Hottoceame The Age of Commercialism

FeistyUpper If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

Odelecol Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

Phillipa Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

bkoganbing H.B Warner a police captain and young Assistant District Attorney John Archer are working on what back in those days would be a white slavery racket. Young women theatrical hopefuls sign up for some kind of training school and then disappear.But when a body of a young woman shows up known to have gone to this 'school' it becomes a solid case of homicide and law enforcement redoubles its efforts.Astrid Allwyn a Lois Lane type reporter is covering the story, but she has a discomforting surprise awaiting here which I will not reveal. It could compromise a budding romance with Archer.This had some possibilities, but in the end it's a shoddily made independent feature.

dougdoepke An assistant DA tries to track the whereabouts of missing girls, leading into a tangled web of corruption.With that suggestive title and sleaze director Elmer Clifton, I was expecting maximum titillation. Well, there is some peek-a-boo at The Crescent School of Fine Art, where the half-clad dancers somehow manage to all be female. No doubt, if it weren't for the censors, the "school" would be called Gateway to Hookerland, but then this is a commercial product. Not surprisingly, it is a cheap undertaking by quick-buck producers. Still, the cast is much better than the material, especially the sparkly Allwyn and the smoothly slick Van Zandt, who's especially impressive as an egotistical gangster. His sarcastic exchanges with DA Horton (Archer) may well be the film's dramatic highlight. These main players may not be exactly household names but they do lend edge to what could have been merely a listless payday. Impressive too is old-timer HB Warner who's about as relaxed before the camera as anyone I've seen. Still, it's a long way from Jesus in King of Kings (1927), a silent screen classic. I imagine he was added for marquee value. Then too, catch malt-shop Gale Storm in a small but appealing part.Anyway, it's a rather complex plot so you may need to keep notes. Still, the large cast does about as well with the tacky material as can be expected, and is not without points of interest.

a_baron What a load of rubbish. Girls are not missing from this non-thriller, but everything else is. No real action until two thirds and more of the way through, and then only if you use a liberal definition of action. Leading lady Astrid Allwyn is no ingénue but you kind of wish she was, even women reporters were never meant to be this brazen. There is no real plot to this either, there is no scenery, it could have been made in one building, and probably was. Did people really shell out good money to watch celluloid trash like this even in the 1940s? Another reviewer has suggested it has hidden depths, that the missing girls were involved in a white slavery racket or some such. It does give that impression towards the end, but if ever subtlety was not needed, it was not needed here.

Red-Barracuda City of Missing Girls is an interesting post-Hays Code mystery film. It verges on exploitation subject matter but seeing as it was made after the stringent Code censorship rules you could be forgiven for not even noticing. The story is basically about an unscrupulous club-owner who sends show-girls off to lives of prostitution. Pretty racy stuff for the times but the vice material is only ever really alluded to. This was seriously taboo material in the 40's hence this enforced approach.The film itself is an efficient enough, if unremarkable, example of genre film-making of the time. The focus is strictly on the mystery side of the story, with thrills and suspense almost completely absent. Still it's worth checking out as something of a curiosity piece, seeing as it was quite unusual in the 40's for such a standard mystery film to incorporate any exploitation material at all. So at the very least this movie has this one unusual angle to differentiate it from most of its peers.