City of Missing Girls (1941)

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

H.B Warner a police captain and young Assistant District Attorney John Archer are working on what back in those days would be a white slavery racket. Young women theatrical hopefuls sign up for some kind of training school and then disappear.But when a body of a young woman shows up known to have gone to this 'school' it becomes a solid case of homicide and law enforcement redoubles its efforts.Astrid Allwyn a Lois Lane type reporter is covering the story, but she has a discomforting surprise awaiting here which I will not reveal. It could compromise a budding romance with Archer.This had some possibilities, but in the end it's a shoddily made independent feature.

City of Missing Girls is an interesting post-Hays Code mystery film. It verges on exploitation subject matter but seeing as it was made after the stringent Code censorship rules you could be forgiven for not even noticing. The story is basically about an unscrupulous club-owner who sends show-girls off to lives of prostitution. Pretty racy stuff for the times but the vice material is only ever really alluded to. This was seriously taboo material in the 40's hence this enforced approach.The film itself is an efficient enough, if unremarkable, example of genre film-making of the time. The focus is strictly on the mystery side of the story, with thrills and suspense almost completely absent. Still it's worth checking out as something of a curiosity piece, seeing as it was quite unusual in the 40's for such a standard mystery film to incorporate any exploitation material at all. So at the very least this movie has this one unusual angle to differentiate it from most of its peers.

Girls are going missing and a DA and veteran cop team up to expose the rackets that are set up to lure young girls in to a life of shame.This film is more a curiosity than anything. My guess it was cheaply made and ran on the exploitation circuit for years. The music isn't even stock music, but is supplied by an organ that pumps out bridges between scenes.How best to describe this movie? Its the type of movie that insomniacs prayed not to find on the Late Late Show because it was just interesting enough to keep them awake while it un-spooled. It wasn't good enough to actually wake them up, but it wasn't bad enough to put them out, rather its a film of the twilight between asleep and awake. I'm of a similar mind, its not bad, but its not good. Its the sort of thing that just is. If you should run across it on TV you might want to try it, but I can't suggest searching it out.5 out of 10

****SPOILERS**** A number of young women have disappeared or have been found murdered in and around town. The one connection being that they all have in common with each other is that they attended or are attending the Crescent School for the Fine Arts. The local police department as well as the up and coming assistant DA James Horton,John Archer,as well as John's good friend and mentor police Captain McVeigh,H.B. Warner, have been trying with interest to find out who's behind these missing and dead young women. D.A Horton starts to put the heat on the schools owner Joseph Thompson, Boyd Irwin,who's a front-man for the cities top mobster King Peterson, Philip Van Zandt. Thompson has no idea of what the school that he's running is all about, Peterson's prostitution and call-girl racket. Peterson tries to pay off assistant DA Horton with $10,000.00 to stop his investigation but the incorruptible Horton tells Peterson to take a walk with Capt. McVeigh listening in on the office inter-con. Peterson later comes up with the idea to frame and blackmail Horton in order to get him off his back. Later Tompson panics when it turns up in the newspaper that a student Pauline Randolph in the Crescent School was connected with with one of the murdered girls Thaila Arnold. Thompson wants out of the whole dirty business but Peterson won't let him in fear that Thompson would go to and tell the police in order to save his hide. Pauleine is later also found murdered and the police now have enough evidence to make a case against the Crescent School and it's owner and administrators, the Peterson mob. Peterson then sets up assistant DA Horton by having one of his girls Kate Nelson,Patrkia Knox, to call him over to her hotel room with information on the Randolph murder.Having Horton secretly photographed with her in a somewhat intimate pose Kate later gets into a fight with Peterson who kills her. Horton having himself photographed with Kate in her hotel room and later Kate being found murdered in that same room is now in no position to handle the case. He may very well be indited for murdering Kate! Two things then unexpectedly happen that saves the day for Horton and the forces of law and order. The photographer who took the photo gets scared when he finds Kate's body and is later kidnapped by the Peterson mob only to be rescued by the police and then spills the beans on him, Peterson. Later Thompson's daughter Nora, Astrid Allwyn,who's a newspaper reporter goes undercover in the Crescent School as a student. Nora is recognized by Peterson and in a fit of disgust and outrage goes to call the police on him. the police and assistant DA break into his office and catch him red handed. Peterson is later convicted of murder and sentenced to the electric chair and at last the mystery of the missing and murdered girls is finally solved."City of Missing Girls" is a mostly typical crime drama with the exception of touching on a very taboo subject back in those days, the 1940's, in Hollywood: prostitution. It's interesting to see how the film makers avoided to even mention that word even though the movie plot was all about it, prostitution and call-girls, as if that subject and those very words were off-limits by the moral majority of that day which they were.