Trouble Makers (1948)

Twelfth Bowery Boys movie from Monogram has Slip and Sach witnessing a murder through a telescope. But when they take the cops to the scene of the crime, the body is gone and no one believes there ever was a murder. So, naturally, they set out to investigate the matter and find the killer. An enjoyable entry in the series. Nothing to get excited about but good. Leo Gorcey and Huntz Hall are their usual lovable selves. The rest of the Boys (Bennie Bartlett, David Gorcey, William Benedict) don't get a lot to do in this one. Gabriel Dell plays a cop this time and figures heavily into the plot. Bernard Gorcey returns as Louie and he's always a treat. Helen Parrish provides the pretty. John Ridgely and Frankie Darro are solid baddies, but it's Lionel Stander who steals the show as an ex-con who mistakes Sach for a criminal he used to know. It's not the best Bowery Boys picture but it's entertaining. The short runtime and quick pace help. Any movie where the bad guys have names like Silky, Feathers, and Hatchet is going to be a fun one.

Ever the entrepreneurs, in this one the Bowery Boys are hawking star gazing to passers-by for 5 cents a pop. While playing around with the telescope, Sach sees two men fighting in a room of a hotel several blocks away. Then Slip takes over and sees one of the men strangled by the other and then he convinces up and coming rookie cop Gabe Marino to leave his beat and investigate the incident. However, when they arrive at the hotel, there is no body in the room. Slip tells Sach "to search every nook and granny." When the police captain arrives, Slip explains to him what he saw but that "we can't find the corpus delicious." With tips from Slip, Gabe is putting a big bookmaker's operations under a lot of pressure and in return they set Gabe up and he ends up suspended from force for 90 days. This Bowery Boys outing benefits from a strong supporting cast in Fritz Feld as the delightfully officious hotel manager, Lionel Stander as the humorously murderous "Hatchet" Moran and Frankie Darro as the small time thug Ben Feathers.

An entertaining addition to the Bowery Boys comedy series has Slip and Sach (Leo Gorcey and Huntz Hall) accidentally witnessing a murder in a hotel room window through a telescope down on the street below. They alert their friend Gabe (Gabriel Dell) who has now graduated to the stature of a rookie police officer, but when the boys investigate the hotel there is no body to be found and Gabe is reprimanded by his superiors. It's then up to Slip and Sach to take on jobs as bellhops in the hotel to try and solve the mystery and prove what they saw. This is a good and satisfying chapter, with funny bits featuring Gorcey and Hall at the top of their game. Both actors have some strong moments...Gorcey is given some extra-humorous malapropisms to deliver with gusto, and Huntz has to get tough and even push Leo around in a scene where he pretends to be an ex-con. It's good to see Gabriel Dell put to solid good use in his part of a young policeman, and the roles in general are well cast this time around -- Frankie Darro, Lionel Stander and John Ridgely play the shady characters, with Fritz Feld as the hotel manager. This entry comes off as tighter and better polished than usual, and one wonders whether this was due in part to Reginald LeBorg taking over from William Beaudine as director. *** out of ****

As a kid watching the East Siders and the Bowery Boys I could never figure out why guys like Gabriel Dell and Bobby Jordan (not seen in this one) would often trade places as members of the gang, an outsider up to no good, or as in the case of Dell, an authority figure like he was in this flick. His character is Gabe Moran, up from the streets and making good as a local beat cop who still knows some of the toughs he grew up with, like Stinky Feathers (Frankie Darro). Come to think of it, I still wonder about those casting decisions, just not as much.As usual in these later pictures, Leo Gorcey and Huntz Hall take the lead, with their generally silent partners, Billy Benedict, David Gorcey and Benny Bartlett confined to the background. Benedict had a line or two in this picture, but if the other guys did, I'd have to go back and listen for them.This time out, Slip (Gorcey) and Sach (Hall) witness a murder from a couple blocks away via a long range telescope ('Five cents a look, only a penny a peek'!), then convince Officer Gabe (Dell) to leave his beat to solve the mystery. You wouldn't have had to see many Bowery Boys flicks to know that Point B is never reached from Point A in a straight line. The trail to the killer is derailed by the murder victim showing up some fifteen miles away in the Bronx, so Slip and Sach have some fancy footwork to make things right. I think the story could have gotten a little more mileage out of the Sach/Chopper McGee connection, but that one went nowhere.That summary line I used came from hoodlum Silky Thomas (John Ridgely) eying up Ann Prescott (Helen Parrish), daughter of the murder victim where the story started. Political correctness and male chauvinism aside, you just don't hear clever lines like that in pictures anymore.