liked it. It made me smile. Will I intentionally go looking for the film? Probably not, but when I come across the DVD again, I’m pretty sure that I’ll pop it in again. Following that logic, if you come across it give it a shot, you just don’t need to go looking for it on it’s own

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