NEVER TRUST A GAMBLER. Columbia, 1951. Dane Clark, Cathy O’Donnell, Tom Drake, Jeff Corey, Myrna Dell, Rhys Williams. Story and screenplay: Jerome Odlum. Director: Ralph Murphy.

   It wasn’t planned this way — it happened only by chance — but here immediately on the heels of another Dane Clark film, The Toughest Man Alive, reviewed here, is another one, this one coming out four years earlier. (In between but not reported on here was a TV show I watched, the first episode of Vega$, vintage 1978, in which Clark played a no-good talent agent up to his ears in debt.)

   Clark’s career lasted until 1989, when he was 77 and an appearance on an episode of Murder, She Wrote. I don’t know how feisty he was then, but in 1951 he was definitely a small keg of dynamite about to go off, and go off he does.

   To back up just a little, in Gambler he plays a key witness who goes on the lam during a murder trial in San Francisco and heads for Los Angeles where his ex-wife (beautifully petite Cathy O’Donnell) lives. It seems she divorced him because of his addiction for gambling.

   Swearing that he’s turned over the new leaf and that he’s a new man, he asks her to hide him out for a while. If he were to testify, he says, it would put his best friend in the death house, a friend who’s innocent.

   If he doesn’t testify, the friend goes free. It’s a long set-up, and forgive me for telling it all to you, but it’s only the beginning. When a lecherous off-duty cop makes a play for his ex-wife, Clark’s character explodes, and while it’s an accident, the cop ends up dead.

   Convincing the ex-Mrs. Steve Garry to go along with him — and at this point she doesn’t know how much of his story to believe or not — Garry goes for the cover-up. Big mistake, as things begin to unravel quickly from there, as cover-ups always do.

   I’m sure that the story line sounds completely over the top, and perhaps it is, but both the screenwriter and the director had me hooked from the first scene on. Disregarding all of the coincidences that clutter up small B-movies like this one, the film is a small and all-but-unknown gem, tautly plotted with lots of small scenes each of which add little to the story but (in total) plenty in verisimilitude. (Though personally I could have done without the long, drawn-out escape scene at the end — who’s trying to escape, and from whom, I will not tell you).