All four of the RKO Dick Tracy B-movies of the 1940s are snappy little crime stories that deliver the groceries just fine when it comes to action and suspense in the seedy big city. They’re workmanlike, but they move at a gallop and offer colorful villains that come as close as a low-budget production can to the outrageous bad guys in Chester Gould’s comic strip. This is the first of them (not counting the early serials in which Tracy is an FBI agent rather than a police detective like he is here). In this one, Tracy’s on the trail of a mad slasher who calls himself Splitface (Mike Mazurki). Along the way in this sixty-minute quickie, he deals with oddball characters such as a psychic stargazer named Starling and a spacey undertaker named Deathridge and constantly disappoints his long-suffering, but faithful to the end, girlfriend Tess Trueheart when his work interferes with their relationship.
It’s one of two films starring Morgan Conway as Dick Tracy with the lovely Anne Jeffreys as Tess Trueheart. It’s also an early credit for Jane Greer in a supporting role as the bitchy daughter of a shady nightclub owner.