Boris Karloff's unforgettable visage was always larger than life and his stalking appearance in Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome remains very much in the spirit of Chester Gould's comic strip. Gone, however, are most of the noir touches that lifted the three previous films out of the rut. Like Karloff's presence, the freezing gas is much in line with Gould's latter-day story-telling but that too is more mindful of action serials than hard-boiled detective fiction. The climax, where Boris Karloff almost becomes the victim of a runaway conveyor-belt, also points in that direction. By 1947, a bit of mental fatigue had set in and instead of fully developed supporting villains, RKO made do with punning character names such as Dr. A. Tomic, Dr. I.M. Learned, L.E. Thal, and Y. Stuffum. The last appears on a sign advertising a taxidermist!