Pity the poor old B-movie without even a major cult director or star attached. Pity even more the B-movie that, after every other branch of the brave men and women of the police forces has been ransacked for story material, is left celebrating the brave men and women of the division taking on two-bit grifters fiddling with crystal balls and turban-wearing flim-flam artists. Yet Bunco Squad, directed by Herbert Leeds, is, in its own way, an exemplary B-movie: just over an hour long, it possesses a streak of wry humour and a restrained energy. The best-known face in the film is Ricardo Cortez, having slipped a long way down the ladder since The Sorrows of Satan (1926), but still bringing a dark charisma and compact aggression to his role as Tony Weldon, a brilliant impresario of scams who puts together a team of faux psychics for the purpose of extracting the fortune of one Jessica Royce (Elisabeth Risdon), whom he meets on a train, and pretends to romance her secretary Barbara Madison (Marguerite Churchill). Weldon’s gang create the shonky “Rama Institute”, home to “Princess Lianne” (Bernadene Hayes), a brassy broad who can play the kooky mystic effectively enough, thanks to Weldon’s thorough research and special effects trickery, to rope Mrs Royce, who is still mourning her heroic son who died on D-Day. Fortunately for her and good-hearted gullible folk everywhere, Detectives Steve Johnson (Robert Sterling) and Mack McManus (Douglas Fowley) of the Bunco Squad are on the case. When they hear Weldon is in town, they immediately do the rounds to ruffle the feathers of all the hacks in town, and when Weldon hires several of them, the detectives easily recognise the scam, but have a hard time proving it before Mrs Royce gets fleeced and the bad guys flee.
It’s a wonder – and a shame – that Bunco Squad was never adapted into a TV show, because the set-up is perfect. There’s the inspired touch of giving Sterling a young ingénue actress for a girlfriend, Grace Bradshaw (Joan Dixon), who’s toiling away in minor movie roles, and the film gets almost meta in the repeating joke of scenes that seem at first to be part of the narrative but are then revealed to be on set, and, as a final blackout gag, a fake wedding scene segueing into a real lover’s kiss which the director calls “cut” for. In between, as Grace gets frustrated with her boyfriend continually jilting her for business, Johnson gets the brainwave to use her talents, and gets a magician who advises the police on the techniques of fake mediums (Dante the Magician) to teach her to become a convincing mystic, cueing her amusing transformation into a veiled mystic who wields exactly the same tricks as Lianne. The good guys hope through this to steer the all-too-credulous Mrs Royce away from leaving the Rama Institute a fat chunk of change in her will. But the bunco business isn’t all just funny clothes and spooky voices, as the brake lines on Johnson’s car are severed, sending him careening through traffic and ending in a crash that proves only lightly injurious, and later, when he realises that Barbara knows too much, Weldon sees to her death in another car crash. Soon Grace’s deception forces Weldon’s hand, and a breathless finale ensues.
The narrative territory is somewhat akin to that explored by Dashiell Hammett in his The Dain Curse and short stories (although it’s actually based on Reginald Taviner’s novel “Fortuneer”), delighted by its own cynicism in exposing the machinations of manipulative exploiters of grief. The film even equates these with psychologists, represented by one “Dr. Largo”, aka Mike Finlayson (Frank Wilcox), who Mrs Royce was seeing before being snared by the Rama gang, another grifter who had moved into a classier racket and who Weldon’s gang bullies into recommending them to his most special client. The way in which the film is conscious of role-playing on multiple levels, is perhaps its most interesting aspect; that, and the way Johnson and Grace, negotiating an awkward romance where their exclusive priorities find an unexpected way to meet and mesh in the course of the case. Leeds, who had B-movie experience going back to Charlie Chan and Mr Moto, directs in a relentlessly straightforward fashion, decorated by some snappy, impressionistic edits in Johnson’s car-rash, and the well-orchestrated portrayals of the scam mechanics, confirm the depth of the influence of Fritz Lang’s Spione (1921) and Dr Mabuse, The Gambler (1922) on this sort of fare. But the film’s most likeable aspect is the ways the knowing characters maintain their different facades, mystic jive, showbiz jargon, and streetwise patter all commenting neatly upon each other. There’s also a funny scene late in the film when one of the baddies tries to strong-arm Grace, only for Johnson and Dante, clad in black clothing for imitating otherworldly spirits in the séances, take him on, the tough guy whirling about unable to see the guys pummelling him, as if he really is being beaten up by protecting spirits. The film’s light and fast-paced tone precludes any serious engagement with the interesting elements that bob up throughout – the social fall-out of the war, the differing layers of role-playing deception, the gap between the faithful and the sucker – but then again that’s just another way in which Bunco Squad utterly fulfills its purpose.
