BLONDE DYNAMITE

US, 1950, 66 minutes, Black and white.
Leo Gorcey, Huntz Hall, Adele Jergens, Gabriel Dell, Bernard Gorcey.
Directed by William Beaudine.

Blonde Dynamite is one of many small budget supporting features from the late 1940s and early 1950s featuring Leo Gorcey and the Bowery Boys. There is a slight plots, and the impact of the film coming from Gorcy himself in a recurring character, full of self-confidence, but often overreaching himself. His pal is played by Huntz Hall, again a continuing character, dithering, fairly daft and getting into all kinds of trouble. Many of the actors had recurring rules as the Bowery Boys but Gorcey’s own father, the very short Bernard Gorcey, plays Louis, the proprietor of the shop.

Leo Gorcey had come to some notice in the 1930s with the crime drama, Angels with Dirty Faces.

In this film, Gorcey gets the idea of turning his friend Louis’ sweets shop into an office for male escorts (of the 1950s fairly respectable type). However, there are a number of gangsters who have the same interest. They want to dig under the shop into a bank and rob it – threatening the bank assistant, a friend of the boys, and betrayed by Adele Jergens, a moll, and getting the information about the safe from him.

In the meantime, they persuade Louis to go for a holiday with his larger-than-life wife. When he returns to look after shop, the boys had been taken over by the gangsters and are actually doing a lot of the digging, especially Huntz Hall who is given a chunk of rock and told that it is uranium. While the police capture the criminals, everything seems dim for Louis and the boys, it is confirmed that the chunk of rock actually is uranium!

Along with the many other films, of historical interest.