City of Missing Girls

City Of Missing Girls is a bad attempt at crime drama. The plot revolves around exactly what the title says, missing girls. The hero is DA Horton, and like all of these old crime movies, he's the young, handsome, single variety of District Attorney. Naturally the reporter of the story is the Lois Lane type of young, pretty, and also single. She gives Horton a hard time but never quite crosses the line to unlikable.

Girls are missing, as I said, and the investigators are stumped. When one of the missing girls turns up dead the stakes are raised. Some of the missing are showgirls, but the latest report involves a regular girl-next-door type.

It's essentially a face off of Horton and crime lord Peterson. As Horton and Nora, the reporter, work in their own ways to figure out the exact nature of Peterson's involvement we learn that he's not above murder to cover his tracks. Meanwhile, Nora's father is tangled up in the plot and trying to conceal it from his daughter.

First of all, the nature of what is going on with the girls is very vague. There is some hint that at least some of them are involved in prostitution, but that doesn't seem to be the case with all of them. What's more some of them act in ways that are expressedly out of character with no explanation given. When one of the girls is found there is absolutely no sensible reason for her to have been missing in the first place.

What's more, when you get to the end and find out what has happened to most of the girls you're likely to get up off the couch and yell, “What?? That's it??”

***SPOILER***

You see that the girls have moved out of town to take jobs. No, I'm not kidding.

***END SPOILER***

OK so the nature of it all is shady, but still it's a pretty lackluster solution for a mystery story. It lacks emotion in any satisfactory capacity.

If the awful story weren't bad enough the acting is unconvincing. Add to that some slow and stiff dialogue, and you've got yourself a movie that only the people that made it can love. I suppose I've seen movies that were more boring, but this has nothing to grab the interest.

MORALITY:

Typical of black-and-white movies there is very little questionable material. They are so vague about the activities the missing girls may have been involved in that it actually hurts the plot. I imagine they were trying to avoid getting into anything sexual so as to not offend viewers, but the results are so underdeveloped that they do nothing to draw the viewer into the plot.

There is very little mild violence.

There is no strong language.

SPIRITUALITY:

There is an element here of girls going from troubled lives to ones with more security and freedom. I want to like it for its positive, hopeful message related to this, but the literary aspects simply lack too severely for me to care.

FINAL THOUGHTS:

Don't bother with this one. It's just not worth the effort or the time.

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