Villain Boris Karloff gets top billing above hero Ralph Byrd in this fourth, last and best of RKO’s low-budget series. It’s an hour-long B-movie blip like the others, but it’s the most comic strip campy of them all. A criminal gang pull off a sweet bank heist thanks to use of a gas bomb that puts everyone who whiffs the fumes into temporary suspended animation (depicted with great, clumsy freeze frames). Dick Tracy’s girl Tess Trueheart witnesses the whole thing because she happens to be in a phone booth at the scene and the gas apparently can’t penetrate that. The robbers also shoot a cop on their way out, which is all the excuse that homicide detective Tracy needs to take the case.
The main bad guys in the 1940s Dick Tracy movies all have a visual gimmick in the spirit of Chester Gould’s original comic strip. The first movie gave us the disfigured Splitface. The second and third movies offered, respectively, a shaved-headed lummox and a goon with a hook for a hand. In this one, Gruesome’s gimmick is simply that he’s… Boris Karloff! That’s all he needs to be scary. Works for me. Karloff glowers expertly in this movie’s seedy barrooms and night streets.
Campy character name roll call: Two scientists named Dr. A. Tomic and I.M. Learned, a shifty fella named L.E. Thal and a taxidermy business run by a Y. Stuffum.
B-movie character-actor roll call: bombshell Ann Gwynne as Tess Trueheart, the woefully underrated Skelton Knaggs as a pock-marked mad scientist in creepy bifocals, constant cop or doctor in old movies Joseph Crehan as Tracy’s boss, and future Tarzan and western star Lex Barker uncredited as an ambulance driver who gets his lights punched out by Karloff.