Excellent, a Must See

Boring

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

Blistering performances.

Frankie Darro seems to be doing all of his own stunts here. He actually is in prime shape and he looks good. He has fun while he engages in fist fights with the diamond thieves. The car chase is fun. Everyone is pretty well cast as a good guy or bad guy or good girl or nosy girl. Frankie made quite a few movies and some were very good. I always thought he was a good actor and very good with the action scenes. He did not do lots of love scenes but there was usually a girl chasing him in the films. This movie is a good look at Americans in the Depression era. Always well dressed, even if they were hoods planning a caper. Rooming and boarding houses were common in the 1930s and 1940s in the US. We see a typical house that has a room and board sign in this movie. This is a great escape from texting and talking to a GPS device. Men's and ladies' hats and wardrobe and hair are all interesting. Frankie definitely had great hair.

Let me see if I've got this fairly straight….the Jarvis Diamond is "secretly" being sent down to a retired jeweler living in a little town named San Juan, there to be broken up into small pieces for safe disposal. A man named Morgan rolls into town and checks in to a boarding house to lay in wait to steal the diamond, posing in the meantime as a professor researching a book on a historical figure from the area. Our hero (Kane Richmond) checks in to the same boarding house and announces that he himself is in town to—you guessed it—research a book he's writing on the same figure. Meanwhile, several of Morgan's henchman have arrived in town under separate cover: they are allegedly training a featherweight fighter for a bout that may or may not be coming up in the foreseeable future. This "boxer" turns out to be our other hero, Frankie Darro.Richmond strikes up a romance with the landlady, June Gale (who is the daughter of the retired jeweler), while young Darro finds himself the object of attentions of Rosita Butler, an eager young lady who spends the entire picture chasing after Frankie and being rebuffed.Yes, that's about it. Darro picks a lot of fights with the dull-witted henchmen. Richmond kind of hangs around waiting for something to happen. Gale dotes on her elderly father and tries to get him to lay off of working so hard on cracking up this diamond. Butler eventually steals a peck on the cheek from Frankie Darro. The bad guys grumble about having nothing to do.Not a lot of twists in this plot. And I've got to say that this film contains more than the usual number of moments where a character does something really dumb. For example, if you want to hide a teabag containing diamonds, don't fold it up in this morning's newspaper sitting right on the kitchen table! Duh! However, The Devil Diamond has got some decent action and some energetic performances—at least the cast look like they're trying. And so it's obviously worth a look for us fans of the "comedy-mystery B movie" genre.

This film often made very little sense and it made me wonder if perhaps the studio let children or lemurs. The film begins with some businessmen discussing a so-called 'Devil Diamond'--a supposedly cursed large diamond. In order to be able to sell it, they decide to secretly cut it into smaller diamonds. So far, so good. However, they are going to mail it (uninsured even) to a retired diamond cutter and have him do the work. Considering the stone was nearly the size of a doorknob, it was simply insane to imagine anyone handling it in such a cavalier manner.The scene switches to a group of crooks. They have found out about the plan and are going to the town where the diamond is being sent, as they want to steal the stone. However, and here's where it gets goofy, they create a cover story about why they are in this small town--they are there to train a young and relatively dim boxer (Frankie Darro). The only trouble is, Darro looks about as menacing as a jelly donut and the 'trainers' seem to care less about his workout regimen. To make it worse, a couple of the dumb crooks keep picking fights with Darro--making anyone with half a brain to assume they have no interest in training the guy. And, in the process, they are about as incognito as a group of strippers at a Baptist convention! Staying in the diamond cutters home are not just these guys, but a secret agent for the diamond industry (handsome Kane Richmond). Can Richmond thwart these no-goodnicks? And, for that matter, can stupid Frankie Darro figure out that he is NOT in training?! In recent months, I've seen quite a few of Darro's films--mostly ones he co-starred with Mantan Moreland. The sum total of these films sure make me wonder why Darro was a star--even for a tiny independent studio. He just came off as a bit annoying and completely lacked charisma. If I had been in charge of the production, I would have just focused on Richmond--he at least looked and sounded like a leading man. And, while I was at it, I would have tried to find a competent writer or two! Oh, and I would have found some way to make at least a single moment in this film interesting!

I'm on record as a Frankie Darro fan, but whoever had the idea of portraying him as a boxer probably never saw a real athlete. Darro's character is about the most uncoordinated guy trying to perform his scenes I've ever seen. Like when he's doing his training run or working the speed bag. Working the speed bag - there's a misnomer. One punch at a time was the best he could do to keep up with it.So the battling messenger boy is used as a cover by a bunch of hoodlums to steal an expensive, but seemingly cursed diamond with a history of bad luck for it's owner. I'm trying to understand why once the deal was made with Stevens (Edward Earle), Moreland (Robert Fiske) needed the other four thugs to hang around and make a nuisance of themselves. And really, couldn't the writers have come up with two different cover stories for Moreland and Jerry Carter (Kane Richmond)? Did they both have to be researching the exact same story about Joaquin Murietta? Another eye roller if you ask me.When I see pictures like this, I have to wonder what audiences of the time really thought about them. The character dialog is totally unnatural, and the situations are so forced they don't make any sense at all. Like Darro's character picking fights with the henchmen at the drop of a hat and usually for no reason. And the brawl at the restaurant where the guy gets his nose in a piece of toast not once, but three times! What are the odds? But I can't stop. I have a Mill Creek Entertainment collection with two hundred fifty of these gems on sixty DVD's. It's their Mystery Collection, and if you're a fan of stuff like this, it's about the best value you can find for the money. Frankie Darro's in there a bunch of times, including another boxing flick with Kane Richmond as his fight manager in 1936's "Born to Fight". Darro wasn't too coordinated in that one either.