AllMovie

Former real-estate salesman Benedict Bogeaus rechanneled his huckstering skills when he went into independent film production in 1940. His earliest films were an eclectic, eccentric bunch, including The Shanghai Gesture (1941), The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1944), Captain Kidd (1945), and The Macomber Affair (1947). Entering into a partnership with director Allan Dwan in 1950, Bogeaus turned out several offbeat adventure programmers, featuring such second-echelon luminaries as Ronald Reagan, John Payne, Dan Duryea, Virginia Mayo, and Arlene Dahl. Among the best of the Bogeaus-Dwan collaborations were the Byzantine-plotted Western Silver Lode (1954), which co-starred Bogeaus' actress-wife, Dolores Moran, and Slightly Scarlet (1956), an operatic adaptation of James M. Cain's Love's Lovely Counterfeit. Ever the maverick, Bogeaus frequently ran into financing problems, as well as difficulties with the various Hollywood guilds for employing non-union technicians, but he always managed to deliver his product to theaters on the designated release dates. The one notable exception was Benedict Bogeaus' final film, The Most Dangerous Man Alive, which was completed in 1958 but remained on the shelf until 1961.