Cosmo Jones in the Crime Smasher (1943) User Reviews

Comes over like Harold Lloyd

[bkoganbing · 4/10 · 30 April 2015]

It's a Monogram film folks so don't expect too much. But if you're a fan of Harold Lloyd, lead character and creator of Cosmo Jones on the radio, Frank Graham, comes over like Harold Lloyd in one of his sound films.

Cosmo Jones, Crime Smasher did his smashing on radio originally. In this film our hero freshly graduated from correspondence school and now a detective happens to witness an attempted kidnapping of an oil heiress. He's with Sergeant Richard Cromwell who fires some shots and wounds a 'bystander'.

Cromwell gets no help from the victim who denies anything was going on and is demoted. That's when Graham goes to work with the aid of porter Eustace Jones played by Mantan Moreland on hiatus from Charlie Chan. It all becomes too real when the heiress is kidnapped for real.

Mantan and his shtick help this film along as does Edgar Kennedy playing a police captain with Irish brogue added to his slow burn.

Graham has a lot of screen credits, mostly however as voice only. This is one of the few times you'll actually see him on screen. I suspect Monogram wanted to do a series of Cosmo Jones films, but the demand was underwhelming.

Graham in his crime fighting mode has the talents of voice mimicry and ventriloquism at his command. But I suspect not in real life. His impression of Edgar Kennedy was too real, it had to be dubbed.

Sam Katzman over at Monogram had enough series with the East Side Kids and Charlie Chan. Another wasn't in the cards.

Amateur Detective vs. the Underworld

[Mike-764 · 4/10 · 3 May 2003]

Two rival gangs start to declare war on each other, and an innocent bystander in the mix, Professor Cosmo Jones (a correspondence detective school graduate),decides to help the police stop the melee, much to the disappointment of the police captain. When a patrolman friend of Cosmo is investigated in a gang shooting and later kidnap of a key witness, Cosmo, friend Sgt. Flanagan, and Cosmo's partner Eustace unfold a plan to have the gang members wipe each other out. This one could have been somewhat better, but the plot outline for the movie probably didn't make for a long picture so a synopsis of the two gangs encounters with each other make for a 12-15 minute story where it would be at most a 90 second montage in a Warner Brothers movie of the same genre. Graham as Cosmo makes for an interesting character though, even I don't recognize what OTR program he ever appeared on. Kennedy & Moreland as usual make for good comic relief, but Cromwell's character seems to lifeless and usually halts the pace of the film in the scenes set around him. OK film for Monogram though. Rating- 4.

Meandering and unfocused

[dbborroughs · 5/10 · 26 August 2007]

Based on a radio show this short (an hour) film is a bit of a meandering mess.

the plot of the film has two gangs going to war and somehow in the middle of it all the daughter of an oil man is kidnapped. As the police try to solve the crime(s), Cosmo Jones, a genius and amateur criminologist forces himself into the case.

This is a weird film where the title character doesn't show up for a quarter of the running time. When he does show up he sort of seems as if he were added into the mix for no good reason, with a young police Sargent taking the lead. Its not until into the second half of the film that he takes center stage. Another weird twist is Mantan Moreland who is listed fourth in the credits as a "star" and he only shows up close to the half way mark in a role that requires him to do little more than stand around for most of his screen time (I guess a pay check is a pay check).

The problem is that the film wanders to and fro with out any real direction. Its starts off as a gangster story, shifts to the cops, shifts again to gang war film, turns again into a murder tale then swerves into the kidnap tale. Characters take center stage then fall to the background over and over again, not like in an ensemble film where there is ebb and flow, instead its like seeing a series of almost unconnected photographs. The result is a rather bland and un-involving movie, which is a shame since the film does have some genuinely good moments (the near torture of Moreland is horrifying in a very real way) and there are more than its share of funny lines.

Not really worth seeking out, I'd pretty much let this one slide unless I ran across it on TV, in which case it would be worth taking a peak.

Cosmo didn't last all that long on radio, either.

[horn-5 · 8 March 2004]

"Cosmo Jones" was a country-bumpkin type radio character detective created by writer Walter Gereing in 1941, that featured long-time CBS radio announcer Frank Graham in the title role. The character was originally introduced on a CBS series called "Nightcap Yarns", except in the eastern states of the U.S. where it was known as "Armchair Adventures."

CBS broadcast it as a network show in eleven western states, but not in the rest of the country. There, it was a 15-minute transcription show offered to radio stations on a sustaining basis for only the cost of the transcription records...until it could be sold to local sponsors. One of the reasons it may not have lasted very long was because some of the local stations may not have bothered to tell the producers of the program when they picked up a sponsor. It was offered as either a twice-weekly or three times weekly program, which meant some stations ran through the series 33% faster than others.

Frank Graham was the announcer in 1943 on the CBS program "Tommy Riggs and Betty Lou", which featured in regular roles well-known radio (and film) names such as Ken Christy, Verna Felton, Mel Blanc, Elvia Allman and Bea Benaderet.

In 1949, when Jack Webb left the CBS radio program "Jeff Reagan, Investigator" to play "Sergeant Joe Friday" on a new program called "Dragnet", he was replaced in the title role by Frank Graham. Webb had a little more success with "Dragnet" than Graham did with "Jeff Reagan, Investigator."

It didn't matter what the character of "Cosmo Jones" looked like on radio---television without pictures---but in this movie he was costumed nearly exactly as Bob Burns was in Universal's "Alias the Deacon", and his character makeup had him looking a little like "Abner Peabody" on the "Lum and Abner" program.

I could see why this never became a Monogram series....

[planktonrules · 3/10 · 28 September 2015]

In the 1940s, Monogram made a ton of cheap detective films. They not only took over the Charlie Chan series from Twentieth Century- Fox, but made many, many series and standalone private detective films. They were all quickly made and were also a tad cheesy--but most of them were also fun B-movies that are enjoyable if you are willing to cut them some slack. After all, they weren't meant to be anything more than escapist entertainment.

Among the most obscure and least interesting of the Monogram detective films that I've seen is "Cosmo Jones, Private Detective". Now it isn't terrible--and fans of the genre will probably enjoy it well enough. But it also has many shortcomings--the biggest of which is the leading man, Frank Graham ('Cosmo') has less charisma than a moldy orange. It also lacks the laughs you find in many of them. Even with Edgar Kennedy and Mantan Moreland on hand as comic relief it never seemed funny, just forced.

The story begins with Cosmo introducing himself to the police and announcing he's a detective...because he took a correspondence course on the subject! Not surprisingly they tell him to get lost! But when an heiress is almost kidnapped yet she refuses to tell the truth about this*, Cosmo looks into the case and finds evidence that she WAS nearly killed in this attempt. Eventually, she really is kidnapped so it's up to our super-dorky hero to solve the crime. After all, we ALL know in these films that the cops are total incompetents!!

*Why this woman refused to tell the police never really made a lot of sense.

The usual suspects, the stereotypical comic relief, all rolled up into one big mess.

[mark.waltz · 3/10 · 29 April 2015]

This is below par crime drama focusing on a kidnapped socialite who was involved with criminals and an amateur detective's attempts to solve this crime while visiting the big city from the sticks. It's all pretty mild stuff with comic moments from Mantan Moreland as a malapropism filled janitor that the titled character (Frank Graham), especially when they encounter bumbling cop Edgar Kennedy.

In fact, when it was all over, I pretty much had forgotten what I had just witnessed with the exception of Mantan's performance (especially every time he encounters a dead body). Moreland is one of those black character actors who can be amusing if you can get past the stereotypical dialog he was forced to say, but it takes a genius of an actor to make you laugh in spite of the current political atmosphere concerning the type of roles talented black actors were forced to take on.

In all fairness, the gangsters are presented equally as stupid, and they all happen to be Caucasian. Overall, this isn't any different or any better or worse than the hundreds of low budget crime capers made during the late 1930's and 1940's, only that the presentation is very mediocre and other than a few minor moments of amusement, the result is a weak Z grade feature that doesn't hold up as well as others.

Cosmo Was A One Movie Miss

[hogwrassler · 5/10 · 8 January 2021]

I caught this movie at 5AM this morning on the Late Late Late Show on Movies TV! It turns up in that time slot on Movies TV quite often. From the title, it appears that it was meant to be the first of a series. Other titles could have been "Cosmo Jones in the Murder Stopper," or "Cosmo Jones in the Arson Extinguisher." But it was not to be. This movie was cheaply made and it shows. Frank Graham just isn't interesting as the correspondence school graduate in detective studies. A blonde Gale Storm is the girlfriend of police Sergeant Flaherty, played by Richard Cromwell. Edgar Kennedy as Police chief Murphy is a caricature of every Irish cop that ever showed up in a Jimmy Cagney movie. Tris Coffin plays one of the gangsters and Mandan Moreland comes off best as Eustace, a janitor who assist Cosmo in smashing crime. This plot involves two kidnappings, and a rivalry between two criminal gangs. Cosmo wants to be a detective in the worst way, but the police don't want his help. So he operates on his own, with Euastace's able assistance. It can be a fairly watchable movie as long as you don't expect too much. If you haven't seen Cosmo Jones yet, it might be worth setting the DVR the next time it turns up on Movies TV.