This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

This is a gorgeous movie made by a gorgeous spirit.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

No wonder Chester Morris as Blackie is smiling so slyly through this film - he's the smartest guy in the room!. A group of art thieves are taking legitimate works of art to auction, making replicas, and then selling the replica and keeping the original. This time, though, the owner of the work up for auction gets suspicious in the middle of the auction, stands up, and declares there is something wrong. One of the bad guys thinks the simple thing to do - knowing there are cops in the audience - is shoot the owner! Blackie,also in the audience, is conveniently armed and shoots at the shooter. His shot causes the original bad guy to miss and shoot his own partner through the heart.Of course the cops don't look any further than Blackie, but he easily gets away. The bottom line of this fast paced Boston Blackie entry is the police apparently can't count shots or do geometry or they would have known Blackie could not have fired all of those shots at those angles from where he was, don't even notice the body of the auctioneer for a good while, and never stop and ask themselves WHY would Blackie shoot at all of these people.Now let's turn our attention to the IQ of the art thieves. They make hollowed out statue replicas that anyone that knows art could spot in 10 seconds, install secret panels in their statues which is a big tipoff that this is not an original, and insist on having their art studio in what is obviously an underground death trap under the right circumstances - it wouldn't take OSHA to spot the hazard here. And if their goal is to ultimately steal the original, why not just do that in the first place rather than stage this elaborate ruse with poorly made replicas? So why watch this theatre of the absurd? Mainly because of the wit and wisdom of Chester Morris as Boston Blackie plus it's just plain fun. On the lighter side we get to see Blackies's sidekick, the runt, attempt to evict an amazon who claims to be Blackie's wife from Blackie's apartment. Recommended for the fun of it all.

Boston Blackie is in top form in "Confessions of Boston Blackie," a 1941 entry into the popular series that stars Chester Morris, George E. Stone, Richard Lane, Charles Winninger and Harriet Hilliard (aka Harriet Nelson). Nelson plays Diane Parrish, who has given the wrong people an enormous statue to auction, not knowing that they copy the piece and auction the fake instead. At the auction, she realizes it's not the original statue, and chaos reigns, during which a man is killed - and of course Blackie (Morris) who had pulled his gun, is accused. The statue has a piece that comes off in the back, and it's used to hide the dead body. Of course Blackie's wealthy friend Lloyd Corrigan (Winninger) buys the fake one for $200.This film is grand fun, with Faraday (Lane) as bumbling as ever, Blackie getting away from him in no time. George E. Stone is funny as the runt, Blackie's sidekick. Playing Blackie himself, Chester Morris is handsome, demonstrating the character's good humor and relaxed manner with his great line deliveries. There's a subplot here of an old flame of Blackie's showing up and trying to blackmail him. But we all know that Blackie gets around."Confessions of Boston Blackie," directed by Edward Dmytryk, is zany and keeps you hopping.

After a period of amazing experimentation in the 30s, the detective genre settled into a few tracks. One of these consisted of series films with previously well known characters, usually from radio. Some actually pretended to have a mystery, while others like this did not. The main appeal was supposed to be in the characters and their traits. Boston Blackie's character is one of the more endearing, which allowed the extremely low budget production room to continue.Blackie is a successful thief, one of those charming, superclever types that appeared in the 20s and early 30s. Blackie stole because the rich deserved it, pure and simple, not out of selfish greed, and in fact his story always mentions how he gave the proceeds to the starving. He was one of the inventions we created during the last period where the difference in the wealthy and poor was immense.By this time (1941) he had been reinvented. Now he was a retired thief, with his cleverness turned to solving crimes the police were too dumb to understand. Along the way, the police (always the same guy) would suspect Blackie of the crime. So in addition to outwitting the criminals — which was ordinary in such movies — he had to more severely and embarrassingly outwit the police. That's the added piece here.His two sidekicks are runt, a Runyon-esquire character, and Arthur, a rich but clueless playboy. Arthur is important because he anchors the political reinvention handily. He always has enough money which is freely available for Blackie's escapades.I've only seen a couple of these, but this has something a bit extraordinary. Quite independent of any story element or need, we have a thread inserted. One of Blackie's affairs has resurfaced, a tall tough redheaded moll, who claims to be married to him and wants money... "or else."Its a strange episode, obviously inserted to tell us something about Blackie that is expected to build his appeal and thus the franchise. He's a wisecracking guy clever guy who (almost) never resorts to violence. He's slick and chatty. But we get the idea here that in the bedroom he can master this wild amazon. Because in the US, we were deep in the stupid prurient code, there had to be this amazingly indirect way of telling us this.I suppose its important, and that it worked. Blackie lasted for 15 films.Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.

This time Blackie is suspected of being the murderer of an art dealer at an auction attended by Inspector Farraday. Blackie has to spend the rest of the movie exonerating himself of the crime and discovering what happened to the missing body of the art dealer.Female interest is provided by HARRIET HILLIARD, wife of "Ozzie" Nelson(the bandleader), who was making a few rather unimpressive appearances in films around this time. She's interested in purchasing a statue of Julius Caesar. Blackie is up to his same old shenanigans in throwing Farraday off his trail and proving that he's not guilty of a murder he never committed.Interesting plot has to do with the missing body of the dead man and how it was accomplished with a phony statue. The story follows the usual Boston Blackie formula and this one is not quite on the same level with the first Blackie film. Still, for detective fans, it manages to move briskly within its short running time.