REVIEWED BY DAN STUMPF:

   

FIND THE BLACKMAILER. Warner Brothers, 1943. Jerome Cowan, Faye Emerson, Gene Lockhart, Marjorie Hoshelle, Bradley Page, John Harmon, Lou Lubin, and Jimmy the Crow. Screenplay by Robert E Kent, from a story by G. T. Fleming-Roberts. Directed by D Ross Lederman.

   I’m not really sure what prompted me to watch this, because if I saw it listed on TCM, the cast alone would have made it a “Must-Miss.” I mean, a movie starring Jerome Cowan? Jerome Cowan? Whothehell would ever make a movie starring Jerome Cowan? Whothehell would watch it?

   Well I did, and I’m glad because this little 55-minute b-feature offers wit, speed, and a certain awareness of its own silliness I found irresistible.

   Jerome Cowan tops the cast as D. L. Tree, the least-known Private Eye in town, and selected for that reason by aspiring mayoral candidate “Honest John” Rhodes (Gene Lockhart, who looks like he never did an honest thing in his life ) to deal with a gambler named Molner, who owns a crow he has trained to say, “Don’t kill me, Rhodes!” It seems Molner has plenty of enemies, and if he turns up dead, Rhodes could get convicted on the crow’s testimony.

   Yeah. Convicted on a crow’s testimony. Okay. Well then. Faster than a speeding simile, Tree goes to Molner’s apartment and finds him dead on the floor, in the time-honored tradition of such stories. And so the search is on for the squawking squealer.

   Said search gets quickly complicated by:

   Molner’s rather ineffectual bodyguard (John Harmon) now in search of new employment;

   Tree’s brassy secretary (Marjorie Hoshelle) in search of back pay;

   Faye Emerson as a gold-digger with an inside track on the felonious fowl;

   Cool gangster Bradley Page, who holds IOUs from a dead man;

   A diminutive Hired Gun (Lou Lubin) sort of a smaller, nastier Wilmer Cook type with a ready gun.

   A bent lawyer and the usual too-persistent cop showing up whenever they can be unhelpful.

   That’s a lot of beef to be moving around in a movie this short, and Blackmailer takes the only reasonable course of action — chuck logic out of the script, throw in some rapid-fire patter and hope no one notices this thing makes no damn sense.

   It works. Find the Blackmailer is a near-hour of fast-paced silliness with an ending so ludicrous I don’t dare reveal it – no one would believe me!