Motor Patrol is a Lippert Pictures salute to those unsung heroes of the police force, the motorcycle patrol cops who normally spend their days issuing tickets. One of them, William Henry answers a call from a distressed citizen reporting a dead body lying in the road. It's declared a hit and run fatality.
Whether it was a deliberate homicide is for the Accident Investigation Squad in the person of Reed Hadley to determine. When Hadley starts getting a lead as it turns out Henry is killed pursuing the suspect Hadley was drawing an investigative bead on.
Don Castle steps into the picture, he's still in the Academy and is engaged to Henry's sister. He agrees to go undercover as a known booster of cars and infiltrates the gang. It's quite a set up headed by a garage owner who funnels stolen cars through an established used car dealer.
One thing did bother me throughout the film. A group as organized as this crowd would have stripped the car and ditched it if it was involved in the homicide of a cop. That was a big glaring hole in the plot, bad writing as far as I was concerned.
Lippert Pictures regular Sid Melton is in this one and he's for once not part of the gang, but owner of a bar where these folks apparently congregate. He's strictly comic relief in this film as he does a variation of the old burlesque routine 'pay the two dollars' on the phone with an operator as he keeps throwing in nickels that the phone eats.
Motor Patrol is a sincere if cheaply made film, but with some glaring errors in plot.
