CITY OF MISSING GIRLS
US, 1941, 71 minutes, Black and white.
H.B.Warner, Astrid Alwyn, John Archer, Philip Van Zandt, Sarah Padden.
Directed by Elmer Clifton.
This is a police investigation drama, along with newspaper reporting. It has an unsavoury subject – but this was 1941, the Code had been introduced and, the darker realities of the plot was made somewhat respectable -looking.
H.B. Warner, who had been Cecil B. De Mille’s Jesus in 1927 (and his last film was De Mille’s 1956 The 10 Commandments) is a police chief who loves his job and keeps working instead of retiring. John Archer is the assistant district attorney, committed to uncovering crime – and, both are faced with a number of girls being abducted, two of them turning up dead. The district attorney is in love with a reporter, full of energy and verve, daughter of an entertainment entrepreneur.
There is a very emotional scene where the assistant district attorney and the chief comfort a grandmother whose granddaughter has disappeared.
The main person under suspicion is the proprietor of nightclubs, played by Philip Van Zandt. With the entrepreneur, he auditions young girls and contracts them out to club owners around the United States. In fact, while it is not explicitly spelt out, they are hired out for prostitution.
There are confrontations between the nightclub owner and the police, his trying to set up the district attorney in a compromising photo with one of the girls, offers him a $10,000 bribe which he refuses. The complication of the plot is that the journalist is the daughter of the entrepreneur. She decides to infiltrate and to go for an audition to find out what happens to the girls, is recognised, her father set up, his refusal to comply, his being shot by the nightclub owner. It is the photographer of the compromising photos who gives up the information to the police.
H.B.Warner brings some dignity and decorum to the proceedings – although he is fond of winking in collusion with the district attorney and has a comic scene being roused from his sleep.
