The 1946 film Dick Tracy Vs Cueball was the second Tracy feature film and it again starred Morgan Conway as Dick Tracy. He's ok but the theater owners wanted Ralph Byrd instead of Conway and they got him with the next movie. Dick Wessel plays Cueball and he's a murderous dick. He kills for some already stolen diamonds and keeps on killing until Dick takes him down. Anne Jeffreys is Tess Trueheart and Lyle Latell is Pat Patton. It would be a fairly average cop film of the time but for the unusual characters which make it fun to watch. The 720p copy from the Internet Archive is better than the copies I have on dvd. The movie turns up in those cheap public domain dvds all the time.
The third Dick Tracy film, Dick Tracy's Dilemma, came out in 1947 and it starred Ralph Byrd as Dick. Byrd had played Dick in the four 1930's Dick Tracy serials and that really typecast him as Dick Tracy. That's Hollywood, huh! That's Ralph Byrd and Lyle Latell in the picture above. Lyle is the one with his mouth open. There's a new Tess Trueheart who's being played by Kay Christopher. The Claw is a guy who's got a hook for a hand. He's pretty nasty. The guys chase his metal handed ass down and the movie ends with Dick and Pat leaving Tess and Vitamin without dinner again. That happens at the end of every film so far. You'd hope they have gotten used to it.
They saved the best for last and had Boris Karloff play the villian in Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome. Ralph Byrd and Lyle Latell are Dick Tracy and Pat Patton. That's Skelton Knaggs with Boris Karloff in that picture above. Skelton plays Rudolph X-Ray, Gruesome's henchman. They have a nerve gas that causes temporary paralysis, people appear dead, which they use to rob banks. Anne Gwynne plays Tess Trueheart. The movie would be another average one but for Karloff. He's great as the villian, all somber and murderous, yet he's still fun to watch. All these movies are short, about an hour, and ove fairly quickly. There's a good bit of humor in them, some funny, some not so. The link on the IMDb takes you to the 720p version that looks pretty darn good. If you watch just one of these films this is the one to watch but I'm partial to seeing Boris in nearly anything. He's one of those actors I noticed as a boy and have liked for well over 40 years. It helps that he's in the sort of movies that I often want to watch. Can't say that about every actor.
There wouldn't be another Dick Tracy film for 43 years. In 1990 Warren Beatty played him in a goofy highly stylized version of Chester Gould's world called Dick Tracy. There weren't any more films after that one. I've never been a Warren fan for the most part. The films he made weren't ones that I rushed to see. I did see his Dick Tracy when it came out. I actually went to see it in the theater. I briefly had a copy of the movie I taped off of HBO but I didn't watch it enough and taped over it. I never bought a dvd, by the time it came out I had last all interest.
There was a 1950 tv show with Ralph Bryd playing Dick Tracy again. That only had a short run and it ended when Bryd died in August 1952. I just put the series on my NetFlix queue. Who knows when I'll see it. There was a cartoon in 1960 that was not too good. I watched it moths ago. In 1967 there was a pilot made for a Dick Tracy tv show but it never got past that.
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