I’m returning to the Crime Doctor series this week because this is probably the one I should have gone to previously instead of the first one. I had seven of them(there are ten altogether) and when I watched this one, seeing the words SCREENPLAY BY LEIGH BRACKETT, I knew I should have seen them all before deciding on one to post. It’s easily the best of the lot I had, no mean feat as they were all pretty decent little mysteries. But we’re talking Leigh Brackett here.
An ex-soldier comes to Dr. Ordway for help, telling of experiencing temporary loss of memory, only to come out of it wandering the same strange part of the city. Ordway agrees to take him on as a patient and he leaves. Shortly a young woman stops him, his fiancee, wanting to know what he wanted with the Doctor. Ordway can’t even admit he’s a patient.
A week later when the patient doesn’t show up for his first appointment, Ordway is walking in that area of the city when he spies two men hustling a slumped third from an alleyway that appears to b his patient. Instinct makes him play a drunk lost and stumbling, getting him close enough to see it is his patient with an apparent bullet hole in his temple. A sudden sap to his head finds him awakening later in a nearby park!
When he alerts the police, a lieutenant(played by William Frawley of I Love Lucy fame) can’t find a body in the area or even evidence of a murder.
The Crime Doctor starts his own investigation. The fiancee is the daughter of a rich man and is worried about her intended. In the curse of his looking about, hints of a mystery woman, a blond, keep popping up. It doesn’t take long to find out that the fiancee has an older sister, that virtually raised her after their mother’s death, and hadn’t been seen in three years since their father had driven her off.
Could that be the mystery woman and what had she to do with the two men dragging thr dead fiancee? And where had the body gone to?
CRIME DOCTOR’S MANHUNT is my favorite of the ones I saw, though I found them all entertaining. Need to find those other three.
As always, for other movies and related posts, go to SWEET FREEDOM.
Not The Baseball Pitcher 
I don’t think the Crime Doctor series is as good as The Whistler series but it’s a solid group of Bs anyway. All these are sort of noirs by default. Studios knew that by using noirish lighting they could shoot many more pages of script a day, a major consideration in the B unit. Fine post; thanks.
LOL. What a title. I definitely overlooked this one
I will have to see this eventually, and I should go and look more closely at Brackett’s IMDb credits list…thanks.