review for Dick Tracy, Detective on AllMovie

Although he bears little physical resemblance to Chester Gould's comic strip hero, Morgan Conway plays Dick Tracy with a tough no-nonsense approach worthy of Humphrey Bogart and his is perhaps the closest screen interpretation of any comic strip-to-movie character, Warren Beatty's Tracy version included. Thanks to director William Berke and cameraman Frank Redman, Dick Tracy has much of the same feel as a typical 1940s noir. At the same time, and although he is a creation of the RKO writers, Mike Mazurki's Splitface fully adheres to Gould's archetype villainy. Anne Jeffreys' Tess Truehart and Lyle Latell's Pat Patton are also perfect casting and the RKO stock company provides plenty of atmosphere. There are quite a few interesting camera angles at work here and the famous brownstone set from such films as The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) and Cat People (1943) adds production gloss to what essentially is a lower-grade B-picture. Audiences never warmed up to Morgan Conway's interpretation, however, and the final two films in the series starred the original serial Dick Tracy, Ralph Byrd.