User Reviews

(Some Spoilers) Wall Street messenger boys Slip & Sach together with the rest of the Bowery Boys get themselves involved with a den of thieves at the swanky and members only High Hat club after their boss David Thurston was reported to have committed suicide in his Wall Street office. Finding a number of items, a book of matches and pair dice, in Thuston's office with the High Hat club logo it becomes apparent that it, the club, had something to do with Thurston's death.

Trained by street wise card shark and dice shooter Buffer McGee on the in the ins an outs of cheating with a deck of cards and on the crap table Slip & Sach get themselves a job as dealers for the High Hat club by it's crooked owner Bruce McDermott. As the boys start to get all the dirt they can on McDermott and the sleazy racket he's running they relay that information to their good friend Gabe Moreno a reporter who has a hard hitting political expose TV news program. It's Gabe together with the crusading and man of the people city council president John Martin who are out to put an end to McDermott and his mob who specialize in cheating, with loader dice and marked cards, big time rollers out of their cash when they come to roll the dice and flip the cards at the High Hat Club. As it turned out one of these big time roller was non other then David Thurston himself! It was Thurston who was about to blow the lid on McDermott's operation when he mysterious ended up killing himself. Or was he in fact murdered by McDermott's thugs in order to keep him quite!

***SPOILERS*** As McDermott starts getting a bit suspicious of Slip & Sach in them letting their friend sweet shop owner Louie Dumbrowski, masquerading around as Arizona cattleman "Arizona Louie", win big on the crap table McDermott and his boys, that includes dragon lady Countess Margo, get the lowdown from an inside source that Gabe is about to finger, on his TV show, who's the real power behind McDermott's illegal gambling operation! That leads Gabe to get worked over by McDermott's Mob and put into traction at the local hospital! In the end it's the Countess who, like everyone watching the movie want's to do to her, gets herself squeezed into rating out Mr. Big by being threatened by D.A Tom Whitney into spilling the beans on him in order to get a lighter sentence!

P.S Look for veteran character, and sometime leading, actor Lyle Talbot as the High Hat night club owner Bruce McDermott. Talbot was later to become immortalized in such bad movies classics like "Glen or Glenda" and "Jail Bait" directed by what most movie goers consider to be greatest bad movie director of all times Ed Wood Jr.

You have to give these dumb Dead End Kids, East Side Kids, Bowery Boys some credit. In their 20+ years together from stage to middle age, they covered practically every plot territory known to movie mankind. In every one of these genres, they managed to come out on top over some of the most calculating villains and crooks films have ever seen, beating bandits in spoofs of westerns, supernatural villains in horror comedy, and even all sorts of New York City mobsters. Every sub-type of big city crook came along with confidence men, racketeers and even the big bosses. Here, the focus is on an illegal gambling establishment where the boys help pal Gabriel Dell track down who either murdered Dell's Wall Street boss or forced him into committing suicide. With the help of a gambling expert, Slip, Sach and the gang learn tricks of the trade, get jobs in the gambling joint and utilize old pal Louis (Bernard Gorcey) to pose as a rootin' tootin' veteran gambler from Arizona to help expose this mob.

While entertaining and fast-moving, this one crosses the line from the ridiculous to the absurd. Gabriel Dell's character goes from Wall Street errand boy to television commentator, on a mission to expose the racket which killed his boss, while Sach and Slip are so dumb here that their attempts to pretend to be veteran dice rollers just comes off as absurd. Lyle Talbot is perfectly cast as the head of the gambling joint with sexy Hillary Brooke ("Blonde Ice") as his moll. Bernard Gorcey looks silly in his cowboy get-up, sort of like a scrunched up James Cagney from "The Oklahoma Kid". Billy Benedict has a nice scene where he aids two old ladies sitting at his table from loosing their life savings. The funny final scene shows the boys for who they truly are, going from heroes to cowards with the presence of an inanimate prop that truly brings them to their knees.

There are a lot of expressions I picked up as a kid, some still in use today, that I never considered where they originated. Thanks to "Lucky Losers", I now know that a 'dollar three eighty' dates back at least to 1950, used here by Gabe Marino (Gabriel Dell) in an early scene. Said quickly, as in how much is that? - a dollar three eighty - it almost makes sense.

About as much sense as a Bowery Boys movie anyway. This one pits the gang against a back room casino operator with protection from a member of the City Council. The High Hat Club is owned by Bruce McDermott (Lyle Talbot) with able assists from Countess Margo (Hillary Brooke) and Johnny Angelo (Joe Turkel). For their part, Slip (Leo Gorcey) and Sach (Huntz Hall) utilize the services of former card sharp and scam artist Buffer McGee (Harry Tyler), who teaches them the methods to watch for as they go undercover to expose the High Hat operation. Fancy hand work with a deck of cards is a nice touch as far as visuals go, and a couple of the boys did a nice job showing their stuff.

As he often did, Bernard Gorcey takes on a persona to help pull the boys out of a jam when things get tough. Here he's Arizona Louie, working the dice table to keep the bad guys distracted. Louie had a great expression when a couple of McDermott's hoods came over to relieve Slip and Sach as croupiers. He called them 'Paskudniaks'! My spelling is probably suspect, but the expression, translated from Polish is meant to convey a couple of nasty guys. It can also be used to describe something dirty, as in 'paskudny' - so all in all, the expression was used perfectly here, and was just too hysterical to hear.

Like they always do, the Boys eventually prevail in pretty quick order. Notwithstanding the off camera working over the bad guys give Gabe, it's a fairly standard formula for the Bowery Boys. Hate seeing Hillary Brooke as a villainess though, somehow seeing her as a moll tends to misconstrue the connotation.