Cosmo Jones, Crime Smasher (1943)

That was an excellent one.

Excellent adaptation.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

In the 1940s, Monogram made a ton of cheap detective films. They not only took over the Charlie Chan series from Twentieth Century- Fox, but made many, many series and standalone private detective films. They were all quickly made and were also a tad cheesy--but most of them were also fun B-movies that are enjoyable if you are willing to cut them some slack. After all, they weren't meant to be anything more than escapist entertainment.Among the most obscure and least interesting of the Monogram detective films that I've seen is "Cosmo Jones, Private Detective". Now it isn't terrible--and fans of the genre will probably enjoy it well enough. But it also has many shortcomings--the biggest of which is the leading man, Frank Graham ('Cosmo') has less charisma than a moldy orange. It also lacks the laughs you find in many of them. Even with Edgar Kennedy and Mantan Moreland on hand as comic relief it never seemed funny, just forced.The story begins with Cosmo introducing himself to the police and announcing he's a detective...because he took a correspondence course on the subject! Not surprisingly they tell him to get lost! But when an heiress is almost kidnapped yet she refuses to tell the truth about this*, Cosmo looks into the case and finds evidence that she WAS nearly killed in this attempt. Eventually, she really is kidnapped so it's up to our super-dorky hero to solve the crime. After all, we ALL know in these films that the cops are total incompetents!!*Why this woman refused to tell the police never really made a lot of sense.

It's a Monogram film folks so don't expect too much. But if you're a fan of Harold Lloyd, lead character and creator of Cosmo Jones on the radio, Frank Graham, comes over like Harold Lloyd in one of his sound films. Cosmo Jones, Crime Smasher did his smashing on radio originally. In this film our hero freshly graduated from correspondence school and now a detective happens to witness an attempted kidnapping of an oil heiress. He's with Sergeant Richard Cromwell who fires some shots and wounds a 'bystander'. Cromwell gets no help from the victim who denies anything was going on and is demoted. That's when Graham goes to work with the aid of porter Eustace Jones played by Mantan Moreland on hiatus from Charlie Chan. It all becomes too real when the heiress is kidnapped for real.Mantan and his shtick help this film along as does Edgar Kennedy playing a police captain with Irish brogue added to his slow burn.Graham has a lot of screen credits, mostly however as voice only. This is one of the few times you'll actually see him on screen. I suspect Monogram wanted to do a series of Cosmo Jones films, but the demand was underwhelming.Graham in his crime fighting mode has the talents of voice mimicry and ventriloquism at his command. But I suspect not in real life. His impression of Edgar Kennedy was too real, it had to be dubbed.Sam Katzman over at Monogram had enough series with the East Side Kids and Charlie Chan. Another wasn't in the cards.

"Cosmo Jones" was a country-bumpkin type radio character detective created by writer Walter Gereing in 1941, that featured long-time CBS radio announcer Frank Graham in the title role. The character was originally introduced on a CBS series called "Nightcap Yarns", except in the eastern states of the U.S. where it was known as "Armchair Adventures."CBS broadcast it as a network show in eleven western states, but not in the rest of the country. There, it was a 15-minute transcription show offered to radio stations on a sustaining basis for only the cost of the transcription records...until it could be sold to local sponsors. One of the reasons it may not have lasted very long was because some of the local stations may not have bothered to tell the producers of the program when they picked up a sponsor. It was offered as either a twice-weekly or three times weekly program, which meant some stations ran through the series 33% faster than others.Frank Graham was the announcer in 1943 on the CBS program "Tommy Riggs and Betty Lou", which featured in regular roles well-known radio (and film) names such as Ken Christy, Verna Felton, Mel Blanc, Elvia Allman and Bea Benaderet.In 1949, when Jack Webb left the CBS radio program "Jeff Reagan, Investigator" to play "Sergeant Joe Friday" on a new program called "Dragnet", he was replaced in the title role by Frank Graham. Webb had a little more success with "Dragnet" than Graham did with "Jeff Reagan, Investigator."It didn't matter what the character of "Cosmo Jones" looked like on radio---television without pictures---but in this movie he was costumed nearly exactly as Bob Burns was in Universal's "Alias the Deacon", and his character makeup had him looking a little like "Abner Peabody" on the "Lum and Abner" program.

Two rival gangs start to declare war on each other, and an innocent bystander in the mix, Professor Cosmo Jones (a correspondence detective school graduate),decides to help the police stop the melee, much to the disappointment of the police captain. When a patrolman friend of Cosmo is investigated in a gang shooting and later kidnap of a key witness, Cosmo, friend Sgt. Flanagan, and Cosmo's partner Eustace unfold a plan to have the gang members wipe each other out. This one could have been somewhat better, but the plot outline for the movie probably didn't make for a long picture so a synopsis of the two gangs encounters with each other make for a 12-15 minute story where it would be at most a 90 second montage in a Warner Brothers movie of the same genre. Graham as Cosmo makes for an interesting character though, even I don't recognize what OTR program he ever appeared on. Kennedy & Moreland as usual make for good comic relief, but Cromwell's character seems to lifeless and usually halts the pace of the film in the scenes set around him. OK film for Monogram though. Rating- 4.