Dell made his debut at age 18 as one of the eponymous street gang members in the crime drama Dead End (1937). The Dead End Kids, as they became known, were a group of young actors first pulled together for the 1935 stage version of the Sidney Kingsley play about a New York City slum. They proved to be so popular that various studios put them under contract, eventually morphing them into a comic team that went by various names, including the East Side Kids and the Bowery Boys.
Dell was a member of the troupe on and off for nearly two decades, but unlike the other young actors - among them Billy Halop, Huntz Hall, and Leo Gorcey - he didn't always play a member of the gang, sometimes playing reporters, police or gangsters. He made his final picture with them in 1950, although he remained loosely associated, forming a nightclub act with Hall in the 1950s. After studying at the Actors Studio, he secured a wide range of work on stage, film and television, most notably as one of the comic ensemble on Steve Allen's show.
Dell had appeared mostly on the small screen for most of the 1970s before landing a part in the disaster flick Earthquake (1974). During this first half of the decade, he had become acquainted with Dean Hargrove, producer of two TV shows in which Dell did some single episode work, McCloud and The Name of the Game. The two were next credited together on a TV movie that Hargrove wrote, Cutter (1972), the pilot for a black private eye series that was never picked up.
Hargrove specialized in crime and mystery stories. Over the course of his career he produced such series as Matlock, Perry Mason, Diagnosis Murder and Columbo. He must have seemed a natural to parody the form. He and Dell wrote the screenplay for The Manchu Eagle Murder Caper Mystery, and Hargrove took on directing chores for the film as well.
As lame as the premise and some of the situations are in this story, many viewers have found it surprisingly funny in the off-beat, over-the-top manner of later spoofs like Airplane! (1980) and The Naked Gun (1988). As Dan Stumpf put it in his "Mystery File" blog, the picture "proceeds merrily on its way to no place special, speeded along by zany characters, neck-snapping non sequiturs, and a shoot-out like something out of Monty Python. And it caps off with a surprisingly thoughtful (and quite funny) discourse on the folly of pursuing dreams and why we do it anyway. In all, a rough little gem but one worth seeing."
Much of the fun is due to an eclectic and skilled cast of comic performers, among them Barbara Harris (Nashville, 1975), Vincent Gardenia (Moonstruck, 1987), Nicholas Colasanto (Coach on Cheers), Will Geer (aka Grandpa Walton), Sorrell Booke (The Dukes of Hazzard), Jackie Coogan (Chaplin's The Kid, 1921, and TV's The Addams Family), Dick Gautier (starring around the time of this film's release as Robin Hood in the short-lived TV spoof When Things Were Rotten) and a tall, sexy comic treasure who worked constantly from the 1950s through the 1990s, Nita Talbot. It also featured Dell's old Bowery Boys buddy, Huntz Hall.
The film was shot by cinematographer Bill Butler, whose feature film credits (in addition to a number of TV movies) include Francis Ford Coppola's The Rain People (1969) and The Conversation (1974). Butler would follow this with Emmy wins for the all-star television drama Raid on Entebbe (1976) and the TV adaptation of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire (1984), starring Treat Williams and Ann-Margret. He also shared an Academy Award nomination with Haskell Wexler for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975). Haskell started that picture but left after just over a month, and Butler replaced him, only to leave himself after 30 days for a prior contract. William Fraker shot the last scene to be filmed (the boat outing) but did not get credit.
Production on the film began in April 1973, which explains its copyright date for that year, but it was shelved by distributor United Artists until March 1975 and not given much support for its release. It did minimal business at the box office.
Director: Dean Hargrove
Producer: Edward K. Dodds
Screenplay: Dean Hargrove, Gabriel Dell
Cinematography: Bill Butler
Editing: Bob Kagey, John Kaufman, Robert Kimble, Bernard Small
Art Direction: Arch Bacon
Music: Dick De Benedictis
Cast: Gabriel Dell (Malcolm), Will Geer (Dr. Simpson), Anjanette Comer (Arlevia Jessup), Joyce Van Patten (Ida Mae), Vincent Gardenia (Big Daddy Jessup)
By Rob Nixon
