Back to the city and business as normal (?) for Tom Lawrence aka the Falcon in solving crimes the cops can't [#10/13]. "Hollywood" had a nice sunny feel to it, the War was a million miles away and people wanted to get even further away from it with an escapist movie industry to help.
The Falcon's busy losing at a racetrack but quickly gets mixed up with 2 beautiful women (Hale and Corday) and embroiled in tracking down an apparently stolen handbag. This leads to Sunset Pictures backlots where the body of a murdered man is discovered along with a gallery of suspects. The 2 best things here are the riveting but unfortunately intermittent tour of the RKO studios and props as the Falcon and his wisecracking female taxi driver played by Veda Ann Borg investigate, and the tight intelligent scripting. I wished there'd been much more behind the scenes for an even better picture of the studio. I kept expecting Borg to exclaim "Come up to my place!" Conway wouldn't have been as backward as Sinatra! John Abbott as the Shakespeare-obsessed studio boss had many amusing scenes, and Emory Parnell effortlessly swapped from baddie in Mexico to goodie in Hollywood. And the story actually made solid sense this time without detracting from the entertainment, you can follow it from first to last, and even though the baddie's identity is pretty obvious from early on it was all logically explained. The searching of dead Ted's apartment has always stuck with me though for the bit where the Falcon and Borg are philosophising about how sad a dead man's room is and the poignant line about if he had been "worrying about tragic things like a broken shoelace" that morning.
Recommended to fans of the genre, not to others. One of my favourite Falcon's, one I've watched again and again and still hope to.
