Blind Alibi

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Okay, follow along: Richard Dix plays Paul Dover, an American sculptor living in Paris. Paul's sister Ellen also lives in Paris, and is being blackmailed by a former beau with some love letters she wrote. Paul has friends in low places and agrees to steal the letters from the blackmailer. Paul and his criminal neighbor succeed in getting the letters, but in a botched getaway the letters are secreted in some antique furniture bound for a museum in Los Angeles. The blackmailer also has some criminal friends and they set out to retrieve the stolen letters. Paul travels to LA ahead of his competitors and comes up with a master plan to find the letters: he will pretend to be blind, thereby getting special permission to explore the museum unescorted (this outcome was not obvious to me, but apparently he was right). Paul buys a seeing-eye dog (Ace, the Wonder Dog) and sets his plan in motion. The bad guys put one of their own (Paul Guilfoyle) undercover as a janitor but he is too clumsy and loses his access. The bad guys try to recruit blind Paul Dover to their cause, not knowing he is working against them. Yada yada things work out in the end, the letters are destroyed, Paul gets the lovely museum curator (Whitney Bourne) and the dog.

Paul Guilfoyle and Richard Dix
Whitney Bourne, Ace the Wonder Dog, and Richard Dix

Sky Giant

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Richard Dix plays 'Stag' Cahill, an ex-military commercial pilot who is coerced into serving as the assistant to uber-disciplinarian Colonel Stockton (Harry Carey), who is charged with turning the Trans-World Air Line School of Aeronautics into the best darned pilot school in the world. Colonel Stockton's son Ken enlists in the school, and he and Cahill engage in an escalating game of pranks to vie for alpha dog position.  Ken is played by Chester Morris, who was the special prosecutor in my last movie, Smashing the Rackets.

The action of the movie culminates in a plane crash in the arctic wilderness, from which Ken and Stag must hike for days through the mountains before reaching safety.

The real meat of this movie is that both Stag and Ken love Meg, played by Joan Fontaine. Meg marries one but loves the other. It all gets straightened out in the end.

Joan Fontaine and her sister Olivia de Havilland are still alive.

Smashing the Rackets

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This is the story of a gung-ho special prosecutor who rids the city of organized crime "rackets" of the gambling, protection, and (ahem) entertainment variety. Inspired by the real life exploits of Thomas E. Dewey.

Jim 'Socker' Conway (Chester Morris), former FBI agent and night school lawyer, becomes a special prosecutor with the D.A.'s office. Using a combination of trickery and disregard for search warrants he breaks a slot machine racket, a numbers racket, and finally brings down the kingpin, a lawyer who has been consolidating the protection rackets under his own leadership.  Conway also gets the girl (after her sister, a wayward lass, commits suicide by automobile).

Familiar face: Byron Foulger, who normally played some sort of clerk.  In this one he was a chemist producing a "nausea gas". He also played Wendell the train conductor on Petticoat Junction.

Byron Foulger

 
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