Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.

Poor Tom Conway, he's in Southern California to enjoy himself and take in a few races at Hollywood and all kinds of people come out from his past. First Sheldon Leonard whom the Falcon put away with his testimony who would like to even the score. Secondly his former girlfriend Barbara Hale who's trying to make a fresh start in motion pictures only Leonard won't leave her alone. Two cops Emory Parnell and Frank Jenks are around as well. And where the Falcon goes, murders start happening.The Falcon In Hollywood is blessed with one undeniable asset who makes any picture better by her presence. The ever brassy and buxom Veda Ann Borg who plays a cabdriver who kind of attachs herself to Conway and while her presence is a mixed blessing in solving the crime, she's always great to hang around. Between her and Iris Adrian they cornered the market on brassy dames when a film called for one.Two deaths both connected with the filming of a motion picture that John Abbott is producing and Konstantin Shayne is directing happen before the Falcon resolves it. Here's a hint, the plot of this may have been what inspired Mel Brooks to create one of his best films.

This is the tenth Falcon film. It is one of the most amusing and satisfactory of the series. A new director, Gordon Douglas, came into the series, and injected some much-needed fresh energy. But chiefly, this film is remarkable for the pairing of Tom Conway with a female sidekick, a cabbie named Billie, played to superb comic effect by Veda Ann Borg. The two have a wonderful magic together. The producers had stumbled on a formula here which could have generated several more films of the wise-cracking guy and gal type, similar to the Thin Man series. But they retained neither the girl nor the director in future films, which shows that they were asleep at the wheel by this time. It is true that Veda Ann Borg's character gets a bit annoying after a while, through over-persistence, but that could so easily have been fixed. She and Tom Conway 'clicked' because she was not in the category of wolf's prey, so that he could relate to her as a person rather than as a curved shape (not that she was lacking in that department either, but her personality obliterated her looks entirely). Jean Brooks is there again, in her fourth Falcon film. Her icy demeanour makes her once again a chilling suspect. She always added so much to these films, because she was so convincing as either a villainess or a potential one. This film is extremely remarkable for a detective film of the 1940s in that a very large proportion of the dialogue consists of direct quotations from William Shakespeare, most of it uttered by John Abbott, by origin an Englishman who knew how to say the lines properly (he had appeared in England in 'The Importance of Being Earnest' (1937) and 'Mrs. Miniver' (1942) and was well grounded in the Bard). There is also one witty exchange of Shakespearian lines between Tom Conway and John Abbott. There is a wonderful cameo by an obscure uncredited actor, Chester Clute, as the manager of an apartment building (called a 'hotel' in the IMDb character list, though it was not a hotel in the story). The shots around Los Angeles and the RKO sound stages and lot are also fascinating. This is a real winner for avid Falconers.

Back to the city and business as normal (?) for Tom Lawrence aka the Falcon in solving crimes the cops can't [#10/13]. "Hollywood" had a nice sunny feel to it, the War was a million miles away and people wanted to get even further away from it with an escapist movie industry to help.The Falcon's busy losing at a racetrack but quickly gets mixed up with 2 beautiful women (Hale and Corday) and embroiled in tracking down an apparently stolen handbag. This leads to Sunset Pictures backlots where the body of a murdered man is discovered along with a gallery of suspects. The 2 best things here are the riveting but unfortunately intermittent tour of the RKO studios and props as the Falcon and his wisecracking female taxi driver played by Veda Ann Borg investigate, and the tight intelligent scripting. I wished there'd been much more behind the scenes for an even better picture of the studio. I kept expecting Borg to exclaim "Come up to my place!" – Conway wouldn't have been as backward as Sinatra! John Abbott as the Shakespeare-obsessed studio boss had many amusing scenes, and Emory Parnell effortlessly swapped from baddie in Mexico to goodie in Hollywood. And the story actually made solid sense this time without detracting from the entertainment, you can follow it from first to last, and even though the baddie's identity is pretty obvious from early on it was all logically explained. The searching of dead Ted's apartment has always stuck with me though for the bit where the Falcon and Borg are philosophising about how sad a dead man's room is and the poignant line about if he had been "worrying about tragic things like a broken shoelace" that morning.Recommended to fans of the genre, not to others. One of my favourite Falcon's, one I've watched again and again and still hope to.

Fast paced mystery, surprisingly unpredictable. It's nice to see so many locations in Los Angeles of the mid 1940's. Much of the film gives you studio backlot scenes, and behind the camera context, within a Hollywood soundstage. Even so, the story draws you in, and the characters are believable. The film moves at a good pace, and keeps you guessing. Thoroughly enjoyable.