Tag Archives: Frank Sully

I listen to radio shows. A lot of radio shows.

I’ve amassed a large collection over the years, and each radio show is identified by date broadcast so I can listen to them on the same day of the week they were originally broadcast, and on roughly the same date. (For 64 years ago, you add 3 to the day’s date.) I have enough old-time radio shows on MP3 that I’m rarely able to listen to all of each day’s programming, which is fine — in the ’40s no one listened to everything, and I’m sure plenty of people missed their favorite shows if they were out for the evening.

Currently, the shows from 64 years ago that I hate to miss include The Adventures of Sam Spade with Howard Duff and Lurene Tuttle, Suspense, The Whistler, The Great Gildersleeve with Harold Peary, and The Adventures of Philip Marlowe with Gerald Mohr.

I have plenty of episodes of Boston Blackie downloaded, but most weeks it’s not a show I go out of my way to listen to. On the other hand, whenever I do listen to it, I have a good time.

I feel the same way about both Boston Blackie movies I’ve seen — Boston Blackie and the Law (1946) and this one, Trapped by Boston Blackie (1948), which was directed by Seymour Friedman and released by Columbia Pictures — it wasn’t on my “must watch” list, but I taped it when it was on TCM a few months ago, and I had a good time watching it.

Horatio Black, a.k.a. “Boston Blackie” was created by writer Jack Boyle in 1914. Blackie started out as a professional thief but eventually became a crime-fighter and detective-for-hire. The character appeared in a variety of magazine stories and a number of silent films starring different actors. It wasn’t until the first sound film about the character, however, that one actor would play the character more than twice. Meet Boston Blackie (1941) starred Chester Morris as the gentleman safecracker and high-society thief, and Morris would go on to play Boston Blackie in a total of 14 films. (Except for a brief run during the summer of 1944 that starred Morris, the radio version of Boston Blackie that most people remember starred Richard Kollmar. The series that starred Kollmar was syndicated to Mutual and other stations and ran from 1945 to 1950.)

The film version of Boston Blackie doesn’t make quite as make puns and wisecracks as his radio counterpart, but they’re both smooth-talking, distinguished gentlemen who still have a streak of criminality, despite being mostly reformed.

Trapped by Boston Blackie was the penultimate film in the series. (The last was Boston Blackie’s Chinese Venture, released in 1949.)

In Trapped by Boston Blackie, Blackie and his weaselly sidekick, “The Runt” (George E. Stone), are hired to protect a valuable pearl necklace at a high-society party, but it goes missing from under Blackie’s nose, and he and The Runt are the prime suspects.

After the theft, The Runt says to Blackie, “At least we’re innocent.” Pause. “Or are we?”

Blackie spends most of the film’s running time wearing some kind of ridiculous disguise. First he dresses up as an Eastern mystic in order to circulate freely around the party and keep an eye on the necklace (and kids, when Blackie examines his costume before putting it on and holds up the turban and exclaims “Gay!” it doesn’t mean what you think it means).

Later, in order to track down the necklace, Blackie disguises himself as a fussy old man with The Runt in drag as his wife. (The Runt uses his old-lady disguise as an excuse to give a pretty young woman played by Patricia Barry a creepy and overly familiar hug.) Later, Blackie affixes a fake mustache to his upper lip and passes himself off as an insurance investigator.

And of course he’s dogged all along the way by his arch-nemesis and sorta-pal, Inspector Farraday (Richard Lane), who’s assisted by the extremely dim-witted Detective Sergeant Matthews (Frank Sully).

Trapped by Boston Blackie is not the first mystery programmer from Columbia Pictures I’d recommend if you’ve never seen one before, but if you’re a fan of the Boston Blackie series, it’s solid good fun.