Dick Tracy vs. Cueball

The second of RKO's four Dick Tracy features, based on Chester Gould's comic strip. A bald, thick-necked ex-convict called Cueball strangles a diamond courier with a shoelace and goes hunting for the rest of the stolen stones, leaving a trail of bodies across the city. Dick Tracy and his girlfriend Tess Trueheart work the case from opposite ends, she going undercover as a diamond broker to draw the killer out. Morgan Conway plays Tracy as a placid, square-jawed straight arrow, and Dick Wessel's Cueball is an effectively brutal heavy. The film is a tight, cheap, well-paced B-mystery that clocks in at just over an hour. Released in 1946, it is in the public domain in the United States.