{"id":32617,"date":"2022-09-18T00:01:26","date_gmt":"2022-09-18T06:01:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/?p=32617"},"modified":"2022-09-16T09:49:54","modified_gmt":"2022-09-16T15:49:54","slug":"film-review-cosmo-jones-in-the-crime-smasher","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/film-review-cosmo-jones-in-the-crime-smasher\/","title":{"rendered":"Film Review: Cosmo Jones in the Crime Smasher"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/lVmaMPKKSLE\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Frank Graham created the character of Cosmo Jones for his radio series\u00a0<em>Nightcap<\/em> <em>Yarns<\/em>, where he voiced all the characters in a Monday-Friday program. One of the more recurring stories to emerge was Cosmo Jones, an eccentric little &#8220;professor&#8221; who solved crimes whether the police wanted him to or not.<\/p>\n<p>In 1943, the series received a poverty row adaptation as Monogram released <em>Cosmo Jones in The Crime Smasher.\u00a0<\/em>The main plot centered around a socialite being kidnapped after a gangland killing.<\/p>\n<p>The highlight of the movie was getting an actual on-screen appearance by Frank Graham, who also did radio announcing work and starred in the more serious detective program <a href=\"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/regan\/\"><em>Jeff Regan, Investigator<\/em><\/a> in the 1949-50 season. He had also served as narrator for a lot of short subjects and animated features (the most famous of which was Disney&#8217;s\u00a0<em>The Three Caballeros<\/em>)<em>.\u00a0<\/em>Graham does a great job embodying the character of Cosmo Jones, the small, eccentric professor. He shows some decent physical comedy skills and is fun to watch as far as that goes.<\/p>\n<p>The rest of the movie is weak. It feels unfocused at times. Edgar Kennedy and Mantana Moreland, two Monogram mainstays, were in the film but the script didn&#8217;t give them a lot to work with. The story is simple enough, but seems to get sidetracked, and much of the humor doesn&#8217;t land. Like many films, they felt the need to tack on a boy-girl romance between two side characters that just isn&#8217;t that compelling. It mostly seems to take away from the main attraction of seeing Cosmo Jones work on-screen. The film is not horrible or particularly offensive, but it isn&#8217;t good, either.<\/p>\n<p>The film&#8217;s an odd curiosity for modern viewers. It&#8217;s a movie adaptation for a radio character for whom we have scanty recordings. The <a href=\"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/awr0200-cosmo-jones-special-night-cap-yarns-and-studio-x\/\">one episode<\/a> we do have from Frank Graham&#8217;s run on <em>Nightcap Yarns<\/em> that features Cosmo Jones includes a fight between Jones and several policemen that would have taken Monogram days to shoot and an elaborate stunt in a museum that would have probably blown their production budget for the entire year. All this occurred in a twelve-minute radio story with nothing more than Frank Graham&#8217;s voice and a few sound effects.<\/p>\n<p>As such, this was one of those ideas that would never have worked as a film, but you can&#8217;t blame either Monogram for giving it a try in the midst of World War II. I can only recommend it if you&#8217;re curious to see Graham act or if you&#8217;re a completist fan of either Kennedy or Moreland.<\/p>\n<p>Rating: 2.25 out of 5<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Frank Graham created the character of Cosmo Jones for his radio series\u00a0Nightcap Yarns, where he voiced all the characters in a Monday-Friday program. One of the more recurring stories to emerge was Cosmo Jones, an eccentric little &#8220;professor&#8221; who solved crimes whether the police wanted him to or not. In 1943, the series received a&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_robots_follow":"","_seopress_robots_imageindex":"","_seopress_robots_snippet":"","_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_robots_breadcrumbs":"","_seopress_robots_freeze_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_custom_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_canonical":"","_seopress_social_fb_title":"","_seopress_social_fb_desc":"","_seopress_social_fb_img":"","_seopress_social_fb_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_height":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_title":"","_seopress_social_twitter_desc":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_height":0,"_seopress_redirections_value":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled_regex":"","_seopress_redirections_logged_status":"both","_seopress_redirections_param":"","_seopress_redirections_type":301,"_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[298,123],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32617","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dvd-review","category-golden-age-article"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pECdK-8u5","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32617","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32617"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32617\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32647,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32617\/revisions\/32647"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32617"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32617"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32617"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}