bkoganbing It's a Monogram film folks so don't expect too much. But if you're a fan of Harold Lloyd, lead character and creator of Cosmo Jones on the radio, Frank Graham, comes over like Harold Lloyd in one of his sound films. Cosmo Jones, Crime Smasher did his smashing on radio originally. In this film our hero freshly graduated from correspondence school and now a detective happens to witness an attempted kidnapping of an oil heiress. He's with Sergeant Richard Cromwell who fires some shots and wounds a 'bystander'. Cromwell gets no help from the victim who denies anything was going on and is demoted. That's when Graham goes to work with the aid of porter Eustace Jones played by Mantan Moreland on hiatus from Charlie Chan. It all becomes too real when the heiress is kidnapped for real.Mantan and his shtick help this film along as does Edgar Kennedy playing a police captain with Irish brogue added to his slow burn.Graham has a lot of screen credits, mostly however as voice only. This is one of the few times you'll actually see him on screen. I suspect Monogram wanted to do a series of Cosmo Jones films, but the demand was underwhelming.Graham in his crime fighting mode has the talents of voice mimicry and ventriloquism at his command. But I suspect not in real life. His impression of Edgar Kennedy was too real, it had to be dubbed.Sam Katzman over at Monogram had enough series with the East Side Kids and Charlie Chan. Another wasn't in the cards.

mark.waltz This is below par crime drama focusing on a kidnapped socialite who was involved with criminals and an amateur detective's attempts to solve this crime while visiting the big city from the sticks. It's all pretty mild stuff with comic moments from Mantan Moreland as a malapropism filled janitor that the titled character (Frank Graham), especially when they encounter bumbling cop Edgar Kennedy. In fact, when it was all over, I pretty much had forgotten what I had just witnessed with the exception of Mantan's performance (especially every time he encounters a dead body). Moreland is one of those black character actors who can be amusing if you can get past the stereotypical dialog he was forced to say, but it takes a genius of an actor to make you laugh in spite of the current political atmosphere concerning the type of roles talented black actors were forced to take on. In all fairness, the gangsters are presented equally as stupid, and they all happen to be Caucasian. Overall, this isn't any different or any better or worse than the hundreds of low budget crime capers made during the late 1930's and 1940's, only that the presentation is very mediocre and other than a few minor moments of amusement, the result is a weak Z grade feature that doesn't hold up as well as others.

dbborroughs Based on a radio show this short (an hour) film is a bit of a meandering mess.the plot of the film has two gangs going to war and somehow in the middle of it all the daughter of an oil man is kidnapped. As the police try to solve the crime(s), Cosmo Jones, a genius and amateur criminologist forces himself into the case.This is a weird film where the title character doesn't show up for a quarter of the running time. When he does show up he sort of seems as if he were added into the mix for no good reason, with a young police Sargent taking the lead. Its not until into the second half of the film that he takes center stage. Another weird twist is Mantan Moreland who is listed fourth in the credits as a "star" and he only shows up close to the half way mark in a role that requires him to do little more than stand around for most of his screen time (I guess a pay check is a pay check).The problem is that the film wanders to and fro with out any real direction. Its starts off as a gangster story, shifts to the cops, shifts again to gang war film, turns again into a murder tale then swerves into the kidnap tale. Characters take center stage then fall to the background over and over again, not like in an ensemble film where there is ebb and flow, instead its like seeing a series of almost unconnected photographs. The result is a rather bland and un-involving movie, which is a shame since the film does have some genuinely good moments (the near torture of Moreland is horrifying in a very real way) and there are more than its share of funny lines.Not really worth seeking out, I'd pretty much let this one slide unless I ran across it on TV, in which case it would be worth taking a peak.

Leslie Howard Adams "Cosmo Jones" was a country-bumpkin type radio character detective created by writer Walter Gereing in 1941, that featured long-time CBS radio announcer Frank Graham in the title role. The character was originally introduced on a CBS series called "Nightcap Yarns", except in the eastern states of the U.S. where it was known as "Armchair Adventures."CBS broadcast it as a network show in eleven western states, but not in the rest of the country. There, it was a 15-minute transcription show offered to radio stations on a sustaining basis for only the cost of the transcription records...until it could be sold to local sponsors. One of the reasons it may not have lasted very long was because some of the local stations may not have bothered to tell the producers of the program when they picked up a sponsor. It was offered as either a twice-weekly or three times weekly program, which meant some stations ran through the series 33% faster than others.Frank Graham was the announcer in 1943 on the CBS program "Tommy Riggs and Betty Lou", which featured in regular roles well-known radio (and film) names such as Ken Christy, Verna Felton, Mel Blanc, Elvia Allman and Bea Benaderet.In 1949, when Jack Webb left the CBS radio program "Jeff Reagan, Investigator" to play "Sergeant Joe Friday" on a new program called "Dragnet", he was replaced in the title role by Frank Graham. Webb had a little more success with "Dragnet" than Graham did with "Jeff Reagan, Investigator."It didn't matter what the character of "Cosmo Jones" looked like on radio---television without pictures---but in this movie he was costumed nearly exactly as Bob Burns was in Universal's "Alias the Deacon", and his character makeup had him looking a little like "Abner Peabody" on the "Lum and Abner" program.